CNBC’s David Faber reported minutes ago that Icahn is getting close to dropping his bid for Dell. What changed? Perhaps it’s the matter of funding. The New York Post reported today that Icahn and partner Southeastern Asset Management are having trouble pulling together the $5.2 billion needed to make an offer that would improve on the $24.4 billion leveraged buyout offer put together by Michael Dell and the private equity firm Silver Lake Partners.

Icahn, the Post said, had told investors that at least part of the delay is addressing the $3.9 billion funding gap called out on June 5 by the special committee of Dell’s board overseeing the go-private process. Icahn and Southeastern proposed last month to recapitalize Dell and pay shareholders a $12 special dividend while leaving a publicly held stub.

One problem is that interest rates have risen a bit in recent weeks, making the prospect of borrowing that kind of money a lot more expensive. The other is that any potential lenders have been looking at the state of Dell’s deteriorating business and found it hard to underwrite a bid for a company with so much risk.

Icahn has — if nothing else — made the Dell situation a lot more colorful. One day he openly proclaimed in a televised rant that he would fire Michael Dell if he were ever to get control of the company. Since then, Icahn has proposed a new slate of directors as well as a short list of CEOs he might like to hire, though at least one of them, Oracle president Mark Hurd, has indicated he’s not interested.

The vote of Dell shareholders on the go-private proposal is set for July 18.

Salesforce shares closed at $43.25 a share, down $2.44, or 5.25 percent. Yesterday the company said it earned 10 cents a share on a non-GAAP basis on sales of $893 million. Both figures were short of consensus forecasts by analysts, which called for 12 cents in EPS and revenue of $935 million. Gross margins fell slightly, while operating expenses rose by 29 percent. The company said it expects full-year non-GAAP earnings of 47 cents to 49 cents per share and sales in the range of $3.84 billion to $3.88 billion, up slightly from prior guidance. CEO Marc Benioff has been saying the company is getting close to recording its first $4 billion year.

Most analysts today, including those at Stifel Nicolaus, Lazard Capital, Oppenheimer and Barrington, looked at the price drop as a buying opportunity. Most but not all. One analyst, Steve Koenig of Wedbush Securities, took the opportunity to cut his rating on Salesforce. Salesforce is a sufficiently large company that it can now be affected by overall shifts in the IT spending budget, Koenig argued.

One problem the company said it experienced was currency headwinds, specifically regarding the Japanese yen. As he does every quarter, CEO Marc Benioff appeared on CNBC’s “Mad Money with Jim Cramer.” The deflationary trends on the Japanese yen are hurting payments to Salesforce when they get converted to U.S. dollars, and Benioff said during the segment that Japan has become Salesforce’s largest customer. Previously that distinction had been held by Hewlett-Packard.

At the outset, it seems a tall order. Name a significant line of HP’s business and it’s probably in the middle of one sort of fundamental slowdown or another. Whether it’s the historical decline in PC sales, a weak environment for server sales, a lousy market for printers or ongoing difficulties with its enterprise services business, HP has troubles in all four. Together, these troubled units accounted for about 92 percent of HP’s sales last quarter. Add to the mix a significant exposure to Europe, where the economy remains weak, and it becomes incredibly difficult to feel hopeful for a pleasant surprise in HP’s results today.

Whitman and CFO Cathie Lesjak have been clear in past public statements that there are no quick fixes for HP. And its rivals are taking advantage. Dell unleashed a bit of a price war on the PC front, cutting prices aggressively in order to take some market share ahead of its anticipated $24.4 billion go-private transaction.

While Dell is willing to sacrifice profitability, HP doesn’t seem to have responded, and so may have missed some sales. As Chris Whitmore of Deutsche Bank Securities wrote in a note to clients yesterday, “It appears HP is sacrificing share to protect near-term margins.”

Dell has also been bragging about its ability to take market share away from HP on the server front.

What HP has got going for it: Aggressive cost management. Remember that HP surprised the Street with better-than-expected cash flow in the first quarter of the year, giving the appearance that the promised turnaround had begun in earnest. But much of that surprise came from a one-time tax benefit that added a half-billion dollars to operating cash flow. That is unlikely this quarter, so Whitmore is worried that cash flow may come up short: “The combination of cash restructuring payments, headwinds from revenue declines in PCs impacting working capital and cash cycle and the absence of favorable factors in Q1 (tax deferrals, bonus payments, etc) may result in worse than expected cash flow,” he wrote.

Analysts expect HP to report 81 cents per share on sales of $28.12 billion. A miss on either the top or bottom line will probably freak out shareholders impatient to see some tangible sign that, despite having survived the worst year in its history, HP can yet be salvaged, and that Whitman is the one to get the job done. HP shares opened up slightly this morning at $21.21 a share.

I talked about all this a little this morning on CNBC. The video is below:

Taking to CNBC’s airwaves in another one of his candid phoned-in afternoon rants (the last was an epic 28-minute on-air slugfest with hedge fund investor Bill Ackman in January) with host Scott Wapner during the closing half hour or so of the network’s “Fast Money Halftime Report” show, Icahn revealed that on Monday he will nominate a slate of 12 new directors and, if successful, he’ll see to it that Michael Dell doesn’t remain CEO. “He will not be running the company,” Icahn said.

