Despite the ringing of a major-warning bell by its stronger microprocessor rival Intel, Advanced Micro Devices is maintaining its commitment to returning to profitability in 2009.

AMD, which reported its eighth consecutive quarterly loss last month and softening sales, says it is cutting costs and focusing on core products to lower its break-even point.

“We are going to structure the company to a point where we can start making money while retaining core investments in research and development and products,” Dirk Meyer, chief executive, told the company’s analyst day in Silicon Valley today.

AMD also launched a key product today - a processor codenamed Shanghai for servers, which offers major performance improvements and is its first based on a more cost-effective 45-nanometre manufacturing technology.

Last month, it announced it would spin-off its manufacturing capabilities into a new company, with the help of an investment of up to $8.4bn from Abu Dhabi investors.

It is also shedding the consumer electronics business it inherited from its acquisition of the Canadian graphics chip maker, ATI.

Mr Meyer, who took over from Hector Ruiz as chief executive in the summer, said AMD was one of only two companies, with Intel, that could produced leading-edge x86 microprocessors in volume and one of only two leading graphics chip makers, with Nvidia. It was the only company that had both capabilities under one roof.

AMD’s ambitious plans for “Fusion” of the two has led to losses, a large debt burden and a share price that has fallen 69 per cent this year and was down 9 per cent at $2.33 in trading today.

But Mr Meyer said AMD has a shot at a $46.5bn market - $8.5bn for servers, $4bn for graphics cards and $34bn for client PC microprocessors.

Shanghai should give it a lift in the server category - compared to its “Barcelona” predecessor, it is on time and performing above expectations. The quad-core processor offers 35 per cent better performance with up to a 35 per cent decrease in power consumption.

“I think it will have a big impact in the data centre around virtualisation,” Sally Stevens, director of platform marketing at Dell, told me.

“What’s nice is that there’s no change of the motherboard, so it’s a simple drop-in of the new processor.”

Dell, HP, IBM and Sun are among the first customers for the new Opteron-brand processor.

Intel is hot on AMD’s heels with a new processor design called Nehalem, which will first appear in high-end desktop PCs from Monday and in servers next year.

“I think Shanghai puts AMD back in the game, but it is not going to have a whole lot of unblocked sunlight,” says Roger Kay, analyst at Endpoint Technologies .

“It does not make it a clear winner, with Intel breathing down its neck.”

Console game publishers are working up a sweat in their efforts to win over a casual gaming audience.

Peter Moore, once a PE teacher but now head of EA Sports, says he has given himself some tough workouts testing its new Active personalised fitness product for the Nintendo Wii, but sees women as the natural target audience.

Women, consistently in the minority as game players, have been drawn to the Wii and the activities made possible by its motion-sensing controller. EA announced today it will launch Active next March, leveraging the popularity of Nintendo’s Wii Fit and its balance board accessory, which resembles a bathroom scale.

EA is adding other peripherals including a resistance band and leg straps containing the controllers - enabling monitoring of fitness levels within a personalised workout programme.

“This will complement the Wii’s balance board, which is more about the Eastern philosophy of fitness with balance and coordination. In the West, we’re all about getting a sweat on and getting your heart rate up,” says Mr Moore.

EA Sports core audience up to now has been predominantly young male players, who have bought millions of copies of Madden NFL and other sports titles.

“We’re in no way blind to the challenges that talking to a mid-30s woman presents for EA Sports, but we think health and wellness and fitness over the next few years is going to be very important to consumers.”

Other publishers are also targeting fitness and the female demographic on the Wii. THQ has just launched its All Star Cheer Squad, teaching cheerleading and dance moves using the balance board. Another publisher has announced plans for a pole dancing game.

However, Celia Pearce, co-founder of the Ludica women’s game collective, says publishers fall into the trap of seeing women as stereotypes.

“The problem is that when you get a bunch of golf-playing guys in a room brainstorming about women’s games, you get some pretty stupid ideas,” she says.

“When I hear pole dancing and cheerleading, I just cringe, because I feel they do not get it still. I wish these companies would hire more women - there are many freelance women game designers, mostly because they can’t stand to work in the macho environments of game companies.”

Sezmi, a start-up seeking to be at the heart of the convergence of the internet and broadcast television, has announced the completion of the first successful technical trials of its “TV 2.0″ service.

