January 2005 prices for consumer electronics dropped 0.8% from Dec 2004, according to NPD Consumer Electronics Price Watch. The price for a market basket of the 27 most popular electronics goods fell to $10,825 in January from December and, were over $2,500 below one year ago. The largest declines were for 42-inch plasma screen prices, which slipped 7.2% to $2,207, while 17-inch LCD monitors fell to $351, down 5.3%.

TNS Media Intelligence published the advertising budgets of top 10 advertisers (both online and offline) in the United States. Procter & Gamble, General Motors and Time Warner all spend more than $2 bln a year on advertising.

$3.0-$4.6 bln in outsourced testing is sent offshore, throwing up opportunities for companies in India that thrive on low-cost knowledge workers. Testing could make up 25-50% of software budgets, according to Gartner. Independent testing is growing at 50-65% while the part of work done offshore is growing at 35-40%.

F-Secure claims instant messaging viruses are growing at 50% a month. Where as the Sasser email worm took 14 minutes to compromise 95% of all vulnerable PCs around the world, instant messaging worms could infect all IM using computers in just 14 seconds.

Los Angeles, Seattle, Chicago and New York lead the nation in number of coffee shops opened, with 801 shops in LA area. However, when NPD Group divided the population numbers by the number of coffee shops, Seattle, Portland, Minneapolis and San Diego became the market with the highest coffee shop penetration. There’re 2.5 coffee shops for every 1,000 people in Seattle, WА.

1.4 bln euros will be spent on search engine marketing in Europe, Forrester Research says. This will result in 65% YTY growth. By 2010, European marketers will spend almost 3 bln euros, up from 856 mln in 2004, on search marketing. In the UK, the largest online advertising market in Europe, search marketing is expected to grow to over 1 bln euros in 2010, up from 763 mln euros at the end of 2005. France will own 19% of search marketing spend in Europe by the end of 2005 and 31% by 2010. Germany search engine marketing spending totaled 165 mln euros, but is expected to slow down and will reach 399 mln euros in 2010.

IDC and IGN asked gamers about their gaming and music listening habits. The bulk of respondents reported spending 4-20 hours a week playing video games. 20% said they spent 6-10 hours a week gaming. 35% reported owning between 100 and 299 music CDs. 16% said they owned 300 to 499 CDs. 93% of those who took the survey were male. 83% said that they had music stored on PCs in their household, with 23% saying they had 1,000 or more songs stored on their PCs. 16% used a paid online music service.

Digital cameras are now in about 43 mln homes in America, and that 40% penetration could reach 70% by 2007. In the United States, prints ordered from retailers and Web sites or made at home fell from a peak of 30.3 bln in 2000 to 27.4 bln in 2004 and could dip to 25.9 bln in 2005 according to Photo Marketing Association International. Propelled by price wars among retailers led by Wal-Mart, Costco, and online upstarts like Snapfish and Shutterfly.com, prints from digital cameras could hit 7.7 bln this year, up from 400 mln in 2000, and outnumber prints from film cameras by 2007.

34% of online US households will file their taxes electronically in 2005, up from 28% in 2004, according to a survey by the Conference Board and research company TNS. About 55% online filers said they have been using the Net to file their taxes for more than three years.

Input predicts that state and local governments will increase their IT spending from $48 bln in fiscal 2005 to about $70 bln by fiscal 2010. IT spending in professional services will lead the market with a 14.2% compounded annual growth rate through 2010; telecommunications will see an 11.4% growth rate; and software is projected to receive an 8% growth rate.

Media Life Magazine publishes the results of February 2005 survey by comScore Media Metrix. comScore measured visits to the Web sites of popular peer-to-peer applications. This would not accurately reflect the download or usage activity of the P2P apps, but would provide an estimate of where the users are headed. ComScore Networks numbers from February show visits to five P2P sites such as Kazaa, LimeWire and WinMX slipped by a 36.8 percent versus February 2004, from 30.86 million to just under 19.50 million. For the same period, comScore numbers show visits to the top 10 retail music sites were up 8 percent, from 24.42 million to 26.44 million. ComScore numbers include people using the internet at home, at work and at college and university locations.

40% of fastest-growing company executives say they plan to add 25% or more employees in the next 12 months. About 20% say they plan to add more than 50%. Deloitte & Touche LLP conducted the survey earlier in 2005 based on its annual ranking of the 500 fastest-growing tech companies in North America.

Falling prices have boosted adoption of USB flash drives, according to Business 2.0 magazine. Nearly $4.5 billion worth of these drives were sold in 2004, and that number will top $5.6 billion in 2006, according to market research firm Web-Feet.

IDC showed healthy growth for the IP telephony market in Western Euрope in Q4 2004, with revenue increasing by over 13% compared to Q3 2004, reaching total revenue of $77.1 million. Q4 2004 saw a 14% rise in IP telephone shipments. Cisco was the vendor with the highest market share; its unit market share increased 1.5% in Q4 2004 while revenue market share increased by around 3.4%. Avaya was in second place and the company is clearly making inroads in the European IP telephony market. In terms of deployments, healthcare and local government were the vertical markets with the most activity in Q4 2004. SMB companies were also starting to discover the benefits that IP telephony can bring to them.

Clean Edge stated that the renewable energy markets are poised to grow to more than $100 bln by 2014 from $16 bln in global revenues in 2004. Venture capital investments in US-based energy-tech companies increased to $520 mln in 2004 from $509 mln in 2003, representing nearly 3% of total VC investments in the United States in 2004.

28% of the US households are likely to purchase a mobile phone over the next 12 months, according to Parks Associates. The mobile phone industry and its content partners will benefit from being first to implement interoperable digital rights management (DRM) solutions, which will provide greater revenue opportunities and better user experiences.

Point Topic published the results of UK broadband market survey. There are over 200 ISPs which buy lines on a wholesale basis from BT Wholesale and a further 100 to 200 which buy through wholesale ISPs such as Telefonica, Griffin, Netservices and Brightview. Some higher profile ISPs (Virgin, UK Online) are wholly owned brands operated by companies in the list below (NTL and EasyNet, in these two cases respectively), so they do not appear separately below. The ?Other ISPs? total of something around 150,000 to 200,000, includes fixed wireless access, satellite broadband and the many smaller ISPs which are served by BT Wholesale or wholesale ISPs, themselves supplied by BT Wholesale.

Order-per-email rates reached a new high of 0.35% in Q4 2004, up from the previous high of 0.3% in Q2 2003, DoubleClick reported. Click-to-purchase conversion rates in e-mail marketing campaigns increased 14% YTY in Q4 2004, from 4.2 to 4.8%. As e-mail volume rose, however, the average revenue per e-mail remained at 26 cents, which resulted in an 11% YTY decline in average order size to $89.