F1Q10 Earnings Call

July 10, 2009 8:30 am ET

1. The first great period to buy SNDA was the first three months after its IPO on May 13, 2004. At that time, online gaming was a new concept to most investors in the U.S., where console games dominated the video game market. As a result, investors were generally cautious on SNDA, the first Chinese online gaming IPO on U.S. exchanges. What they ignored was that the Chinese online gaming industry was at the expansion stage of its life cycle, driven by fast-growing Internet usage, PC ownership, and broadband penetration in China. From August to the end of 2004, Shanda reported great earnings for 2Q04 and 3Q04, and its stock surged to around $45.40 on December 30, 2004, quadrupling its $11 IPO price.

In this week’s Barron’s cover story “Shorts Story” they report on a small North Carolina-based research firm called Short Alert who have been recommending stocks to short since 1998.

CareView Communications, Inc. (CRVW.PK) develops, markets and operates high-speed data network systems that are deployed throughout healthcare facilities using the existing cable television infrastructure of the facility. The systems provide bedside, point-of-care video monitoring and recording as well as providing patients with entertainment, communications and education systems. The Company’s systems are suitable for use by a wide variety of healthcare institutions including hospitals, nursing homes, adult living centers and select outpatient care facilities.

F4Q09 Earnings Call

July 9, 2009 5:00 pm ET

All the talk about Chrome OS (GOOG) got me thinking about operating systems and how different OSes are used by people. Also, a comment on my post yesterday by Scott Shapiro got me to segment my blog reader base by Windows and Mac (AAPL) users in Google Analytics this morning. I looked at all the visits to my blog year to date by Mac users and Windows (MSFT) users and then looked at where each set of users come from. The data is interesting (click to enlarge) and here it is:

Monthly NPD sales data paints one picture of how the video game industry is faring in this economy. Tracking firm Nielsen has crafted an alternate perspective. In a new study, Nielsen turned the lens on the recession’s impact by measuring how much time is being spent playing and how many used games gamers are buying. Not surprisingly, the survey found both game engagement and used game purchasing have been trending up.

According to Nielsen, metered minutes, the firm’s broad metric for time spent playing games, was up throughout the first quarter. Key demographics including men between 18 and 24 and female gamers between 13 and 17 showed significant gains. The male group saw year over year gains of 16 to 29% for each month of '09. The 13 to 17 year old female demographic was up between twelve and thirty percent. [click images on right to enlarge]

Since the June 26 announcement that the U.S.-Democratic-party Department of Justice (DoJ) was taking Oracle's (ORCL) acquisition of Sun (JAVA) off the fast track because of a "narrow licensing issue" related to Java, I have posted my guess that it had something to do with the GNU General Public License (GPL) under which a lot of Sun software is currently licensed.

Dennis Gaughn of AMR is quoted in InformationWeek with the first viable alternative theory I've seen. (This as opposed to the hysterical or non-Java-related theories that have been thrown against the wall in the last two weeks.) Dennis' thought is that the DoJ is concerned that so many enterprise applications companies use Java and that enterprise applications is a market in which Oracle participates.

By MG Sielger

Date/time of earnings release:

Duoyuan Global Water (DGW) - Began trading on 6/24 after pricing at $16 per share. The stock ran up to the mid-$20’s in the first week of trading and has held steady since. The company is a maker of water treatment equipment in China that includes wastewater treatment and water purification. One of my favorite long-term investment themes involves water and water-related stocks. The ties DGW has to China make the stock even more attractive because the country has major water issues and will have to address them in the years to come. The most recent Chinese stimulus package is actually going after upgrading infrastructure and will be a boost for DGW.

Halifax is a 42 year old company that currently participates in the supply chain management industry. For the past several years Halifax had been operating as a company with sluggish revenues and inconsistent profitability.

Google (GOOG) is starting to respond to questions about the just announced Chrome operating system. In a short FAQ Wednesday they talked about cost and initial partners.

Net income came in at $4.1 million, reversing a prior year loss. It also appears to be the company's first profit in some time.

Google (GOOG) has been very busy this past year. Wave, the online email, instant messenger and collaboration tool was only unveiled a few weeks ago. A few months prior to the Wave announcement, Google launched the web browser Chrome, which according to the company has been downloaded more than 35 million times since inception. Now the leader in on-line searches has surprised the market again with confirmation it is to launch a brand new operating system late in 2010, currently described as Chrome OS. The development of such a strategically important product does not pass through the planning stage overnight, so to successfully ambush both investors and industry insiders so late in the development stage is no small feat.

The Chrome OS proposition will tackle Microsoft’s (MSFT) monopolistic Windows operating system head on, which has to be good news for the consumer who has felt increasingly locked into Microsoft’s not-so-subtle business model which forces consumers to adopt the next painfully inevitable revision of Windows. This inconveniently seems to make even recent hardware purchases, such as laptops, painfully slow, quirky and semi-redundant in the short-term and unworkable without Microsoft upgrades, not long after.

By Michael Kanellos

A fight over control of the home (and office) seems to be taking shape.

Is Google’s OS the end of the OS – the long-predicted moment when Google and the web take over the PC? Or is it merely the disruptive OS throwing marbles on the floor for Microsoft (MSFT) and to some extent Apple (AAPL) and the software industry? Or will it be a platform and boon for app developers and PC makers and cloud companies? Or all of the above? Yes.

One may try to parse the motives and implications of the move like Latin haiku, but I think it’s simple; it usually is with Google: It saw an opportunity to serve the end user and took it. The more such opportunities it grabs, the more benefit it brings to more people, the more money it makes. Maps, Docs, Reader, Android, book search, translation tools, GoogleNews are all that. Some attempts don’t stick to the wall; some frontiers remain (it has not won in the social web, the live web, the deep web, and the local web); some things Google has to buy; some still don’t have a clear business model. All have competitors; none is a monopoly, though search and advertising appear that way to some.

AMR Research has recapped its annual ranking of the top 50 enterprise software vendors, but the real story may be in its findings that more than 60 percent of enterprise software vendors have applications that rely on Java.

And of the top 50 enterprise software vendors 33 offer applications that rely on Java. Add it up and this group represents more than $38.5 billion, or 77 percent of the top 50’s revenue.