As noted earlier, Hewlett-Packard released its earnings results for the first quarter of its fiscal year a little while ago, and and they’re surprisingly good. HP shares are rising after-hours, on word that the company beat its own expectations and those of the street rather handily. The consensus view called for it to report 71 cents a share in per-share earnings. HP came in at 82 cents. Sales were also ahead of the consensus, despite the fact that revenue fell in nearly every significant business segment. Still don’t harsh HP’s buzz with too many details. There’s more to crow about: Net debt of the operating company came down by $1 billion to $4.7 billion, and it’s looking like HP will be close to zero debt for the operating company this year. The results if nothing else buy Meg Whitman and her team some time to quiet the critics who say the HP should be split into two or more companies in order to unlock value. That buzz was prominent late in the trading session as rumors flew that a breakup announcement might accompany earnings. As careful AllThingsD readers might have already guessed, a breakup isn’t in the cards, at least not for the time being. The conference call with analysts is about to get underway momentarily and I’m listening in. Expect lots of questions about the balance sheet, and probably more chatter about the breakup idea. 5:05 pm : Joining the call in progress. CEO Meg Whitman is speaking.
Read MoreLike me, David Einhorn — the brainy hedge fund star who is currently engaged in a proxy battle with Apple over how to deal with its giant cash horde — is a bit of a night owl. So, when I pinged him around midnight, about the conference call his Greenlight Capital is having with investors later today to better explain his effort to thwart an Apple effort to make it harder to issue preferred shares that pay a dividend, he offered to chat right then about what he was up to. Einhorn has been fighting with Apple over its plan to eliminate preferred stock from the company charter, after the longtime Apple bull got no satisfaction from lobbying its board to issue preferred shares. He then sued the company to compel it to consider ways to unlock the value of its $137.1 billion cash horde to shareholders, seeking an injunction to stop next week’s vote on a company proxy proposal related to “blank check” preferred stock. As the Wall Street Journal noted : Mr. Einhorn’s lawsuit, filed in the federal court in Manhattan, argues that the very formulation of Apple’s proxy statement violates Securities and Exchange Commission rules that allow shareholders to vote on “each matter” in the proposals. The suit seeks a court injunction against Apple’s proxy vote, and says he asked twice this week for the company to stop the vote or to “unbundle” the proposal at issue, but was rejected by the company. Although the Silicon Valley tech giant said it was talking to Einhorn , Apple CEO Tim Cook also hit back at an investment conference recently, saying that Greenlight’s legal moves were a “silly sideshow” and distraction . That said, a judge in the case later contended there was a “likelihood of success” Greenlight’s case. Thus, in a time-honored blabby hedge fund dude manner, Einhorn decided to make his case even more noisily about the proxy proposal, which is up for a vote at Apple’s Feb. 27 annual meeting. “We’re going to explain ourselves better, because I think that there has been reaction where people are asking, ‘Why don’t they just raise their dividend or do a buyback?,’” said Einhorn in an interview. “We think the preferred stock idea is a lot better and, once people understand it, we want people to convert from worrying that it is complicated to wondering ‘Since it makes so much sense, why doesn’t Apple do that?’” It sounds so easy, but it has not been, with a heated debate occurring since Greenlight went after Apple, with some dubious of Einhorn. This has clearly caused a lot of confusion that he said he hopes to clear up
Read MoreDemand Media said today that it planned to split its company in two parts, spinning off its domain business from its media one in a bid to better clarify the company to investors. Since it went public several years ago, there has been some level of difficulty for each part of the Santa Monica, Calif.-based Demand to easily explain itself to Wall Street, given the very different natures of its key — but very different — revenue units. In a statement, Demand said that it was “our intent to spin off our registrar business and separate into two independent, publicly traded companies.” The company noted that the two units “divergent strategic priorities and opportunities” would be better in the new configuration with a pure-play media company and domain services company. The transaction is expected to take place in the next nine to 12 months, Demand said. But it still requires a number of company and regulatory approvals to do the tax-free spin-off that will create two different stocks. The move makes a lot of sense on many levels, given the company’s two divisions have not coalesced in any way that has made much sense to investors. As part of today’s announcement, Demand also released its fourth-quarter earnings. Minus traffic acquisition costs, the company’s revenue for the three months was up 19 percent to $96.8 million, on net income of 12 cents of adjusted earnings per share. Here are Demand’s two press releases from today, including its Q4 earnings: Spin Off Announce FINAL 02.19.13 4Q.12 Results FINAL 02.19.13
Read MoreFacebook announced on Friday that it had been the target of a series of attacks from an unidentified hacker group, which resulted in the installation of malicious software onto Facebook employee laptops. “Last month, Facebook security discovered that our systems had been targeted in a sophisticated attack,” the company said in a blog post . “The attack occurred when a handful of employees visited a mobile developer website that was compromised.” Facebook said that these employees then had malware installed on their laptops as a result of their visiting the website. The hack used what is called a “zero-day Java exploit,” a known vulnerability in Oracle’s software which has gained much attention in recent months. Essentially, anyone visiting a website using this attack who also has Oracle’s Java enabled in their browser was vulnerable. As a result, hackers inserted malware onto the laptops of multiple Facebook employees. “As soon as we discovered the presence of malware, we remediated all infected machines, informed law enforcement, and began a significant investigation that continues to this day,” the post read. In the company’s post, Facebook notes that it had “found no evidence that Facebook user data was compromised.” Facebook did not say what the hackers did have access to, however, after the installation of said malware. Facebook’s announcement comes on the heels of a string of recent attacks on other major websites. Twitter, the microblogging social network that hosts more than 200 million active users on its service, announced it had been hacked two weeks ago, and that upward of 250,000 user accounts may have been compromised as a result. Other targets have included the Washington Post, the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, all of which have said they believe that the Chinese government was somehow involved in their system infiltration. But both Facebook and Twitter, in their respective blog posts, made no accusation or direct comparison to the hacks made on the Times, the Journal or the Post.
