Microsoft’s (MSFT) fourth-quarter net income dropped 29% to $3.05 billion and revenue fell 17% to $13.10 billion. It was hurt by a global slump in demand for PCs and servers. Sales in the client division which produces Window OS, fell 29% and earnings fell 33%. Google will be introducing the Chrome OS soon while Microsoft will be launching it’s own Windows 7 in October of this year.

Apple (AAPL) reported third-quarter profits increase by 15% to $1.23 billion and revenue rose 12% to $8.33 billion. Apple sold 5.2 million iPhones, a 700% increase YoY. Macintosh saw 4% rise in shipments to 2.6 million units, however, revenue fell 8% to 3.33 billion due to price cuts on some MacBooks. iPod sales dropped 7% YoY to 10.2 million and revenues declined 11% to 1.49 billion. This is the natural effect of cannibalization by iPhone and iTouch.

Amazon (AMZN) said its second-quarter net slid 10% to $142 million, though sales increased 14% to $4.65 billion. The company, which announced an agreement to buy online retailer Zappos.com yesterday for $850 million, said it expects net sales of between $4.75 billion and $5.25 billion in the third quarter.

Yahoo (YHOO) said its second-quarter revenue slid 13% to $1.57 billion but profits rose 8% to $141.4 million due to layoffs of 700 employees to 13,000 total, and other cost-cutting measures. A Yahoo/Microsoft deal is back in the negotiating room as the companies seek to form a partnership against rival Google, which means the deal would have to be approved by regulators due to antitrust concerns. The companies have skirted the negotiations over the past 2 years until they came to head a few months ago with CEO Jerry Yang when negotiations failed and Yahoo stock fell considerably as the recession hit. Yahoo, this past Tuesday launched a new home page and announced a deal with AT&T to sell display advertising.

AMD (AMD) posted second quarter losses of $330 million while revenue was down from $1.36 billion to $1.18 billion. Margins for its chips business were down from 35% to 27% a stark contrast from rival Intel’s report of increasing gross margins. Intel’s revenues also in turn increased 12%. AMD blamed the declines on under-utilized factories which lead to a reduction in margins and also lower chip prices.

Google (GOOG) reported a revenue increase for 2.9% to $5.52 billion while profits rose 19% to $1.48 billion due to cost cuts and laying off some 300 employees. Google commands one-third of the $24.5 billion U.S. Internet advertising market. Mr. Schmidt reported a recovery in advertising spend in travel and shopping but finance sector remains weak. The bulk of the growth came for search advertisements as advertisers turn to more predictable and targetted ads on Google.

TomTom (TOM2), a dutch navigation equipment manufacturer reports 61% drop in second quarter profits to $28 million while the top line saw a decline of  19% to $522 million. The company expects to a total industry demand of 15 million Portable Navigation Device units in Europe and 17 million in North America for the complete fiscal year of which it expects that 11 to 12 million units will be of TomTom. The company also suffers stiff competition from the likes of iPhone and other similar phones in the market which provide a navigation facility among other things.

Wipro (WIT) reported a 12% rise in first-quarter profits to $210 million making it the third Indian software company to beat forecasts. Earlier, bigger rival Tata reported a 22% increase in profits while Infosys reported a 17% increase in profits. Wipro, India’s third largest software maker booked revenues from IT services, products, customer care and lighting businesses.  IT Services registered revenues of $1.03 billion which makes up 77% of Wipro’s revenue stream and margins in the same division grew from 20.9% to 22.3%.

LG Electronics, South Korea’s second largest consumer electronic company after Samsung, reported quarterly net income increase for 62% to $918 million and earnings increased 14% to 1.2 billion. LG expects strong outlook in LCD and handset business. The company sold nearly 30 million handsets in the quarter and operating margin on these handsets increased from 6.7% to 11% QoQ.

Elsewhere, Cisco (CSCO) signed a deal with Marriot hotels for telepresence services in 25 locations. Telepresence helps reduce travel costs and Mariott cancelled previous deals with HP (HPQ) telepresence solutions for $120K each plus $10K monthly fee. Last year alone, HP sold Cisco gear worth $1 billion but tough economic times has lead to tough competition between the two. Cisco’s top of the line telepresence sells for $300K vs HP’s $350K. BBC has dumped project Kangaroo, an Internet TV service that was planned in collaboration with two other television networks. The project was ruled out in February due to antitrust issues from the Competition Commission. BBC wrote off some $15 million in the project for the FY ended April 30. The BBC iPlayer gets 41 million+ hits a month and BBC is currently exploring other options for profitable online television broadcasting.

We wanted to make you aware that we have modified our Terms of Service: To more effectively serve our Gallery members, we have adjusted our photo-storage policy to align with storage usage.

How this affects you.

Once you begin storing photos at the Gallery, you must make the following purchases to continue such storage:

- Members with photo storage of 2 gigabytes (GB) or less must make annual minimum purchases totaling at least $4.99.

