China vs. the U.S. in electric vehicles

The electric car is finally about to move from idea to reality. Currently there are barely more than 2,000 on the road in the world's two largest car markets (China and the U.S.) combined. But that number is about to soar. Beijing has demanded that its fast-growing auto industry put at least 5 million all-electric cars on the road by 2020. Will the U.S. keep up?

What Steve Jobs said about Google

Apple's CEO used Monday's earnings call with analysts to rip into Android

Steve Jobs is usually content to let COO Tim Cook and CFO Peter Oppenheimer handle the hour-long Q&A with analysts at the end of each quarter. But he turned up on Monday afternoon for Apple's (AAPL) Q4 2010 earnings call, and he clearly had a lot on his mind.

After briefly dismissing Research in Motion's (RIMM) BlackBerry as a MORE

Geithner's missed opportunity

Why can't Obama officials acknowledge that insulting the business community is counterproductive?

U.S. Secretary Timothy Geithner spoke Monday afternoon in Silicon Valley in an unusually friendly setting, far from Washington, D.C., and being questioned by the polite, witty billionaire and former journalist Michael Moritz. He might have used his appearance in front of the Commonwealth Club in Palo Alto, Calif., to convince the business community that the Obama administration is simpatico. MORE

Apple sold 14.1 million iPhones in Q4, iPad sales disappoint

Shares fall in after-hours trading despite earnings of $4.64 per share on sales of $20.34 billion. Steve Jobs makes a rare appearance on the earnings call to attack Google and RIM.

Despite earnings that easily beat the Street's expectations, Apple (AAPL) shares dropped sharply, giving up more that $18 (nearly 5.7%) in after-hours trading.

The numbers:

The best rhetoric in business: cable vs content

When the cable providers and the companies providing the shows fight over fees -- as Cablevision and News Corp currently are -- the viewers lose. But those who enjoy their business bare knuckled definitely win.

Forget the monkey, now it's the (Detroit) Lions' time to weep

As the "Cablevision vs. News Corp." feud escalates, more than three million subscribers remain without Fox programming. Cablevision blames News Corp. for demanding an MORE

Google's enterprise search box gets Cloud smarts

The updated Google Mini Box now searches Microsoft Sharepoint data as well.

The only piece of hardware that Google (GOOG) sells is a rebranded Dell (DELL) yellow box (or Blue) called the Google Search Appliance. Google sells these to businesses that have content behind a firewall which can't be indexed by Google's normal spiders.  These businesses want to privately catalogue Intranet and back-office data using Google's integrated search features  without sending data to MORE

Verizon's iPad data plan: One plan to rule them all?

Depending on which of the new plans you choose, you could end up saving a few bucks, spending roughly the same, or paying through the nose.

Back in June, two months after the iPad launched in 3G and Wi-Fi-only flavors, Fortune recommended that potential buyers skip the 3G option, buy a Wi-Fi version and pair it with a MiFi router instead.

It seems Verizon (VZ) got the hint. On October 28, the MORE

Facebook's false choice: What it should have done to preserve trust

How the largest social network can pursue both its own objectives and its customer needs.

by Inder Sidhu, contributor

No. 6 on the list of "Most Hateable Companies Not Named BP"?

Ouch. That's got to hurt.

So how did Facebook, a destination of choice to more than 500 million people, get cast in such a poor light? The same way a lot of technology companies falter: it made a false choice that it never MORE

Angry Birds proves popularity of Android as a portable gaming platform

The quirky game has been downloaded a million times per day on Android over the weekend.

If there was ever a question of Google's Android being a viable gaming platform, RovioMobile's release of the full version of Angry Birds may have answered it.  On Saturday and Sunday, Rovio distributed a million of their Angry Birds apps for Android through GetJar and then the Android Market.  They added another million on Sunday.

Rovio gives Angry MORE

What if the iPad were a PC?

If you throw tablets in the mix, Apple just became the U.S.'s No. 1 computer maker

Click to enlarge.

"The iPad," writes Deutsche Bank's Chris Whitmore in a note to clients issued Monday, "is driving a rapid, unprecedented shift in the structure of the computing industry."

To illustrate that point, Whitmore has taken a chart of domestic personal computer market shares over the past seven quarters as measured by IDC, which MORE