Read More“We have power but no Internet or phone. I think the universe is trying to tell us to relax. Thank you, universe.” That was the philosophical conclusion from my friend the ESPN sports writer Jane McManus in my Facebook feed this morning (obviously posting from a still-working mobile phone) as the Northeast woke up to snow, snow, and more snow today. Power is out to some 650,000 people in areas of New England, most of them in Massachussetts, and some 29 inches of snow was said to have fallen in Portland, Maine. From Connecticut to Toronto, weather forecasters are talking about snowfall in feet, not inches. Most of the region’s airports are closed, though Newark International was expected to re-open today, and commuter trains suspended service. According to The Wall Street Journal, more than 5,300 flights were canceled yesterday. The storm is also being blamed for six deaths, so it’s no laughing matter. There were hurricane-force winds in Massachusetts, and the snow forced the shutdown of the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant in Plymouth. Boston is said to getting so much snow that it may break the record of 27.6 inches set in 2003. For the most part wireless infrastructure appears to have held up well, which is more than it did during Hurricane Sandy. I got a short statement from AT&T spokesman Mark Siegel who said: “The vast majority of our cell sites across New England and in each of the hardest-hit states like Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island are operating as usual. We are coordinating our efforts with local and state officials and have additional resources, including crews and equipment, ready to deploy for restoration efforts as soon as we can ensure the safety of our people. Service is currently normal or near-normal operational levels in all states in the region, including New York, New Jersey, Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire.” No word from Verizon, Sprint or T-Mobile yet, but I haven’t heard about significant wireless outages anywhere. Good thing, because there wasn’t much else to do but go outside and take pictures and share them on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram.
Read MoreOf all the complex aspects of the $23 billion leveraged buyout that is set to take PC maker Dell private — which sources said is likely to be announced sometime early today — one of the more interesting parts of the mega-deal is the evolving relationship between software giant Microsoft and private equity powerhouse Silver Lake Partners. As part of the massive and complicated transaction led by Silver Lake and founder Michael Dell, as reported yesterday by The Wall Street Journal and others, Silver Lake is ponying up $1 billion and Dell 16 percent stake in the company worth $3.8 billion, as well as $700 million more from his investment firm. There will also be $15 billion in bank debt too. Microsoft’s contribution will be to invest about $2 billion in a form of debt from its nearly $64 billion cash kitty. That’s in part to protect its important Windows operating system franchise, which has been under siege as the device market has moved swiftly to a mobile-based one at the expense of PCs. It’s a big check to write to do so, but one that it’s been willing to consider when it comes to Silver Lake, which has been on both sides of the table with Microsoft in recent years in big-money transactions. The most prominent was when Silver Lake was the seller and Microsoft the buyer in the $8.5 billion deal for Skype , the global telephony company, in mid-2011
Read MoreThe last week of tech headlines reads like some sort of cybersecurity end of days scenario. The New York Times hacked . The Wall Street Journal hacked . The Washington Post hacked . And finally on Friday, Twitter — one of the world’s largest Internet communication services — also hacked . “Who’s next?” you may be thinking.
Read MoreAccording to a report in the New York Times , along with that newspaper, The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg, another media organization targeted by hackers apparently originating out of China is the Washington Post. But, it might be worse than that. Outgoing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton addressed the issue in her final meeting with reporters, noting: “We have seen over the last years an increase in not only the hacking attempts on government institutions but also nongovernmental ones. [The Chinese] are not the only people who are hacking us.”
Read MoreAs Bloomberg reports, sometime this year Apple TV users will be able to watch HBO shows — if they’re already subscribing to HBO via a pay cable provider. In other words, HBO will port its popular HBO Go app to Apple TV, just like it has already done with Roku and Microsoft’s Xbox. For the record, no comment from Apple. And here’s a non-comment comment from HBO: “We’ve said we would like HBO GO accessible on all preferred platforms so we are always having discussions with a variety of companies.” Anyway, when it does come, it will be a nice extra for HBO subscribers. Because HBO Go has a much deeper catalog than you can get from the HBO on demand service you get via cable and satellite. But that’s about it.* And if you want to start imagining that this is a precursor to HBO actually selling itself over the Web, on an al a carte basis, well, I can’t stop you. But you’re wrong: HBO isn’t ditching the pay TV bundle anytime soon , because it thinks that bundle works really well. And so does HBO’s owner, Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes. You can have a lot of fun arguing with the HBO guys about why they think that, when so many of us Internet geniuses are convinced they’re wrong. And that’s certainly going to come up when we talk to HBO president Eric Kessler next month at our Dive into Media conference . But here’s another question: Why isn’t everyone on Apple TV right now? Or more precisely, why doesn’t Apple open its box to outside developers, the same way Roku has? Opening up the platform to the rest of the world sure seemed to work well for the iPhone (recall that the App Store didn’t show up until the iPhone had been in the market for a year). But right now Apple TV has a grand total of 9 outside apps (one of which comes from the Wall Street Journal, which like this site is owned by News Corp.) Why hasn’t Apple let a thousand TV apps bloom
Read MoreSix out of 10 small-business owners say they believe social-media tools are valuable to their company’s growth — but most aren’t impressed by Twitter Inc. Just 3 percent of 835 business owners surveyed earlier this month by The Wall Street Journal and Vistage International said Twitter had the most potential to help their companies. Read the rest of this post on the original site »
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