Kara came out swinging this week over Meg Whitman’s insistence that the Skype acquisition by eBay should be put in her “win” column. Whitman, former CEO of eBay (EBAY), is running for governor of California, and Kara had her spin detector set to maximum. Speaking of dystopia, Kara covered the release of Ken Auletta’s new book, “Googled: The End of the World as We Know It.” Auletta posits that Google (GOOG) is more Spock than Kirk and lacks important emotional intelligence. He made similar accusations about another subject of his recent works: Microsoft (MSFT). Insert sarcastic gasp here. Kara rounded out the week with a flight aboard the airship “Broadband,” aka Virgin America. It seems as though Facebook is everywhere these days, and on this day in particular, Facebook was just a few rows behind her in the person of a PR guy from the company. The moral is that maybe the greatest thing about that speedy in-flight Internet is farming out the awkward seatmate talk to your email inbox. Kara did get an invitation to Facebook’s Washington, D.C., offices out of the deal.

Digital Daily opened the week with an invasion of droids. No, John wasn’t stuck in front of an Xbox playing Terminator; he was covering the release of the first 100,000 units of Motorola’s (MOT) newest iPhone competitor. John also covered Apple’s (AAPL) opening of a “significant store” in New York this week, which may shed light on the company’s future retail strategy. John sees potential for the newest store to serve as jai-alai palace, should the whole iPhone thing not work out. And just in case Kara’s story about Google’s lack of feeling wasn’t frightening enough, John brought us a look into the search giant’s designs on the software space occupied by Microsoft Office. While Google claims to have no plans for domination of office productivity, it sure seems like it would like to paint the whole cloud Chrome.

Peter gave us the cold hard facts about the projected costs of the coming AOL spinoff, as he began the week in somber tone. In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, AOL estimates losses will run to nearly $200 million and end employment for up to 1,000 people. Nothing gets Peter up from that kind of low quite like a good session with “The Office,” and this week’s episode was just too good to pass up. The team at Dunder Mifflin did a little Wall Street Journal paywall pole-vault right on screen. Commentary on recent “Murdochian” events or not, Peter thinks it’s just good TV. MediaMemo covered the pending AOL spinoff from the other end this week and addressed the biggest problem in the room head on: AOL is going to enter a space it hasn’t filled since the days when the sound of “you’ve got mail” meant you were high tech. Google runs the yard now, which will make it harder for AOL’s old dog to play with the comparatively young pups.

Most people think bigger is better, but in the strange world of tech columnists, small reigns supreme. Walt’s Personal Technology column this week covered three new laptops with some very sleek features to please the holiday consumer. New offerings from Toshiba, HP (HPQ) and Lenovo came under the Mossberg microscope, and all were pronounced impressive, if a bit pricy. Walt’s semifavorite is the Lenovo, but his preference for the slim, light design admittedly came at the heavy expense of limited battery life. The trip to Mossberg’s Mailbox this week yielded answers on pressing questions from potential Motorola Droid owners, a person hoping to make the move from a Palm (PALM) PDA to an iPhone, and from an older computer user thinking about making the switch to Apple’s new bigger-screened iMac. Over at The Mossberg Solution, Katie reviewed the new BlackBerry Bold from Research in Motion (RIM), which seemed to have 10 percent more features and a similar reduction in size. The newest model wasn’t quite as Bold as its predecessors, Katie found. Many features originally reserved for this higher-end model have been passed down to the rest of the product range. Her advice: have a look at the Tour or Curve 8900 before going Bold.

Tune in next week to get the 30,000-foot view on the wide world of tech from the road-ready AllThingsD team. Let’s hope we can get Wi-Fi on that flight too.

People familiar with the matter tell Bloomberg that Apple’s handling of the matter remains under scrutiny and that company directors Art Levinson and Bill Campbell had been briefed by Jobs’s doctors on his medical condition at the time of the January disclosures, but little else.

Now, the path from “Steve is suffering from a common bug” to “a hormone imbalance has been robbing Steve of the proteins his body needs to be healthy” to “Steve has undergone a liver transplant” is obviously something of an eyebrow-raiser. But whether it was material to Apple’s business and therefore required disclosure isn’t clear. After all, Apple (AAPL) did just fine while Jobs was on sabbatical; the debut of new Macs, iPods and iPhones is testament to that. Beyond that, there’s this: Apple’s stock posted a 59 percent gain while he was away.

“The issue is not going to be whether they needed to disclose the medical records,” James Cox, a securities law professor at Duke University, told Bloomberg. “It’s going to be whether they monitored the disclosures about his health, in relation to investor expectations that Apple would continue to be led by Steven Jobs….[Apple] did fine. Do you need to say more than, ‘Our CEO has health problems and he’s out on leave?’ The question I think the SEC is looking at is whether it’s material.”

