Los Angeles Times

"There are thousands of people out there, if not tens of thousands of people, that could buy this product," Pang said. "We found the secret sauce to make billionaires act like little giddy schoolchildren."

A survey of 1,000 U.S. home builders found that 29% of residences they built in 2011 included home theaters, up from 20% a year earlier, according to market research firm Parks Associates.

From the article, "Now showing in rich people's homes: first-run movies" by Dani ...read more

Getting the average homeowner to take an interest — and make an investment — in managing energy is a chronic problem for the industry. But it's the wave of the future, and utilities, service providers and a slew of technology companies are all trying to figure out how to get people to open their homes and wallets. According to Parks Associates, 17% of U.S. households will have some form of in-home display for monitoring energy consumption by 2015. By 2021, nearly half of househo ...read more

It's not just time. "Camelot" players also spend more money. The average social game on Facebook succeeds in getting between 2 percent and 5 percent of players to spend money on the game, according to Pietro Macchiarella, an analyst with Parks Associates. Most pay to get special powers to advance faster in the games or to customize their games or avatars with virtual items.

From the article, "Hard-core gamers turning to social networks" by Alex Pham

The average social game on Facebook succeeds in getting between 2% and 5% of players to spend money on the game, according to Pietro Macchiarella, an analyst with Parks Associates. Most pay to get special powers to advance faster in the games or to customize their games or avatars with virtual items.

From the article, "Game maker Kabam finds its social niche" by Alex Pham

For Zynga, recruiting players for its games is just the first step because their games can be played for free. Zynga generally makes money when it can persuade those players to pony up actual dollars, or in this case Chinese yuan, to get special virtual items or to advance more quickly in the games. In the U.S., the percentage of players who pay for social games ranges from 2% to 4%, according to Parks Associates, a market research firm.

From the article, "CityVille's new ne ...read more

Google+ is Google's most aggressive effort yet to crack the evolution of the Web from a place that connects people to information to a place that connects them to one another. It has amassed 20 million users in three weeks, according to research firm ComScore Inc. The addition of social games could liven up Google+, which has far fewer users than Facebook's more than 750 million and fewer bells and whistles. Google+ still requires an invitation.

The market for social games i ...read more

Nonetheless, Internet TVs began gathering retail momentum this year, as 1 in 4 high-definition televisions sold in the U.S. provided Internet capability, according to researcher Parks Associates. Fewer than half of the consumers who purchased such high-end devices, or 40%, took advantage of this feature, Parks found.

A scant 5% of people whose televisions are connected to the Internet have used their TVs to access online video services such as Netflix, Amazon Video on Demand ...read more

Paul Gagnon, an analyst with DisplaySearch, calculated that based on the NPD figures, about 20,000 of the flat-panel sets were sold by those major retailers.

That's a tiny number compared with the approximately 7 million TV sets overall that were shipped to retailers around that time frame, according to the Consumer Electronics Assn. trade group.

And a Parks Associates study released Thursday showed that despite the success of several recent 3-D movies, awareness of the ...read more