From All Things Digital, Oct. 19, 2009:

Apple’s September quarter saw, among other things, the release of Snow Leopard, the latest upgrade to its OS X operating system andthe first public appearance of CEO Steve Jobs, who’d been on a medical leave of absence for a liver transplant. It was also the first full period since the company launched the iPhone 3GS, in late June.

No wonder it was a blowout quarter.

After market close Monday, Apple reported a fiscal fourth-quarter profit of $1.67 billion, or $1.82 a share, on revenue of $9.87 billion. That topped the estimates of analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters, who’d expected the company to earn $1.42 a share on revenue of $9.2 billion.

The company sold 3.05 million Macs during the quarter, a 17 percent increase over last year. It sold 10.2 million iPods, eight percent decline from a year-ago quarter.

And iPhones? It sold 7.4 million of those — seven percent more than it did during the same period last year. So much for those supply-chain issues that some analysts warned might undermine iPhone sales.

“We are thrilled to have sold more Macs and iPhones than in any previous quarter,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “We’ve got a very strong lineup for the holiday season and some really great new products in the pipeline for 2010.” [Editor's Note: "...really great new products"--is that a euphemism for tablet?]

Apple shares, which closed at $189.86 today, are spiking as I write this. At $203.90 they’re up more than seven percent in extended trading as I write this...

More coverage from All Things Digital:

• Intel CEO Says Had No Knowledge of Trading Probe
• AT&T: Are They Trying to Lose Wireline Customers?

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From The Business Insider, Sept. 8, 2009:

Google and Apple are on a collision course.

While the companies are not each others' biggest rivals, they are increasingly competing with each other.

This follows years of enjoying one of the coziest relationships in Silicon Valley -- one that will now get more complicated as the companies compete in more areas.

The latest: Google is developing a movie rental service for YouTube. This is a logical extension of the Web's top video site, as YouTube increases its focus on professional content. But if it happens, it will put YouTube in square competition with Apple's iTunes store, which has offered movie rentals for years.

Video rentals do not generate a huge amount of revenue for either company, so it's not a big conflict. But Google is also increasingly competing with Apple in its more important, core platform businesses.

Their most significant rivalry today is mobile phone platforms, where Google's Android phones compete with Apple's iPhones. So far, Apple has had more success, both in getting consumers to buy its phones, and in getting software companies to develop apps for its platform.

But Google has a big year ahead: It will eventually be distributed by all four major U.S. wireless carriers, while Apple is exclusive with AT&T (for now, at least). And phone manufacturers like Motorola have plans to make lots of mid-range, high-volume phones with Android. Assuming the efforts are adequate, Google could catch up significantly in the next year...

See more from The Business Insider:

• 7 Ways Google Is Trying to Kill Apple
• 10 Ways the iPhone Changed Smartphones Forever

It's fashionable these days to criticize social networking sites for their inability to connect with teens (NYT on Twitter), potential to ruin friendships (WSJ on Facebook) and lack of profitability (all).

But beneath the surface - in this case on top of Twitter's platform - some entrepreneurs are seeking to turn the power of social networking into actual businesses.

Take, for example, StockTwits.com, which bills itself as "Bloomberg for the little guy and gal."

After just seven months, StockTwits.com has 90,000 users and over 1000 unique contributors sharing ideas about stocks and the economy in a community built on Twitter's open software architecture.

Unlike the "computer generated" tickers at the bottom of CNBC or Bloomberg TV, StockTwits is "the human ticker," says co-founder Howard Lindzon...

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From All Things Digital, June 26, 2009:

Palm shares are on a tear Friday, rallying on the company’s fourth-quarter financials and the promise of its new Pre handset. Palm is trading at $15.30 as I write this, up more than nine percent in reaction to the company’s claims that the Pre and Palm’s webOS are off to a strong start.

“We think the Palm Pre is by far the best product we’ve ever shipped and I am very happy with how we are managing the launch,” CEO Jon Rubinstein said on an earnings call Thursday, though he refused to disclose actual sales numbers. “We are successfully ramping supply to meet demand that is strong and growing.”

Rubinstein gave strong emphasis to Palm’s new operating system. “The most important indicator of our success is that customer response has been simply great, especially to Palm webOS. Just as Palm pioneered PDAs in the 90s, we believe it has now pioneered the mobile operating platform for the next 10 years and beyond. WebOS integrates information and services from the cloud and offers a true multi-tasking environment. We feel it takes better advantage of the benefits of Web 3.0 than any other mobile platform available today.”

Quite a claim, especially given the incumbents in the market and Palm’s history. The company has never been strong on execution, and while it’s done a great job of bringing the Pre and webOS to market, it has clearly stumbled a bit. Thanks to supply constraints, Palm may be leaving some sales on the table. And it hasn’t done itself any favors by delaying the release of the webOS software development kit.

WebOS won’t be the “the mobile operating platform for the next 10 years and beyond” unless developers are actually, you know, writing applications for it. And there are far too few of them doing that right now because Palm has, so far, restricted access to the SDK.

Rubinstein says that will soon change, though. “We are eager to expand access to our SDK but we need to do so in a measured and methodical fashion, so we can be sure we are providing a great development experience,” he said Thursday. “Over the next few weeks, we expect the program to grow from hundreds to thousands of developers and our goal from there is to make our SDK available to everyone by the end of this summer.”

OK. So Palm would rather do things right than too quickly. That’s understandable–especially if it has more products in the pipeline, as it most certainly does. Given the rivals against which it must compete, the company cannot afford even a single misstep...

