Russian investor Digital Sky Technologies appears to be hungry for a bigger piece of Facebook.

The firm just finished spending $100 million to purchase current and former Facebook employees’ shares of the company, on top of a $200 million direct investment into the social-networking site earlier this year. Now DST, known for its investments in social-networking sites in Russia, Poland and the Baltics, has approached a number of Facebook shareholders seeking to buy more shares, according to several people familiar with the conversations.

After wrapping up its official tender offer, which was closed this week, DST held about a 3.5 percent stake in Facebook.

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TiVo (TIVO) shares this morning are heading lower after the company said the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has granted a request by EchoStar (SATS) to stay a contempt order imposed by a lower court pending the outcome of EchoStar’s appeal in the the patent dispute between the two companies.

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Microsoft (MSFT) shares haven’t touched the $30 level in more than a year. But the stock has been rallying impressively since bottoming in the $15 range in March–can it complete the double?

Some analysts think so. In fact, two of them this morning upped their targets on the stock to exactly $30.

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Nokia (NOK) shares are headed sharply higher this morning after the company indicated the worst may be over for the mobile phone business.

For the first quarter, the company posted revenue of 9.276 billion euros, down 26.7 percent year over year, and 26.8 percent sequentially. Revenues from the device business were down 33.4 percent year over year, and 24.2 percent from Q4. The Nokia Siemens equipment business was down 12.1 percent versus a year ago, and 31.1 percent sequentially.

Profits in the quarter on a non-IFRS basis (the equivalent of non-GAAP) were 10 euro cents per share, versus 39 cents a year ago.

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Intel (INTC) reported stronger-than-expected earnings and said that it believed the slumping computer sales market had “bottomed out.” Wall Street’s response: Sell ‘em.

The chip giant’s shares are off four percent, dragging on the Nasdaq Composite and raising some questions about the tech sector generally. This bout of pessimism is probably a bit overdone and reflects more what’s happened in the past few months than what happened yesterday.

Tech shares have been on a strong run, with the S&P 500 information technology group up 15 percent in the last month alone. That’s a pretty quick sprint, and Intel’s merely decent news wasn’t enough to sustain it.

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Take profits in Salesforce.com (CRM), Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Nemeroff advises.

Nemeroff this morning cut his rating on CRM to Sell from Hold, noting that the shares at last night’s close of $37.38 were more than $10 above his $27 target price. His view is that the company’s small and medium-sized customers “could continue to be pressured by negative economic headwinds and that subscriber attrition at existing larger customers could continue to increase over the next 1-3 years due to shelf-ware reductions from multi-year agreements coming up for renewal.”

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Slowly but surely, Legg Mason has been easing out of its once gigantic stake in Amazon.com (AMZN), formerly a favorite stock of Legg Mason portfolio manager Bill Miller.

In a filing with the SEC yesterday, Legg disclosed that it now holds 9,592,126 Amazon shares, down from 24,280,422 shares in its previous filing in October. The latest sales reduce Legg Mason’s stake to 2.24 percent of Amazon’s outstanding shares.

The investment firm has been gradually paring back its shares over the last two years.

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‘Tis the season to make year 2009 predictions. Today, Standard & Poor’s analysts released their predictions for the Internet in 2009. Scott Kessler, Internet analyst with S&P, says Microsoft (MSFT) and Yahoo (YHOO) will “finally bury the hatchet” next year “and decide to join forces to better compete against Google” (GOOG). Kessler says Microsoft won’t buy Yahoo (well, they’ve already said they were no longer interested in that), but rather pursue a joint venture “related to search.” He thinks that could lift Yahoo shares, to which he assigns a “Buy” rating.

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Baidu (BIDU) today issued a press release to address allegations in a China Central Television report that yesterday drove down the Chinese Internet search company’s shares $44.80, or 25 percent.

As I noted in several posts yesterday, a CCTV report broadcast on Nov. 15 and 16 asserted that some unlicensed medical companies appeared high in the company’s search results due to their willingness to pay for popular keywords. Baidu’s search engine mixes paid and unpaid search results. The company was also accused of pulling from its search index some organizations that declined to buy keywords.

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Yes, it sure is nice to see stock prices flashing green. But despite the market’s historic two-day move, there are still reasons to worry about what happens to technology shares over the next several quarters.

There are several negative factors at work here. Start with currency: One of the more eye-opening aspects of Oracle’s (ORCL) well-received earnings report last night was the company’s comment that revenues in its fiscal third quarter ending October will see a serious drag from currency factors. Oracle expects a 10 percentage point swing on a year-over-year basis: Currency boosted revenue by 7 points in the year-ago quarter, but will cut revenue growth by 3 percentage points this year, assuming exchange rates stay about where they are now.

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Corel (CREL) shares are rallying today after the company reported solid results for its fiscal second quarter ended May 31.

For the quarter, the company posted revenue of $67.0 million and non-GAAP EPS of 36 cents; the Street had expected $66.85 million and 35 cents.

For Q3, the company sees revenue of $63 million to $65 million, with non-GAAP profits of 30-36 cents a share; the Street had been expecting $63 million and 32 cents. For the full year ending in November, the company sees revenue of $263 million to $275 million, with profits of $1.50 to $1.70; the Street consensus has been $269.1 million and $1.54.

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Everyone assumed Microsoft was the loser when it handed Facebook a $15 billion valuation. But reports that Facebook insiders are trying to dump shares at a huge discount to that may highlight the danger of high expectations at a very young age.

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Netflix (NFLX) shares are coming under pressure today following a skeptical note on the company from Needham analyst Charlie Wolf.

Wolf today picked up coverage of the company with an Under Perform rating; he writes that “the company’s current valuation incorporates unrealistic subscriber acquisition cost and churn rate assumptions.” He calculates fair value for the shares to be $22, well below the current level.

Wolf, a long-time Apple bull, seems to be making the anti-iTunes call here. “Netflix’s immediate challenge lies in building a profitable video digital distribution business,” he writes. “In contrast with the online DVD rental market, which the company has owned, Netflix will have to compete with several heavyweights in this market. Indeed, Apple has already carved out a first-mover advantage.”

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While not strictly a technology story, JP Morgan’s buyout of Bear Stearns on Sunday is worth looking at in the larger context of the tech industry. As you hopefully know by now, JP Morgan picked up Bear Stearns for $2 a share, a total of $236 million, which is (quite literally) pennies on the dollar for a firm that not so long ago was valued at $170 a share and on Friday alone had tumbled from about $55 a share to $30 a share.

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If you’re following the twists and turns of Microsoft’s hostile bid for Yahoo, you can’t escape one name that keeps popping up in the media: Eric Jackson. As an activist shareholder in Yahoo, he has become the voice of the opposition, calling on Yahoo to accept Microsoft’s takeover bid–or any reasonable bid. Last year, he was instrumental in raising a ruckus online over Yahoo’s poor stock performance, and helped get Yahoo CEO Terry Semel ousted.
But what’s amazing about Jackson is that unlike the big-name activist shareholders such as Carl Icahn and Daniel Loeb who have huge war chests to buy up stock, Jackson is a small fish. He only owns 96 shares of Yahoo stock. Where Jackson has innovated is in using the tools of social media to gather support from other shareholders and get the attention of the media to make his case for corporate change.

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