PLUS: Earnings up at Google, IBM | Google co-founder spotted on subway wearing internet glasses | Twitter puts embedded tweets on steriods | Microsoft in Dell buyout finance talks | Cogent investors react to Mega hosting deal.
Google has reported a 6.7% rise in fourth quarter profit to $US2.89 billion. "Core revenue" (including Google ads on partner sites) was up 22% to $US12.94 billion. The amount advertisers pay per click continued to drift downward, but more Ad Words were bought overall.
IBM fourth quarter profit rose 10% to to $US6.1 billion - ahead of analsyts' expectations - while evenue dropped 1% to $US29.3 billion. The profit perk up at the world's largest tech company is seen as a sign the market could be picking up.
Forbes notes analyst speculation that three new iPhones are on the way this year: A lower-cost 4.3-inch iPhone and a 4-inch iPhone 5S (both June/July) plus a 4.8-inch iPhone at the end of October. For good measure, and Apple television is tipped for Spring.
Google co-founder Sergey Brin has been spotted wearing Google Glass on the New York subway, The Guardian reports. "Google Glass" is the search giant's protype glasses that display an internet feed on part of their lenses via wi-fi. The Atlantic Wire wonders if it was a little too much of a coincidence augmented reality enthusiast Noah Zerkin happened to sit across from Sergey and Twitpic him (above). Hells no, says NBR. If it was a Google PR stunt, surely it would have been executed via the all-conquering Google+?
Yeeeah... I just had a brief conversation with the most powerful man in the world. On the downtown 3 train. Nice guy. twitter.com/noazark/status…
— Noah Zerkin (@noazark) January 21, 2013
Twitter has put its embed function on steroids, the company revealed in a blog post today. Embedded tweets - such as @noazark's above - can now feature photos, videos and article summaries.
Microsoft is in talks to help finance the Dell buyout, says The Wall Street Journal (Dell plans to go private, it was reported last week). Microsoft would no doubt nudge the world's number three PC maker to release more tablets based on its Windows 8 software.
Micosoft will ship its Surface Pro tablet February 9 in the US. The cheaper Surface RT launched before Christmas. Still no word when either will make it to NZ.
The company that hosts Mega has seen its Nasdaq-listed shares dip today - the first full day of trading since Kim Dotcom's file sharing service launched over the weekend (Monday having been Martin Luther King Day in the US).
Washington DC-based Cogent Communications [NAS:CCOI] was down 1.49% late in the Tuesday (US time) session, outpacing a broader market decline of 0.27%.
However, it would be a stretch to say investors were taking fright - especially in comparison to the one-day 23% fall suffered by Cogent on the first day's trading after the January 2012 Megaupload shutdown (although they recovered and gained through the year; see chart).
ABOVE: Cogent 12-month Nasdaq performance. S&P Capital IQ. Click to zoom.
Congent, which has a market cap of just over $US1 billion. It was described in the Megaupload indictment as one of the world's top five providers of bandwidth and hosting services; the FBI lists a series of monthly payments to Cogent that often topped $US1 million a month for 36 servers in Washington DC and France (a big contract, if smaller than Megaupload's business with Virginia-based Carpathia, where it hosted most of its files; Carparthia was paid more than $US110 million over seven years).
Kim Dotcom told NBR ONLINE that Cogent's decision to do business with him again was a vote of confidence in his new service's business plan and legal position. He emphasised that Cogent was a listed company.
Dotcom said although Mega is using Cogent exclusively for its launch (on undisclosed terms), it will move to a distributed model over the next few months, with hundreds of different hosts around the world.
On Sunday, the accused pirate said 500,000 signed up to Mega during the service's first 14 hours online. The rush caused overloading, which continued Tuesday morning, leading to an apology from Dotcom for what he called 'poor service quality."