See More from All Things Digital:

• Does John Malone Want to Own AOL?
• Google: Less Unhappy Days Are Here Again

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At 12:01 a.m. Saturday morning, Facebook will allow user to register user names and domain names (facebook.com/username) to go with them.

One marketer tells me employees at her firm have been instructed to wait up until midnight Friday so they can quickly register user names for all of the firm's clients before squatters can claim them during the land rush.

This approach may not be necessary.

On Digital Media Law, Jonathan Handel explains how a company can protect its trademark before the land rush commences:

At http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=username_rights, there’s a “Preventing the Registration of a Username” form for entering your company name, title, email, trademark, and registration number. (Oddly, there’s no place to enter your own name.) As that last data item suggests, only registered marks are eligible, although I’d recommend that holders of trademark applications in process simply enter the application number instead. Filling in the form will prevent someone else from using your trademark as a user name.

What happens if an infringer registers your trademark before you fill out the form?...

See also:

• The Future of Facebook Usernames Revealed!
• Facebook Misses Anotehr Revenue Opportunity

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From All Things Digital, June 3, 2009:

In the new era of hand-held computers — super-smart touch-screen phones that run sleek, compelling software — Apple’s iPhone has been king. A new, improved iPhone is expected to be announced on June 8.

But on June 6, Apple will get a powerful competitor in this category. It’s a beautiful, innovative and versatile hand-held computer that’s fully in the iPhone’s class. It’s called the Pre, and it comes from Palm, the company that pioneered the hand-held computer in the 1990s.

I’ve been testing the Pre for a couple of weeks, and I like it a lot, despite some important drawbacks that will have to be remedied.

Pre sports an all-new operating system called webOS. Like the iPhone, Google’s new Android phone operating system, and the modern BlackBerry models from Research in Motion, the Pre is meant to do much more than make phone calls, send and receive messages, and browse the Web. It’s a platform, like a PC, that’s designed to run a wide variety of sophisticated third-party programs, or apps, from social-networking gateways to games to business tools. Palm plans to build a whole line of devices based on webOS.

The Pre is launching on the Sprint network in the U.S., though it will be offered by other carriers later. It includes Wi-Fi connectivity. Like the iPhone, it costs $200 — but there’s a catch. At most stores, you get that price only after a $100 mail-in rebate. And there’s another catch. Production of the Pre will be limited at first, so they’ll be hard to come by for a while.

I consider the Pre to be potentially the strongest rival to the iPhone to date, provided it attracts lots of third-party apps, which it sorely lacks at launch...

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Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos online, free, at the All Things Digital Web site, walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.

See more coverage from All Things Digital:

• Microsoft's Bing yields results
• Copying files from XP to Windows 7
  
• D7 video: Jon and Roger market the Palm Pre

quot;Many of our global customers are describing the business momentum in a different way than prior quarters," Cisco CEO On Cisco's fiscal third-quarter conference call Wednesday, CEO John Chambers cited "some stabilization" and "a leveling out" of orders from the firm's customers.

The comments would seem to make a nice bookend to Chambers' late 2007 call about demand being "lumpy," which proved a harbinger of the crisis of 2008.

While neither Chambers nor Cisco CFO Frank Calderoni are declaring a "bottom" is in for the global economy, Cisco is seeing signs of improvement across many geographies, Calederoni says...

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President Obama sent a shot across the bow of U.S. multinationals Monday when he announced plans to close offshore tax loopholes.

Intentionally or not, Cisco Systems is one of the companies potentially most exposed to such changes in the tax code: The WSJ reports Cisco's U.S. tax rate was cut by 16.1 percentage points in fiscal 2008 because it reinvested international earnings overseas, a common practice among U.S. firms Obama wants to halt.

"If we are in a situation where we have a higher tax rate than what we have today, we will have to make some compromises within our business, says Cisco CFO Frank Calderoni. "It gets down to a discussion about where you make investments...that [are] tied to jobs. That comes into play when you are a global business and you have to balance where you do make investment in order to continue to deliver the right return to your shareholders."

Calderoni also downplayed Obama's claims that changes to the tax code will give U.S. companies incentives to keep jobs in America, but stressed...

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Cisco reported a sharp drop in fiscal third-quarter earnings and revenue Wednesday, but results beat expectations. Similarly the company's guidance for fourth-quarter revenue of $8.3 billion to $8.6 billion, would represent a 17% to 20% drop from last year but is ahead of consensus. (Cisco shares, which were up about 20% in the three months prior to Thursday, were recently down over 3%.)

On the firm's conference call last night, CEO John Chambers talked about signs of "stabilization" and "leveling out" of customer demand.

Cisco CFO Frank Calderoni echoed those comments in our conversation today, but says "visibility is still very limited" beyond the current quarter.

As a result, Cisco isn't giving guidance beyond the current quarter...

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Now that there’s at least talk of a recovery, the letters “IPO” are being whispered around the Valley again. Venture capitalist Fred Wilson went further this week saying the end of the IPO drought is at hand. And the biggest candidate in tech-dom is eBay’s proposed spin-off of Skype.

As fashionable as it is to blast eBay for overpaying for Skype, it's now one of the largest long distance phone companies and nearing $600 million a year in revenues. That’s a real business, says my guest Om Malik, of the popular tech blog GigaOm who’s covered Skype closely through much of its life.

But as bullish as he is, Malik doesn’t expect that IPO until 2010 at the latest. The big question is whether eBay believes in the company enough to wait that long, or if it sells to another bidder. And the big question for Skype? Can it stop the decline in average-revenue-per-user in the meantime?

Plus: Malik notes other hot Valley IPOs to look for in 2010.

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