When it comes to easing robots into mainstream consumer markets, nobody is doing better than iRobot (NASDAQ: IRBT ) . The company has pumped more funds into its advertising during the past year, which means catchy ads for its Roomba floor cleaner are sweeping (no pun intended) television and the Internet.
But iRobot is so much more than just robotic household appliances. This company has helped the U.S. government in a big way, and is venturing into the world of health care, all while keeping some pretty solid financials. Even after spending $14 million on Roomba advertising last year, iRobot has still managed to maintain a 5% operating margin. �In the video below, Motley Fool contributor Caroline Bennett takes a closer look at why iRobot might be a good bet to take your portfolio into the future.
The retail space is in the midst of the biggest paradigm shift since mail order took off at the turn of last century. Only those most forward-looking and capable companies will survive, and they'll handsomely reward those investors who understand the landscape. You can read about the 3 Companies Ready to Rule Retail in The Motley Fool's special report. Uncovering these top picks is free today; just click here to read more.
10 Best Quality Stocks To Buy Right Now: Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (BABA)
Alibaba Group Holding Limited, incorporated on June 28, 1999, is an online and mobile commerce company. The Company operates its ecosystem as a platform for third parties. The Company operates Taobao Marketplace, China�� online shopping destination, Tmall, China�� third-party platform for brands and retailers and Juhuasuan, China�� group buying marketplace. In addition to its three China retail marketplaces, the Company operates Alibaba.com, China�� global online wholesale marketplace, 1688.com, its China wholesale marketplace, and AliExpress, its global consumer marketplace, as well as provides cloud computing services. As a platform, the Company provides the fundamental technology infrastructure and marketing reach to help businesses leverage the power of the Internet to establish an online presence and conduct commerce with consumers and businesses. Effective August 01, 2014, Alibaba Investment Ltd, a unit of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, acquired a 10.193% interest n Singapore Post Ltd.
The buyers and sellers discover, select and transact with each other on the Company�� platform. Third-party service providers add value to its platform through service offerings that make it easier for buyers and sellers to do business. The third-party participants in its ecosystem include a payment services provider, logistics providers, retail operational partners, marketing affiliates, independent software vendors and various professional service providers. The Company has developed policies and procedures that maintain the health and sustainability of its marketplaces, including consumer protection programs, marketplace rules, qualification standards for merchants and buyer and seller rating systems. As its ecosystem expands, new jobs are created.
Taobao Affiliate Network is powered by Alimama, its online marketing technology platform. Through this platform, sellers place marketing displays on its marketing affiliates��websites and mobile apps, and sellers pay a performance-b! ased marketing fee primarily based on cost-per-click (CPC), and cost-per-sale (CPS), models. Through China Smart Logistics, the Company provides real-time information to its logistics partners, including key operating metrics, such as distribution center utilization rates, route planning data and order volume forecasts. Independent software vendors (ISVs) provide software tools, as well as systems integration services to sellers.
Tmall is an online platform featuring brands and retailers with each seller having an identifiable online storefront. Users may access Tmall anytime, anywhere through the Tmall Website and the mobile apps and mobile-optimized websites provided by Taobao Marketplace and Tmall. The physical product categories on Tmall include apparel and accessories, electronics and appliances, home furnishings, home appliances, maternity and baby products. Juhuasuan is an online group buying marketplace in China. Juhuasuan offers quality products at discounted prices by aggregating demand from numerous consumers. Juhuasuan mainly does this through flash sales, which make products available at discounted prices for a limited period of time. Juhuasuan offers group buying channels featuring branded and private label products, products made to custom specifications and local services.
AliExpress is a consumer marketplace enables consumers from around the world to buy directly from wholesalers and manufacturers in China. On AliExpress, consumers have access to a variety of products. In addition to the global English-language site, AliExpress operates two local language sites in Russia and Brazil. The product categories on AliExpress.com include apparel and accessories, phones and communications products, beauty and health, computer networking, jewelry and watches. Alibaba.com is an online commerce platform. Sellers on Alibaba.com may pay for an annual Gold Supplier membership to host a premium storefront with product listings on the marketplace.
The Company��! marketin! g technology platform, Alimama, offers sellers on its marketplaces marketing services for both personal computer and mobile devices, which include P4P marketing service and display marketing. Alimama also offers its sellers these marketing services through third parties through the Taobao Affiliate Network. The Taobao Ad Network and Exchange (TANX) automates the buying and selling of billions of advertising impressions on a daily basis by third parties. The Company also offer a data management platform (DMP), connected to TANX. Its DMP allows participants on TANX to evaluate and select online advertising inventory using both behavioral data they provide, as well as data from browsing behavior and shopping history. Its Cloud Computing supports its commerce ecosystem by providing a distributed computing infrastructure to handle the large volume of traffic and data generated on its online marketplaces. Its cloud computing platform offers service offerings, including elastic computing, database services and storage and large scale computing services.
