Smith Barney CFA Lanny Baker last month predicted a 20 to 25% increase in expenditures. Other forecasts fall within that range. “In 2003, we see online ad spend at $6.3 bil total, increasing to $7.6 bil in 2004, about 21%,” said Nate Elliott, an associate analyst at Jupiter Research.

“We see 2003 as a rebound year,” Elliott observed. “What we’ll see in 2004 is an extension of that and overall even better growth. Online advertising markets grew 10% in 2003.” While Jupiter’s figures are based on the entire market, a market subset may experience 2004 as a second, more moderate, wave in a surge that already occurred. A poll of 26 members of the Online Publishers Association (OPA) showed the members’ ad revenue in the third quarter of 2003 jumped about 46% over that same period in 2002. For this handful of leading publishers, 2004’s 20% growth may seem even mellower than it will to others in the industry.

Windows Media Player leads the pack, with 34% of the users polled claiming they fire up Microsoft’s player utility to access the Internet. AOL’s Instant Messenger came in second, at 20%, while Real Network’s RealPlayer, Microsoft’s MSN Messenger, and Yahoo’s instant messenger client round out the list. In other findings from Nielsen/NetRatings’ monthly report on Web usage, the audience ranking firm noted that the number of people accessing the Internet in November, 2003, was up 11% over the same month last year.

?With 76% of Web surfers using Internet applications, functionality has grown beyond the browser to become a fundamental piece of the overall desktop,? said Abha Bhagat, a senior analyst at Nielsen//NetRatings in a statement. ?It’s become harder to distinguish when you’re on the Internet.?

IDC has sized the Malaysia packaged software market at US$342.7mil (RM1.3bil) in 2002, increasing 5.5% in 2003. It updated the forecast revenue to post a 6.2% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) for the period 2002 through 2007, to reach US$463.4mil (RM1.76bil) in 2007, the market research firm said in a statement.

From this year to 2008, IDC predicts that the semiconductor market will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 12.5%, with revenue rising from US$160 billion this year to US$282 billion in 2008. China, the world’s largest consumer of mobile phones and second largest consumer of PCs, will continue to drive mobile phone semiconductor and PC semiconductor growth. Mainland Chinese semiconductor demand currently represents over one quarter of the US$60 billion total for Asia Pacific and will account for almost half of the entire region by the end of 2008, IDC’s Vice President of semiconductor research Mario Morales said in a statement.

The center reports receiving over 120,000 online fraud complaints through its website this year - an increase of 60% over the 75,000 complaints counted in 2002.

According to IDC’s Enterprise Server Tracker Report for Q3 2003, IBM registered the highest revenue share growth of 4.2%, amongst top server vendors in India, in the overall server market in the first nine months (Q1, Q2, &Q3) of 2003. In the non-x86 Unix server segment, IBM recorded the highest revenue market share growth at 6.9% in the first nine months of 2003, compared to the year-earlier period.

E-mail phishing attacks jumped over 400% during the holidays, according to an analysis released Wednesday of scams reported to clearinghouse Anti-Phishing.org.

Despite this growth in activity, the growth of the online population itself has slowed. There was almost no growth over the course of 2002 and there has been only a small uptick in recent months to leave the size of the online U.S. adult population at 63% of all those 18 and over. More than three-quarters of those between the ages of 12 and 17 use the Internet. The number of American adults going online grew by 47% between our March 2000 and August 2003 surveys. However, growth in Internet penetration was relatively flat over the course of 2002.

Monitoring company FootFall said there were 5% more shoppers out compared with the same weekend 12 months ago.

Tumbleweed claims 5% of e-mail recipients respond to a “phishy” e-mail, where the suggested URL is not whgat it appears to be (the article tells about the latest Visa International scam).

With increasing personal income in China and falling prices of motherboards and processors, competition for desktops now centers on models with price tags ranging between 5,000 and 7,000 yuan, compared with the previous entry-level machines at 5,000 yuan, the sources quoted date released by the CCID (China Center of Information Industry Development) as saying. Desktops with prices ranging between 5,000 and 7,000 yuan accounted for 40.6% of total desktops sold in China in the third quarter, compared with 37.1% for models priced at below 5,000 yuan, according to CCID.

