All the noise from new CEO Carol Bartz to the contrary, Yahoo! (YHOO) is in trouble. Display ads are increasingly viewed as weak offerings in the online space. Ironically, online news aggregator Digg may save Yahoo! and its display ad cohorts.

First, the bad news for Yahoo. According to findings by online advertising company the Rubicon Project, the price of display ads fell by 20% to 30% during the first quarter of 2009 vs. the fourth quarter of 2008. Ouch. Rubicon also found that online display ad inventory soared by 150% between the two quarters, further depressing display ad prices. The vast majority of Yahoo's revenues come from display ads. This would seem to spell serious trouble for Bartz.

Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) has lagged other technology companies in the last two months as tech has surged. The company reported an awful quarter on May 19 after the market closed. CEO Mark Hurd reported earnings that were roughly in line but guided revenues for the ongoing quarter strongly downward, dismaying analysts and investors.

On the news, shares fell $1.88 to $34.70 in after-hours trading. For HP, second-quarter net income declined to $1.72 billion, or 70 cents a share, from $2.06 billion, or 80 cents, from a year earlier.

Piqqem Sentiment for Apple (AAPL) increased overall by 6.5% since the last report on March 24, 2009 and has been rebounding for the past month. The eastern half of the country appears to moving strongly upward in sentiment for Apple as does software engineers, women and managers. Apple sentiment has not recovered from a high of 2.96 (on a scale of 0-to-4) in February three months ago. Apple sentiment declines have been less pronounced than those of other PC-related companies.

In the smart phone category, competitors Palm (PALM) and Nokia (NOK) have actually outpaced Apple with significant sentiment increases as compared to Apple’s decrease over that period.

As everyone knows, the Amazon (AMZN) Kindle 3 is coming and lots of folks are hopped up about the new toy from the e-commerce giant.

Surprisingly, Piqqem.com users are voicing slightly bearish sentiment trends on Amazon even as the company ramps into launch of its much anticipated 9.7 inch screen Kindle on Wednesday of this week.

McDonald's Corp. (MCD) reports its earnings for Q1 2009 before markets open on April 22. Piqqem Sentiment for shares of MCD has dropped from a six-month high of 2.82 (on a 0-to-4 scale with 0 as lowest) to 2.64, a significant drop of 18 basis points. In comparison, according to First Call analyst sentiment for the fast food chain has dropped roughly 6 basis points, from a rating of 2.06 (on a 1-5 point scale with 1 as highest) to 2.0 over the course of the last 120 days. Analysts appear to be more bullish than the general crowd at Piqqem. However, sell side analyst sentiment has been shifting to meet the general crowd sentiment.

There are clearly some challenges facing McDonald's. Key competitor Burger King (BKC) reported weak March sales. Starbucks (SBUX) is mounting a sustained effort to stem any market share losses in the premium coffee markets to counter McDonalds' successful McCafe push. Additionally, further increases in the value of the U.S. dollar relative to other currencies could hurt McDonald's due to its relatively greater reliance on growth from outside the U.S. McDonald's executives have restated optimism for 2009, saying that sales in January and February have been solid and international markets such as Brazil and China are performing strongly. The company has an exceptionally strong track record. However, if McDonald's misses whisper estimates shareholders may punish the company due to higher expectations expressed in the recent upward momentum in the stock, as it rose from the $51 range to the $56 range.

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Internet advertising and search powerhouse Google (GOOG) will announce its most recent quarterly earnings on April 16. Options activity in the name has picked up dramatically, with primarily calls being written and positive sentiment expressed. Shares have surged nearly 20% in the past month from roughly $320 in mid-March to a $379 closing price on April 15. Upon reports of positive results in the past Google shares have swung 20% or more. At present value, Google is approaching the $400 mark, which some equity analysts have perceived as a resistance point. Mean analyst rating as recorded by Thomson Reuters is 1.64 (on a five point scale with 1 as a strong buy and 5 as a strong sell). This rating represents a slight strengthening in analyst sentiment over the recent period; three months ago, analyst sentiment was a consensus 1.70, a 6 basis point differential.

Will the Nano go ballistic? That's the big question for Tata Motors Ltd. (TTM), India’s largest automobile manufacturer. The pint-sized vehicle goes on sale in two weeks and it could either be a collossal flop or an entry level phenomenon for Developing World buyers. As background context, our proprietary Piqqem Sentiment for automaker shares is neutral with one positive for Toyota and crowd sentiment pointing towards the assumption that the sector has hit a bottom. Stay tuned, folks.

SUMMARY: Piqqem Sentiment for Internet Shares has in aggregate increased slightly over the past three months. Rising 10 basis points from 2.11 to 2.21. Overstock (OSTK) and Netflix (NFLX) show the strongest sentiment gains while Google (GOOG) showing moderate declines. However, overall sentiment remains strongest for Amazon (AMZN) and Google with Yahoo (YHOO) sentiment remaining the weakest.

