TechCrunch
Flash Memory Provider Violin Memory Down 17% In Public Market Debut While Cloud Service RingCentral Up 45% In IPO
RingCentral is up 45% in early trading today, after pricing its IPO at $13 per share. Violin Memory is down 17% in its debut on the public markets.
Violin Memory, a Flash memory provider, priced its IPO Thursday night to open at $9 per share but opened at $7.41, 17.7 percent lower than the IPO price. RingCentral, trading as “RNG,” was priced at $13 per share. In early trading, the stock is hovering cloe to $19 per share.
Taken together, the two are examples of the quite diverse types of companies that are considered in the enterprise category and their relative dominance as IPOs in the tech sector. But these are also not the hottest of IPOs, signaling a change in the tenor about how enterprise companies might fare in the public markets.
RingCentral provides a way to deliver phone and fax services with its clous service. Violin Memory’s Flash-memory technology is used in on-premise enterprise operations to bolster the performance of applications and manage the process of large amounts of data.
The market has not been bullish about Violin. The company has raised $268 million, a considerable amount coming from Toshiba, which Violin leveraged for its play in the market. In the past year though, its star has fallen to some degree. HP, once its biggest customer, has not renewed its contract.
On the other hand, the mood has been upbeat for RingCentral. The company has pleased Wall Street with consistent increases in revenues over the past few years. Founded in 1999, RingCentral has $44 million in funding. It raised its first $12 million round in 2007 from Khosla Ventures and Sequoia Capital. According to public documents, the company posted revenues in 2012 of $114.5 million. In 2011, it had revenues of $78.9 million and $50.2 million in 2010.
A number of enterprise companies have had IPOs in the past 18 months. Last week, FireEye shares jumped $16 for the security company. In total it raised nearly $304 million, giving it a market cap of $2.3 billion.
Earlier this year, Tableau Software raises $254 million in its IPO whie Marketo raised $85 million at a $550 million valuation.
In July 2012, Palo Alto Networks raised $260 million and HR specialist Workday’s IPO in October 2012 raised $637 million.
Study: Children Reading Fewer Books, Down 8% From 2012
The Harry Potter series is wildly entertaining, but so is Angry Birds, Snapchat, Facebook, YouTube Justin Bieber re-enactments, texting, Halo, The Disney Channel, Transformers 3, and a consumer flying drone.
Books have a lot more competition these days, and a new study from Nielson Books suggests that digital fun is starting to crowd out the habits of occasional readers. Specifically, “the proportion of occasional and non-readers among children aged 0-17 rising to 28%, up from 20% in 2012,” reads a summary of the report, presented at The Bookseller Children Conference.
The good news is that reading is still one of the most popular activities: 32% of children read on a daily basis, second only to TV (36%). Both of these crush 21st century entertainment, with 20% using social networks, 17% watching YouTube, and 16% nose down in mobile games and apps.
Weekly, a sizable 60% read for pleasure. “But there’s a really disturbing pattern beginning to emerge when you look on a weekly basis,” warns Jo Henry of Nielson Books.
Bookworms, or “heavy readers” who read 45-plus minutes a day, are unaffected by the deluge of gadgets. But non-readers and occasional readers are ditching books, which suggests yet another kind of digital divide in self-education. The blindingly colorful, 1990′s-looking graph below shows how occasional reading is falling across all age groups.
The study should be taken a grain of salt: the numbers are simple averages and was conducted by a for-profit institution. This isn’t peer-reviewed quality. But, the decline in reading does mirror other research, which suggests that reading has fallen, at least since 2005 [PDF]. Interestingly, research from the National Literacy Trust finds that children who say they read on websites is down from 2005 (64% to 50), suggesting that new forms of reading are not replacing books.
Sure, reading is great for developing brains, but pictures are so much more fun. Maybe teachers should call for an essay of Lord of The Flies to be composed in Snapchat.
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