Michael Dell spent an hour and a half on the phone yesterday with Wall Street analysts outlining his plan to put Dell back on track. It was Dell’s first strategy call since it resolved the accounting problems that forced it to run on radio silence for more than a year, so analysts jumped at the chance to re-connect.

Dell’s new strategy is to "simplify IT" while focusing on on five key areas: Consumers, emerging markets, notebooks, big companies, and small and medium businesses.

Dell went on to outline specific initiatives in each of these broad areas - a new emphasis on design in notebooks; a continued focus on finding new ways to let consumers "see, touch and feel" Dell computers before buying them; and a focus on new devices specifically designed for small businesses, for example.

While Mr Dell was keen to outline his plans for the company, he avoided getting into specifics of how those plans are unfolding thus far. For example, when asked about the progress of Dell’s retail push - a fair question given the fact that the introduction of Dell computers into Wal-Mart and other retail stores seems to have done little to revive the company’s flagging US consumer sales - Mr Dell dodged the question by reciting a list of previously announced retail partnerships.

After more than two years of struggles, investors will no doubt be glad to hear that Dell has begun to identify possible solutions to some of the problems facing its business model. Still, they could be forgiven for hoping for a clearer picture of the progress that has been made to date.

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So says Chris Sacca, who has been leading Google’s attempt to shake up the wireless industry.

In a post on his blog, Sacca has just paused to take stock. It was almost exactly a year ago, during a talk at Oxford University, that he first openly attacked the mobile operators for restricting the applications their customers can use. The result:   

Within hours, my response was all over the newspapers and the phone was ringing off the hook. A lot of folks inside the company were upset and worried that Google would suffer retribution at the hands of carriers. Quite simply, I was in the doghouse.

Fast-forward to today, and Sacca seems to have made remarkable progress, at least in the US (though this hasn’t all been about Google - Skype’s so-called "Carterphone" petition to the FCC in February also had a big hand in moving things forward.)

Sacca could hardly have hoped for a sequence of headlines like those of the past five months. Consider these:

June: Buyers line up in the streets to buy the iPhone, a closed device that nonetheless gives an early taste of what a true internet-enabled handset could do.

July: The FCC adopts "open access" provisions for its upcoming spectrum auction.

November: A broad group of technology and mobile companies forms the Open Handset Alliance and considers adopting Google’s Android software.

November: Verizon Wireless says it will open up its network to "unlocked" handsets and internet applications next year.

Quite a year. Sacca may sound a little smug, but it’s certainly understandable.

The Nintendo Wii continued its dominance of next-generation console sales in the first week of the US holiday shopping season.

Nintendo says it sold 350,000 of the $250 Wiis in the Thanksgiving week beginning November 18 – its biggest seven-day sales figure since that of the week it launched a year ago.

Microsoft has just reported sales of 310,000 Xbox 360s over the same period. It claimed it outsold Sony’s PlayStation 3 by two to one, citing estimates from top retailers.

Sony must have hoped for better after introducing a cut-price 40-gigabyte version of the console at $399.

It avoided issuing sales figures, but said PS3 sales in the week were up 245 per cent on the same period a year ago, when Sony suffered supply problems and a slow start to its launch.

Sony is currently running new PS3 commercials in its largest marketing effort for the console to date.

What they obviously don’t say is that the Wii is cheaper, the Xbox has a better games line-up and consumers aren’t clear about the benefits of a cheap Blu-ray player being in the PS3, when the standards war with HD-DVD has yet to be resolved.

  Are there any corners of the Web that won’t end up plastered in advertising?

Today comes news of a plan by Adobe and Yahoo! to attach ads to PDF documents displayed inside a browser. Given the A4 size, PDFs leave space for a column of adverts to be attached in the right hand margin of the screen: they will be supplied dynamically by Yahoo, using its standard keyword bidding system and contextualisation engine.

This potentially opens up a big new advertising market - Adobe says that some 90 per cent of internet-connected PCs have one of its PDF readers, and the format is widely used by both professional publishers as well as amateurs who want to create their own professional-looking newsletters and other documents.

PDF documents also have characteristics that should make them particularly valuable advertising vehicles, says Emily Reilly, an analyst at Jupiter Research. They tend to contain specialist information and reside several "levels" down in most Web sites: that means that internet users who take the trouble to find and open them are likely to be very interested in the subject, and so more valuable to advertisers. Also, PDFs tend to have a very long shelf-life, so a library of documents, once created, might generate a continuing stream of revenue, with new adverts placed against it by Yahoo.

The idea raises some intriguing possibilities. What about placing advertising alongside other PDF documents, such as those generated by companies who use it as a format for creating regular corporate documents? Adobe and Yahoo executives say this is not part of the initial plan, which is aimed at online publishers, but do not rule it out for later.