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You will have to pry the print edition of the Sunday New York Times (NYT) from my cold, dead fingers before I give up dead trees. On a personal and entertainment level, I see a physical paper as one of the great joys of life. As an investor, I can only say this. The latest Internet Advertising Bureau numbers came out two days ago showing that online ad sales actually grew by $2.2 billion during 2008, a year in which the U.S. economy was in free fall. At the same time, newspaper ad sales continued to plunge as Sun-Times declared bankruptcy, NYT and Washington Post (WPO) both announced layoffs or pay cuts, and the entire print world shuddered after Clay Shirky's thoughtful essay poised the question that no one had wanted to ponder -- if we can't save newspapers, then what will journalism look like?

From an investor's standpoint, a few contrarians are hanging tough in NYT and Gannett (GCI). Sentiment in newspaper stocks that we collect at Piqqem.com is surprisingly sanguine, with Gannett and McClatchy (MNI) both garnering "neutral" Piqqem Sentiment ratings.

Founded in 1981 by seven software engineers with the equivalent of $250, Infosys Technologies (INFY) is now one of the world's largest IT services firms. The Bangalore-based firm offers a full range of IT services, from application maintenance to management consulting. Although it's known best for offshore work, more than 50% of revenue comes from on-site and near-shore assignments in India. The company reports earnings on April 15.

Analyst consensus rating for Infosys is a "Hold", according to Reuters. Our Piqqem Sentiment crowd rating for Infosys is a moderately bullish 2.47 (on a scale of 0-4). However, sentiment trend is strongly positive with an increase of 19 basis points over the past three weeks off a 6-month low of 2.29. The stock has rebounded recently off 52-week lows but priced at $27 per share remains well off 52-week highs.

TechCrunch's Erick Schoenfeld had an eye-opening article earlier this week about how Salesforce.com (CRM), a very large software company runs all of its data and services on a very small number of highly optimized servers. "Salesforce has more than 55,000 enterprise customers, 1.5 million individual subscribers, 30 million lines of third-party code, and hundreds of terabytes of data all running on 1,000 machines" tweeted Schoenfeld from a Salesforce.com event. The implications of Salesforce's efficient cloud computing on the enterprise software business itself is already very clear.

As more and more enterprise software moves into the cloud, then companies like Oracle (ORCL) and Microsoft (MSFT) will have to deal with dramatic downward margin pressure because software-as-a-service simply can't post the same margins as traditional software models where the purchaser also bears or pays for most of the installation and maintennance costs. For that reason, Microsoft sports operating margins north of 30% while Salesforce.com puts up operating margins less than half that size.

Normally an earnings miss is a very bad thing. On March 19, Palm (PALM) missed, big time, reporting that revenues that had fell from $312.1 million to $90.6 million. The company's net loss for its fiscal third quarter ended Feb. 28 was $95 million, versus $54.7 million a year earlier. Shares fell roughly 5% on the whiff. With an expensive launch of the Palm Pre -- the company's vaunted iPhone killer and the star of the most recent CES show -- still coming up and the market for high-end smartphones cooling, the timing of a "bet the company" new product launch is unfortunate.

Amongst our own Crowd Wisdom stock prediction community at Piqqem.com, sentiment for Palm shares has come off lows in the 95 point range (on a zero-to-400 point scale) and rebounded to roughly 150 points -- a still bearish bias as anything below 200 points is negative sentiment. Shares of Palm have come up smartly off roadkill 52-week low levels of just above $1 to CES-fueled peaks of near $10 (current shares are trading between $7 and $8). Stock initially soared a whopping 35% on Pre news but the bloom is slighly off that rose.

Last weekend, my wife and I went down to the AT&T Store to consolidate our cell phone plans and to cut back on minutes used. I have switched to using more Skype (EBAY) and turned up usage on Google's (GOOG) Grand Central service to cut back on cell phone usage. She had been making fewer calls in general. We saved $50 per month. Unfortunately for AT&T (T), we may not be alone.

Cell phone companies have relied on steadily growing revenues as more and more users have upgraded to fancier data plans, upgraded to more minutes, added texting, and used expensive 411 services. That's enabled AT&T and Verizon (VZ) to continue to grew Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) through the economic downturn. And many analysts have viewed cell phone usage an essential utility and therefore unlikely to contract, particularly among the growing user base of people without landlines.

It's definitely news when a company run by an outsized ego like Larry Ellison elects to start offering shareholders dividends. Oracle (ORCL), Google (GOOG), Apple (AAPL), Microsoft (MSFT) and Cisco (CSCO) are a few of the companies floating around with the most cash, according to this recent SA article. But Oracle is only the second of the pack to offer dividends (Microsoft was the first). Let's hope that this will lead to more technology companies issuing dividends in the future, something that would be good not only for investors but for the companies themselves.

