“Despite having fully achieved the original merger integration savings objectives of Nokia Siemens Networks, changes in the global economy and competitive environment make further cost reductions necessary,” the company said.

Among the upgrades: A slimmer design, a 3.2-megapixel camera, sharper 360-by-480 display, 802.11b/g Wi-Fi support and an optical trackpad similar to that of the BlackBerry Curve 8520. The new handset is also outfitted with a 624MHz processor and 256 MB of flash memory.

Paired with BlackBerry OS 5.0, this should mean some decent performance gains. So an incremental update, but little more. Said RIM co-CEO Mike Lazaridis: “This is the Bold for those that wanted it just a little smaller, but still wanted the Bold look, feel, performance and materials.”

About 1987 word got out that the Ingres database would soon have a sexy new function: It would be able to do distributed queries… Ellison told [Oracle ad man Rick] Bennett to prepare an advertisement announcing Oracle’s distributed capability. Then he assigned an engineer to whip up a distribtued feature so the company would actually have something to sell when the ad appeared. Ten days later Bennett’s advertisement hit the trade press: “Oracle Announced SQL*Star,” it said. “The First Distribtued Relational DBMS…”

“The fact of the matter was Oracle didn’t have anything,” said George Schussel, the trade show promoter who had followed Oracle from the beginning. “But that was the way they worked. Everything was marketing, everything was image. You simply announced the product and then figured out later how to deal with it from a technological point of view.”

– Excerpt from The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison

If you’re going to claim in an advertisement that Transaction Processing Council benchmarks show that a hybrid Sun-Oracle server runs faster than a competing product from IBM, it’s probably wise to make sure you have the TPC benchmarks to back up your claim.

Not if you’re Oracle (ORCL), though. On Aug. 27, the company ran an advertisement in The Wall Street Journal and the Economist claiming that “Sun + Oracle is Faster” compared to a TPC-benchmarked IBM (IBM) system. “Oracle and Sun together are hard to match,” Oracle said in the ad. “Just ask IBM. Its fastest server now runs an impressive 6 million TPC-C transactions, but on October 14 at Oracle OpenWorld, we’ll reveal the benchmark numbers that prove that even IBM DB2 running on IBM’s fastest hardware can’t match the speed and performance of Oracle Database on Sun systems.”

A boastful claim. Thing is, at the time it was made, the Sun (JAVA)-Oracle system hadn’t yet been audited by the TPC. In other words, it was based on an unsubstantiated benchmark. And that didn’t fly with the TPC, which fined Oracle $10,000 and ordered the software maker to pull the ad. “Oracle’s claim that it is faster than IBM using a TPC-C benchmark result it claimed would be announced on October 14, 2009 was not supported because Oracle did not have a TPC result at the time of publication,” the TPC explained in an official statement. “The TPC requires that claims based on TPC benchmarks must be demonstrable using publicly available data from official TPC benchmark results.”

Net income in eBay’s second quarter, ended June 30, fell 29 percent to $327 million, or 25 cents a share, from $460 million, or 35 cents a share from a year earlier. Revenue fell four percent to $2.1 billion.

The results came in at the high end of the Q2 outlook eBay provided back in April when the company said it expected revenue of between $1.85 billion and $2.05 billion and earnings per share of between 23 cents and 26 cents.

“We drove solid second quarter results, with strong momentum and market share gains at PayPal and continued stabilization in our core eBay business,” eBay CEO John Donahoe in a statement. “I’m pleased with our pace, our progress and our performance.”

Can’t be much pleased with the company’s core online-auction business, though. That continues to show weakness. The amount of goods and services flowing through eBay’s (EBAY) marketplace, called “gross merchandise volume,” fell 10 percent year-over-year to $11.1 billion. And that’s not good. Especially when Amazon.com (AMZN) is gaining market share so quickly.

“The core eBay marketplaces business continues to be the most important driver for eBay’s share price,” Heath Terry of FBR Capital Markets said in a note to clients this week. “While the company is making progress, management still has a long way to go in addressing the years of technological neglect at the company.”

Three months after Intel CEO Paul Otellini announced that the PC market had reached bottom, the company’s latest financials, which handily beat expectations, seem to have proven him right. “The worst is now behind us,” he said. And the tech economy is showing signs of muted recovery.

The question is: Is that recovery sustainable?

The answer, according to Otellini, is yes. “The second quarter was clearly better than we expected,” he told analysts on a conference call. “Customers signaled increased confidence in their ordering patterns.” After months of global recession, Otellini noted that the company’s second-quarter results “reflect improving conditions” in the PC market.

