By Dasan

The fourth element of the monthly Dasan Stock Digest is the Dasan Focus Report. In this report, I cover whatever I find interesting at the time. In this particular issue, I will cover what has to be the story of the week for any stock investor - the trading in Amazon (AMZN) shares in 2009, culminating in Friday’s 25% move.

by Derek Hoffman

Lately, I continue to see layoffs popping up in the news on a very consistent basis (again). So, I put together a list of company names and their recent layoff announcements right here as a one-stop-shop to showcase the fact that these people, who are consumers in the global economy, will be very worried about their upcoming holiday time.

4:19 PM, Nov 11, 2009 --

• NYSE up 28.9 (0.4%) to 7,155.36.
• DJIA up 44.3 (0.4%) to 10,291.
• S&P 500 up 5.5 (0.5%) to 1,099.
• Nasdaq up 15.8 (0.7%) to 2,167.

GLOBAL SENTIMENT

The world of investment banking tech research analysts is a competitive one, so the saavy types make a strong effort to step beyond the traditional quarterly report publication grind. A great example of this came from Genuity Capital Markets, whose Wireless Analyst spent some time in California at the Open Mobile Summit. Here’s a snapshot of his findings:

Open Mobile Summit – An industry conflicted that will remain volatile

By Thomas Rasmussen

By Leena Rao

We’ve heard multiple reports that layoffs are taking place at Adobe (ADBE) Tuesday. One source reports that Adobe is laying off 15 percent of its staff, but this is unconfirmed. There are also Tweets about the layoffs on Twitter. Last December, Adobe laid off 600 workers (or 8 percent of its staff) due to the recession.

By Leena Rao

With all of its SaaS offerings, Salesforce.com (CRM) is consistently integrating with other forms of cutting edge technologies, such as Twitter, Box.net, and more to offer clients more diverse and appealing options. Sunday, the company is partnering with Adobe (ADBE) to offer the “Adobe Flash Builder,” off of Force.com, Salesforce’s platform to build and deploy enterprise applications.

This is a practical follow-up to our recent article on volume as an indicator, and on divergence between volume and price action in particular.

We screened the S&P 1500 for stocks with rising prices and falling volumes. More specifically, we looked for stocks with “sinker” attributes:

Future sustainable growth of Qualcomm Inc. (QCOM) is all set to come from its state-of-the-art next-generation Snapdragon technology platform. A major initiative of Qualcomm is the convergence of mobile computing with its Snapdragon solutions. These chipsets have been designed for pocket-sized portable computing devices.

This platform enables phone manufacturers to develop high-speed and more power efficient smart-phones and smart-books. We believe diversification into the mobile computing market was necessary for Qualcomm due to lukewarm growth of the company’s ordinary mobile phone chipset market. Massive growth of smart-phones may make up for these losses.

Areas of Focus

On Monday, Adobe (ADBE) announced Flash 10.1 (not Flash Lite) will be available in beta for Windows Mobile and webOS in 2009, and Android, BlackBerry and Symbian in 2010. Adding support for the Research in Motion (RIMM) platform to the previously announced list leaves only one smartphone conspicuously absent.

Apple (AAPL) has been conspicuously rejecting Flash for a variety of reasons, both implicitly and by explicit Steve Jobs pronouncements. It uses its terms of service to ban such technologies. PC World argues that Apple is fighting Flash to protect its App Store business model against encroachments by direct Flash downloads.

Adobe’s (ADBE) announcements that a full version of Flash is coming to every smartphone not named Apple iPhone leave me conflicted. Full-blown Flash can be a boon to the mobile Web, but has the potential to become one huge security headache.

First the happy talk (Techmeme, Adobe statement): A public beta of Flash Player 10.1 will be coming to Windows Mobile and Palm’s WebOS later this year. Next year will bring Flash betas to Google Android and Symbian phones. Research in Motion (RIMM) is also working with Adobe. Multi-touch Flash, accelerometer perks and other mobile goodies abound.

Monday NVIDIA Corporation (NVDA) in partnership with Adobe Systems Incorporated (ADBE) announced GPU video and graphics acceleration for the Flash player, bringing Internet video to a new class of low-power and high-end PCs and Internet devices.

Together, NVIDIA GPUs including NVIDIA’s GeForce, ION and Tegra products and Adobe Flash Player 10.1 will help device manufacturers deliver Web browsing of rich applications, interactive content and HD video to netbooks, smartbooks and mobile devices such as smartphones to consumers. This will also help lower power consumption.

ByThomas Rasmussen

When Adobe Systems (ADBE) and Omniture (OMTR) announced the details and rationale behind their $1.8bn tie-up in mid-September, some interesting items emerged. Highlighted was the obvious benefit from a combination of Adobe’s popular Flash video platform and Omniture’s analytics capabilities. As the Web analytics market has become more saturated, Omniture has recently been expanding into higher-margin niches such as online video analytics. Combining online video content management with analytics is an area in which some early startups have carved out a profitable niche over the past few years as video has finally started to move to the Web.

Top 50 Properties

In comScore’s rankings, Google (GOOG) Sites once again led as the most visited property in August with 161 million visitors, followed by Yahoo (YHOO) Sites with 158 million visitors and Microsoft (MSFT) Sites, with 130 million visitors. Facebook.com held its #5 ranking with 92 million visitors, up 5% from the previous month, comScore said.

by Brenon Daly

To look at the recent performance of the Nasdaq, you’d hardly know that capitalism (as we know it) almost died a year ago. The tech-heavy index was largely unchanged on Wednesday but has posted gains for three straight sessions, having added 9% so far in September. That’s part of a longer run that has seen the Nasdaq tack on 35% since the beginning of 2009 and 70% since bottoming out in early March. In fact, the index is essentially where it was a year ago, before banks started going under, the credit market froze and the US government fired up its printing presses to give us all enough money to buy our way out of the recession.

Monday, Adobe (ADBE) launched its new Flash Distribution Service Platform at the IAB MIXX Conference and Expo. The Flash Distribution Service is hosted, managed and maintained by Adobe and its partners on a pay-per-use basis.

The platform consists of a number of facilities available online that enable advertisers, publishers, game developers and other flash content providers to develop applications that can be easily shared and transmitted between desktops, Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs) and across social networks.

by Brenon Daly

Goldman Sachs (GS) is having a September to remember, after an uncharacteristically quiet run throughout 2009. We noted in our mid-year league table report that Goldman, which topped our annual rankings 2005-07, had slipped to a distant seventh place in the first half of this year. Since the beginning of September, however, the bank has regained its Midas touch.