In addition to trademarks, we currently hold several patents in the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada. We believe these patents represent our commitment to developing innovative products and tools for investors. 

## License Agreements 

In the majority of our licensing agreements, we license our products and/or other intellectual property to our customers for a fee. We generally use our standard agreements, whether in paper or elec- tronic form, and we do not provide our products and services to customers or other users without having an agreement in place. 

We maintain licensing agreements with our minority-owned oper- ations. We put these agreements in place so these companies can use our intellectual property, such as our products and trademarks, to develop and market similar products under our name in their operating territories. 

In the ordinary course of our business, we obtain and use intel- lectual property from a wide variety of sources. We license some of this intellectual property from third parties and obtain other por- tions of it directly from public filings. 

## Seasonality 

We believe our business has a modest amount of seasonality. Some of our smaller products, such as the Ibbotson Stocks, Bonds, Bills, and Inflation Yearbook  and one of our investment conferences, gen- erate the majority of their revenue in the first or second quarter of the year. Most of our products are sold with subscription or license terms of at least one year, though, and we recognize revenue ratably over the term of each subscription or license agreement. This tends to moderate seasonality in sales patterns for individual products. 

We believe market movements generally have more influence on our performance than seasonality. The amount of revenue we earn from asset-based fees depends on the value of assets on which we provide advisory services, and the size of our asset base can increase or decrease along with trends in market performance. 

## Largest Customer 

In 2010, our largest customer accounted for less than 5% of our consolidated revenue. 

## Competitive Landscape 

The economic and financial information industry has been marked by increased consolidation over the past five years, with the stron- gest players generally gaining market share at the expense of smaller competitors. Some of our major competitors include Thomson Reuters; Standard & Poor’s, a division of The McGraw-Hill Companies; Bloomberg; and Yahoo!. These companies have financial resources that are significantly greater than ours. We also have a number of smaller competitors in our two business segments, which we discuss in Business Segments, Products, and Services above. 

We believe the most important competitive factors in our industry are brand and reputation, data accuracy and quality, breadth of data coverage, quality of investment analysis and analytics, design, prod- uct reliability, and value of the products and services provided. 

## Research and Development 

A key aspect of our growth strategy is to expand our investment research capabilities and enhance our existing products and services. We strive to rapidly adopt new technology that can improve our products and services. We have a flexible technology platform that allows our products to work together across a full range of invest- ment databases, delivery formats, and market segments. As a general practice, we manage our own websites and build our own software rather than relying on outside vendors. This allows us to control our development and better manage costs, enabling us to respond quickly to market changes and to meet customer needs efficiently. As of December 31, 2010, our technology team consisted of approximately 800 programmers and technology and infrastruc- ture professionals. 

In 2010, 2009, and 2008 our development expense represented 8.9%, 8.0%, and 8.0%, respectively, of our revenue. We expect that devel- opment expense will continue to represent a meaningful percentage of our revenue in the future. 

