There has been some confusion on Seeking Alpha over the meaning of the announcements made by Texas Instruments (TXN) at the analyst conference call this week. TI announced they are combining their wireless unit and embedded unit into one business unit under embedded. You can read the conference call transcript on Seeking Alpha here.

TI will be concentrating on some huge markets where it has distinct advantages leveraging its technology portfolio and customer base. How big is the opportunity? TI stated it this way in the conference call:

This concept of Internet of Things, I just want to spend a minute on, it is literally everywhere... I've got a figure here, 24 billion connected devices by 2020, and this is the -- GSM Association came up with this figure. If you have seen any of the things that the Ericsson team has positioned out in the market, the Ericsson

Steve Jobs declared war on Google (GOOG) and the Android phone makers, declaring he would spend every penny of Apple's (AAPL) vast financial resources to stop them from copying the iPhone and iOS with Android-based devices. Yesterday, after a lengthy trial pitting Apple against Samsung, the jury declared Samsung guilty on a wide variety of patent infringements and awarded over $1Billion in damages to Apple. They also declared the infringements willful, which opens the door to triple damages for Apple. This is a huge victory for Apple, which protects their intellectual property and ensures that future products like the iPhone5 will be far less likely to be copied.

For Samsung, this is a major blow, wiping out all the profits for those infringing smartphones and more, and most likely forcing them to come to the table with Apple to settle on cross licensing fees for Apple patents. They should

Google (GOOG) announced its new Nexus 7 tablet this week at an event in San Francisco and with a link to a product site on the Google homepage. This means that millions of people are clicking through and getting a preview of the device today, and in the coming days. Google is making the tablet in partnership with Taiwan computer giant Asus, and plans to start shipping it in July.

The device can be pre-ordered now online through the Google Play Store. The key features are the 7 inch form factor with a 1280x800 pixel display, a quad core Nvidia Integra ARM CPU, and ports including Near Field Communications (NFC), WiFi, Bluetooth, micro USB, microphone, GPS, accelerator, gyroscope, and magnetometer. You can read more details about these features on the product site. Google will sell two models, one with 8GB of internal memory for $199, and one

Today Google (GOOG) announced their new Nexus 7 Tablet, a very good implementation of a high definition 7 inch tablet based on their own Android 4.1 mobile OS. You can read about the feature details on their product page. With all the discussion on Seeking Alpha about the new Microsoft (MSFT) Surface tablet and comparisons with Apple (AAPL) iPad, almost none of it has been about the real battle in the tablet wars, Google and its Android mobile OS vs. Microsoft and its Win8 strategy. Win8 will have major impacts on Google's strong Android mobile strategy beginning later this year. Google has begun to fight back today with the release of the Nexus 7 tablet and new Android 4.1 OS.

First Microsoft. Two weeks ago Microsoft suddenly announced two versions of a new tablet for Windows 8 they will produce called Surface. With regards to hardware tech

New stats confirm that the Facebook (FB) IPO debacle has frozen the market for new IPOs after a strong start for new IPOs in 2012. According to data provided by PriceWaterhouseCoopers as part of their IPO Watch service, in Q1 2012 there were 44 IPOs, or an average of 14 per month. The second quarter started off just as strong, with 27 IPOs from April 1 through the middle of May, or an average of 18 per month.

But then came Facebook on May 18. I have documented previously much of what went wrong that day, and also covered much of the damage that had been done, including predicting that the IPO market had been destroyed. Now it has been confirmed: Instead of the three to fiev new IPOs per week averaged over the last 18 months, no new IPOs have gone to market since May

There has been much discussion on Seeking Alpha and elsewhere about the new Surface tablet announcement from Microsoft (MSFT) on Monday, and most of it has centered around comparisons to iPad and how it will effect Apple (AAPL). This is worth considering, but this announcement impacts Google (GOOG) far more than Apple for several reasons.

First Apple. They will continue to make new variations of iPad to serve their very loyal customer base, and as has been true with PCs, they will continue to dominate the high priced segment of the market. And the massive success of the iPhone will continue to drag the iPads along with it as more and more high end users learn and become hooked on the very impressive Apple ecosystem of iOS, Apps, content, and cross functionality among Apple devices. And as is also true with PCs, there is plenty of market share available

I wrote a column yesterday about the problems Nasdaq (NDAQ) had trying to execute the Facebook (FB) IPO share trades on opening day, May 18th. Nasdaq completely botched the trading process on that first day, resulting in many trading errors and confirmation problems. Nasdaq CEO Robert Greifeld has been on an apology tour trying to explain what happened, but he has been apologizing to the wrong people. He is sorry about the damage this has done to all his Wall Street cronies who participated in and profited from the fiasco, rather than to the real victims, the retail investors who bought stock and trusted the system.

Yesterday's column gave the details of Nasdaq's internal investigation and what they plan to do about it. They are offering a paltry "accommodation" of $40M ($13.7M in cash and the rest in future commission discounts) to their market maker clients like Knight (KCG)

If you bought Facebook (FB) shares on opening day, May 18th, you know what a crazy day it was. Nasdaq (NDAQ) completely botched the trading process on that first day, resulting in many trading errors and confirmation problems. Nasdaq CEO Robert Greifeld appeared on CNBC yesterday June 6th to discuss it as the company put out a press release to explain the results of its investigation into the problems. Nasdaq has decided to do a voluntary "accommodation" program to provide some compensation to some of the trades from that day. You can read the press release here

www.nasdaqomx.com/newsroom/pressreleases/pressrelease/

The key points of the program from the press release are these:

The program will provide accommodations involving three kinds of orders that were placed during the IPO cross:

• Sells priced at $42 or less that did not execute
• Sells priced at $42 or less that executed at an inferior price
• Buys

There has been lots of news about the Amazon (AMZN) Kindle Fire since it was first announced on September 28th and started shipping in mid-November. The latest is that the Kindle Fire is selling at a strong one million units per week heading into Christmas. Many analysts, especially the technically-oriented ones, have spent lots of time comparing the Fire to the iPad2 and making the case that the Fire is an inferior device. Others have claimed Amazon is now in a battle royal between Apple (AAPL) and Amazon for the tablet market.

A small minority of observers on Seeking Alpha such as Rocco Pendola, Scot Wingo, and yours truly have been correctly explaining what the Kindle Fire is about: It is a portal into all things Amazon, both media and merchandise, and that is exactly what millions of customers are now proving they want by

In the battle for market share in the cellular market, AT&T (T) and Verizon (VZ) have far outdistanced Sprint (S), and the respective stock prices and market caps reflect that. But desperation may have forced Sprint to do the previously unthinkable: rent out use of its 3G smartphone network as a backup to wifi based smartphones. A new company in Cary, North Carolina called Republic Wireless has teamed up with Sprint and a special LG (KSE: 003555) smartphone to create a $19 per month unlimited wireless plan.

How do they do it?

Up until now, noboby has been supporting wifi calling on smartphones, because it would severely impact those giant monthly fees that the carriers get from users for accessing those expensive 3G and 4G voice, data, and messaging networks spread out all over the country. Much of the profit for the carriers comes at that magic moment

The major floods in Thailand have put a large crimp in the worldwide production capacity for hard disk drives. Analysts estimate that about 1/3 of all disk drive production has been interrupted, meaning that there will soon be a shortage of 50 million drives. At an estimate $50 contract price per drive, this represents a potential $2.5B revenue hit for the major drive makers like Seagate (STX) and Western Digital (WDC). Prices for existing inventory and production from other factories in China and elsewhere are already rising, and will go higher. This will soon begin to impact technology companies across the board.

Let's take a look at a few of the 'A's as examples. Amazon (AMZN) is very dependent on a large supply of disk drives to build and expand data centers for its cloud computing initiatives. With the new Kindles beginning to ship in large

There is a lot of opinion out there about Amazon (AMZN) taking aim at Apple (AAPL) with its new Kindle Fire android based tablet. Amazon has no intention of taking on Apple because it doesn't need to.

The Kindle Fire is the first version of what it was meant to be: a digital tour guide to all things Amazon. Loyal Amazon customers get movies, TV, and books from a dedicated Amazon content library, apps and games from a dedicated Amazon android store, cross promotion and shopping for products of all types from thousands of vendors large and small, and other Amazon services. All this is provided through the Kindle Fire using an Amazon developed browser, plus Amazon cloud support and storage.

Nobody, not even Apple, can bring all this to its ecosystem. Arguing about tech specs is irrelevant at this point as there will be a variety of Kindles with