- Members with photo storage exceeding 2GB must make annual minimum purchases totaling at least $19.99.

Failure to meet this requirement may result in your photos being deleted from the Gallery.

The recession has hit Kodak (NYSE:EK) quite hard as is clearly apparent from their stock price for the prior 12 months.

My sympathies to their shareholders, employees and customers alike but unless this is a last ditch effort, I am not sure what they aim to achieve with this move. Those Kodak Gallery users that stay on will do so only because they are coerced into it–pay up or lose the pictures. Those that have backups will probably ditch Kodak with a bad taste in their mouth and unlikely to return. I am not sure how much money they intend to salvage from this move, but it seems like a downward spiral for Kodak. Must be really desperate times.

Simply download timezone.exe (unzip the file timezone.exe to c:\ or something) and run this command which specified the starting and ending times as hour-minute-day:

timezone.exe 00-01-06 00-01-11

The timezone.exe utility updates the relevant registry keys and you’re good to go.

* Net cash of $194MM or about $7.50 per share. Their current assets and Intellectual property are valued at $75-125MM bringing share price in the $10.50-12.50 range
* PortalPlayer’s sockets are in use in Sandisk Sansa e200 (currently has ~10% market share) and iPod video players. It has also announced that it has won a wireless socket deal.
* PortalPlayer’s Preface technology for Microsoft Windows Sideshow device will be a part of Vista due to ship in January 2007. PortalPlayer announced “collaborations with Acer, ASUSTeK, Compal and Quanta, two of the largest notebook OEMs and two of the largest notebook ODMs in Taiwan”.
* The CEO Gary Johnson will be leaving to pursue other startup opportunities, however, his profile reveals that he has not stuck with any company more than 2-3 years in his recent career. In fact it might be a good thing as PortalPlayer forays into richer portables someone with a sales background for example could bring new vigor and reach to the company.
* Earnings Yield of 45% and return on capital greater than 100% (see Magic Formula Investing screen)
* PortalPlayer’s low-power and WiFi enabled chipsets along with audio/video/image support makes these chips very lucrative for new and existing portable media devices. They already have a proven track record with Nanos and iPod videos and have also worked with Creative and Samsung among others.
* PortalPlayer is partnered with Microsoft to develop Preface technology for Windows Sideshow for Vista. Preface will aim to extend notebook use to a full day on one charge while allowing users to use the auxillary Personal Media Display (PMD) to access data and content on the notebook including email, calendars, music, video and photos. Further, Sideshow devices can be wireless and don’t have to be physically embedded within the notebooks. Sideshow devices will also feature Gadgets which will be a part of Windows Vista Sidebar and are already a part of Windows Live.

Other interesting pieces of the puzzle and possible technological convergences that you could see sooner than you think:

* Microsoft’s Zune player has wireless capabilities, however, in my previous post on Microsoft Zune I noted that WiFi use-case scenarios are very limited (6th bullet). WiFi capabilities are under-utilized at the moment but it’s imminent that they will open up to support more interesting use-case scenarios. It would be an awful waste of hardware space, battery life and production and materials costs to enable WiFi for just photo sharing.
* As an aside, convergence and interoperability of WiFi devices can also be seen in home and media. Apple’s latest foray into iTV which will feature 802.11n to support high quality video streaming from your PC along with picture slideshows, music, apps and possibly even games on your television. Windows Media Center which has been around for much longer also supports the same scenarios.
* Windows Vista has powerful P2P networking support. This will mean good things for Zune and other WiFi enabled devices that will be able to interoperate with Vista and PortalPlayer’s chips offer an easy platform to build these devices.
* I believe Zune has the capability to act as a sideshow device even in its current form based on Microsoft’s Sideshow specifications. It is possible that PortalPlayer might get a socket in Zune along the line though this is highly speculative.
* Even if Zune has nothing to do with it, SideShow devices interfacing with Vista computers open up the playing field for 3rd party hardware plugins similar to the ones that exist for the iPod today, only these will be for the PC. For example a cheap SideShow device could interface with your PC and run the Weather gadget or display recipes and be mounted in your kitchen–essentially acting as dumb terminals. If Microsoft does manage to create a rich ecosystem here, PortalPlayer’s outlook could become very promising. Again, this is highly speculative though I don’t doubt it much but then again I have a technological bias. Also these scenarios would not be enabled for another year or so.

These bullets highlight PortalPlayer’s cheaper valuation which give it little downside but at the same time there is huge upside due to the technological potential. PortalPlayer chip designs have also been through quite a few iterations providing a stable platform for Portable Media Devices.

Another interesting find: PortalPlayer’s Indian design and development center currently has a number of positions listed for WinCE engineers, WiFi and other curious positions posted in the last month or two.

Disclaimer: I work for Microsoft but have no internal visibility into any of this; all information here was garnered from public resources and is highly speculative. I currently own PortalPlayer (PLAY) stock (for pretty much the same reasons I mention here).