The company offer search functions on all of its Web pages, mobile apps and many of its marketing affiliates��websites and apps to make it easy for buyers to find products and services within its marketplaces. The Company offers Aliwangwang, a personal computer-based instant messenger that supports text, audio and video communication. The Company developed Aliwangwang to facilitate open communication between buyers and sellers on Taobao Marketplace and Tmall. Buyers and sellers use it as a tool for a range of tasks, including negotiation of prices, customer services and delivery notification, in addition to the basic messaging functions. It offer Qianniu , an integrated platform for communication and productivity tools which allows sellers on Taobao Marketplace and Tmall to manage their operations more efficiently.
Alipay, the Company�� related company, provides payment and escrow services for transactions on Taobao Marketplace, Tm! all, 1688! .com and certain of its other sites, as well as to third parties in China. The Company�� small and medium enterprise (SME) loan business provides micro loans to sellers on its wholesale and retail marketplaces through lending vehicles licensed by the local government.
The company competes with Tencent and Baidu.
Advisors' Opinion:- [By WWW.DAILYFINANCE.COM]
ChinaFotoPress/Getty ImagesEmployees cheer at Alibaba headquartes in China as its stock debuts in New York. At $231 billion, Alibaba Group (BABA) closed Friday with more than twice the market cap of Facebook (FB), three times that of eBay (EBAY), and about 50 percent more than Amazon.com (AMZN). For founder Jack Ma, the run-up means he's now worth more than $20 billion, according to Forbes' estimates. Yahoo (YHOO), meanwhile, is now sitting on a stake that was worth more than $49 billion the day of the initial public offiering -- about $10 billion more than its current market cap.
- [By Philip Springer]
Today’s initial public offering by Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. (NYSE: BABA) was priced at $68 per share, giving the company an initial market value of $168 billion. This put Alibaba among the 40 biggest public companies worldwide, and third in value among Internet companies after Google and Facebook.
- [By Ben Levisohn]
Trading volume was particularly heavy today, thanks to Alibaba’s (BABA) heavily-hyped IPO. More than 270 million shares of Alibaba changed hands today, making it the most heavily traded stock today, while Yahoo! (YHOO), which owns a big chunk of the Chinese internet giant, saw 231 million shares traded, the most since Microsoft (MSFT) it would no longer buy the company back in May 2008. Overall, 8.6 billion shares changed hands today, the fourth highest volume of the year.
- [By MONEYMORNING.COM]
And one of the best current examples of "history being made" is the looming initial public stock offering (IPO) of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. (NYSE: BABA), the Chinese Internet heavyweight whose shares are scheduled to price tomorrow and begin trading Friday.
Top 5 Internet Stocks To Buy Right Now: eBay Inc.(EBAY)
eBay Inc. provides online platforms, services, and tools to help individuals and merchants in online and mobile commerce and payments in the United States and internationally. Its Marketplaces segment operates ecommerce platform eBay.com; vertical shopping sites, such as StubHub, Fashion, Motors, and Half.com; and classifieds Websites, including Den Bl�Avis, BilBasen, Gumtree, Kijiji, LoQUo, Marktplaats.nl, mobile.de, Alamaula, Rent.com, eBay Anuncios, eBay Kleinanzeigen, and eBay Annunci, as well as provides advertising services. The company?s Payments segment offers payment and settlement services for consumers and merchants on and off eBay Websites and other merchant Websites. This segment operates PayPal, which enables individuals and businesses to send and receive payments online and through mobile devices; Bill Me Later that enables the United States merchants to offer, the United States consumers to obtain, credit at the point of sale for ecommerce and mobile tra nsactions; Zong, which allows users with mobile phones to purchase digital goods and have the transactions charged to their phone bill; and BillSAFE that enables customers pay for purchases upon receipt of an invoice. Its GSI segment offers an ecommerce services suite for enterprise clients that operate in general merchandise categories, including apparel, sporting goods, toys and baby, health and beauty, and home; and marketing services comprising full-service digital agency, enterprise email marketing, mobile advertising, affiliate marketing, advertisement retargeting, and in-depth analytics services. The company also offers X.commerce platform that provides software developers access to the company?s applications programming interfaces to develop functionality for various merchants; and Magento Connect, which allows developers to market and sell add-on functionality and solutions to merchants that use a Magento storefront. eBay Inc. was founded in 1995 and is headquarter ed in San Jose, California.
Advisors' Opinion:- [By Steven Russolillo and Chris Dieterich Agence France-Presse/Getty Images Facebook]
Facebook�� wait to join the S&P 500 was roughly in line with Google Inc.(GOOG), which joined less than two years after its August 2004 IPO. Others waited longer. Amazon.com Inc.(AMZN), eBay Inc.(EBAY) and Yahoo Inc.(YHOO) each took over three years to join the S&P 500.
