LinkedIn has just released Q2 earnings, and the enterprise-focused social network continues to rise. It’s posted revenues of $228.2 million and earnings per share of $0.03 (non-GAAP EPS: $0.16). This puts the company past earnings estimates from First Call of $216.3 million, and Yahoo Finance, which had estimated revenues of $216 million. It also beat First Call’s EPS of $0.01, as well as LinkedIn’s own guidance of revenues of $210-$215 million. However, GAAP net income was nearly halved to $2.8 million, versus net income of $4.5 million Q2 2011. (Non-GAAP net income for the second quarter was $18.1 million, compared to $10.8 million in the second quarter of 2011.)

Q2 saw LinkedIn get hit with what might have been its worst publicity disaster in recent times, when some 6.5 million passwords were stolen. Although the company moved quick to create password changes, the breach would have put off users from relying too much on putting data into that social network, or using it for and paid services, but these results show that clearly it was not hit as hard as people might have thought.

LinkedIn says that it now has 174 million members, up from 116 million a year ago and 161 million in Q2012. ComScore puts the unique visitors for the quarter at 106 million, meaning it has a pretty strong rate for active users. Pageviews were down slightly to 9.3 billion from 9.4 billion the quarter before.

Here’s how some of its divisions performed:

Hiring Solutions: Revenue totaled $121.6 million, up 107% compared to the second quarter of 2011. Hiring Solutions revenue proportion is going up. It’s now 53% of total revenue versus 48% in Q2 2011.

Marketing Solutions: Revenue totaled $63.1 million, up 64% versus Q2 2011. Marketing Solutions revenue represented 28% of total revenue in the second quarter of 2012, compared to 32% in the second quarter of 2011.

Premium Subscriptions: Revenue was $43.5 million, up 82% versus Q2 2011. Premium Subscriptions represented 19% of total revenue in the second quarter of 2012, compared to 20% of revenue in the second quarter of 2011, LinkedIn said.

We’ll be listening in to the call at 2pm PT. Some things we’ll be looking for:

Mobile in Q1 accounted for 22% of LinkedIn’s visitors, and with the introduction of LinkedIn’s iPad app, investors will be looking to see whether the company has been able to capitalize on that further. In the release, LinkedIn notes no numbers but does say the iPad app has been “received positively, and engagement trends are encouraging.” More than half of page views on the app are being generated by content-focused products such as updates, news and groups — meaning potentially more routes for monetizing on those down the line.

User engagement, as some have noted, is another focus. The company in May bought enterprise content sharing platform  SlideShare for $119 million, and just weeks ago it launched a redesign that is also geared to making the site a place where users would like to spend more time, with an enhanced LinkedIn Today story stream and more options for communicating with other LinkedIn members.

LinkedIn’s revenue guidance for Q3 had been $235 million, and now it’s bumped that up to $235 million-$240 million. It’s also raised its full-year forecasts to $915 million-$925 million; in its Q1 call, LinkedIn had given the range $880 million$900 million.

In Q1, LinkedIn had impressed analysts with a set of very strong results, producing earnings per share of $0.15 against estimates of $0.09, and revenues of $188.5 million against an estimate of $179 million.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Today, Facebook hit a new milestone, perhaps one that it won’t be celebrating much: the stock went down past $20 a share. In fact, as this post is being written it’s trading at $19.99.

Because this number is a bit arbitrary, here’s some context for how the mighty sometimes become less mighty: this might make Facebook worth less than $44.6 billion, what Microsoft offered to pay for Yahoo in 2008:

Why do we write “might”? A caveat to point out: as Henry Blodget pointed out earlier today,  sites like Google Finance and Yahoo Finance might be getting their shares outstanding wrong. Facebook tells him that the number of shares outstanding as of today are 2.74 billion. If you multiply that by the share price, you get a market cap of $54,772,600,000, not $42.83 billion, as noted above.

According to Blodget’s calculation, we will need to wait until the stock is at $16.28 before it hits Yahoo/Microsoft territory.

That could happen sometime on or after August 16: as the WSJ points out, that is when lock-ups on stock sales by employees begin to expire, and will continue to come up on a rolling basis between then and the end of the year. Between the middle of August and the end of the year, the WSJ points out, more than five times the number of shares currently trading will come onto the market. That could mean an even bigger drop in the stock’s price.