Top foreign brands, including IBM and Dell, which were concentrating on models at 7,000 yuan and above, have stepped up efforts to boost sales in the lower segments. The move could dent the market share of Acer and other Taiwanese brands, which have been focused on the 5,000-7,000 yuan models. China?s notebook market, which is expected to grow to 1.2 million units this year, will exert additional pressure on the desktops. With many newcomers in the market, the share of the top five brands dropped to 64.9% in the third quarter from 65.3% of the previous quarter, according to CCID. The sources expect this to fall further as new players become established and pricing gets more competitive.

Three major Taiwanese WLAN product suppliers ? CyberTAN Technology, Gemtek Technology and Global Sun Technology ? expect to see their combined monthly capacity reach 5.9 million to 6.0 million units by the end of 2004 from about 3.3 million currently. Details of each company?s expansion plan are not available, but it appears that the companies have gained increasing confidence in sales for next year. Last month, the companies said they were each targeting shipping 10 million WLAN devices in 2004, up from the six million to eight million they had originally projected. Global WLAN product shipments are expected to surpass 30 million units this year, according to Taiwanese suppliers.

Foundry prices for high-voltage processes, required for production of LCD driver ICs and some handset chips, have been increasing due to surging demand. Eight-inch, high-voltage (30V or higher) processes at Vanguard International Semiconductor (VIS) are priced about 40% higher than standard CMOS processes, while prices for 6-inch, high-voltage processes at Episil Technologies and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) are close to quotes for standard 8-inch CMOS processes. According to sources, prices for 8-inch, standard 3.3V CMOS processes range between US$500 and US$1,300, depending on the number of metal layers and production technology, while prices for 8-inch, high-voltage processes start at US$700.

Research firm TrendFocus sees hard drive shipments to consumer electronics makers soaring to 55 million units in 2006 from an estimated 17 million this year. Blazing a trail for the market is Japan’s Toshiba, which provides small drives for Apple Computer’s hugely popular iPod music player. Toshiba controls 98% of the market for the 1.8 inch-diameter drives used in the iPod, which can pack up to 10,000 songs in a device the size of a deck of cards, and its small drives are also appearing in a miniature video camera that can record up to two hours of high-definition video.

A recent ruling by the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC), HDTV market developments in Europe and Japan, and the planned move by Motorola to outsource STBs (set-top boxes) from Asian suppliers, could all be blessings for Taiwan?s STB makers, according to sources. Local makers are expecting an increase in demand for digital terrestrial tuner modules after the FCC said it will start requiring TVs sold in the US market to have built-in HDTV receivers from 2005.

The number of TVs bundled with HDTV receivers in the US market is likely to swell to around 47 million units by 2007, the sources quoted FCC estimates as saying. Taiwanese makers will have an advantage over competitors with their expertise drawn from manufacturing HDTV receivers for LCD, plasma and projection TVs, according to the sources. In Europe, the number of families with digital TV receivers has reached 100,000, though the market is very much in a trial period. When digital TV officially kicks off in 2004, demand for HDTV STBs is expected to swell to 500,000 units, the sources said.

The resulting market will be worth nearly $4.4 billion by 2005, and nearly $43 billion by 2010. Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst at ZapThink, cited application security, security appliances, system management, application integration, data integration and business process management as six key markets that will become transformed as vendors enable their solutions with SOA.

Many of Taiwan?s optical disc drive manufacturers, in light of increasing OEM orders for DVD burners, plan to gradually decrease OEM production of combo drive models. According to Taiwanese makers, the OEM price level of combo drives has dropped from US$70-80 per unit in Q1 2003 to US$40-45 currently. The OEM prices of DVD burners have slipped from US$170-180 to about US$100 in the same period. As the price difference has fallen from US$100 to US$55-60, global demand for DVD burners has grown faster than for combo drives. Many Taiwanese makers are willing to allocate more capacity to DVD burners by reducing combo drive output.

The CPRM-protected Secure Digital format grabbed 30% of the US flash memory market in October, overtaking Compact Flash for the first time. CF took 28.8% share and Sony’s Memory Stick formats 22%, according to the market research firm NPD Group. Although technically antiquated, CF still enjoys economies of scale from its long leadership, with 1 GB cards retailing for about $400.