Data

Pick up some Dell while it's down

Photo: Dell

At a low point in the romantic movie classic The Princess Bride, Andre the Giant's character finds his once-proud swordsman friend defeated, drunk and destitute in the woods. The giant picks him up, nurses him to health, and brings him along to help save the day.

That scene should inspire investors eyeing Dell (DELL), the former PC king. The stock has looked like a dog for the past two years, MORE

It's Microsoft vs. Cisco for the future of the office phone

Photo: Microsoft. Chairman Bill Gates takes the stage for the company's most important announcements.

Microsoft (MSFT) Chairman Bill Gates on Tuesday kicked off the software giant's campaign to reinvent the office phone – an ambitious strategy that could be a multi-billion-dollar business for Microsoft, and that will almost certainly lead to a showdown with fellow tech titan Cisco Systems (CSCO).

In Gates's vision of the future, common annoyances like phone tag and MORE

Consumer credit crunch could hurt holiday TV sales

Market research firm iSuppli says the subprime mortgage mess and financial market turmoil could make consumers hesitant to open their wallets and buy pricey TVs this holiday season.

Apple revamps a bestseller list, making iPhone sales harder to track

The Apple (AAPL) Store has revamped the way it lists the top-selling online items, making it more difficult to tell whether iPhones are more popular than iPods or Macs.

Up until the past few days, Apple displayed one list of the top-selling items across all of its product categories at store.apple.com. That list tended to show that the iPod nano was the company's best-selling single item, followed by the iPod classic MORE

Live: Adobe Systems Q3 earnings call

Adobe Systems (ADBE) has reported Q3 earnings that blew past analyst expectations and the company's own projections, based on unexpectedly strong sales of its Creative Suite and Acrobat products. Because Adobe is the first major technology company to report earnings during this cycle, executives sometimes offer insights into the technology buying patterns that affect larger players such as Apple (AAPL) and Intel (INTC).

Silicon Valley still tops for chip companies

Silicon Valley is still the headquarters location of choice for chip makers, research firm iSuppli says. In fact, the firm estimates that a quarter of all global chip companies have headquarters in the area south of San Francisco.

Last year 56 Silicon Valley semiconductor suppliers raked in $68.2 billion in sales. That's still far ahead of the second-place locale, Taiwan's Hsinchu City, which managed $50.2 billion.

Yahoo's audience slightly smaller than Google's, but far stickier

Yahoo's (YHOO) U.S. audience was smaller than Google's (GOOG) by about 6 million people in the month of August, but Yahoo visitors lingered about twice as long, according to data released today by research firm Nielsen//NetRatings.

Live: Apple iPod event, 10 a.m. Pacific

PHOTO GALLERIES: NEW IPODS TAKE ON THESE RIVALS

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iPhone fever: Latest numbers point to a big July

Remember July, when the business press seemed to turn against Apple's (AAPL) iPhone? Near the end of the month, when Apple reported earnings, some analysts and pundits decided that the phone's activation numbers through AT&T (T) were disappointing.

I said then that the market's reaction to those reports was just plain silly, and the latest data seems to be bearing that out: Research firm iSuppli now says the iPhone was the MORE

Watch out Sony, Samsung: Flat TV value brands gain

As flat TVs gain in popularity, consumers are less concerned with brand and more concerned with price, according to analysis from research firm iSuppli. That's bad news for the likes of Sony (SNE), but good for upstarts like Vizio – which, according to iSuppli's numbers, shipped the most LCD TVs in North America this spring.