The Silicon Valley company has been using Seattle as a testbed for its hybrid system, which combines digital terrestrial TV signals with broadband connections to offer both regular TV channels and programming on demand.

Sezmi’s partners in Seattle were Fisher Communications, Tribune Broadcasting and Daystar Television Networks - TV station owners who are licensing their spectrum and expect to earn additional revenues from advertising on local news content included in Sezmi’s service.

Sezmi expects to be able to undercut the offerings of cable and satellite providers by using the existing over-the-air TV towers and broadband infrastructure to deliver its services.

 It emerged from stealth mode in May and planned launches in several US markets this year. But that schedule has slipped. Phil Wiser, co-founder and president, told me there had been a couple of delays “getting the pieces to fit the right way”. The next stage would be full-blown consumer trials in Seattle before moving into other markets in the course of 2009.

Despite the credit crunch, he said Sezmi was in a good position financially. Its last funding announcement was a $17.5m round in August last year.

Sezmi will be showing off its service, which allows members of a household to create separate personalised TV experiences, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January.

For a brief moment this week, it looked like spam had been vanquished.

No kidding. The Washington Post claimed to have slain the beast. Late on Tuesday afternoon, after an investigation by the newspaper, a hosting centre called McColo Corp, which had acted as something of a spam hub, was shut down.

IronPort, an internet security firm, said it saw global spam volumes immediately plummet by two-thirds as a result. Based on the typical amount of spam sloshing around the internet, that suggests that McColo alone was responsible for pumping out around 100bn messages daily.

This victory has been short-lived. Figures from the same security firm show that as of late Wednesday, spam was already bouncing back. Volumes today have been down only 27 per cent - something of a success, but certainly nothing like the immediate drop when McColo closed.

The same thing happened when another Californian hosting centre, called Intercage, was shut down in September, a spokesperson for Ironport says. It doesn’t take long for the spammers to find another conduit for their messages.

Of the latest setback for the spammers, the spokesperson says: “We fully expect they will find another hosting service to use.”

We all know that Google collects a phenomenal amount of personal data - a perennial question is whether it’s healthy for one company to know so much about us all.

But what if all that collective data could be used to spot disease epidemics before they take hold? Good thing or bad thing? I’d say good.

If Google’s Flu Trends is anything to go by, the team at Google.org have pretty much cracked it for influenza, and can predict a flu outbreak with a delay of one day, as opposed to the two weeks taken by the official body CDC. It’s a big claim, but so far, the evidence presented is impressive.

Google has been very open with their research, publishing their calculations, references, the historical data they have used and providing a draft manuscript that has been accepted by the journal Nature.

The most persuasive picture is this one, which shows how Google’s search data (in blue) tracks the incidence of influenza as measured by the CDC over the last five years.

This is serious stuff, and the implications are pretty big. If Google can predict flu outbreaks with what would be considered scientific certainty, then you could argue that we are entering a new era of epidemiology. Taking two weeks off recognising disease outbreaks could potentially save thousands of lives, giving the health authorities a far higher chance of inoculations or other preventative measures.

Google do strike a suitable note of caution, saying that “past performance is no guarantee of future results. Our system is still very experimental, so anything is possible, but we’re hoping to see similar correlations in the coming year.”

I would add to that: just because we search for something doesn’t mean it will happen. It just means we are interested. Google searches for Palin outnumbered Obama for most of September and some of October, but we all know what happened come election day.

Equally, the Google trend on, for example, HIV doesn’t reflect infection rates, but rather the news agenda. Which is fair enough, but we need to be careful. There will be more people searching for flu just as a result of this research, and capturing that isn’t helpful to predicting disease outbreaks. Google would also seem unlikely to be able to predict rarer diseases with non-standard symptoms, as the search query range would be too large and random.

But for now, this looks like a good start. If flu, which kills up to 500,000 people per year, could be spotted earlier, it would be nothing short of a major breakthrough.

That was the sobering message from Charlie Giancarlo (left), formerly of Cisco and now chief executive of Avaya, when I saw him earlier today.

There have already been signs that corporate spending - the main engine that still drives the tech industry, even if the rise of the consumer has been the story of the last five years - has been weakening. Cisco, whose quarter ends a month later than most others, said last week that customer orders in October dropped by 9 per cent compared with a year before.

According to Giancarlo, though, these still count as the good times. His reasoning: “IT departments are spending as much as they can this quarter, because they know it’s going to dry up next year.” And while they won’t get any personal benefit from saving money now, CIOs know they will certainly be blamed if they can’t keep up with their users’ needs next year.