When Facebook first listed on May 18, its shares opened at just over $42.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

More news from Yandex, Russia’s biggest search engine, that highlight the opportunity for more growth in digital in Russia and adjacent markets. One day after announcing a new real-time search partnership with Twitter, the company is reporting Q4 earnings: sales were at $200 million with net income of $71.3 million, both representing growth respectively of 56 percent and 51 percent on the same quarter a year ago.

But although Yandex says the figures were at the high end of its guidance, revenues fell short of average analyst expectations of $207.6 million, as polled by Yahoo Finance.

Yandex noted that its share of the Russian search market is now at 60.8 percent, according to LiveInternet. That still makes it the biggest search portal in Russia, although this represents a decline on last quarter, when the company reported a 62.7 percent share of the market.

That underscores Yandex’s move to search for new platforms and mediums, and markets, to serve ads.

Those include services like adding Twitter’s real-time search. But also, like its rival Google, Yandex is putting a lot of effort into its mobile business, and has in the last several months inked search deals with Samsung for its bada devices and Microsoft for Windows Phone — where Yandex will now become the default search window for the CIS and Russia, respectively.

It has also bought its own mobile developer, SPB Software, for a price believed to be around $38 million. SPB has developed mobile payment services, games, and other mobile apps. It’s probably a big leap to think that Yandex will go the whole hog and look at making its own mobile OS, as Google has done with Android (although never discount the possibility). But in any case, SPB already works in enough areas where Yandex could potentially insert ads and power other functions, for its own services and those for third parties.

Added to that, the company is also expanding outside of its traditional base of Russia the CIS: it has launched new services like maps in Turkey, where it is currently making a big push.

While those efforts have yet to bear significant fruit for Yandex — at least not enough worth mentioning in today’s results — the company continues to see growth in its existing online advertising business:

Search engine result pages were up by 36 percent on last year; and advertisers now number at 173,000 — a 43 percent rise on last year and 10 percent up on Q3. For the full year, advertisers were up by 44 percent to 270,000. The bulk of Yandex’s ad revenues are coming from its own search-based text ads, which account for 68 percent of Yandex’s revenues. But just in terms of actual growth, revenues from third-party sites actually saw bigger gains last quarter. Text based ads altogether accounted for over 80 percent of Yandex’s revenues:

Yandex said it expects that overall, ruble-based revenue growth for 2012 will be in the range of 40 percent – 45 percent.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

YCharts, a startup that provides stock research, tools and analysis, has raised $3.25 million in Series B financing led by investment research company, Morningstar with participation from existing investors including the Hyde Park Angels, I2A, and others. This brings YCharts’ total funding to $4.75 million.

YCharts provides free stock analysis tools and charts that give investors a quick, comprehensive long-term outlook on their holdings. The site lets them understand the real value of their holdings in the long run by comparing dividend yields, total returns (not offered by Yahoo Finance) and around 75 other metrics, with the ability to compare against other holdings.

The beauty of YCharts is that it digs into past long-tail data that’s publicly available from a variety of sources, such as P/E ratios, R&D spending, or cash flows, and graphs these over time. YCharts, which does not offer opinion-based analysis, seeks to provide investors with comprehensive, objective information on the companies behind the stocks, allowing them to make the most accurate decision for their portfolios.

YCharts currently offers three products; YCharts.com, YCharts Pro and its chart creator tool for third-party sites, journalists and bloggers. For a monthly fee, Pro users gain access to YCharts’ quantitative analysis strategies that objectively rate the stocks covered. The service has grown from 30,000 users to more than 400,000 users in slightly more than a year.

The funding will be used to build out the startp’s team, scale infrastructure, increase marketing efforts and expand the scope of its financial research and analytics.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

For many years I loved Yahoo Finance. It was one of the only sites I used every single day, and the only Yahoo property I used with any regularity at all.

Back when it launched, it was revolutionary for a business reporter, since most engines of real-time financial data are premium, expensive products none of my employers would pay for. I loved it so much, I even used to host a show on Yahoo Finance called TechTicker, now broadened to the Daily Ticker.

