profits

eBay profits up 22 percent on listing gains

It's not a bad week for eBay.

First the company defended itself successfully against a trademark lawsuit filed by jeweler Tiffany, and now the company has said that profits jumped 22 percent from last year. None of this impressed Wall Street much.

The Web's largest online auctioneer said after the close of trading Wednesday that second-quarter net earnings grew to $460.3 million, or 35 cents a share, up from $375.8 million a year ago. The boost came from an increase in item listings and sales growth at the company's PayPal division.

The company's share … Read more

Lessig: Don't fall into the four-year trap

NEW YORK--Lawrence Lessig, Stanford University law professor and co-founder of the new Change Congress project, gave the audience at the Personal Democracy Forum conference a brief history lesson on Tuesday morning. His message: government corruption is nothing new.

On a massive display screen, he loaded up a portrait of legendary New England statesman and eventual Secretary of State Daniel Webster, whose professional conflicts of interest would have been enough to make even the most lukewarm of political bloggers cringe.

"Bribery wasn't even a crime in our Congress until 1853. The 19th century was a cesspool of this kind … Read more

Software margins choked by the cloud?

Microsoft expects to lose margins as "cloud" competitors start to eat away at its core businesses.

Kudos to Microsoft for calling out the obvious. But the software maker still has a lot to learn, if it thinks it can charge more under its own cloud model because "the customer will pay Microsoft a larger fee, since Microsoft also runs and maintains all the hardware," as Nick Carr notes:

Capossela's assumption that Microsoft will be able to charge companies more under the cloud model seems optimistic, given the different economics of providing software as a Web service and the aggressive pricing strategies of cloud pioneers like Google, Zoho, and Amazon.

Put more bluntly, there's not a chance in Hades that Microsoft will be able to charge more for its cloud-based offerings--not when its competitors are using the cloud to pummel its desktop and server-based offerings. This is something that Microsoft (and everyone else) is simply going to have to get used to. The go-go days of outrageous software margins are over. Done.… Read more

Creative Commons gains $4 million grant, loses CEO Lessig

Creative Commons, the nonprofit dedicated to reforming copyright in the digital age, said Tuesday it has received a $4 million grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

The money will bolster Creative Commons' five-year financial plan, which has also seen support or pledges of support from Google, Mozilla, Red Hat, and the Omidyar Network.

Out of the $4 million from the Hewlett Foundation, $2.5 million will go to the main Creative Commons organization over the next five years, and the remaining $1.5 million will go to its CCLearn education project.

Meanwhile, Lawrence Lessig, the organization's founder, … Read more

Toshiba cuts its forecast by a third

Though already expecting losses from the failed HD DVD business, Toshiba's shareholders were told Wednesday to expect more bad news.

The Japanese electronics giant said the market for NAND flash memory (the kind of chips used in portable gadgets) was weak and expected to get worse, the Wall Street Journal reports.

"We now see prices falling 50 percent this fiscal year, after predicting 40 percent in October," said Executive Vice President Fumio Muraoka.

As a result, Toshiba lowered its expected profit for fiscal year 2007, which ends March 31, to 125 billion yen ($1.26 billion), from … Read more

iTunes profitable, Billboard estimates

iTunes is the No. 2 music retailer in the United States (behind only Wal-Mart Stores), and it passed the 4 billion download mark in February, but nobody knows how much money Apple's actually earning from the service.

In Apple's earnings reports, iTunes revenue is lumped into a category called "other music-related products and services," alongside licensing revenue from iPod peripheral makers, and the company doesn't break out expenses or operating profit by segment.

So some Billboard reporters decided to do some back-of-the-envelope calculations, using Amazon.com's expenses as a benchmark for a large-scale e-commerce … Read more

HP's redwood property could become a state park

A piece of land owned by Hewlett-Packard since 1963 was sold to two nonprofit groups for $4 million, according to the Associated Press.

The 534-acre property, known as Little Basin, is located in the Santa Cruz Mountains and has long been used for company picnics, events and camping trips. The land is reportedly worth $13 million, and HP says it is selling it because the company's employees are not all located in or near the PC maker's San Francisco Bay Area headquarters.

"It's not a cost issue. Basically we had a minority of employees who were … Read more

News Roundup: Microsoft, Yahoo, YouTube

Microsoft eyeing Yahoo deal. The New York Post is reporting that Microsoft has recently become very interested in trying to buy out Yahoo. Yahoo's projected sales price is reported to hover around $50 Billion. Such an acquisition would include popular Web properties like Flickr, Hot Jobs, and Microsoft rivals like Yahoo Messenger and Mail. ( CNET News.com)

Popular on YouTube? You may soon get a profit cut. YouTube is offering its most popular users with recurring content the chance to share revenue from ads adjacent to their videos. A revenue sharing program for the video hosting service has long … Read more