Apple has beaten Wall Street expectations after posting its financial results for the fourth quarter of 2009. The Cupertino-based company posted a overall profit of $3.38 billion, or $3.74 per share - an increase of 50 percent from the same time last year. As well, its overall revenue was up - $15.68 billion from $11.88 billion from last year.

In its product lineup, Mac and iPhone sales increased, while sales of the iPod fell. Apple sold 3.36 million Macs, a 33 percent increase from last year's quarter; while the iPhone saw a 100 percent increase from the same time last year, selling 8.7 million units. It sold 21 million iPods, a decline of eight percent.

"If you annualize our quarterly revenue, it's surprising that Apple is now a $50+ billion company," CEO Steve Jobs said in a statement. But Jobs has hinted on a "major new product that we're really excited about" that is to be launched this week on January 27/28 (Melbourne). He has also hinted that there could be more product releases in the year.

Looking ahead of the first quarter of this year, Apple's Chief Financial Officer Peter Oppenheimer said that they expect Apple could have $11-$11.4 billion in revenue and an earnings per share in the range of $2.06 and $2.18.

The European Union has given its approval to Orcale's purchase of Sun Microsystems, the owners of several technologies like MySQL and Java, after finalising its investigation that was opened in September of last year.

The investigation was launched to see if it would be an impediment of "effective competition" within the European Economic Area (EEA), a free-trade agreement within the European Union and three other states - Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway. It was mainly focused on the database market, as fears arose that Oracle's ownership of Sun and MySQL would pose a threat to competition and the open-source database leader could be in jeopardy when Oracle took ownership.

"I am now satisfied that competition and innovation will be preserved on all the markets concerned. Oracle's acquisition of Sun has the potential to revitalise important assets and create new and innovative products," Neelie Kroes, the Competition Commissioner said in a statement.

In the statement, its investigation found that MySQL and Oracle are not "close competitors" despite competing in the database market and that the openness of MySQL allowed forking (branching off the MySQL base code) to compete with MySQL. It also took into account Oracle's announcement that it will still release MySQL under the GPL open source license, and showed that PostgreSQL - a credible alternative to MySQL by many users in the open source world - could likely replace the competitive force that is exerted by MySQL.

During the investigation, effectively delaying it, Sun has been losing money - estimated to be around US$100 million per month - as its customers move to IBM and HP.

With the EU approval, along with the US Justice Department's approval of the deal, China and Russia are set to approve the deal, meaning that the deal could close very shortly.

Intel has announced that has made a net income of $2.3 billion during the fourth quarter of 2009, making that a 875 percent increase of its earnings last year, a dismal $234 million in Q4 2008, beating the Wall Street projections.

The largest chipmaker also announced that it has posted revenues of $10.6 billion during the quarter, up by 28 percent from last year and up 13 percent from last quarter.

It also posted an operating income of $2.5 billion; and while it was up 62 percent from last year, it was down quarter-to-quarter by 3 percent.

While its revenue continues to come mostly from the Asia-Pacific region, with 57 percent of the revenue; the Americas region made up 20 percent of the revenue, while Europe and Japan made 14 percent and 9 percent of the revenue respectively.

However, for the entire year, its revenue was down 7 percent to finish $35.1 billion, from $37.6 billion from 2008; and its net income was down 17 percent, to $4.4 billion. This could be because of a European Commission fine of $1.45 billion and a settlement with rival AMD of $1.25 billion; along with revenue was down in its groups, with the exception of the Intel Atom processor revenue as that increased 167 percent.

It predicts revenue to be $9.7 billion in the first quarter of 2010, which is above estimates from Wall Street; and with more and more companies releasing their numbers, hopefully we see the end of the economic downturn.

Image from: Josh Bancroft/Flickr

VMware will buy Zimbra from Yahoo for an undisclosed sum of cash. The open-source email suite provides email, contacts, calendar, search, document collaboration and authoring and VoIP tools for corporations and businesses, including Digg, H&R Block and Comcast.

Under the terms of the agreement, it will also acquire all Zimbra intellectual property and technology, and will grant Yahoo a license to continue using the technology on its Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Calendar software.

VMware will optimise the products to work on vSphere-based cloud infrastructures, alongside optimising similar tools provided by Microsoft and IBM.

"Zimbra is a great example of the type of scalable ‘cloud era’ solutions that can span smaller, on-premise implementations to the cloud. It will be a building block in an expanding portfolio of solutions that can be offered as a virtual appliance or by a cloud service provider," Brian Byun, Vice President and General Manager of Cloud Services, said.

"We are excited to welcome the Zimbra team and community to the VMware family."

This was long rumoured, especially when news of the deal broke on WSJ's All Things D blog; as Yahoo looked to slim down its portfolio - including offloading search to Bing and closing Geocities - and concentrate on the successful acquisitions and sites after when CEO Carol Bartz took over from Jerry Yang.

Analytics firm Flurry has said that the Nexus One has sold around 20,000 in its first week. However, compared to the iPhone 3GS first week sales, it is relatively minor - the 3GS sold 80 times that numbers. As well, the myTouch 3G outsold it by 3 times that number, while the Droid outsold it by more than 12 times. In actual numbers, the 3GS sold more than 1.6 million, the myTouch sold 60,000 and the Droid sold 250,000.

"As a product, the Nexus One boasts the most advanced Android OS to date as well as unique features, such as Google Voice and Google Maps," Flurry said.

"However, potentially due to the heightened "promise" created by early buzz, the handset has ultimately fallen short on sales expectations. Without the "wow factor" now expected with each new challenger to the iPhone, especially the first smartphone with Google's own branding, demand generation has been modest."

Flurry has noted that the distribution method and pricing should be considered when comparing the phones, as the factors make an "apples-to-apples" comparison difficult (in other words, comparing them purely by looking at the numbers").

It's official. Rotten Tomatoes, the popular movie reviews aggregator, has a brand new owner - Flixster, another movie social network. The company acquired the site from IGN, which is owned by News Corporation, in exchange for a minority stake in the company.

"It’s a huge step forward in our goal of connecting users to their own personalized world of movies on any platform they choose. We can’t think of a better pairing for movie fans and our technology partners," CEO of Flixster, Joe Greenstein, said.

"Joining Rotten Tomatoes with Flixster creates a company that can dominate the online movie category," President of IGN Entertainment, Roy Bahat, said. "This also enables IGN to focus on serving the male 18-to-34 audience–especially videogamers–and the advertisers looking to reach them." Bahat will also join as an observer to Flixster's Board of Directors.

However, exact details of the deal have not been revealed yet; but the deal looks like a perfect partnership as both deal with movies and user reviews from Flixster and critic reviews from Rotten Tomatoes would complement each other. They previously had a partnership where the critic reviews from Rotten Tomatoes on Flixster's website and its mobile applications.

eBay has announced that it has settled a lawsuit with the co-founders of Skype around its sale of the VoIP service, allowing the deal signed by eBay with several investment firms to sell a majority stake in the company worth US$2 billion to go ahead as planned.

The founders, Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, will take on a 14 percent stake of the company, while eBay will still hold a 30 percent stake. The investment firms will now take a 56 percent stake in the communications company, lower than the original 65 percent stake that was announced previously.

Read More »

NEWS IN BRIEF: Microsoft has announced that it would be axing another 800 jobs in the company, in addition to the 5,000 positions it eliminated earlier in the year. A spokesman for the Redmond-based company said that these cuts will be broadly “spread across multiple businesses and locations”.

The first 1,400 employees under the cuts happened on January 22, and another happened in May.