Business Tech

Hurt by its sluggish auction business, eBay reported a 29 percent drop in second-quarter earnings.

Net income fell to $327 million, or 25 cents a share, compared with $460 million, or 35 cents a share, in the year-ago quarter. Sales also were lower, slipping 4.5 percent to $2.1 billion for the quarter ended June 30, the company said Wednesday.

Excluding one-time charges and stock-option costs, eBay said quarterly earnings would have reached 37 cents a share, or $478.6 million.

Despite the downturn, results beat the forecasts of analysts, who had expected sales of $1.99 billion and … Read more

VMware's financial results from the second quarter of 2009 are out. They beat revenue and income estimates but those estimates were far less euphoric than during VMware's spectacular growth days of a few years back. Second-quarter revenue was $456 million, flat from the second quarter of 2008. Operating income on a GAAP basis was down 38 percent from the year-ago quarter and down 14 percent non-GAAP.

International revenue saw about 3 percent growth but this was counterbalanced by a similar decline in the U.S. International revenue is now almost equal to those in the U.S.--$… Read more

Departing significantly from what other browsers offer, Google has begun building its O3D plug-in for hardware-accelerated 3D graphics into its Chrome browser.

"The O3D team is working on getting O3D integrated into the Chromium build, and we're close to being able to complete our first step towards integration," said programmer Greg Spencer in a mailing list announcement Wednesday about Chromium, the open-source project that underlies Chrome itself. "I'll be making the Windows build of Chromium be dependent upon building O3D as part of the build process."

By helping to pave the way for high-powered Web-based games, the move furthers Google's ambition to speed the transformation of the Web from a static medium into a foundation for applications. Another piece of the work is Google Native Client, which is designed to let Web applications take advantage of a computer's native processing power. … Read more

Netherlands-based GPS maker TomTom reported on Wednesday that earnings for the second quarter were 20 million euros ($28 million), a drop of 61 percent from 52 million euros ($74 million) in the same quarter a year ago. Sales fell 19 percent to 368 million euros ($523 million).

But analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters had expected a net gain of only 13 million euros ($18 million). And despite the decline, both sales and earnings were higher than in the first quarter, when TomTom was hit with a 39 million euro ($55 million) loss on sales of 213 million euros.

"In … Read more

Apple said Tuesday that it has made a $500 million prepayment to Toshiba for flash memory chips and indicated the market is stabilizing.

"The NAND flash market has now begun to stabilize and we expect it to move to a slight demand imbalance," said Apple Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook in Apple's Tuesday earnings conference call. (The call is available as an audio Webcast on Apple's Web site.) The news was reported earlier by Reuters.

"In terms of the Toshiba prebuy, we did a long-term supply agreement with Toshiba, as a part of that, as … Read more

In the midst of the global recession, at least one company's business is booming.

LG Electronics reported on Wednesday record-high quarterly earnings of $1.15 trillion Korean won ($920 million), a leap of 62 percent over the year-ago quarter.

Global sales for the quarter that ended June 30 shot up 13.8 percent to 14.5 trillion won ($11.63 billion).

The net profit surpassed expectations of analysts polled by Dow Jones, who had forecast around 743 billion won. Earnings also enjoyed a strong rebound from the first quarter when LG took a loss of 197.6 billion won.… Read more

Several open-source software companies and many other allies have banded together in a consortium called Open Source for America to try to persuade the U.S. government to use more of the collaboratively developed software, to participate in its development, and help its practitioners work with the government better.

The group includes more than 70 companies, academic institutions, organizations, and individuals. Among them are Linux sellers Red Hat, Novell, and Canonical; software sellers Sun Microsystems, its would-be acquirer Oracle, Mozilla, SugarCRM, Alfresco Software, Pentaho, Revolution Computing, Zmanda, EnterpriseDB, and Yahoo's Zimbra; and open-source allies including Advanced Micro Devices and … Read more

Advanced Micro Devices on Tuesday reported a net second-quarter loss of $330 million as the chipmaker offered a muted outlook for the rest of the year.

The $330 million loss, or 49 cents per share, compares favorably to a $1.2 billion loss, or $1.97 per share, in the same period last year. Analysts had forecast a loss of 47 cents per share.

Revenue of $1.18 was flat compared to the first quarter of 2009 and decreased 13 percent compared to the second quarter of 2008.

AMD expects revenue for the product company--which excludes the spun-off manufacturing operations--to … Read more

Web developers should appreciate two of Adobe's latest open-source initiatives announced Tuesday, both designed to help media companies and other publishers build richer Flash applications.

The first project, Open Source Media Framework (OSMF), lets designers create more sophisticated media players to run Adobe Flash presentations. The second, Text Layout Framework (TLF), helps developers add more advanced typography and font layouts to their Flash apps.

Both OSMF and TLF are available for free as open-source applications.

OSMF is the open source piece of the Adobe project formerly known by the codename Strobe, a framework for Flash media players. Using OSMF, … Read more