After seeing gains for 12 trading days in a row, Nasdaq investors were due for a wake-up call. The news from the tech sector during this earnings season has been less dire than feared, but that doesn’t mean the recovery is here yet.

Microsoft duly brought things down to earth on Thursday. What was most striking in its weak second quarter results was a 29 per cent slump in revenues from the Windows client business. Didn’t Intel just report a snap-back in the PC business as manufacturers corrected for their earlier aggressive inventory reductions - and didn’t Microsoft itself say that sales of PCs to end-customers only fell by 5-7 per cent in the latest quarter? Continue reading "Microsoft spoils the tech party"

It’s still very early days for the “Googlephone”, but there are already signs that the strategy is working.

Google’s aim was to create a mobile platform for its services and, eventually, to drive more advertising. Data from Admob (which serves up 8bn mobile adverts a month and so has as good a view as anyone of where those ads are going) show the plan is unfolding on schedule.

The HTC Dream - the first Google phone, launched by T-Mobile late last year - first appeared in March on Admob’s list of top-20 handsets, based on the volume of advertising they consume. By last month, it had risen all the way to the number six slot. Continue reading "Google’s mobile ad gambit starts to pay off"

Even sceptics would agree, that’s a lot of iPhones: Apple just said it sold 5.2m of them in the three months through June.

True, it’s not as many as the company sold when it introduced the iPhone 3G a year ago, a blockbuster 6.9m units in the initial quarter. But the 3G had just shy of three months to help rack up the overall shipment numbers.

Continue reading "Apple sells 5.2m iPhones, most of them recently"

To cheer themselves up in these dark times, Silicon Valley’s venture capitalists have taken to drawing comparisons with tech’s pre-bubble days. If investment activity has returned to levels seen in the mid-1990s, the argument goes, this at least represents a healthy baseline: it is the “new normal” from which things start to pick up again.

So they should get a kick out of the latest figures from the National Venture Capital Association. Based on the $3.7bn put to work in the second quarter (up a little from the first quarter, but down by more than 50 per cent from a year ago), the total invested this year is projected to reach 1996-1997 levels. Of course, back then the VC industry provided a living for far fewer people. The shake-out has barely started.

Now that the first half of the year is over, it’s a good time for taking stock. These numbers pretty much tell the story of the tech financing markets:

Down 57 per cent.  The value of tech IPOs and M&A in the US in the first half of 2009, compared with the same period last year (figures from Dow Jones Venture Source.) At only $2.8bn, this is back at 2003 levels. The NVCA reckons that the amount that all venture-backed companies raised from “liquidity events” fell by 53 per cent, to just under $4bn.

Down 44 per cent. The amount of money invested in global “green tech” in the second quarter compared with a year ago (figures from the Cleantech Group and Deloitte.) At least the $1.2bn that found its way into the sector was up 12 per cent from the dire first quarter.

Up 25 per cent. The first-day pop for software company LogMeIn, which made its debut on Wall Street on Wednesday. Hey, it’s not all bad news: a handful of well-received tech IPOs has shown that, since the Nasdaq bottomed out in March, some investors are getting interested again. But it’s still a far cry from an active IPO market. Only 11 US venture-backed companies have gone public in the past year and a half, compared to 86 in 2007.

The FT’s Lex column looks at the dilutive stock sale that will see the founders of Dutch navigation device maker TomTom give up their majority stake in the company to head off a debt cruch. Its conclusion:

Painful, but a price worth paying to put the focus back on growth, and away from a tattered balance sheet.

Continue reading “TomTom’s capital raising”

Apple’s annual  Worldwide Developers Conference opened today with intense speculation that a new iPhone would be unveiled when Phil Schiller, its vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, briefed the media at 10am Pacific time.

All we knew officially was that Apple would discuss the latest version of its operating system - Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard - and talk more about the 3.0 version of the iPhone OS.  A new iPhone would have been no surprise, and we expected a cheaper version to be announced as soon as today. Any appearance by chief executive Steve  Jobs, on medical leave till the end of this month, would have been a sensation.  Here’s how the event unfolded, with our live blogging from the  Moscone Center in San Francisco. Continue reading "Apple unveils new iPhone - live coverage"

If past experience is anything to go by, it may be time to short Cisco Systems.

Being admitted to the Dow Jones Industrial Average is the ultimate mark of corporate respectability - and it has added 5 per cent to Cisco’s shares today - but the history of techs in the Dow has not been a cheerful one.

For many years the brain trust at the DJIA turned a cold shoulder to tech. Only IBM was admitted to the club - and even Big Blue only made it through the door after it had been around for close to 70 years. Continue reading "Tech’s painful Dow hangover"