Ethan Allen: A Tradition of Quality Furniture

“They don’t make them like they used to” is the lament of people looking for quality. Ethan Allen Furniture is one product that is definitely made like it used to. Ethan Allen products are as sturdy today as they ever were.

Ethan Allen’s furniture style is generally American Traditional. The quality and pricing are both geared towards the higher end of the mass market. If well maintained, many sets will last for decades and can even be passed on to the next generation.

The company was founded in 1932 by two Vermont brothers who bought a bankrupt furniture manufacturer. Like any company of its age, it has gone through various economic cycles. At one point, it became part of a conglomerate, but, after a management buyout, it is now an independent firm that is publicly traded.

Although the firm did have to close one of its Vermont plants, it still does most of its manufacturing in the United States. The company’s products are sold through 300 stores located in North America and the United Kingdom.

Flotek: Servicing the Growing Fracking Industry

Hydraulic Fracturing, also known as fracking, has become an important method of extracting energy in the United States. It is estimated that as much as 80% of natural gas will be removed from the ground using this method over the next decade. Thanks to methods such as fracking, the United States can reduce its dependency on foreign sources of energy. This should please both consumers and politicians.

Whenever there is a rush for any resources, one should always keep an eye on the companies that service the miners. For example, everybody has heard of Levi Strauss’s jeans, which he originally created to clothe gold miners; however, few can name any of the miners. The fracking business is no different, dry well or not, someone has to supply them. This includes both drilling equipment and chemicals used in production. Furthermore, these wells become depleted faster than conventional wells, which is good news for anyone who is selling equipment for the next well.

One of the top fracking service companies is Flotek. Founded in 1985, Flotek has grown to be a full service provider in the fracking industry. This would include drilling and production equipment as well as chemicals. The company has subsidiaries that manufacture and lease equipment to the drilling companies.

The market for fracking is solid. It is a commodity, so any investor needs to be concerned about the market turning. However, despite objections from some environmental groups, fracking has become a reality. In fact, fracking miners have realized the importance of maintaining high standards and moved to police themselves. Combine this with a good source of employment for workers and extra income for property owners and it will be hard for states to say no to fracking. This is good news for Flotek.

The demand for the company’s products has translated into an excellent financial picture. Revenues have more than doubled in the past year to $312 million. Operating margins are within the industry average of 16%. After becoming profitable in 2011, Flotek’s earnings doubled in the past year.

Splunk Has Spunk

In the highly competitive software industry, Splunk certainly has spunk! Founded in 2003 by Erik Swan, Rob Das and Michael Baum, the company has grown from its relatively humble beginnings to its competitive nature today – headquarters in San Francisco, California with regional offices across Europe, Asia, and Africa as well as the Middle East; 600 employees and growing; and revenues of US$198.94 million as of 2013.

It now has 3,700 licensed customers from the abovementioned areas with almost half of all Fortune 100 companies including Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, and Credit Suisse now on board.

The company made its initial public offering in 2012 and trades under NASDAQ with ticker name SPLK. Investors are definitely getting in on the act with Splunk considering its growing area of coverage and customer base, thus, its growing potential for dominating its niche.

Splunk produces a wide range of applications essential in searching, monitoring and evaluating real-time, machine-generated data using a web-style interface. The applications then generate reports, graphs and alerts, among others, for use by humans.

Workday, Inc.: Making Management of Finances and Manpower Better

With David Duffield and Aneel Bhusri as co-Chief Executive Officers, Workday, Inc. continues to make inroads into its thrust of providing excellent cloud-based human resource and financial management services at a more affordable cost than their competitors. When we say competitors, the company means Oracle and SAP in particular, the former of which staged a hostile takeover in 2005 of PeopleSoft, the company founded and managed by Duffield with Bhusri as his chief strategist.

The company launched a successful IPO on October 2012 and now trades at the New York Stock Exchange with ticker name WDAY. Its present headquarters are in Pleasanton, California with over 20 locations in the United States staffed by over 1,750 employees. Its revenues as of October 2012 were $119.5 million although the company does not expect to turn a profit in the near future.

But it is not just its history of hostile takeovers followed by successful IPOs and doubled revenues that make Workday a rising star in the highly competitive global software industry. Instead, its excellent products and services notably online software are being patronized by more and more companies from mid-sized businesses to multi-billion Fortune 500 corporations.

Take a look at a few of these products and services:

• By Applications

Workday combines human resource and finance management solutions into a single seamless system with the conviction that each one drives the other to top performance. The system includes Workday Financial Management, Workday Human Resource and Talent Management, Workday Big Data Analytics, and Workday Integration Cloud.

• By Industry

Workday provides products and services that will grow with their clients, so to speak. Industries served include financial services, healthcare and life sciences, manufacturing, higher education, and retail and hospitality as well as the government sector.

• By Role

Executives, managers and supervisors can rely on Workday for solutions designed to assist in better decision-making processes. Choose from solutions for CEOs, CFOs and CHROs.

Jamming Away in the Gaming Market

Playjam started in 1999 as a paid TV game provider. As the game industry has evolved with popularity of other gaming platforms such as the internet, social networks, and mobile devices, the company is focused on becoming a leader in television games with its interconnected game products. They have the ambitious goal of putting these products on a billion devices. They also hope to use cross-product marketing to build up their brand.

In the rough and tumble world of gaming, Playjam has rolled with the punches. It started as subsidiary of Static 2358. It was sold to OpenTV in 2001, but was repurchased by founder Jasper Smith in 2008. The company strategy is focusing on building its place as a gaming force. It has created the Interconnected Game Forum to standardize equipment and software requirements. It has also acquired distribution deals with major manufacturers of televisions and gaming platforms. To finance this, the company was given five million in financing from Game Stop Ventures. It is clear that the company’s ambitious goals are combined with a solid plan to get there.

Target Marketing for the New Media Age

If you have not noticed, there is a revolution going on in the world of media.  In the past, an advertising campaign would saturate a television market and attempt to hit a target demographic.  We all know that those days have passed.  With the rise of on-line viewing and interactive television, ads can target an audience with the precision of a laser.  So it is no longer a matter of what groups of people are watching a show, but rather what a person is.

Videology is a technology company that is a leader in this field.  Their algorithms allow their clients to focus campaigns in the most effective manner.  This gives the clients the ability to ensure that the advertisements we have always loved are being seen by those who are most likely to buy.  The traditional way to manage audiences, such as Nielsen Ratings or Arbitron can be replaced the way GPS replaces compasses or satellites. 

The company prides itself on having a media platform capable of delivering robust results for its clients.  Remember that the most important part of traditional advertising is capturing an audience’s attention while the key initial face-to-face sale is closing the deal.  Videology uses its math models to bridge this gap.  It finds the most likely clients and then puts together a program that will get those prospects to buy.  Videology’s clients increase their effectiveness and cut their costs.  Videology also supplies their clients with detailed reporting to show just how well the plan has performed. 

This business model has brought the kind of attention that entrepreneurs like.  The company was founded in 2007 and has over 900 clients in twelve countries.  This has led to doubling of annual revenues and new financing from top Venture Capital firms.  Just as Google took search engines to the next level, Videology is doing the same for media and advertising.