Traditionally, tech investors have had to endure stiff-lipped refusals to cough up dividends from growth companies fat with cash. This has been a largely irrational claim that tech companies needed the cash to make acquisitions. Stocks bearing dividends tend to outperform non-dividend stocks over time and stock has almost always been a better vehicle for acquisitions than cash. Companies that pay out dividends tend to be better managed. And there has been no connection established between paying dividends and diminished technological innovation. In fact, some research has suggested the organizational discipline enforced by regular dividends actually enhances R&D returns because those programs are managed more like businesses and less like blank checks.

Oracle (ORCL) reports earnings this week, among the most anticipated earnings events in the tech sector. And that's not just because Larry Ellison watching is so much fun. Rather, it's because the database and enterprise software giant is the rarest of birds, a tech bellwether that has remained relatively unscathed by the economic fallout from the Great Recession that has hammered makers of cell phones, PCs, telecom equipment and LCD TVs. Thus far, Oracle has managed to avoid major retrenchments in sales and has continued to boost profitability. Will Larry's streak continue? It's a critical question not just for Oracle but also for the rest of the sector.

That's because, as much as any other major tech player, Oracle is truly a canary in the silicon coal mine. Big ERP software companies, such as SAP, usually build their products on top of Oracle databases and middleware. Companies doing big Oracle installs often need to buy new servers from companies such as Dell (DELL), Sun (JAVA) and HP (HPQ), among others. And growth of database licenses is usually a strong underlying indicator for core economic growth because the growth of data has outpaced actual economic growth for some time now. Oracle management has carefully controlled expectations for the quarter, warning that the core database license business could decline by as much as 10%.

Since March 6, Nokia (NOK) shares have sharply rebounded from $8.75 (near 52-wk lows) to $10.22 as of closing on March 11. The Finnish mobile phone and telecom equipment manufacturer actually started climbinging before the tech rally of March 10 and March 11 picked up steam and lifted large tech growth players like Apple (AAPL), RIM (RIMM), and Google (GOOG), among others. At Piqqem, we started seeing our prediction market sentiments for Nokia begin rising in late January from a six-month low of 1.98 (on a rating scale of 0-4 points) and increasing 18.9% to 2.33 through March 11. (The graphic below shows the sentiment trend.)

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The recent word that Hearst is going to either sell (highly unlikely) or shutter (far more likely) the San Francisco Chronicle is only the latest but perhaps the most serious indicator that the entire sector is not beyond heroic revival measures. That one of the most vibrant metropolises in the world cannot even come close to supporting a daily metropolitan newspaper is proof enough that the segment is simple DOA.

True, the Chron has lost money for many years, faces high labor costs, and is in the most digitally-savvy (and least paper-centric) market in the country. All of that said, with the advertising dollars sloshing around the Bay Area one would think that if the business were viable, it would have a niche. Ditto for a city like Philadelphia, a capital of the insurance industry and big pharma and a place that is about to go dailyless. So let's take a look at what this unstoppable decline will mean.

The netbooks are coming and Apple (AAPL) should be scared. That was part of the message from Calyon Securities, which downgraded Apple shares on Feb. 24 to Underperform. The Calyon note claimed that Apple's premium PC pricing model would struggle in a tightwad spending environment and that the netbook market, in particularly, would be a tough nut to crack without cannibalizing current lower-end MacBooks.

This has been something of a recurrent theme among analyst who track Apple, and it's a valid topic to address. After all, Intel (INTC) shares have suffered in part due to fears that the lower-priced Atom processor used in netbooks will cannibalize sales of Intel's higher priced processors. And Dell (DELL) and HP (HPQ) have only reluctantly entered the netbook market after Taiwanese maker ASUS started posting serious numbers when it pioneered the simple, small and easy to use Web surfing and light computing appliances.

The Apple (AAPL) doomsayers had a field day last week when independent research company NPD announced that sales of Mac computers were down by 6 percent in January in U.S. stores. Based on that decline, Apple's market share dropped to 13.7 percent from 16.4 percent. A second study, by forecasting company ChangeWave Alliance, also showed an incremental weakening of Apple sales, particularly in the desktop segment.

We think these changes are borderline irrelevant. Apple continues to be the highest-rated stock in the "Piqqem Sentiment Index" and for good reason. Here's why last week's bad news and the subsequent price decline into the low $90s is actually a pricing anomaly pending a rebound into the low $100s as the news shakes out.

The annual sweetheart celebration is coming this weekend so we thought it a good time to revisit sentiment for two sweet stocks for steady going.

The Hershey Company (HSY), one of the world's largest chocolate makers, is closing out some of its high-end lines but appears to be successfully pushing through price increases, a rarity in this market. The company just beat earnings consensus and upped guidance for the coming year. Apparently, chocoholics are going to buy sweets whatever the economic situation so Hershey appears to be a good defensive play, although forward valuation, at nearly 20 P/E, is quite rich. Piqqem Sentiment on The Hershey Company is moderately bullish with a target share price of roughly $38.50. Make mine a dark, please.