But increasingly, I get angry when I go to the site. The information is less-than real time, there are frequent errors, there’s no currency translations or advanced tools for companies listed overseas. The latter wasn’t that big of a deal in 1998. Now that the third largest Internet company in the world is listed in Hong Kong, it’d be a nice new feature. But Yahoo Finance seems to have no interest in new features.

Even the news aggregation by ticker is increasingly useless. Because Yahoo Finance is such a powerful tool for driving traffic, business and financial sites take the Nascar approach– wallpapering stories with dozens of ticker symbols so those stories will show up when each of those stocks are searched. As a result, you can go to GOOG on the day of Google’s earnings and find stories with little-to-nothing to do with Google’s earnings. And like a lot of Web 1.0 portals, the comments and chartrooms make YouTube’s discussions look highbrow.

A lot of this isn’t Yahoo’s fault. The real time data has to come from other sources and those sources aren’t always cooperative or quick. And given all of Yahoo’s problems, why invest in a property whose users don’t demand it? Yahoo has a golden goose on its hands. They’ve rarely had to innovate, and they still dominate the category. TechTicker was run with a highly experienced but skeleton crew, making profitability a snap and within months we had four times the audience reach of CNBC. We should all have such “awful businesses.”

But Yahoo’s gain as a corporation is increasingly my loss as a user. So from now on I’m throwing my support (read: eyeballs) behind a lesser-known Chicago-based company called YCharts in Don Quixote-like hopes that one of two things happens: Yahoo eventually gets under fire enough it fixes its product or someone else (hopefully YCharts) finally builds a great alternative for free, detailed, reliable financial information.

YCharts’ newest feature shows how the company is trying to up the game. It tracks how much a stock appreciated once you take dividends into account. Consider a stock like Procter & Gamble. If you invested $1,000 in P&G in January 1996 those shares would be worth $2,092.90 today. Any stock chart can show you that. But missing is what you make from dividends, which over 50% of companies and 80% of companies listed in the S&P 500 pay. If you reinvested your dividends, P&G would have returned 326.80% over that period, or $1,175.10 more.

YCharts excels at digging into past long-tail data that’s publicly available from a variety of sources– things like P/E ratios, R&D spending, or cash flows graphed over time. The focus is on determining what works in the markets in the long run. This doesn’t just differentiate YCharts, it’s a cheaper way to build the company. Historical data is cheaper to aggregate than real time data, so the company is starting there and will bootstrap its way  into more of the real time fray once it builds and audience, says co-founder Shawn Carpenter.

YCharts has raised just $1.5 million to date, but will likely announce “something new” soon, Carpenter says. Usage is muted compared to other sites at just 350,000 monthly users, but it’s growing fast and those users not surprisingly skew towards desirable demographics like college degrees and higher incomes.

YCharts makes money from charging $40 a month for a premium service that takes their data and adds professional analysis to help investors make smarter decisions. Whether the freemium model will work remains to be seen. There are big established audiences for free financial information and for very solid financial information delivered over incredibly expensive devices like Bloomberg machines. Paying a decently high monthly amount for something in between is newer territory.

I hope it works, because YCharts– or somebody– needs to stay in business long enough to challenge Yahoo Finance. Getting anywhere close to its gargantuan user numbers is going to be tough, making building large, sustainable ad-based company a challenge. In the long run, YCharts may wind up being more powerful as part of a bigger portal than on its own.

Crunchbase

YCHARTS

Company:
YCHARTS

Website:
http://ycharts.com

Launch Date:
1/2009

Fundamental research and empirical data drives all portfolio strategies and stock ratings for YCharts and YCharts Pro. Our team performs extensive studies of historical factors that tend to predict…

Learn more

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Before there was Hashable, there was Tracked, Michael Yavonditte’s attempt to build a better Yahoo Finance. It was little too complicated, and not social. “I felt like I was on the wrong side of history,” he tells Chris Dixon in this episode of Founder Stories.

So Yavonditte (who had previously sold advertising startup Quigo to AOL for $360 million) started from scratch, recruited a new team, and Hashable was born—a lightweight mobile app that helps you keep track of your business meetings and contacts, and is replacing business cards for many people.

In the video clip below, Yavonditte explains what exactly is Hashable and hints at some upcoming features. Be sure to also watch Part I of this interview, in which Yavonditte describes how he went toe-to-toe with Google back in his Quigo days, and came out all right. He also describes his thoughts on management: “Leadership is not acquiescing to the mob.”

