financial

Intel blows through financial projections

Update: I added a bit more detail, news of the CFO switcheroo, and a self-congratulatory but illuminating quotation from Intel's CEO.

Intel on Tuesday stomped all over estimates of its quarterly financial performance--not only Wall Street's but its own.

Three months ago, the Santa Clara, Calif.-based chipmaker in September predicted revenue of $9 billion to $9.6 billion for the third quarter of 2007. Then, in September, it raised it to a range of $9.4 billion to $9.8 billion.

The real number: $10.1 billion, a 15 percent increase from the year-earlier quarter. And net … Read more

Financial sites MarketWatch, Cake get in on social networking

Financial advice takes a turn with the introduction of social networking features to Dow Jones' MarketWatch.com and Cake Financial, a new, entirely user-based investing community.

Just this week MarketWatch added MarketWatch Community, a Beta offshoot where users can post comments, rate articles, and try their hand at market forecasting.

Cake Financial, currently in Alpha, passes over an authoritative analyst voice in favor of a "Social Investing Revolution" allowing users to view the real-time performance of community members with similar profiles. During sign-up, users fill in their investment style, growth goals, history, and education level among other questions. They still build their own networks by adding family and friends, and can create account preferences like an automated stock watchlist.… Read more

Palm posts loss for first time in 4 years

Palm posted disappointing financial results Monday, swinging to a loss for the first time since 2003.

During the company's first fiscal quarter of 2008, which ended August 31, Palm recorded a net loss of $800,000, compared with net income of $16.5 million last year. Smart phone revenue was up 21 percent, but overall revenue was up just 1 percent from $356 million last year to $361 million this year.

Much has been made about the effect of the iPhone on Palm, but were that it's only problem. Everyone's passing Palm by these days as the … Read more

Open source offers a way to grow the market...even as companies "roll their own" software

Tim O'Reilly has an interesting piece about hedge funds as software companies. His post is a riff on Paul Kedrosky's analysis showing that Renaissance Capital has a higher ratio of software developers on staff than Oracle:

Oracle (56,000 empl.): 1 - 8 (one developer for every eight employees) Renaissance Technologies (178 empl.): 2 -3 (two developers for every three employees) It's not too much of a stretch to say that hedge funds are the new software companies.… Read more

The Financial Wisdom Of The Crowds: Spendview, Cake, Mint

I just got a look at SpendView, a financial site for young people. It will compete with Mint (launching tomorrow; hands-on review coming then too) and Wesabe (review) and it shares a core feature: When you let the product download your bank and credit card data so you can track it, it also uses that data to create an aggregate view of how people spend money. Then it lets you compare you outlay on, say, rent, gas, and food, to other people like you. It's social without being personal. (You can ignore the social info if you want, and … Read more

Intel butts into Barcelona Day with earnings surprise

Intel expects more revenue than it previously thought this quarter, as demand has turned out to be pretty strong across the globe.

The company now expects to record between $9.4 billion and $9.8 billion in revenue for its third quarter, which ends this month. When the company reported second-quarter earnings in July, it expected to do between $9 billion and $9.6 billion in revenue. The ranges are there as hedges--when Intel and other companies provide a range they are generally directing you toward the midpoint of that range.

In 2006, Intel announced it would be doing away … Read more

Marketcetera, one of the coolest open-source companies I've seen in a long time

It is fascinating to see how people are using open source. I'm part of the "old guard" of open source, I suppose, delivering an open-source alternative to a tired market ripe for commoditization and innovation. But other companies, like OpenAds (open-source advertising server), Path Intelligence (tracking shopper flow based on the open-source GNU radio), Chumby (open-source consumer electronics/hardware), etc. are taking open source into new markets.

Today, I was fortunate to meet one of the most interesting open-source companies I've seen in a long, long time: Marketcetera. Marketcetera provides an open-source trading platform that hedge funds and others use to process and deliver trades through a brokerage to an exchange (like NASDAQ). It's like proprietary, expensive FlexTrade, only not proprietary...or expensive.

The market for this kind of platform is not huge today, as the founders, Toli Kuznets and Graham Miller, told me today (roughly $500 million for custom development, but probably not including packaged software like FlexTrade). But with more and more trading moving from people to algorithmic processes (30-40% in the US today, jumping to 50-60% by the end of the decade), the market will grow accordingly.

Besides, I can think of a range of other uses for this sort of technology beyond hedge funds.… Read more

The perils of great expectations

It seems we're all just searching for a way to keep score.

The beauty of sports is that there is always a winner. The beauty of life is that it's not like sports. Sometimes you win, and sometimes you lose. Sometimes you get two-thirds of what you expected after leaving something on the table to get that far, and sometimes you fall short of a goal but find yourself better for the experience.

That's why we have sports, to amuse ourselves with contests that fulfill a need for clearly defined winners and losers but that don't … Read more

Apple financials reconfirm dominance

The Q2 financial results that Apple reported today once again show how unstoppable the iPod/iTunes (and now iPhone) juggernaut has become.

Recall that Apple hasn't released a major new update to its portable music player since the iPod video and Nano models debuted in 2005. The 2006 updates were fairly minor, adding capacity but no significant new features. Even so, and with the iPhone getting most of the press and garnering the most excitement among the Apple hardcore, the company sold 9.8 million iPods in Q2, up from 8.1 million in the previous year. Add to … Read more