“Intel is seeing a firming up in demand,” he added. “It’s encouraging news for the industry.”

Indeed. Intel is a bellwether for the tech sector; as goes Intel, so goes the industry. So, if Intel says demand is beginning to return to normal seasonal patterns, then the industry may truly be stabilizing. That said, there’s still quite a bit of economic volatility–enough to suggest that it might be wise not to read too much into Intel’s performance.

Said analysts at JP Morgan: “Although the Intel quarter was clearly spectacular on all fronts, we continue to believe the upside was driven by inventory replenishment as we have not seen any evidence of increasing PC demand.”

Shares of Intel (INTC) are trading up 6.77 percent at $17.97 this morning.

Zzzzzz…

Not exactly a big surprise. Still, quite a piece of machinery. Built around Intel’s (INTC) latest Nehalem Xeon Processors, the new Xserve boasts twice the performance of its predecessor, according to Apple (AAPL). It offers a 128GB SSD boot drive option and up to 3TB of internal storage and RAID 5 support. And it is, according to Apple, the best Xserve the company has ever made. It always is.
“The Xserve is the best workgroup server for our education, business and creative customers,” David Moody, Apple’s vice president of Worldwide Mac Product Marketing said in a statement. “With up to twice the performance, better power efficiency and an innovative SSD drive option, this is the best Xserve we’ve ever made.”

The ax is indeed swinging at Big Blue. Following reports that it is preparing to cut thousands of jobs in its global services unit, IBM (IBM) said Thursday it has begun notifying employees of what it likes to euphemistically refer to as “resource actions.”

“On March 26, we notified some employees to inform them that some jobs were being eliminated,” a spokesperson said in a statement. “IBM continuously evaluates its mix of skills and resources throughout the year, and makes changes as needed. Managing resources in this way keeps us competitive, while adapting to the evolving needs of our clients. We anticipate that some employees will find other positions within IBM, and we’re helping them in that effort. Those employees who leave IBM will receive separation benefits.”

According to Lee Conrad, spokesman for a union group called Alliance@IBM, “Employees are being notified this morning. We do know that 1,674 employees in the application Services unit will lose their jobs. This is one more in a series of IBM job cuts that have contributed to the downward slide of the IBM USA employee population. We see increases in the shifting of jobs offshore as US IBM employees are terminated.”

All told, some 5,000 staff are expected to be affected by the cuts, most in IBM’s Global Business Services division. An ironic twist of fate given IBM CEO Sam Palmisano’s January all-hands message to employees recognizing the division for its contributions to the company’s latest earnings report:

Under extremely challenging economic circumstances, we had a strong fourth quarter and a great 2008. I want to thank you for everything you have done to help achieve this impressive performance.

In the fourth quarter we had particularly strong contributions from our services and software businesses and from growth markets. Our two Global Services segments together delivered pre-tax profit growth of 32 percent and margin growth of 4 points on lower revenues compared to 2007. We signed 24 deals larger than $100 million–the highest we’ve seen in quite some time.

UPDATE: Some interesting comments popping up on the Alliance@IBM boards, among them this one, which offers another explanation for “resource actions” like today’s:

“This is not a story about another 5,000 layoffs in the sea of the millions already laid off. That’s exactly how IBM wants you to report it. In fact, the recession and other layoffs are great cover for IBM. The real story is this is not a typical recessionary layoff, pruning poor performers or re-balancing skills for client needs. This is a story about a deliberate and systematic business strategy to replace 15-20K American workers each year with lower-cost BRIC (Brazil, India, China) workers. So far this year, it is approaching 10K (5K in Jan; 5K today) with rumors of more to come in June and in the fall. This is not a story about moving unskilled work to another country. The layoffs have included highly-skilled and experienced professionals–scientists with PhDs, MBAs, seasoned software developers, marketing experts, consultants, project managers and manufacturing workers. This is a story about throwing near-retirement workers into the layoff pool–and using some of the savings (not sent overseas) to hire lower cost & unsuspecting new college grads.”

PREVIOUSLY:

• IBM: The “I” Stands for “India”
• Will This New “Long-Term View” Approach Also Include Layoffs?
• IBM: Maybe No One Will Notice Our 2,800 Layoffs…

How could a company whose Chief Internet Evangelist, Vint Cerf, once told the Senate Commerce Committee that allowing “broadband carriers to control what people see and do online would fundamentally undermine the principles that have made the Internet such a success,” approach those carriers with a proposal that would seemingly do just that?

