You should not be surprised to learn that a federal judge yesterday ordered BlueBeat.com to immediately stop selling Beatles songs and other music from its site, rejecting a goofy assertion that the company had copyrights on the songs via the use of something called “psycho-acoustic simulation.”
Activision Blizzard this afternoon posted slightly better-than-expected Q3 results, and reiterated its previous guidance for the full year.
Garmin this morning reported much better-than-expected Q3 results, giving an early lift to shares of the GPS device maker.
For the quarter, Garmin posted revenue of $781 million and non-GAAP EPS of $1.02 a share; the Street had expected $704 million and 69 cents. Revenue was down 10 percent year over year, but up 17 percent sequentially.
So, the race to $0 book prices continues.
As the AP notes this morning, the fierce price cutting in the book business, which until now had focused largely on pre-orders, has now spread to current works: Amazon.com is offering both John Grisham’s short-story collection Ford County and Barbara Kingsolver’s new novel The Lacuna for $9 apiece.
Roth Capital Partners analyst Arnab Chanda this morning lowered his rating on several chip stocks to “Hold” from “Buy,” citing the risk of a modest inventory build given high projected margins and growth at Intel, Marvell, Nvidia and others.
Netgear ratcheted higher after hours on a strong Q3 financial report.
The maker of consumer networking products posted revenue of $171.1 million and non-GAAP profits of 31 cents a share, trouncing the Street consensus of $156 million and 8 cents.
Broadcom shares are down sharply in late trading after the chip maker posted Q3 earnings. For the quarter, the company reported revenue of $1.254 billion, up 20.6 percent from the second quarter, down 3.4 percent from a year ago, and ahead of the Street at $1.16 billion.
There was a telling bit of news on the continued travails of the U.S. consumer today from a small Texas retail chain called Conn’s. (In general, I would say calling a retailer “Conn’s” is not something I would recommend. But I digress.)
Wow, this is pretty strange behavior for a company that is hemorrhaging access lines.
AT&T has unveiled plans to raise landline phone rates by more than 20 percent in California, according to both the San Jose Mercury News and the San Francisco Chronicle.
Corning this morning said it suffered a power disruption over the weekend at its LCD glass manufacturing facility in Taichung, Taiwan which affected some glass-making operations.
Comments by Advanced Micro Devices yesterday apparently have triggered worries on the Street that the PC manufacturers, in their zealous optimism about the prospects for Microsoft Windows 7, may have built too many PCs.
As I noted last night, AMD said on its post-earnings conference call with the Street that it expects a less-than-seasonal sequential increase in Q4 revenues, due in part to the “the big build we’ve seen of PCs in anticipation of the Win 7 launch.”
The already intensively competitive wireless sector today finds itself with a tough new player: Wal-Mart. The retailing giant has teamed up with American Movil to sell low-cost service under the Straight Talk brand. The company is offering unlimited voice and text minutes for $45 a month, or 1,000 minutes and 1,000 text messages for $30 a month.
Is corporate IT spending showing signs of life?
Jefferies enterprise software analyst Katherine Egbert thinks so. She issued about a flurry of research notes today, saying various nice things about the improving climate, lifting targets and estimates for an assortment of stocks.
Piper Jaffray analyst Michael Olson today launched coverage of Coinstar with an Overweight rating and $38 price target. The parent of the Redbox video kiosk chain closed yesterday at $31.96.
Olson sees several trends working in the company’s favor.
One of the tech sector’s great hopes is that sometime in 2010, there will be a major PC refresh cycle, driven in part by by the arrival of Microsoft Windows 7, new Intel processors but even more by the general perception that the installed base of PCs is rapidly aging. The conventional wisdom is that the average PC is about five years old.
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