Corporate and legal

As expected, Dell's second quarter was carried largely by sales to corporate customers as demand was on the rise worldwide for the company's enterprise offerings, including servers and networking systems, storage and services. (Statement)

For the quarter, the company reported net income of $629 million, or 32 cents per share, on sales of $15.53 billion, a 22 percent increase over the year-ago quarter. Wall Street had been expecting earnings per share of 30 cents on sales of $15.2 billion for the company's fiscal second quarter.

Large Enterprise saw the greatest revenue growth across business segments, … Read more

Hewlett-Packard was right where Wall Street expected when it reported third-quarter revenue of $30.7 billion Thursday.

That figure is an increase of 11.4 percent from the same quarter a year ago. The PC maker also reported net earnings of $1.8 billion, or 75 cents per share, excluding costs related to a legal settlement and taxes.

That's exactly what HP said it would report when it previewed its third-quarter earnings earlier this month--the same day it announced CEO Mark Hurd was resigning. Wall Street was looking for revenue between $29.7 billion and $30.7 billion.

In … Read more

In designing its new Places geolocation service, Facebook seems to have learned from its past privacy blunders. The new service has multiple layers of privacy control, but as with other aspects of Facebook privacy, users need to put some thought about whether and how they want to disclose their location. Facebook has also created an extra level of privacy for its under-18 users, prohibiting them from displaying their location to anyone other than their friends.

The first thing to know about Places is that it's not fully automatic. You have to "check in" or be tagged at … Read more

BlackBerry maker Research In Motion is looking to get into the mobile advertising business, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal Thursday.

Following in the footsteps of rivals Apple and Google, RIM is looking to acquire a mobile advertising network to help it jump-start its advertising and marketing efforts. The Wall Street Journal reports that RIM is eyeing a Baltimore-based company called Millennial Media. The two companies were supposedly in talks, but the deal has stalled as the companies have not come to agreement on Millennial's worth.

AdMob was acquired by Google for $750 million in November 2009. … Read more

Buoyed by double-digit gains in market share, Lenovo returned to profitability in the first fiscal quarter.

Earnings for the quarter ended June 30 climbed to $55 million, compared with a net loss of $16 million for the same quarter last year. Sales shot up almost 50 percent to $5.1 billion from $3.4 billion in the year-ago quarter.

The Hong Kong PC maker attributed the bump in quarterly results to its surging market share. For the third quarter in a row, Lenovo proved to be the fastest growing of the top five worldwide PC makers, helping it capture its … Read more

Apple will close mobile-advertising company Quattro Wireless at the end of September, it announced Thursday.

"We believe iAd is the best mobile-ad network in the world, and starting next month, we're going to focus all of our resources on the iAd advertising platform," Apple wrote in a statement on the Quattro Wireless home page. "We are no longer accepting new campaigns for the Quattro Wireless Network, and we will soon begin winding down existing campaigns. As of September 30, we will support ads exclusively for the iAd Network."

The statement also includes a link to … Read more

Intel plans to buy security company McAfee for $7.68 billion--the biggest acquisition in its 42-year history.

The chipmaker said Thursday it has entered into a definitive agreement to buy all of McAfee's common stock at $48 per share in cash. McAfee's stock closed Wednesday at $29.93, making Intel's offer a 60 percent premium.

The boards of both companies have approved the deal.

Security has become an essential element of online computing, on par with energy-efficient performance and connectivity, Intel said. But today's security isn't adequately addressing the array of new Net-connected machines on … Read more

Five years after Sprint merged with Nextel, the deal remains a controversial topic in the financial world. Not only has the combined company struggled through several difficult quarters, but also Bloomberg recently named the acquisition as one that "never should have happened."

In a review published last Thursday of the 100 biggest takeovers since 2005, Bloomberg ranked the Sprint-Nextel deal as the third worst for shareholder value. According to the report, though Sprint paid $36 billion for Nextel in 2005, the carrier now is valued at $30 billion, including dept. The two transactions that fared worse were McClatchy'… Read more

NEW YORK--Verizon Communications is prepping a new live TV streaming app for tablet PCs like the Apple iPad, a move that could eventually eliminate the need for a home set-top box and set the stage for true "TV everywhere" viewing.

At a demonstration at the home of Verizon CIO Shaygan Kheradpir, Verizon executives showed off a slew of new features for its Fios TV service, including the live TV streaming application on an iPad.

The new app allows Fios TV subscribers to stream live TV from their service onto an iPad over a home Wi-Fi connection. Initially, the … Read more