- [By MONEYMORNING.COM]
Finally there's e-commerce. Here Google might consider buying a big company like eBay Inc. (Nasdaq: EBAY) or something more digestible, such as Square Inc.
- [By Adam J. Wiederman]
Getty Images Bitcoin made headlines last year when the value of all outstanding pieces of the electronic currency reached nearly $10 billion. It's not just speculators drawn to the new currency. Many businesses are also attempting to cash in on this growth: Several public companies, including Zynga (ZNGA) and Overstock.com (OSTK), accept Bitcoins as a form of payment. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen's firm has invested nearly $50 million in Bitcoin-related ventures, and it is looking to invest even more. And the Winklevoss twins -- who notoriously accused Facebook's (FB) Mark Zuckerberg of stealing their idea -- have been "in dialogue" with the SEC about opening the first Bitcoin exchange-traded fund, according to Bloomberg. Yet a new survey from TheStreet.com (TST) reveals that 76 percent of consumers are not familiar with Bitcoin -- and 79 percent would never consider owning a currency like it. Does this signal opportunity for savvy investors? Or is this a fad you'd be wise to avoid? The Basics of Bitcoin Bitcoin is a completely unregulated form of currency developed by an anonymous Japanese programmer (according to some apocryphal claims) as a completely digital, peer-to-peer payment system that is independent of national currencies (which, Bitcoin users argue, are all subject to the riskiness of the underlying country). Bitcoins are rewarded throughout the day to a "Bitcoin miner" whose computer solves a series of algorithms quicker than other miners. The puzzles become more difficult over time, so the calculations take longer and the computations require more computing power. There will eventually be a total of 21 million Bitcoins (12.4 million are in circulation today) and we won't reach the point that they are effectively "mined out" until 2040. The value of a Bitcoin is supposed to be market-driven, meaning they're worth whatever the two parties in a transaction value them as. For example, in one of the original Bitcoin transactions, a "mi
- [By Adam Levine-Weinberg]
Amazon's mixed results and weaker-than-expected guidance led Therese Poletti of MarketWatch to state that "Amazon investors may start to get fed up." Poletti notes that Amazon trades for more than 100 times forward earnings estimates, far ahead of e-commerce rivals like eBay (NASDAQ: EBAY ) . Yet while Amazon initially dropped after-hours following the report, the stock surged to an all-time high on Friday.
Top 5 Internet Stocks To Buy Right Now: Google Inc.(GOOG)
Google Inc. maintains an index of Web sites and other online content for users, advertisers, and Google network members and other content providers. It offers AdWords, an auction-based advertising program; AdSense program, which enables Web sites that are part of the Google Network to deliver ads from its AdWords advertisers; Google Display, a display advertising network that comprises the videos, text, images, and other interactive ads; DoubleClick Ad Exchange, a real-time auction marketplace for the trading of display ad space; and YouTube that provides video, interactive, and other ad formats for advertisers. The company also provides Google Mobile that optimizes Google?s applications for mobile devices in browser and downloadable form; and enables advertisers to run search ad campaigns on mobile devices, as well as Google Local that provides local information on the Web; and Google Boost for small businesses to participate in the ads auction. In addition, it offers And roid, an open source mobile software platform; Google Chrome OS, an open source operating system; Google Chrome, a Web browser; Google TV, a platform for the consumers to use the television and the Internet on a single screen; and Google Books platform to discover, search, and consume content from printed books online. Further, the company provides Google Apps, a cloud computing suite of message and collaboration tools, which includes Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, and Google Sites; Google Search Appliance that offers real-time search of business and intranet applications, and public Web sites; Google Site Search, a custom search engine; Google Commerce Search for online retail enterprises; Google Checkout to make online shopping and payments streamlined and secure; Google Maps Application Programming Interface; and Google Earth Enterprise, a firewall software solution for imagery and data visualization. Google Inc. was founded in 1998 and is headquartered in Mountain View, California.
Advisors' Opinion:- [By Bloomberg]
Richard Vogel/AP Google (GOOG) and Viacom (VIA) settled Viacom's lawsuit claiming YouTube violated copyrights by letting users post video clips from shows without authorization after a federal judge twice threw out the allegations. Terms of the settlement weren't disclosed, the companies said Tuesday in a joint statement. "This settlement reflects the growing collaborative dialogue between our two companies on important opportunities, and we look forward to working more closely together," the companies said in the statement. Viacom originally sued in 2007, seeking $1 billion in damages and claiming that YouTube users were illegally uploading thousands of videos of Viacom TV shows, such as "South Park" and "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart," and movies from its Paramount Pictures film studio. U.S. District Judge Louis Stanton ruled in 2010 in Mountain View, Calif.-based Google's favor. In April 2012, the U.S. Court of Appeals in New York overturned that ruling and sent the case back to the district court. In April 2013, Google for a second time persuaded Stanton to throw out Viacom's lawsuit, and New York-based Viacom said at the time it would appeal the decision. The case is Viacom v. YouTube, 07-cv-02103, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan). The appeal case is Viacom International v. YouTube, 10-03270, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit (Manhattan).