Ancient history, I suppose. But perhaps worth thinking about in light of OpenTable’s rather astonishing IPO last week. Originally priced at between $12 and $14, shares in the company were instead listed at $20. They opened at $24.50 and then spiked to $33 before closing at $31.81. A 59 percent surge on the first day of trading. For a company whose business is built on the recession-brutalized fine-dining industry? Impressive. Must have made for quite a windfall for OpenTable’s’s larger investors. Especially those who took the opportunity to dump their stakes in the company. Charles Schwab (SCHW), Pacific Asset Partners, W Capital Partners, Venture Frogs, Zagat and a number of small private investors sold off all their OpenTable shares as part of the company’s IPO (click on chart below), according to the SEC filing.

Interesting, yeah? Seems at least some of the company’s investors had been hoping for an exit. And they fled for it in unison, pockets full, when one was offered. Perhaps they’d lost their appetite for risk after reading through the Risk Factors section of Open Tables IPO filing, which grimly noted that “a significant majority of our restaurant customers are fine-dining restaurants which have been particularly affected by economic downturns such as the one we are currently experiencing.”

Or perhaps, like Scott Sweet, a senior managing partner at I.P.O. Boutique, they remember Foodline and the last dot-com bubble and bust. “People don’t truly know the story here about this company. It’s a one-trick pony company,” Sweet told the New York Times. “Pricier restaurants in San Francisco, Tampa, New York are not that hard to get in right now. In fact, one can do it themselves if they choose, with 15 minutes notice.”

“Chrysler’s bankruptcy and announced factory shut-down will impact second quarter numbers by reducing the number of prepaid bundled subscriptions associated with the production and shipment of new cars,” Jim Meyer, Sirius’s President of Operations and Sales, said during a conference call last week. “There will be a noticeable hit to subscribers in the second quarter, as a result of these production halts.”

A noticeable hit. What does that mean? Sirius didn’t say at the time, but a filing the company made with the SEC today gives us a clearer picture–and it’s not a pretty one. Chrysler sent quite a bit of new business Sirius’s way. From the Risk Factors item in the company’s 10-Q filing:

We do not expect to generate a significant number of new subscribers from Chrysler while its plants are closed. During the year ended December 31, 2008, Chrysler produced approximately 900,000 vehicles which included a satellite radio and a prepaid subscription to our service. These subscribers represented approximately 16% of our gross subscriber additions in 2008.”

 
Now, there’s no telling how long the Chrysler factory shutdown will last, so it’s impossible to know how much of an impact it will have on Sirius. That said, if the company’s bankruptcy proceedings drag on for any length of time, it obviously does not bode well for Sirius, especially since XM is potentially facing a similar scenario with General Motors (GM). Again, from the Sirius 10-Q:

There is also significant uncertainty surrounding General Motors’ future and potential filing for bankruptcy protection. A bankruptcy filing by General Motors could have similar effects on our subsidiary, XM.

And that would be grim news indeed. Because while Sirius has stopped counting on its auto partnerships to drive sales, it hasn’t yet established other means of driving subscriptions.

It’s not clear what activities are at issue here, but if they’re found to be in violation of the FCPA, Sun (JAVA) could be in a for a rough time of it. As the company itself notes, “The FCPA and related statutes and regulations provide for potential monetary penalties, criminal sanctions and in some cases debarment from doing business with the U.S. federal government in connection with FCPA violations, any of which could have a material effect on our business.”

Also disclosed in the filing: three class action suits seeking to block Oracle’s $7.4 billion acquisition of the company. “Three putative shareholder class action were filed by individual shareholders on April 20, 2009, April 30, 2009 and April 30, 2009, respectively, in Santa Clara County Superior Court naming Sun and certain of our officers and directors, as well as Oracle Corporation, as defendants,” Sun explains. “The complaints, which are similar, seek to enjoin the proposed acquisition of Sun by Oracle Corporation and allege claims for breach of fiduciary against the individual defendants and for aiding and abetting a breach of fiduciary duty against the corporate defendants. The complaints generally allege that the consideration offered in the proposed transaction is unfair and inadequate. Sun and the other defendants have not yet responded to the complaints.”

Wonder what Oracle (ORCL) will make of all this?

Zing.

Ellison went on to note that Oracle has big plans for Sun’s SPARC chips as well. “Once we own Sun we’re going to increase the investment in SPARC,” he said. “We think designing our own chips is very, very important. Even Apple is designing its own chips these days. Right now, SPARC chips do some things better than Intel chips and vice-versa. For example, SPARC is much more energy efficient than Intel while delivering the same performance on a per socket basis. This is not just a green issue, it’s an economic issue. Today, database centers are paying as much for electricity to run their computers as they pay to buy their computers. SPARC machines are much less expensive to run than Intel machines….our primary reason for designing our own chips is to build computers with the very best performance, reliability and security available in the market. Some system features work much better if they are implemented in silicon rather than software. Once we own Sun, we’ll be able to plan and synchronize new features from silicon to software, just like IBM and the other big system suppliers. We want to work with Fujitsu to design advanced features into the SPARC microprocessor aimed at improving Oracle database performance. In my opinion, this will enable SPARC Solaris open-system mainframes and servers to challenge IBM’s dominance in the data center. Sun was very successful for a very long time selling computer systems based on the SPARC chip and the Solaris operating system. Now, with the added power of integrated Oracle software, we think they can be again.”

Oracle’s (ORCL) intentions for Sun’s (JAVA) hardware business come as great news for engineers worried they might lose their jobs as a result of Oracle’s surprise acquisition of the company. Bad news for rivals like Dell (DELL), Hewlett Packard (HPQ), and IBM (IBM), though. Having Oracle out there in the market peddling an integrated hardware and software solution is going to make their lives more difficult.

Sadly for Otellini, that’s not likely to be the case. Sources close to the company tell Bloomberg that IBM is knee-deep in talks to acquire Sun and that a deal may be announced as soon as next week.

“You know the beautiful thing: June 29, 2009, is the two-year anniversary of the first shipment of the iPhone. Not one of those people will still be using an iPhone a month later. Think about it–If you bought the first iPhone, you bought it because you wanted the coolest product on the market. Your two-year contract has just expired. Look around. Tell me what they’re going to buy.”

– Elevation Partners founder Roger McNamee

Roger McNamee’s hyperbolic predictions about iPhone-to-Pre conversion rates didn’t go over too well at Palm. Appalled by McNamee’s inflated, indecorous claims about its forthcoming smartphone, the handset maker on Monday filed a Free Writing Prospectus with the SEC that distances the company from McNamee’s claims and categorically refutes his your-next-iPhone-will-be-a-Pre foolishness. There are 10 “clarifications and corrections” in the prospectus, among them these two little gems:

5. With respect to the statements in the tenth paragraph of the transcript that the Palm Pre is “going to be a million times–well, not a million times–several times faster” than Apple, Inc.’s iPhone products and is “going to run rings around them on the web,” the Palm Pre is still under development and it is premature to state the speed at which the device accesses the web or the relative speed of the Palm Pre compared to the smartphone products of competitors.
 
8. The statement in the second paragraph of the article that “not one” person who bought an Apple, Inc. iPhone on the first shipment date “will still be using an iPhone a month” after the two-year anniversary of that day is an exaggerated prediction of consumer behavior pattern and is withdrawn.

Ouch. That was CRAZY talk, Roger.

An embarrassing retraction for McNamee and for Palm (PALM), which was understandably uncomfortable with the silly levels to which the investor raised expectations for the Pre. The next time McNamee appears on Bloomberg TV, he’ll be accompanied by two Pinkerton guys with tranq guns….

Good thing too, because that uncertainty was pretty worrisome. Buried in the company’s recent Notification of Late Filing with the SEC, along with the now standard warning about the souring economy’s effect on business, was this little disclosure:

Management has not yet completed its evaluation as to whether substantial doubt exists relative to the Company’s ability to continue as a going concern for a reasonable period of time. A significant element of that evaluation relates to uncertainties associated with funding of amounts stipulated in the aforementioned Investment Agreements. These uncertainties may not be resolved by the time the Company files its Form 10-K with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In the event such uncertainties remain unresolved, management anticipates that KPMG LLP’s auditors’ report relative to the Company’s 2008 consolidated financial statements will contain an explanatory paragraph indicating substantial doubt about the Company’s ability to continue as a going concern.

In addition to resulting in termination of further funding pursuant to the Investment Agreements, the inclusion of such a paragraph by KPMG LLP would result in a default under certain indebtedness of the Company, XM Holdings and XM Satellite Radio Inc. (“XM Inc.”) which defaults, if not cured or waived prior to the expiration of the applicable grace period, would result in an event of default under other indebtedness of the Company, XM Holdings and XM Inc. Such events of default, if they occur, provide the lenders the right to demand all amounts due under the respective agreements immediately due and payable.

What this means is that if KPMG’s assessment of the company is that it’s not able to continue as a “going concern” and the company had not at that time resolved its debt issues, it would automatically default. Presumably, now that Sirius (SIRI) has closed the Liberty (LINTA) deal, that’s no longer a possibility. Looming crisis averted.