Weekly Tech Summary: Microsoft, Zynga & Yelp
This week was quite eventful for the tech sector, with a lot of significant developments related to major companies like Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) and Zynga (NASDAQ:ZNGA), and the recently listed Yelp (NYSE:YELP). We analyze a few such developments which could impact their value in the coming years.
Microsoft
Microsoft, like Google and Apple, is always in the news. This week, it officially launched Windows Phone in Microsoft, and plans to grab significant market share in the coming years, by targeting the budget smartphone segment. It hopes to launch inexpensive Windows Phone Tango enabled smartphones with partners, and is looking to become one of the largest players in the Chinese smartphone space.
Windows Phone also passed the 70,000 apps milestone this week. Though it still offers just a fraction of the total apps in the iOS App Store or Android Market, it continues to add apps and games to Windows Phone Marketplace, which should help it attract consumers.
Microsoft also announced that it plans to complete the development and testing of Windows 8 by summer 2012, enabling device manufacturers to launch their Windows 8 notebooks and tablets by October, right in time for the holiday shopping season. Microsoft needs to launch Windows 8 as soon as it can, or it risks being too late to the tablet market, which is already dominated by Apple and Google. On the Office front, it slashed Office 365 pricing to boost usage, and announced Dynamics ERP as a cloud based service powered by its Azure platform.
Check out our complete analysis of Microsoft.
Zynga
Zynga has been making a lot of savvy moves lately in our view with the launch of its own gaming platform and its intentions to enter the lucrative online gambling market. This week, it lost the title of the top Facebook Connect app to OMGPOP, the maker of Draw Something, which has seen explosive growth since it launched weeks ago.
However, Zynga went into acquisition mode, and bought OMGPOP for around $200 million. It is one of the biggest mobile game developers. Zynga plans to integrate Draw Something in its “With Friends” series of mobile social games.
Check out our complete analysis of Zynga.
Yelp
There has been a very positive development with Yelp, which went public earlier this month.
Yelp was one of the third-party services integrated with Apple’s Siri voice activated AI assistant, which was launched with the iPhone 4S last year. It has been integrated even further in the latest iOS 5.1 update, which was launched last week. Now whenever users search for recommendations on local businesses using Siri, they will return results powered by Yelp. It will also direct all requests for reviews and ratings directly to Yelp’s mobile site. Given the millions of iPhone 4S units sold to date, this could become a major traffic driver for Yelp, and also increase visitor engagement levels. This could boost both its local and display advertising businesses, which are ultimately driven by hits.