Your smartphone already allows you to do instant price comparisons at the store, usually by scanning a barcode. There are several apps that let you "showroom" in this way. We don't know which, if any, will be available for Glass. But assuming one of these apps gets ported over to the new hardware, you'll be able to get price comparisons just by picking up a product and looking at the barcode.
- [By Rick Munarriz]
Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO ) and Google (NASDAQ: GOOG ) reported quarterly results this week. The market enjoyed Yahoo!'s performance and soured when Google came to the plate, but both companies offered similar snapshots of the challenge in monetizing mobile.
- [By WWW.DAILYFINANCE.COM]
Paul Sakuma/AP There were plenty of winners and losers this week, with a few potential mergers coming undone and a maker of electronic learning toys getting schooled. Here's a rundown of the week's smartest moves and biggest blunders. Trex (TREX) -- Winner It's summer, and apparently a lot of homeowners decided to invest in sprucing up their outdoor living space. Trex posted strong quarterly results on Monday. The leading maker of weather-resistant wood-alternative decking saw its sales climb 23 percent, and adjusted pre-tax earnings soared 62 percent. There was some weakness earlier this earnings season out of other home improvement specialists, so it's a welcome surprise to see Trex holding up so well. The good news doesn't end there. Trex is eyeing accelerating growth, calling for revenue to climb a better than expected 27 percent in the current quarter. Mergers -- Loser In any week there seems to be a couple of acquisitions or mergers, but sometimes Cupid isn't feeling up to the arrow-slinging task. A couple of big potential buyouts came undone this week when Rupert Murdoch pulled his offer to buy out Time Warner (TWX), and Sprint (S) nixed plans to snap up T-Mobile (TMUS). The deals fell apart for different reasons. Murdoch just didn't have an interest in chasing Time Warner's stock higher in a hostile buyout bid. Sprint realized that regulators weren't going to be happy unless there were four major independent wireless carriers out there. Instant Gratification -- Winner Amazon.com (AMZN) announced on Wednesday that it was expanding its same-day delivery service to six more cities. Prime shoppers in Baltimore, Dallas, Indianapolis, New York City, Philadelphia and Washington, DC, metro areas will now be able to place an order on the website by noon and pay $5.99 to have it delivered that same day. Naturally the selection is limited to items that Amazon stocks locally, but the one knock on Amazon about having to wait a day or two at least for shipme
Top 5 Internet Stocks To Buy Right Now: CYNK Technology Corp (CYNK)
Cynk Technology Corp., formerly Introbuzz, Inc., is a development stage-company. The Company intends to develop a social network business. Social networks are Web based services that allow individuals to post a profile and link their profile to other friends and organizations.
The Company intends to develop a database of professional and other business persons, as well as other interested persons in providing and utilizing contacts. As of November 14, 2012, the Company had not generated any revenue.
Advisors' Opinion:- [By WWW.DAILYFINANCE.COM]
CYNK Technology (CYNK), the mysterious over-the-counter stock that at one point broke a $6 billion market cap, dropped roughly 80 percent in its first trades after a Securities and Exchange Commission halt. The SEC halted CYNK for two weeks following a massive rise in the stock's value -- it had been worth only a few cents per share in June, but it jumped above $21 on July 10. The Belize-based CYNK Technology supposedly operates a social networking site, but filings indicate it only has one employee and virtually no assets. Experts told CNBC the week of the SEC halt that they expected CYNK to fall precipitously after reopening, and its first day of trading is proving those predictions correct. When it was halted, the stock was worth just less than $14 per share, and is now below $3 a share after briefly hovering around $5 earlier Friday morning. An OTC Markets spokeswoman told Reuters that CYNK's shares were not trading on its platform, but were occurring over the phone. Earlier this week Reuters reported that OTC's CEO did not expect CYNK to trade on its platform at all after reopening, as no brokerages would file the required paperwork for the stock to trade on their exchanges. An SEC spokesman said that the organization cannot comment on the status of a company after a suspension period ends, citing an online explanation of the process. That document notes that broker-dealers may not solicit investors to trade the previously suspended OTC stock until they satisfy several regulatory requirements. The SEC warned, however, that "unsolicited" trading may occur after a reopening -- as CYNK is now seeing -- but "even though such trading is allowed, it can be very risky for investors without current and reliable information about the company."
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