Also, how about using Adobe’s Flash player as another vehicle to distribute advertising? Like the Acrobat document reader, Flash is on most PCs. That could give Adobe an influential role in online video as well as text and graphical advertising.

Internet users, meanwhile, will just have to get used to seeing more commercial messages in more places - though Adobe and Yahoo executives take refuge behind the familiar claim that this advertising will at least be relevant and unobtrusive.

(Disclosure: one of the publishers taking part in a trial of the PDF advertising system is the education division of Pearson, which also owns the Financial Times.)

Google Finance, launched in March last year, has failed to put a dent in Yahoo Finance’s lead as the most popular web source of financial news and data.

Google’s service is not even in the top 15 of financial sites and has yet to break 1m unique visitors a month.

If there is a challenge to Yahoo, which has rested on its laurels for too long, it comes from AOL’s Money and Finance site. It unveiled a new version today that is still in its beta testing phase.

Yahoo Finance had 79m unique visitors in October, compared to 70m for AOL, 46m for MSN Money, 18m for Dow Jones and 15m for CNN Money.

Marty Moe, senior vice president of AOL Money & Finance, told me the revamp was part of AOL’s strategy of focusing on “key verticals” rather than clinging to its traditional portal for success.

The site has some impressive features. Its real-time headlines and news feeds are powered by Relegence, which AOL acquired last year. Relegence provides a news engine to top brokerages, with more than 3,000 sources. Mr Moe said Yahoo had about 40 in comparison.

The new site will also have “heat indicators” letting users know when a stock is driving news coverage and users will be able to set up custom searches on any company or topic.

One of the simplest and most useful features for me was historic returns being easily available next to Flash-based charts. You can instantly see how the stock has performed over one month, six months, year-to-date etc. There is even a “Return since” button linked to a calendar, so any date can be entered to find out the percentage return since then.

“We want to bring the power of a Bloomberg screen to individual investors, but make it easy to digest,” said Mr Moe.

The free service is expected to emerge from beta in the next six to eight weeks and AOL has “a very aggressive 18-month plan” to continue to add data, he said.

Here’s food for thought. The average Infosys employee produces roughly the same amount of profit for his or her company in a year as the average worker at Accenture. And that’s in absolute terms, not relative: an engineer hacking out code in Bangalore is adding as much to the corporate bottom line as a consultant in Manhattan, at around $14,000-15,000 a year.

This was pointed out to me by Infosys chief financial officer V Balakrishnan, who stopped by while visiting San Francisco recently. It’s a sign of the considerable leverage in the business model of the Indian services companies (at around $50,000 a year, revenues per employee for Infosys are only 40 per cent those of Accenture, so the parity on profits looks impressive.)

There are two ways to look at this. One is that the Accentures and IBMs of the world have ample room to expand their margins. If it brings costs down closer to the level of their Indian rivals, the "global sourcing" both are pursuing should fuel profit growth for some time.

The other side of the coin is that price deflation could be about to turn scary for the Western IT services firms. The business model of the Indian firms - with healthy profits despite much lower prices - leaves them in a strong position to attack.

For now, the Western firms publicly brush off the threat: the Indian firms are stuck with lower-value work, and are not big enough to be a force in many parts of the IT services market. But that is changing fast (Infosys, for instance, plans to add 30,000 workers next year to the 80,000 it already has.) The Indian firms have also been recuiting consultants and other "front end" workers in the West to build deeper links with customers there.

It may still be the case that noone ever got fired for buying from IBM - but when it comes to future services deals, they might at least get to bargain harder over the price first.

It’s beginning to look like the Search Wars are over, at least for now: Google has won.

Despite everything Microsoft and Yahoo! have been able to throw at it, Google’s share of the search business has just kept going up, to the point where it finally seems time to declare this contest done (though with two caveats - see below.) Whatever the next front in the battle for online dominance, it looks like it won’t be in search.

The latest figures from ComScore today make the point. Already dominant in Europe, Google’s share of US searches reached 58.5 per cent in October. That is up from only around 35 per cent in November 2004 - the month when Microsoft formally took the gloves off with the launch of its own search engine. In almost every month since, Google has bitten off a little more of the business. (Nielsen NetRatings figures show a slightly less dramatic rise, but the story is essentially the same.) Who would have predicted that three years ago?

A growing awareness that Google’s lead now looks impregnable has underpinned its latest stock price rise, and led one analyst this week to suggest that $900 a share is now in sight.

So what could go wrong? One caveat is that, despite Google’s massive brand and technological advantages, there is still nothing to stop its users defecting en masse for a better experience elsewhere. It has become fashionable to compare the maturing Google to Microsoft, but the lack of customer lock-in is formidable. The search wars are over for now, but this is a fight that can easily resume - after all, who would have expected a return to the Browser Wars?

