THE NEWS WRAP: Overheads and investment costs outstripping growth for SoundCloud

Popular online music and audio sharing platform SoundCloud’s rapid growth is seeing its costs runaway from its revenues, TechCrunch reports.

The platform is now exceeding 175 million listeners each month, and is on track to reach 200 million.

The company posted a turnover of $US14.1 million ($A16.2 million) in 2013, up 40% from 2012. However, its operating loss for the period more than doubled to $US29.2 million.

The company says it’s trying to grow SoundCloud into the market-leading platform for listening to, creating and sharing sound.

“This has necessitated investment in technology, headcount and marketing. Our overhead base has increased faster than our revenues,” it says.

Raspberry Pi sales pass 3.8 million

Sales of the Raspberry Pi microcomputer have now passed 3.8 million, dwarfing its creator’s original expectations.

Its creators, the Pi Foundation, envisaged selling as few as 10,000 boards of the course over its lifetime.

The Pi shipped just over a million in its first year on sale, and two and a half years later sales continue to trend upwards.

Patent trolling pays

Statistics published by the lawfirm Goodwin Protector as part of a manual that provides tips for fighting patent trolls show that in the US, from 2010 to 2013, non-practising entitles (patent trolls) received three times more in damages than real companies, Gigaom reports.

Michael Strapp, one of the manual’s authors, says the result is because of patent trolls squeezing settlements from dozens of smaller companies and then suing larger companies like Apple or Google. He also says another factor is a dysfunctional feature of the American patent system, which allows the trolls to choose the venue of legal action.

Overnight

The Dow Jones Industrial Average is down 115.15 to 16,544.10. The Australian dollar is currently trading at US87 cents.