2011

Intel's revenue in the third quarter jumped 28 percent year over year, while profits also shot up over the previous year.

The world's largest chipmaker reported revenue of $14.2 billion on a GAAP (generally accepted accounting principles) basis, on GAAP earnings of 65 cents per share. Adjusted income was 69 cents per share. This compares to $11.1 billion in revenue in the year-earlier period, or 52 cents a share.

Intel was expected to report earnings of 61 cents a share, on revenue of $13.9 billion, according to an analysts' consensus.

The chipmaker surpassed $14 billion … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Interviewed at the Web 2.0 Summit, Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley talked about how the location check-in app is becoming more passive.

"One of the big hurdles we have is that you have to think about using it," he said of Foursquare. "If we can lower that barrier, we can juice the experience."

That's why the company recently launched the Radar feature, which, once you turn it on, collects info about where you are, the direction you're going, and so on. It'll tell you if people you like are nearby, and "… Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Hewlett-Packard's uncertainty and confusion is unquestionably an advantage for Dell Computers, according to the company's founder and CEO Michael Dell.

"It's a great opportunity for us to describe to our customers and our potential customers our commitment to what we do, [and] investments that we're making within inside our business," said Dell while speaking at the Web 2.0 Summit on Tuesday morning. He added that Dell Computers has approximately 100,000 partners, and that pool is growing very quickly.

"You think about the enterprise customers. These are customers that think about … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Twitter CEO Dick Costolo took to the state of Web 2.0 Summit here tonight and, in a far-reaching conversation, talked bluntly about the 5-year-old company's goals.

"We have lofty ambitions," Costolo said in a conversation with John Battelle, whose company, Federated Media, sponsors the conference. "We want to be part of the fabric over every communication in the world, and we think we can reach every person on the planet."

That goal, he said, makes Twitter distinct from what Facebook and Google+ is trying to achieve, which he described as social "as … Read more

Serial entrepreneur and investor Bill Gross is "completely smitten" with social media.

"The way it's connecting the planet, it's a new connective tissue for knowledge sharing," he told CNET during an interview last week. "It's really, really unbelievable."

As Gross sees it, the only hurdles today's social networks face are relevance and monetization. Not surprisingly, his latest social offering, dubbed Chime.in, is an effort to address both issues. Chime.in will formally launch today at 11:05 a.m. PST--timed to coincide with a live demo by Bill Gross … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Considering all that's going on with beleaguered Yahoo, it's impressive that Ross Levinsohn even showed up here at today's Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco.

Not surprisingly, Yahoo's executive vice president for North America didn't say much about the hot-button issues in his interview with John Battelle, the founder and CEO of Federated Media, which puts on the conference: Will the company sell itself, for instance? And who will replace Carol Bartz, whom the board fired in September after a disastrous 2 1/2 years as CEO?

But Battelle tried.

Is Yahoo buying AOL? … Read more

Apple is once again expected to top Wall Street's estimates when it reports its fiscal fourth-quarter earnings tomorrow.

The maker of iPhones, iPads, and Macs is expected to post earnings of $7.27 per share on revenue of $29.3 billion, according to a Factset Research average posted by MarketWatch. That's up sharply from Apple's forecast of $5.50 per share on sales of $25 billion, which the company included in its third-quarter results, and even more so from the $4.64 per share on $20.3 billion of revenue the company actually posted during same quarter … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Sean Parker's interests in revolutionizing the music industry, so to speak, are well known from his early days as a co-founder of Napster. His current efforts on this horizon are focused on Spotify.

"These historical limitations that defined the dynamics of the record business no longer any sense," said Parker, speaking at the Web 2.0 Summit.

Parker described Spotify as an "attempt to finish" what he started with Napster, being that it is a "dream of frictionless-free, tiered service that enables music sharing."

"We're all trying to figure out … Read more

Visitors to the recent IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) in San Francisco had a chance to check out this cartoonish droid from local firm Meka Robotics, and it's quite an eyeful.

The video below provides a close-up look at the one-armed humanoid. It's called the Dreamer robot and it's under development by Luis Sentis and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin.

The robot runs on Willow Garage's ROS and consists of several components, including Meka's S2 Humanoid Head, which houses expressive eyes and emotive ears. Dreamer's peepers are high-resolution FireWire cameras and its head can move along seven axes of motion. … Read more