The broader advertising recovery may take time, but search advertising is clearly beating a hasty path back toward normalcy. Or it is in Google’s case anyway. Reporting third-quarter results after market close Thursday, the search giant posted revenue of $5.94 billion, an increase of seven percent compared to the third quarter of 2008.
Approximately 12 percent of all computer-using U.S. households own an Apple machine, and nearly 85 percent of those also own a Windows-based PC. That’s the conclusion of an NPD survey that suggests that Mac households favor multiplatform environments, buy more gadgets and have the higher income needed to afford them.
This week has been a good one for Sirius XM Radio. The company’s shares spiked, rising about 20 percent to 54 cents on news of the government’s expanded “Cash for Clunkers” program and the positive impact it should have on new car sales and, by extension, new Sirius subscriptions. That analysts had been predicting a second-quarter loss for the satellite radio company, along with the loss of thousands of subscribers, did little to temper enthusiasm.
Looks like News Corp. was a little too optimistic when the company told investors in May that it expected a decline of around 30 percent in fiscal-year-adjusted operating income. Reporting earnings this afternoon, the publisher of The Wall Street Journal and this Web site instead posted a decline of 32.5 percent.
Hewlett-Packard CEO Mark Hurd seems to have managed to cut the fat from the company without hitting any of its internal organs. HP reported a 10 percent increase in its fiscal third-quarter earnings Tuesday, while profits rose 14 percent to $2 billion.
To hear tell from Steve Jobs, Apple doesn’t think its new App Store will make a material contribution to its bottom line. “To be clear, we don’t intend to make money off the App Store,” Jobs said at a town-hall meeting earlier this year announcing the store. “We’re basically giving all the money to the developers, and the 30% that pays for running the store, that’ll be great.” Course, it will be greater still if it adds a few percentage points to Apple’s operating income. And according to Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster, it will.
By the time this Yahoo debacle has sorted itself out Carl Icahn may have done more to revive the long lost art of letter writing than to revive Yahoo itself. In another stink bomb of a letter to Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock today, the activist investor slagged the company’s leadership with particular vitriol. “… You made approximately $10,000 per week last year — not bad for a board member,” Icahn wrote. “I believe most of your shareholders would be interested in seeing your time sheets — especially in light of the fact that, in my estimation, most of your so-called “plans” over the last few years have been failures.”
Investors who were chugging Milk of Magnesia in advance of Google’s quarterly earnings today were given a nice surprise this afternoon when the company posted solid profit and sales gains for the quarter.
Well this ought to cause a chair-tossing tantrum or two up at Microsoft HQ. This afternoon Yahoo, which has been searching for alternatives to Microsoft’s unsolicited $44.6 billion acquisition offer, said it will explore a search-advertising partnership with its greatest rival–Google.
John Paczkowski has been poking fun at the tech industry and the personalities that drive it since 1997. From 1999 to 2007, he wrote the award-winning tech news Web log Good Morning Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper. Read more »
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
12:58 AM: Breakfast: Two schools of fish from Tokyo Bay. Calories: 782,000. How I was feeling when I ate this: confused, irradiated, hating my size.
11:37 AM: Exercise: “Taxi Stomp” (alternating legs, for 30 blocks). Calories burned: 148,900,183.
1983. The Beatles announce their first tour in thirteen years, but likewise announce that Michael Jackson will be going on tour with them as a one gigantic mega-concert event.
Best video mashup ever.
A Facebook Memorial
Wow.
Worth it for the Rickrolling photo alone.
Excellent.
Flughumor!
… you vacuous, toffee-nosed, malodorous perverts
Stephen Fry and zoologist Mark Carwardine meet the kakapo — a fat, flightless and very randy rare parrot.
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