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With all the economic doom and gloom in the world these days, Apple executives must be wondering what all the fuss is about.

Apple's Tim Cook and Peter Oppenheimer acknowledged Wednesday that these are uncertain times to be in the retail consumer electronics business. But put aside any doubts about Apple's ability to sustain the first wave of recession. Posting record revenue and profit during its fiscal first quarter, the company shattered analyst predictions on the strength of solid Mac sales and stronger-than-expected iPod sales.

Can it last? Tough to say, given that few can predict how quickly … Read more

Updated throughout at 3:30 p.m. PST with details from conference call.

Apple reported on Wednesday first-quarter earnings significantly higher than analysts had expected coming off a disappointing holiday season for most tech companies, but provided its usual conservative guidance.

For the three-month period ended December 27, Apple recorded $10.2 billion in revenue, as compared with $9.6 billion a year ago, and net income of $1.6 billion, as compared with $1.58 billion a year ago. That translates into earnings per share of $1.78, far more than the $1.39 in earnings per share that … Read more

After a week spent worrying about the health of CEO Steve Jobs, Apple will look forward to getting back to business Wednesday when it reports its fiscal first-quarter earnings.

The last three months were not kind to computer and consumer electronics companies, but Apple is expected to have weathered the storm better than others. Analysts are predicting the company will report revenue and earnings per share at the high end of the guidance it provided in October, with expectations of $9.76 billion in revenue and earnings per share of $1.38.

The three-month period between October and December is … Read more

If you're one whose search results lead you to a Wikipedia page nine times out of ten, you would do well to install the Googlepedia extension for Firefox.

This free, terrifically easy add-on pulls the Wikipedia article most closely associated with your search term into the right half of a Google search results page. Modest controls let you expand, shrink, or hide the article.

Here's the best part: clicking a link within the article feeds the term back into Google's search engine, and therefore back into Googlepedia's cycle of serving up Wikipedia articles.

Googlepedia will undoubtedly … Read more

If you're one whose search results lead you to a Wikipedia page nine times out of ten, you would do well to install the Googlepedia extension for Firefox.

This free, terrifically easy add-on pulls the Wikipedia article most closely associated with your search term into the right half of the search results page. Modest controls let you expand, shrink, or hide the article. Clicking a link within the article feeds the term back into Google's search engine, and therefore back into Googlepedia's cycle of serving articles.

Googlepedia will undoubtedly save you time if a quick search is … Read more

We take a look at our predictions for 2008 and see how many of them didn't come true. Much to our surprise, we actually didn't do half bad! (Except for the whole HD-DVD thing. That was pretty bad.) Listen now: Download today's podcast

With the nation on edge, you might assume that every Internet retailer worth their salt would have extended red carpet treatment to shoppers during the traditional end-of-year shopping rush.

Wrong assumption.

In fact, more than one-third of the 40 online merchants surveyed in a report on retail satisfaction finished with lower scores than they did during the same period a year ago.

Still, the annual report from Foresee Results found that scores for most of the 40 online retailers it tracks remained the same while one-fourth registered improvements from 2007.

"Holding flat was a pleasant surprise," said Larry … Read more

Updated 3:30 p.m. PST with details following the conference call.

Research In Motion's third-quarter results were a little disappointing, as expected, but a strong holiday season is giving it reason to be very optimistic.

The company had already revealed that it expected third-quarter revenue and profit to be lighter than originally expected, and the official numbers released Thursday were in line with those revised expectations at $2.8 billion in revenue and net income of $396.5 million. Adjusting for the tax complexities involved with RIM's Canadian base of operations and its heavy U.S. presence, … Read more

Search Cloudlet is a Firefox extension from the International Software and Productivity Engineering Institute (INTSPEI) that gives users a cloud of tags to help modify and focus searches on Google and Yahoo. Once installed it will show up on top of search results and provides a simple way to tweak the original query by offering up keywords pulled from the results.

Words that appear more often in the results appear as bigger, bolder tags that you can click on to re-start the query with that word tacked on. The creators recommend dialing up the number of default search results to … Read more