There’s a very simple answer to that question: Google is not doing that, and reports suggesting that is are misguided. Yes, Google (GOOG) “has approached major cable and phone companies” with a plan to “place Google servers directly within the network of the service providers.” Yes, this plan would improve content delivery speeds.

And, no, doing so does not violate the concept of network neutrality. If it did, companies like Akamai and Limelight, which also have servers hosted at broadband provider facilities, would long ago have been tarred as anti-Net neutrality villains. Colocating caching servers is a common practice that improves bandwidth usage by bringing data closer to the end user. And while it will certainly make Google’s services faster and more responsive, it won’t do so at the expense of non-Google services. That would be a violation of Net neutrality.

“Some critics have questioned whether improving Web performance through edge caching–temporary storage of frequently accessed data on servers that are located close to end users–violates the concept of network neutrality,” Richard Whitt, Google’s Washington telecom and media counsel explains. “As I said last summer, this myth–which unfortunately underlies a confused story in Monday’s Wall Street Journal–is based on a misunderstanding of the way in which the open Internet works…. All of Google’s colocation agreements with ISPs–which we’ve done through projects called OpenEdge and Google Global Cache–are non-exclusive, meaning any other entity could employ similar arrangements. Also, none of them require (or encourage) that Google traffic be treated with higher priority than other traffic.”

So Google is not negotiating exclusive deals for privileged access. It is not proposing “a fast lane for its own content.” It is not seeking to prioritize its traffic in violation of the Net neutrality principles it espouses. Frankly, this story has little to do with Net neutrality at all. “Network neutrality is about the routing of packets,” Tech Liberation Front’s Tim Lee explained earlier this year when Akamai was accused of violating Net neutrality. “A network is neutral if it faithfully transmits information from one end of the network to the other and doesn’t discriminate among packets based on their contents. Neutrality is, in other words, about the behavior of the routers that move packets around the network. It has nothing to do with the behavior of servers at the edges of the network because they don’t route anyone’s packets.”

Clearly, the so-called IPO window has been slammed shut by the capital crisis. Indeed, data from Dealogic show that 298 IPOs were postponed or withdrawn over the past 11 months–quite a few more than the 167 that met that fate in all of the 2007. And those companies that went through with their offerings didn’t fare so well. Almost 50 percent of new issues fell on their first day of trading, and aftermarket performance was poor, according to Renaissance Capital; the average new issue was down 38 percent by year-end.

“Performance of 2008 new issues in the US was abysmal by historical standards, although not surprising given the steep decline in equities,” says Renaissance. “The average first day pop was a paltry 2%, down from the more than 10% average first day return investors became accustomed to in each of the last five years. A whopping 58% of all new issues traded down in their market debut, the worst first day showing in at least a decade and almost four times the IPO market’s 10-year average.”

Little wonder, then, that the U.S. went three months without an IPO during the second half of the year–the longest dry spell since the recession of the 1970s.

When will the IPO market return? Tough to say. Renaissance says there’s a lot of pent-up demand by potential issuers to raise equity capital. But they’re not likely to test the IPO waters until the financial markets stabilize.

Sounds intriguing, yeah? So what it is it?

Chowdhry hasn’t the faintest idea. But he speculates that it will involve chips developed by P.A. Semi, the boutique semiconductor design company Apple acquired last April. A clearer picture of what’s in store for us will emerge in early 2009 with a series of new Apple patent filings says Chowdhry, who contends that a P.A. Semi chip has also been designed into the third-generation iPhone–which will boast vastly improved performance and battery life over its predecessor.

Also: A new LED display, 24-inch built-in iSight, built-in speakers and MagSafe.

Cost: $899; available in November.

As for the existing standard white plastic MacBook model, Apple (AAPL) is dropping the price to $999, according to Steve Jobs.

Back to the refreshed line, MacBook users have been asking for “a metal enclosure, faster graphics, and LED display,” Jobs explains. “We’re giving it to them.”

Similar features as the new Pro: unibody enclosure, glass trackpad, faster graphics Nvidia 9400 graphics chip and a five-time increase in graphics performance. The new display is designed with laptops in mind.

And continuing a theme at this event, the new MacBook is environmentally friendly. It has also been awarded the EPA EPEAT designation.

The new metal 13.3-inch MacBook sells for $1,299. The $1,599 model buys a faster processor.

Units start shipping today, and will be in stores tomorrow.