eBay

Following strong results this past holiday season from online (and offline) retailers, eBay was expected to deliver strong earnings for the fourth quarter of 2011--and it did.

eBay reported a fourth quarter net income of $2.0 billion, or $1.51 a share (statement). Non-GAAP earnings were 60 cents a share on a revenue of $3.38 billion and a non-GAAP net income of $788.6 million.

Wall Street was expecting eBay to report fourth quarter earnings of 54 cents a share on revenue of $3.32 billion.

For 2011 overall, eBay produced $11.7 billion in revenue--a 27 percent … Read more

Apple and Amazon took home the best grades in customer satisfaction among people who did their holiday shopping via a mobile device.

ForeSee Results' "E-Retail Satisfaction Index" looked at the top 16 retail sites out of a possible 40 to gauge which offered the best mobile experience for holiday buyers. Apple's score of 85 out of 100 and Amazon's score of 84 handily surpassed third-place Dell with only 78.

Foresee Usability Team Lead Matthew Dull said both companies place huge value on the customer experience and carry that into their mobile environments.

While Amazon has both … Read more

What's it like to be a top manager or engineer in Silicon Valley and a woman? Google's Marissa Mayer, Flickr founder Catarina Fake, and Padmasree Warrior of Cisco Systems talked about that and more today at the CNET Women in Tech panel.

The three agreed that progress has been made, but that there's still a long way to go to get more women into the technology field.

Mayer said she believes we need to get more people interested in technology overall--men and women. Warrior said we need to find ways to keep women in the workforce and … Read more

Quite the donnybrook is brewing on the Internet over PayPal's decision to order a customer to destroy a purportedly rare violin.

A Regretsy.com reader named Erica related yesterday how she sold an old French violin "that made it through WWII" to a buyer in Canada for $2,500. However, the buyer disputed the authenticity of the label and demanded his money back. When the buyer contacted PayPal with his concerns, the payment processor instructed him to destroy it and refunded the purchase price.

"Rather than have the violin returned to me, PayPal made the buyer … Read more

As more and more companies get into the daily-deals game, the bankers behind Groupon's IPO must be banging their heads against the wall. And now, there's one more formidable entrant to give them headaches: PayPal.

The eBay-owned payments company says it is planning on offering deals as soon as the first quarter of 2012. And, according to Bloomberg News, it is taking what could be a smart approach to the ever-popular deal genre: location- and user-habit-based offers.

PayPal has more than 100 million users, and it thinks that it can leverage what it knows about those customers to … Read more

On Sunday evening, HP put the (allegedly) final batch of its discontinued TouchPad tablets on sale for cheap on its eBay store. Less than 30 minutes later, they were all sold out, and I was left slate-less, yet again.

HP entered into its great tumult of 2011 in August--a drama that has been covered in great detail on CNET--and one of the final stages of the corporate carnage came when the company began selling warehouses full of TouchPads for as low as $99. What ensued was a digital crush of bargain-hunting nearly as ugly as a Wal-Mart on Black Friday, but without the pepper spray.

HP offered a lot here and a lot there of the bargain-basement tablets, while smaller batches would briefly pop up on the sites of retailers like Barnes & Noble and OfficeMax or subsites of eBay, only to sell out again in mere minutes. Inventory systems were unable to keep up with the pace of sales, and suddenly a receipt and confirmation number was no guarantee of actually receiving a fire-sale TouchPad. Big bundles of confirmed orders were canceled, and angry customers vented on forums and on Twitter, leaving one unfortunate HP social-media manager tweeting her pleas for compassion and patience.… Read more

HP open sources WebOS as the fire sale on the TouchPad burns out in minutes; Apple announces that 100 million apps have been downloaded from the Mac App Store; and Amazon promises a software update to the Kindle Fire to alleviate some of the user interface issues.

Links from Monday's episode of Loaded:

Hewlett-Packard is slated to officially put its discontinued TouchPad tablet up for sale one last time today for $99 and $149.

Update: Some readers are claiming that the unit has sold out already and that the eBay server has been responding slowly.

HP is putting its short-lived TouchPad tablet up for sale on eBay at $99 and $149 for the 16GB and 32GB versions, respectively, according to an HP internal memo first published by TechCrunch.

As CNET reported earlier, there will be a few catches, however. Probably the most significant is that the offer will go exclusively to HP employees … Read more

Smartphones--can you give them as a gift? And if so, which one should you give as a gift? Go with the Droid Razr or wait for the Galaxy Nexus? Or learn to love Siri and all her quirks? We're here to help--live.

CNET smartphones expert Jessica Dolcourt joins the CNET Holiday Help Desk Monday Dec. 12 at at noon Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern at CNET Live.

Monday's show is our fourth help desk of the season, here to answer your holiday tech-shopping questions. Not only will Jessica help you pick a smartphone, we'll also have Claudia … Read more