The other caveat is China. Fair or not, Google has not been able to make much of a dent against Baidu in what is set to become the world’s biggest internet search market.

Still, it will be years before China boasts an online advertising business to match the scale of its internet audience. For the next few years at least, the lion’s share of the booming profits from internet search now look destined to flow into Google’s coffers.

MC Hammer may have left his 90s chart hits and wide pants behind, but the rap star is still capable of some nifty dance moves, notably the launch of DanceJam.com, a new online video site.

While YouTube is the home of everything from stupid pet tricks to movie trailers, the explosion of online video means new video “verticals” are emerging – such as the comedy clips on Will Ferrell’s FunnyorDie.com and now DanceJam, still in a closed beta stage.

Giving us some Hammer time at the FT’s San Francisco office, “the dean of urban dance” proved he was extremely tech-savvy and was providing much more than a pop star’s endorsement for a site he has co-created with Geoffrey Arone and Anthony Young, founders of the social networking browser Flock.

His interest in the internet dates back to 1994: “It was purely ego-driven,” he says.

“I thought if the Net is so great, why can’t I see my videos on it.”

He remembers visiting Silicon Graphics and going over to Apple and "seeing some kid writing the code for Quicktime."

The idea for DanceJam has evolved over the past two years.

"The challenge i saw was that there was a dramatic decline in the music industry and there was a need to create the next music model."

He decided to build a community around dance in all its forms and tested his ideas in talks with Google and Ron Conway, a well known venture capitalist in Silicon Valley, before hooking up with Flock’s executives.

DanceJam allows members to upload videos of their dances and will combine this user-generated content with music and dance from major media companies. It categorises dance into different styles and geographies and lets its community vote on the hottest exponents.

Its video player is innovative - allowing slow-motion and "scratch" type effects where it rewinds three seconds.

MC Hammer says he has been lining up "five-star sponsorship" and will extend this to offline "dance-off" competitions. In turn, these will be filmed and become premium content on the site.

He sees endless possibilities: "Cheerleading - I’d need another rack of servers just for [those contests]," he says.

Hammer himself does not aim to dominate DanceJam with his skills.

"I’m trying to downplay Hammer," he says.

"But there will be the Hammer brand, some instructional videos, and we’ll be doing some very exciting things to help you sharpen your dance repertoire."

The junior staffer at HM Revenue and Customs who just mislaid personal data concerning 25m people is in good company. He/she can draw solace from the experience of Jared Ilovar, the Ohio state intern who earlier this year mislaid 800,000 social security numbers.

Funny how cases like these always follow the same pattern:

Ageing media. Ohio trusted its data to tapes, HMCR burned its information onto disks. When there’s a need to move such sensitive data around, why put it onto storage media that can get lost in the post or stolen from the back of a car?

Encryption. Or rather, lack of it. If the UK’s tax authority doesn’t use data encryption, what are the chances that any other government department will be any more secure?

Access. How come junior employees and even interns in government agencies have access to vast troves of data, and the ability to move them around seemingly at will? It doesn’t seem enough to protest that this was unauthorised. It shouldn’t have been possible.

Lack of accountability. Both of these cases could very well have remained buried. Three weeks after sending (and losing) the first set of disks, the unnamed HMRC official simply sent another in its place. The Ohio intern was told to keep quiet about the theft of tapes from his car. How many other failures like this simply never come to light?

Did Google just dodge a bullet in the Senate as it moves closer to acquiring DoubleClick? It depends on how you look at it.

A joint letter today from the Democratic chairman and the ranking Republican member of the Senate’s Anti-trust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights committee seems to find little fault with the acquisition. Addressed to the Federal Trade Commission, the letter urges the regulators to think long and hard about the implications of the deal - but it concludes that the politicians haven’t reached "any definitive conclusion" themselves on the matter. An open invitation for the FTC to issue the green light?

Not so fast, says Scott Cleland, one of the biggest Washington agitators against the deal. Cleland points us to what he says are signs that Google may not get a free pass. The letter is the first bi-partisan one of its kind this year, he says - so while the largely non-confrontational tone makes it look like there are few concerns, the joint position is itself unusual and significant. Also, according to Cleland, it is significant that the senators mention (more than once) Google’s "dominant market position." You and I may already have taken it as read that Google’s position in its market was pretty dominant, but Cleland claims the senators are giving the FTC a strong nudge to take a closer look at its spreading power.

Despite this, the odds must be on Google clearing the anti-trust hurdle in Washington with room to spare. The biggest risk still looks like it lies in Europe, where regulators are more inclined than their counterparts in Washington to attach conditions to merger approvals.