He bases his judgment largely on the experience of 2000. Cisco, his employer back then, did fine in November. As usual, corporate customers completed their next annual budgets in early December, and the impact on demand was almost instantaneous: “In the second or third week of December, it fell through the floor.”

This view is not shared universally. When I put the same question recently to Steve Mills, who runs IBM’s software business, he was dismissive of the idea that IT chiefs were spending now while they still could.

We’ll see. The Giancarlo scenario goes like this. There’s a sudden retreat by customers around the turn of the year as companies simply cut off all spending, and tech companies have no real insight into their customers’ intentions. That is the moment of maximum fear and uncertainty. Over the next few weeks, the fog clears a little as the salesforces of the tech suppliers spend time with their customers and come to understand how the budgets really look for 2009. By early Spring, some spending resumes and it becomes possible to plan for the rest of the year.

The bad news: that will probably mean another round of cost-cutting and job losses at that stage, as tech companies adjust to meet the new expected level of demand.

Credit crunch, what credit crunch? HomeAway, an online vacation rental marketplace, has just raised a quarter of a billion dollars in a VC funding round, the biggest of its kind for an internet company in eight years.

With a financial crisis, VC money getting scarce and start-ups cutting jobs and costs, the funding is not only enormous, but counter-cyclical as well.

Yet HomeAway seems to be a special case. It was founded in 2005 and has set about consolidating the hugely fragmented market of vacation rentals, with the aim of becoming an Expedia or Orbitz-type aggregator in this sector.

It raised $49m initially from Austin Ventures and Redpoint Ventures and used it to pick up five rivals. A $160m round in 2006 funded the purchase of VRBO.com and HomeAway now has 11 vacation rental sites in its portfolio.

Owners typically pay $300 a year to list their properties on its sites.

The new funding will be used to wipe out its debt from acquisitions of $88m - a wise move in these debt-crunched times - as well as fund deals for other sites, who may sell themselves cheaply in a recession. There will also be more spent on marketing, with HomeAway still far from being a household name.

Brian Sharples, chief executive, says HomeAway had the right characteristics to attract competition among venture capitalists to fund it:

“We will do just under $100m in sales this year, we’re cash flow positive and quite profitable, 40 per cent of our revenue comes from outside the US and it’s a fairly predictable subscription-based business,” he says.

In addition, he points to research that the market is worth an estimated $48bn in the US, UK, Germany and France combined and says more owners of second homes are likely to want to rent them out in a recession.

Jeff Brody, a founding partner at Redpoint Ventures, says HomeAway is clearly a category killer and a large fundraising round is a good strategy, particularly at a time when no one is interested in new flotations.

“I do believe you will be seeing more substantive later-stage rounds in companies that ordinarily would be public by now and a lot of that has to do with the fact that there are committed pools of capital for late-stage investing that is not going away, so the best deals are being actively sought,” he says.

“We’re seeing a flight to quality. Those companies that have exceptional financial metrics and opportunities in front of them are much less impacted by the valuation corrections and the deleveraging that you’re seeing across the board.”

There is no valuation available based on the new investment round but the size of the commitment from Redpoint, Institutional Venture Partners and Technology Crossover Ventures (TCV) suggests the VCs view HomeAway as eventually being in the same league as another TCV investment, Expedia, which currently has a market capitalisation of $2.4bn and forecast revenues this year of $3bn.

There’s something that’s been bothering me about all the speculation over how a President Obama will use the Web.

There’s an assumption that the online techniques mastered during the campaign (from social networking to search-engine advertising) will in future be deployed to advance the issues promoted by the White House.

Certainly, using the Web to make government more transparent and to continue to harness the engagement that many voters showed during the election are laudable aims.

But presidents don’t campaign - they lead. And that means leading all the country, red states as well as blue.

By definition, broadcast technologies are well-suited to that. But how do presidents lead in an era of micro-targeting and affinity-group politics? Do we really want national leaders to use Google’s AdWords and targeted emailing lists to talk to us, adjusting their message to suit the audience? And how should we feel about a White House that is skilled at mobilising interest groups on the Web that favour its pet initiatives?

No doubt these are the same sort of backward-looking, unfounded misgivings that some people felt when FDR first turned to the radio. Still, it bears some consideration.