Previous episodes of Founder Stories can be found here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

This is going to come as a shock to you: But suddenly and for the first time in years, I really care about the future of AOL. And, because I used to host a show on Yahoo Finance, the story floating around about whether or not these two has-beens of the Internet (sorry, new overlords) would be better together has special resonance with me.

I don’t totally agree with Henry Blodget when he says that it’s a no-brainer because they are the exact same company. (Btw, I used to co-host that same Yahoo show with Blodget. How can a business that employs thousands and thousands of people be so small?) Nor do I agree with Mike that working for Yahoo is a fate worse than losing hundreds of millions in acquisition value.

Here are my totally selfish, biased reasons why I hope the deal does happen or doesn’t happen. Beyond obvious navel gazing, I’m looking at this from the point of view of someone who has worked her whole adult life in media. The companies I grew up writing for are dying in increasing numbers, while TechCrunch just set an uncomfortable cap on how much even the most successful blogs can sell for. Our only hope is that either Yahoo or AOL can finally make good on this obvious but for some reason elusive promise to create a company that can afford to pay well for good content a online mass audience will read.

First, three reasons I hope it does happen:

1. I really miss the Yahoo studios team, and our up-and-down efforts to launch video programming at TechCrunch has proven to me just how hard it is– especially trying to do it on a budget. At Yahoo, I had the benefit of working in a million-dollar, beautiful studio built out during the free spending crazy dot com bubble days, and we had a staff that knew how to make us look good. At TechCrunch we have Jon Orlin running our video efforts– the very guy who actually built that Yahoo studio back in the day. So it’s not a staff problem, it’s a resources problem. Piggy-backing onto what Yahoo had already built and the insanely great Yahoo Finance platform we quickly and cheaply became a profitable division with four times the reach of CNBC. That’s something that TechCrunch just couldn’t replicate. Could AOL? I don’t know. But I do know if we could take the talent and personalities of TechCrunch and add in the expertise and facilities of Yahoo Studios we could launch the kind of amazing and slick video programming that most of us wanted from TechCrunchTV.

2. I think a big part of Silicon Valley’s future is becoming a financial and expertise hub for high-growth, tech entrepreneurs around the world, similar to the way New York became a financial hub for publicly traded companies and a management hub for media. There are huge content, advertising and conference opportunities to knit Silicon Valley elites together with the most mature and fast growing Asian entrepreneur economies. Yahoo has done a better job in Asia than anyone in Silicon Valley. It has valuable properties in China and Japan– so valuable they’re largely propping up the stock prices these days. Yahoo has also been one of the only Internet giants looking at acquisitions and building a presence in Indonesia, and it has been making a huge branding push into India in the last year. I don’t know how all of that could add up to a smart media strategy, but at least there are smart assets and teams on the ground in the most mature and most nascent Asian markets.

3. I still carry a Yahoo backpack because it’s a great backpack, and I haven’t had the heart to rip the logo off, although the OneTrueFan founders tried to convince me to at Disrupt. So, yunno, I have the backpack already… And, for some reason, Yahoo TechTicker still lists me as a reporter. (This was my best attempt at a third reason, which should say something.)

Now, three reasons I hope the deal never happens:

1. Big companies suck. The bigger they get, the more they suck. Yahoo isn’t a company; it’s a collection of smaller companies and silos. For all my talk of potential video and Asian synergies above, I’d be skeptical that any of that would ever prove to be much of an advantage for a property like TechCrunch because my sense is none of those groups are great at working together. Those are things that companies say when they buy you, but they usually don’t wind up being true. This isn’t a knock on Yahoo, it’s just a fact of life.

2. All content companies aren’t the same and all content isn’t the same. My understanding is that Yahoo is still mostly an aggregator of other people’s content, while AOL is mostly a creator of original content. Those are two wildly different businesses and I’m not sure there is a lot of synergy. When you aggregate, you pick great partners and have a symbiotic relationship. When you create content, you are competing with those partners to produce better content. Yahoo’s value in the media world is largely routing eyeballs around the Web. That’s closer to a Digg-model than AOL properties like TechCrunch, Engadget or TMZ. And managing great content creators is a lot harder than managing dealmakers. We’re nuts. Seriously. We’re highly volatile, dramatic and expensive. Why do you think the volume was never turned on during our CrunchCam days?

