Voices

By Eric Savitz, Blogger and Columnist, Barron's, Tech Trader Daily

While it was another down day for the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the Nasdaq Composite actually broke a string of seven down days and posted a modest gain: The index rose 4.39, or 0.3 percent, to 1,649.51. The index nonetheless finished the horrific week with a loss of nearly 298 points, or 15.3 percent. At one point today, the index touched as low as 1542.45, stretching the loss for the week to just over 400 points, or nearly 21 percent. Astonishing.

One interesting development in today’s whipsaw session was the emergence of what appears to be some selective bottom-fishing. Apple (AAPL) was the most obvious example; the stock rebounded $8.06, or 9.1 percent, to $96.80, aided by some bullish comments from Oppenheimer as well as anticipation of the company’s pending launch of new laptops at an event on Tuesday.

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By Eric Savitz, Blogger and Columnist, Barron's, Tech Trader Daily

With today’s further decline–as I write this, the Nasdaq Composite is down another 86 points, or 5.2 percent, to 1,559–the index has tumbled 45 percent since peaking at 2,859 last Halloween. I think we can all agree that a 45 percent decline qualifies as a market crash, can’t we?

In fact, this decline is actually worse than the roughly 36 percent decline on the Nasdaq from peak to trough in 1987, but not nearly so bad as the 78 percent nightmare from 5,048 on March 10, 2000 to 1,114 on Oct. 9, 2002.

Still, it is startling that the current crisis is now worse–considerably worse, in fact–than what happened in 1987. And we’re hardly out of the woods. Next week, earnings season begins in earnest, and it is not going to be pretty.

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By Eric Savitz, Blogger and Columnist, Barron's, Tech Trader Daily

Amazon (AMZN) shares continue to retreat amid a flurry of Street estimate and price target reductions.

Tim Boyd, American Technology Research: Boyd, who has a Sell rating on the stock, today cut his price target to $45 from $60. He says that a guide down for the Q4 is a “virtual certainty” given the 11 percent rally in the dollar since the company last reported. “Unless organic demand has improved during Q3,” which is hard to imagine, he expects guidance to come down. Boyd notes that the consumer is under tremendous pressure, and writes refreshingly, “you don’t need us to tell you what’s going on out there.”

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By Eric Savitz, Blogger and Columnist, Barron's, Tech Trader Daily

The Street continues to ratchet down its expectations for Google (GOOG) ahead of the company’s third-quarter earnings coming up next Thursday.

While continuing to recommend the stock, analysts at both RBC Capital and Bernstein Research today trimmed both their earnings estimates and price targets for the Internet search giant. That follows similar moves by analysts at Stifel, Morgan Stanley, AmTech and Collins Stewart.

RBC Capital’s Ross Sandler maintains an Outperform rating, but today cut his price target to $500 from $600. For 2008, his EPS estimate is now $19.14, down from $19.45; for 2009 he now sees $21.24, down from $23.46. The move, he writes, is “based on the deteriorating macro environment.” (I bet you sure are surprised to hear that.) He says search is holding up better than other forms of online advertising, but that “no company is immune to cyclical factors.”

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By Farhad Manjoo, Technology Columnist, Slate.com

Early every morning, I open my Web browser and load up a half-dozen “aggregator” sites: Techmeme, Memeorandum, Real Clear Politics, Google News, the Drudge Report, and the Huffington Post. This is my first sortie into the day’s news, the way I orient myself to what’s going on in the world now that I no longer subscribe to a print newspaper. After picking clean the smorgasbord of links, I dip into a second set of sites, these pulling in quirkier tales from around the Web: Digg, BuzzFeed, Fark, Hacker News, Boing Boing, and Kottke as well as my personalized Web aggregators at Friendfeed and Google Reader. During the course of the day, I repeat this process often; in my manic hunt for the freshest stuff on the Web, I reload some of these sites 10 or 20 times each.

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By Caroline McCarthy, Editor, The Social, CNET

Digg founder Kevin Rose had a message for the audience at the Future of Web Apps conference on Thursday: It’s time to grow up.

“We have to do better,” he said in his talk, called “The Future of News,” and said that it’s time for the social news site that he founded in 2004 to to expand beyond the geek set and get some real-world relevance. “Why click a button and make the number go up by one? Why does that matter?”

Digg, after all, gets more than 30 million monthly visitors, but Rose said that the site only has slightly over three million registered user accounts–those are the people actually “Digging.” That indirectly confirmed what Digg critics have been saying all along: that it’s reflective of only a tiny and vocal subset of the Web, resulting in a heavy bias toward anything iPhone, anything Linux, anything Barack Obama, and plenty of wacky local news stories.

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By Om Malik, Founder and Senior Writer, GigaOm

Last night I reported on a special meeting held by Sequoia Capital for its portfolio companies, warning them about the fiscal hurricane that was going to hit them, and how they’d better figure out ways to survive what could be a big downturn.

There were some gaps in the details about that meeting, but I have since been able to piece together the minutes and what folks there essentially said. Since these are second-sourced details, I cannot say they are a 100 percent accurate, so please view them with a degree of skepticism. Nevertheless, I still feel confident enough to share them.

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By Jacqui Cheng, Associate Editor, Ars Technica

Hate on the kiddies and their SMS speak all you want, but text messaging is taking off among the masses. AT&T has released data from two studies it recently commissioned, showing that both families and romantic partners are using SMS more and more to communicate. Parents think texting with their kids makes them cool, while lovestruck texters are finding themselves using SMS to flirt and send romantic notes.

We’ll start with the families. AT&T conducted 1,048 online interviews with parents and 1,022 online interviews with children and young adults to get a feel for their usage patterns.

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By Mike Masnick, Blogger, Techdirt

Now that Congress has totally capitulated and allowed the administration’s warrantless wiretapping program to go on without question, it should surprise no one that leaks are coming out highlighting how the program is regularly abused to spy on everyday Americans who are calling North America from the Middle East. In fact, two separate “intercept operators” have apparently come forward separately, and talked about listening in on perfectly innocent calls between two Americans–exactly the scenario that the government insisted never happened. Specifically, General Hayden stated that conversations between Americans were not being intercepted: “It’s not for the heck of it. We are narrowly focused and drilled on protecting the nation against al Qaeda and those organizations who are affiliated with it.”

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By Tiernan Ray, Blogger, Barron's, Tech Trader Daily

A longish article from Reuters today speculates on whether Research in Motion (RIMM) could be bought out, now that its share price has received a 50 percent haircut in the last month, to $59.03, and its market capitalization has fizzled to a mere $33.4 billion. Noting Microsoft’s (MSFT) struggles against Google (GOOG) on one front in the cellphone wars and Apple (AAPL) on the other, Reuters quotes Canaccord Adams analyst Peter Misek–who yesterday raised his rating on the stock to “Buy” from “Hold”–as saying “RIM is a massive strategic fit” for Microsoft, adding, “I’m fairly certain they have a standing offer to buy them at $50 (a share).”

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