May 10, 2007
This Week In Tech Stocks
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Gods
+ Not only did Visual Sciences (VSCN) complete its rebranding from WebSideStory but it killed its quarter and the stock piled up 28%.
+ RadioShack up on turnaround start + buyout rumors. Dell might be buying.
+ BEA up as another takeover candidate and the suitor may be HP.
+ 1-2 Punch at Microsoft. Bill Gates says that he is going to be all over content and advertising. Meanwhile his buddy Ballmer says he is taking on Office Business Applications.
Scum
+ Shares in The Knot (KNOT) plunged 14% as the wedding site screwed its quarterly numbers.
+ 24/7 Media hires Lehman to pimp its business but Jefferies thinks MSFT no long interested due to a poor financial showing this quarter.
+ PlanetOut will run out of cash in 2007 without a white knight. Hires Allen & Co.
+ Analyst gives Murdoch 40% chance of landing Dow Jones.
+ Cisco did well this quarter but is not optimistic enough so Wall Street pulled the plug on the stock, which lost about 6%.
+ JP Morgan says Google should buy Yahoo.
Posted at 04:38 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
April 11, 2007
This Week In Tech Stocks
Follow tech equities on our brother site tech:stocker.
+ “It’s all clicking, our business is on fires” says Comcast's CEO who wants Wall Street to start thinking of his company as an Internet play.
+ Citigroup to Akamai investors: don't worry so much about Limelight. Plenty of money to go around in the space.
+ CheckFree's biggest client - B of A - may take its business in-house. Stock slides down, down, down.
+ Salesforce slides despite new product strategy as analyst cites increased competition from Microsoft and Oracle.
+ Cisco seems to have convinced people that all of its competition in networking - 3Com, Riverbed, Extreme, Foundry, Juniper and the rest of the gang are hosed.
+ With the old management out on the street, Wall Street is not buoyed by Take Two Interactive's prospects.
+ Judge to Vonage: no more new customers until you come clean.
Posted at 05:19 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
March 27, 2007
The Week In Tech Stocks
Read on a tech:stocker
+ 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.
Posted at 05:07 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
March 19, 2007
This Week In Tech Stocks
+ Take Two Interactive stuck drives up 25% plus thanks to shareholder group that demands the gaming company be sold off. Today the company reversed course and says it can be bought.
+ Cisco's next logical buy-outs after Webex: Brocade, Akamai, or J2.
+ Apple set-top box to start shipping. Bigger revenues than the iPhone a possablity.
+ Acquisition of Palm to be revealed this week. Will the winner be, Nokia, Motorla or a private equity firm?
+ SPSS stock has been on the rise on the hunch that it may be buyout bait. Potential acquirers include Business Objects, Cognos or IBM.
+ Analysts have soured on JupiterMedia and its drive into digital pictures due to competitive pressured from other photo licensing outifits.
+ "Vista is a disaster" says one analyst.
View - tech:gigger
Posted at 07:25 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
February 09, 2007
This Week in Tech Stocks
+ Micron reported such bad earnings and outlook and brought the entire market down with it today.
+ Shutterfly reported much better earnings than expected this quarter. So far the IPO has been a success.
+ Napster's earnings and outlook suck but it becomes M&A bait with Ross Levinson added to board says analyst.
+ Too late to get to know disk drive equipment's Intevac? Sales up 82%.
+ TravelZoo well off after blowing quarter. Is their model too simple?
+ Cisco nails its quarter, bolstering tech stocks.
+ Wireless card maker Novatel destroys expecations. Stock straight UP.
+ Rambusshares get 20% bounce on FTC ruling.
Posted at 02:11 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
February 02, 2007
This Week In Tech Stocks
The Lede
+ There were two big stories in tech equities this week. One was the dismisal of Dell's CEO and the return of Michael - the franchise - Dell.
+ The other major story was Google's earnings reporting. Google continues to grow like mad but those expecatations were of course built into the stock so when it did not run past The Street's consensus, it lost a few points.
+ There was also some hoopla with GOOG about Viacom whacking it with a demand that YouTube yank of copy-writed videos. We think that these concerns are not material to the stock price. Legal fights are fully baked into Google's stock price.
Winners
+Elecrtronic Arts beat the street consensus on its quarterly report by a full 5 cents. Analysts still can't agree on EA's prospects so we will have to take it one quarter at a time.
+ Needham's analyst projects that Apple will enjoy a $20 per share boost from sales of iPhone.
+ We hate writing about JDSU. We bought it at the top, sold at it the bottom and are now watching it have another nice quarterly report. The stock did not appreciate because JDSU's forecast was not as bullish as The Street hoped.
+ CNET seems to be awaking from its doldrums with a nice report post stock option scandal. You see CNET resumes all of the place. Some analysts continue to think that CNET is buy-out bait which buoys the stock.
+ Other big winners this week post earnings reports were: SiRF (SIRF), CheckFree (CKFR), edEnvelope (REDE), and Cymer (CYMI).
Losers
+ Disappointing earnings again. Revenues are fine but margins continue to slide. Analysts agree on Amazon that competition is getting stronger from niche eCommerce plays, that free shipping hurts and that Google Check-outs success is not good for Amazon.
+ Symantec to pay $830M for Altiris - and stock falls on news. Analysts supported the long term strategic move as a balance against the threat from Microsoft but felt that short-term Symantec is not strong.
Posted at 03:31 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
January 25, 2007
This Week In Tech Stocks
The earnings reports from tech heavies came in fast in furious this week and we saw dramatic swings up and down for technology stocks.
Uppers
+ Microsoft shares touched a multi-year high Thursday ahead of the results on optimism that the newest versions of Windows and its Office business program will give the company a boost in 2007.
+ Decision by eBay to raise listings fees appears to be working as expected as the Net auctioneer's shares took a nice bump on its quarterly report.
+ Nokia figured out how to improve margins despite ever lowering handset prices.
+ Sun shares rose after better-than-expected results plus a mysterious $700M investment by an affiliate of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts.
+ Texas Instruments did the two step hitting expectations despite a slumping sector.
Downers
+ SAP's plans to spend a quarter billion dollars over the next couple of years on a software on demand platform had wall street cutting and running.
+ Shares in Alcatel Lucent took it in the shorts as it was 10% off in revenue and 35% off in profit.
Posted at 08:49 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
January 18, 2007
The Week In Tech Stocks
It was a typical whip lash week for tech stocks as we saw some first earnings reports.
tech:stocker opinion
+ We added online commercial real estate marketplace LoopNet to our virtual portfolio.
+ We banished Netflix from investment consideration. The stock was up a bit on news of its movies on demand service.
Earnings Reports
+ Apple drove the market nuts with a killer revenue report but lowerered expecations. This drove the stock down but some analysts call Apple's CFO overly conservative.
+ AMD is a buzz crusher. Advanced Micro Devices shares fell 12% on weak earnings report - blame price war with Intel. Intel shares also fell after its earnings report came in, but Intel fared much better than AMD.
Analyst Expectations
+ Citi Lifts EA to buy as revenue miss priced in.
+ Amazon's Feb 1 Numbers Looking Soft.