3. Competition is good for everyone. Some of the arguments for the deal are that AOL and Yahoo would each take out their biggest portal competition. They’d be a must-buy for every large ad deal and the prices of acquisitions like TechCrunch would be squeezed, because there’d be no bidding wars. Yeah, that’s not good for reporters and ultimately not for shareholders either. Competition makes every company better and every industry dynamic. It’s the white space between clumsy giants focused on one another that creates opportunities for new entrants. The only hope for a real media organization that can pay for and distribute the kind of great content that most blogs can’t afford and most newspapers are hemorrhaging is for Yahoo and AOL to be fighting each other to do better, not one big messy company fighting within itself.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

If you go to Google Finance on your iPhone or Android via the mobile browser, it looks a lot like an app. You can enter a ticker symbol or company name in the search box at the top to generate a current price and stock chart. Three buttons on top let you switch from a market view to your saved portfolio to news.

The new mobile-friendly design just launched yesterday. (It is still catching up to Yahoo Finance, which has been mobile browser friendly for a while). The new mobile Google Finance presents most of the same information you can find on the main Website in a single, scrollable column: recent quotes, market charts, financial news headlines, a visual summary showing how different sectors are doing, and a list of gainers and losers.

Google Finance is also linked to other Google properties. Along the top, Finance is shown as a tab with other Google search properties such as Web and Images. When you do a search for a stock price or company on Google’s regular mobile search page, Google Finance results appear and take you into the Google Finance mobile experience.

Google Finance also has an Android app, but no dedicated iPhone app. If you are on the iPhone, the best app for Google Finance is now the browser.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The problem with most portfolio trackers on financial sites like Yahoo Finance is that they are a pain to set up and an even bigger pain to maintain. Typically, you have to enter each stock position by hand, and every time you buy or sell a stock, you need to manually record the change. Wikinvest is introducing its own portfolio tracker today with an obvious improvement: it links directly to all of your brokerage, 401(k) and other stock accounts and tracks positions and changes automatically.

At launch, Wikinvest’s portfolio tracker hooks up to about 25 different brokerage accounts, including Schwab, ETrade, Fidelity, Ameritrade, Morgan Stanley, and Zecco. It lets you combine holdings from different accounts and track them as a single portfolio. You can compare the overall performance of your portfolio to the S&P 500 or Dow Jones, and see the average PE, ROA, ROE, and other ratios across your portfolio. Also, when you hover over a headline for a stock, you get a realtime newsfeed for that company.

Portfolio tracking is an addictive feature for finance site junkies. Parker Conrad, Wikinvest’s CEO, estimates that less than 3 percent of people who use finance portals actually add a portfolio, but those who do make up 30 percent of the pageviews. So if he can make it easier to set up and track portfolios on Wikinvest, it should help drive more growth. The site is still small, with about 1.2 million unique visitors worldwide, according to comScore, but it is currently going through a growth spurt which kicked off a year ago with a redesign.

About 60 percent of its traffic comes from search, with the rest coming either directly or through partnerships. Wikinvest powers the stock charts on Forbes, USA Today, and NPR.com. Wikinvest now needs to make more of those visitors stick around and come back on their own. Hence, the portfolio tracker.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

If you like to trade stocks, chances are you do your research on sites like Yahoo Finance, Google Finance, or even StockTwits to find ideas, and then you go log into your brokerage account to execute a trade. Or maybe you get distracted by a dancing bear on YouTube and never buy or sell that stock.

Online discount brokerage Zecco wants to make sure you can trade anywhere on the Web, whenever the feeling hits you. Today, it is releasing Zap Trade with StockTwits, and as a Firefox add-on. On StockTwits, there will now be a Z button which will launch a Zecco trading widget. The widget allows customers to place stock trades without going back to Zecco. Trade, Tweet, Repeat.

Zecco also has a Firefox add-on which overlays a Zecco trading widget onto any site. The add-on works particularly well with financial sites such as Bloomberg, CNNMoney, MarketWatch, Google Finance, and even parts of competing broker sites like E*Trade and TD Ameritrade. If it identifies a stock ticker on one of those sites, it will pre-populate the trading widget with that stock’s symbol.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch