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Tech stocks - Tuesday, March 27, 2007

The Week In Tech Stocks

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+ Who says you can't monetize social networking? News' Corp's MySpace revenues are at $30M per month and it expects that to double within a year, with good margins to boot.

+ Intuit cancels Electronic Clearing House buy-out. Shares of Electronic Clearing House [ECHO] took a 35% faceplant after the company disclosed a federal investigation into certain customers and said its merger with Intuit [INTU] has been terminated.

+ How Intuit blew it. Shares in Intuit (INTU] fell after its quartelry earnings report as the company is losing share in the tax prep software category as more consumers shift to Web-based filing from using packaged software.

+Thanks World of Warcraft: Retailer GameStop kicks quarter in high gear. Video-game retailer GameStop [GME] bot beat analysts' fourth-quarter expectations and guided the Street higher for its current quarter and new fiscal year. The top seller for Gamestop was World of Warcraft, which sold 850K units in January alone.

+ Rumor Watch: SAP to buy Amdocs. FTN Midwest Securities says they are hearing about a potential deal in which SAP would buy Amdocs [DOX] which today has a $7.6B market, but which might start rising if the rumor has legs.

Apple iTunes Movies Has Just 298 Movies. For all the hulabaloo over iTunes video, selection is about as rich as what you might find on the thin video rack at 7/11 or CircleK. Bottom line, if you are counting on iTunes video to represent yet another major revenue stream for Apple, think different.

+ Openwave's [OPWV] CEO ejected and the wireless company is up for sale. The CEO is gone beacuse the company whiffed with its earnings by a mile.

+ Like AppleTV? Don't Buy AAPL, Buy Chip Suppliers. Analysts at Caris & Co. explain that Broadcom (BRCM), Nvidia (NVDA) and Intel (INTC) are providing the guts for AppleTV. Broadcom supplies the wireless chip content. Intel has three chips inside and comprises the greatest dollar. And Nvidia has the second-biggest chip in the box with as much $20 worth in each box If 2M AppleTV’s ship in 2007, it would be worth $40M to Nvidia.

+ Why GOOG 1/4 may be better than expected. Google’s first quarter is tracking ahead of estimates, says JP Morgan, which now says that Google is on track to grow global query volume 15% sequentially in the quarter, rather than the 13% street consensus. JP Morgan disputes claims that Google's market share has not been hurt by Yahoo’s new Panama search platform.