Amazon

eBay is back!

Supercharged by PayPal, the e-commerce company and its stock are red-hot. Watch out, Amazon!

FORTUNE -- "I'd like to take you on a journey." A group of 2,500 eBay employees is assembled at the San Jose Civic, a concert venue a few miles from company headquarters. Their boss, CEO John Donahoe, is onstage, asking them to reflect on their work. "Close your eyes," he urges in a deep baritone. "What is MORE

Chart of the day: Apple's iPad climbs back to an 81% share

According to Chitika, the iPad has recovered somewhat from its post-Christmas dip

FORTUNE -- There was some consternation among Apple (AAPL) investors in early January when the Chitika Ad Network -- which sells data about the online activities of hundreds of millions of users to its advertising clients -- published a version of the chart at right. It showed the iPad's share of North American tablet Web traffic dropping 7.14% in MORE

Tablet shipments surged 75% last quarter. Apple's iPad still dominant, but less so

IDC thinks Asus, Samsung and Amazon gained market share, but what do they know?

FORTUNE -- IDC on Wednesday released preliminary data from its survey of worldwide tablet sales in the big holiday quarter, and the only thing in the data that we can be sure about is that sales of Apple's iPad grew 48.1% year over year -- from 15.1 million to 22.9 million. We and IDC know this because MORE

Apple vs. Amazon: Bizzaro valuations revisited

The value the market assigns these two companies gets more absurd each quarter

FORTUNE -- Last week, Apple's profits grew and its share price plummeted. This week, Amazon's profits plummeted and its share price soared.

Confused? So was much of the business press. Consider this matched pair of headlines:

Reuters: "Amazon shares set record after strong quarterly profit"

Fortune: "Amazon profits take a dive"

The New York Times offered what may be MORE

Type 'sell' on Google Finance and Apple pops up - update

Type "over sold" and you get Amazon

FORTUNE -- Tricks you can play with Google Finance:

Typing "sell" (without quotes) brings up Apple (AAPL)
Typing "over sold" brings up Amazon (AMZN)
Typing "buy" brings up -- you guessed it -- Best Buy (BBY)

Saturday was a busy day for Google Finance memes. The "sell Apple" one was started, apparently, by Greedy Picks, who described it as "kicking someone in the face when they are already MORE

The average Apple analyst's price target has fallen to $740

Eleven lowered their 12-mos. targets in December, yet few stocks have as far to go

FORTUNE -- Analysts tend to get nervous when a stock they follow drifts too far from their published price target, and few stocks are as widely followed or as far out of whack as Apple (AAPL).

Eleven analysts lowered their Apple targets in the final weeks of the company's first fiscal quarter of 2013, which ends Saturday. MORE

Chart of the day: Christmas messages from new tablets

For what it's worth, iPad tweets outnumbered Kindle 7:1, Google Nexus 18:1, Surface 50:1

FORTUNE -- I can't vouch for the accuracy of the information in this chart. The nominal source -- A.X. Ian --  describes himself on Twitter and other venues as "Purveyor of pseudo-random ideas. Information massage therapist. Always prolific, seldom profound."

But the ratios square with other signs we've been seeing -- including store traffic -- and bode better MORE

Interest in the Surface fell 53% after its price was announced

Meanwhile, 44% of tablet shoppers plan to buy an iPad versus 24% for Kindle Fire

FORTUNE -- Consumer preferences in one of this holiday's hottest categories -- tablet computers -- shifted pretty dramatically between the third and fourth quarters, according to a new survey of U.S. households with broadband access published Thursday by Parks Associates.

Among its findings:

For the first time, more U.S. broadband households plan to purchase a tablet for the holidays MORE

Millennial Media: iPad mini impressions grew 28% per day

Calls Apple's iPad mini the "must have gift" of the year

FORTUNE -- "The iPad mini is a game changer," writes Millennial Media's Matt Gillis in a blog post Monday.

"Every holiday season there seems to be one particular item that stands out as the 'must have gift' of the year," he writes, "and in 2012, early figures lead us to believe that this could be the iPad Mini. Truth be told, MORE

Black Friday on the iPad: Revisiting some dubious data

The holiday shopping news for Amazon was not quite as awful as it seemed

FORTUNE -- There was much gnashing of teeth at Amazon's (AMZN) Seattle headquarters when IBM (IBM) reported the results of its Benchmark analysis of Thanksgiving and Black Friday sales last month.

Not only did Apple's (AAPL) iPad dominate with 88.3% of sales made on tablets, but the Kindle Fire's miserable share (2.4%) was even smaller than Barnes & MORE