“It’s not that I have anything against [Michael] Dell. I’m sure he’s a very nice guy,” Icahn said. “But it’s a new world out there.”

Icahn has had a busy day on the Dell front. First he reported in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that his stake in Dell amounts to 4.52 percent. He also joined Southeastern Asset Management, Dell’s largest outside shareholder, in making a joint bid for the company. (The Wall Street Journal’s Moneybeat has the full text of the joint Icahn-Southeastern letter to Dell’s board here.)

The special committee of Dell’s board has in the last several minutes issued a statement saying it is “carefully reviewing” the Icahn-Southeastern offer.

“Mr. Icahn and Southeastern have outlined a potential leveraged recapitalization transaction that they want the Dell Board either to recommend at this time or to consider if the existing going-private transaction is rejected by Dell shareholders. They have also proposed replacing the Board with a slate of new directors who they say would approve such a transaction. Consistent with the Special Committee’s goal of achieving the best possible outcome for all shareholders, we and our advisors are carefully reviewing the potential transaction to assess the potential risks and rewards to the public shareholders.”

In his televised jeremiad, Icahn blasted Dell’s board and said that Dell shareholders will “literally get screwed” by the $24.4 billion Michael Dell/Silver Lake offer to take the company private in a leveraged buyout. His offer, he said, would leave existing shareholders with a publicly traded stub that would allow them to make more money than the $13.65 per share Dell and Silver Lake have offered.

Below, two video highlights. The second one focuses more on Wapner’s fascination with Icahn’s opinion of the legendary Wall Street short-seller Jim Chanos, who has previously publicly stated that he has been shorting Dell shares. “I’ve made a lot of money going against Chanos,” Icahn said.

Of course it goes without saying that all the attention on Dell caused the shares to trade upward during the half hour or so that Icahn was on CNBC. Ahead of 1 pm ET, Dell shares were trading as high as $13.51, or up more than 1 percent. After Icahn hung up (and apparently called BloombergTV to make a similar on-air speech), its price settled back down. Here’s a screen grab I took of Dell’s share price via Yahoo Finance.

This according to Channing Smith, director of equity strategies at Capital Advisors, who predicts that Apple’s stock will rally in the second half of this year, following a potentially tough March quarter, and June guidance that might leave a little bit to be desired. Like a number of other analysts, Smith says Apple is at risk of a near-term earnings miss. But he also says the company’s big picture remains rock solid.

“What we think is going to happen is Apple gets a pass on this quarter and investors are going to start looking towards the summer and the fall, when you start to see new product announcements,” Smith told CNBC. “We’re going to see some excitement over what Apple is going to do something with its cash, that’s our expectation. … We think the focus really goes into the second half of the year, new product announcements, potential announcements with China Mobile and a lower priced iPhone.”

So: Apple’s shares will recover — assuming the company delivers 1) a capital allocation plan that returns a bunch of cash to investors, and 2) another hit product — preferably the next new, new thing. And if the company can develop a lower-cost iPhone for emerging markets where it’s believed to be losing out on growth opportunities, so much the better.

Optimistic argument, pessimistic rationale — well, partially pessimistic, anyway. It’s clearly in Apple’s best interests to do something to appease shareholders pushing for a dividend increase. The Street’s patience on that matter is clearly running short, and if the company doesn’t announce some sort of plan for its cash soon, there could be ugly repercussions. But this idea that Apple “needs” another disruptive product to succeed? That seems both pessimistic and vaguely irrational.

Even with its shares in decline as they are now, Apple is still the most profitable technology company in the world. It sold 47.8 million iPhones, 22.9 million iPads, and 4.1 million Macs last quarter. Sold, not shipped. Apple has sold more than 100 million iPads since it launched the device two and a half years ago. Again, sold, not shipped. And while the company has some formidable competitors in the mobile industry, it continues to outshine them in both revenue and operating profits. According to Canaccord Genuity analyst T. Michael Walkley, last year Apple captured 69 percent of the handset industry’s profits.

69 percent.

Yet if Apple hopes to ever reclaim its glamour stock luster, it supposedly “needs” another industry-transforming product. The fastest-growing PC maker in the world, the company that generated $35.903 billion in operating income from mobile devices in 2012, the company that holds top mind share in virtually every category it plays in “needs” an encore to the iPod, iPhone and iPad. That’s a bizarrely pessimistic outlook to take on Apple, whose fundamental business obviously remains very strong.

Would Apple benefit from a new, breakthrough product? Of course. But will it quickly fade into irrelevance without such a product? Only if you view 47.8 million iPhones sold during the past quarter as hard evidence that buyers’ interest in the the iPhone might be drying up. Only if your definition of irrelevance accounts for that sort of staggering number does Apple really “need” to field another bright, shiny object before its shares see $600 again.
The continued success of Apple’s business is not predicated on announcing something completely unprecedented every year.

That in turn triggered speculation that HP might be planning something special. Persistent rumors that HP is reconsidering the breakup option refuse to die, fanned in no small part by a sketchier-than-an-art-class report from Quartz. Word that Faber was on the scene as the earnings report crossed the wires led some traders to wonder if a breakup announcement was imminent.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The interview with Whitman happened early this morning, and she batted those rumors away once again: “I am convinced that we should not break up this company.” In the end, though, it’s going to come down to the turnaround strategy in place and the financial results that it yields. If it doesn’t work out, then naturally all options are on the table.

It’s also worth noting that HP shares are up by more than 15 percent today, and rose above the $19 mark for the first time since August. If nothing else, yesterday’s results have given shareholders hope that there is a light, however faint, far, far at the end of HP’s tunnel.

Anyway, it’s worth watching the interview, which lasts about 11 minutes:

Why? I asked yesterday, and many of you replied. Thanks!

Your answers break down into two basic schools of thought:*

Al Jazeera wants to be on American cable TV because of optics. That is: Its Qatari owners think being on American cable TV will validate it as a Very Serious News Operation, like CNN — just being on YouTube won’t cut it. So according to this line of thought, Al Jazeera will spend anything to make that happen — even $500 million for a cable network many thought was worth far less. (Note to Al Jazeera/Current completists: I’m told that the deal was $450 million plus debt, which means the $100 million figure we’ve been batting around for Current TV founder Al Gore’s take from this may be a touch high.)

Al Jazeera wants to be on American cable TV because it thinks being on American cable TV is a great business. This is the argument people on Al Jazeera’s team have been making publicly and privately. The nice thing about the argument is that we won’t know for several years how it plays out. The tough thing about this argument is that the odds are against it.

Why? Because while Gore was able to convince most of Current TV’s pay TV partners to keep carrying the network once Al Jazeera bought it, those pay TV deals will expire over the next few years. And as they do, players like Dish Network, Direct TV and Comcast will try to drop the network, or at least push the per-subscriber fees they pay for the network way, way down, as Reuters notes.

SNL Kagan analyst Derek Baine predicts that Al Jazeera may end up having to give up on its subscriber fees altogether to convince pay TV operators to keep the channel on. And if that happens, a profitable operation ends up becoming a money loser quite quickly.

The optimistic version of this argument holds that Al Jazeera America will be able to keep its subscriber fees intact, or even raise them, because pay TV customers value news.

After all, they say, look at what Fox News gets (82 cents per subscriber, per month). Or CNN (57 cents). Or CNBC (32 cents). Compared to them, the 12 cents per sub that Al Jazeera is getting right now under Current TV’s old deal is a bargain.

I have a rooting interest in that view being correct, because a big and previously untapped market for serious news and international news is good for the journalism job market. But there’s a reason American TV news avoids serious news and international news.

Meanwhile, as I noted yesterday, Al Jazeera’s embrace of cable means it will have to move away from the Web. As my corporate colleagues at The Wall Street Journal report, Al Jazeera is going to stop streaming its Al Jazeera English broadcast on the Web to placate pay TV owners. The new channel won’t go on the Web, either.

That leaves open the possibility that Al Jazeera’s American audience could actually shrink once it goes to cable, instead of expanding. And that would be a bummer.

*Though we should note that “Peter Kafka is an idiot” was a popular third option.

First, HP’s total $8.8 billion write-down isn’t all Autonomy-related. Of that total amount, about $5 billion relates specifically to Autonomy. Moments ago, on a conference call with reporters, HP CFO Cathie Lesjak said that the rest stems from the drop in HP’s share price.

The core allegation is that people at Autonomy took certain accounting actions while still running Autonomy as a publicly held company in the U.K., which had the end effect of making Autonomy seem more valuable than it was. As CEO Meg Whitman put it on a conference call a few minutes ago: “There appears to have been a wilfull effort on the part of certain former Autonomy employees to inflate the underlying financials of the company in order to mislead investors and potential buyers.”

It’s important to note that Autonomy’s founder and former CEO Mike Lynch has just issued a statement, essentially denying HP’s claims. I heard portions of the statement read on CNBC. In a statement being reported by Reuters, he has “flatly rejected” HP’s allegations. Also: “HP’s due diligence review was intensive, overseen on behalf of HP by KPMG, Barclays and Perella Weinberg. HP’s senior management has also been closely involved with running Autonomy for the past year.”

So what is alleged to have happened? For one thing, Autonomy, as HP tells it, was selling some hardware at a loss. During a period of about eight quarters prior to HP’s acquisition, Autonomy sold some hardware products that had a very low margin or on which it may have even taken a loss. It then allegedly turned around and booked those hardware sales as high-margin software sales. At least some portion of the cost on these products, Whitman said, was booked as a marketing expense, not as cost of goods sold.

There’s a second piece of the puzzle, where HP says that Autonomy was selling software to value-added resellers — the middlemen in so many technology transactions — in which there are ultimately no end users. That, too, inflated apparent revenue.

Third, there were some long-term hosting deals — essentially, Autonomy hosting applications for its customers on a subscription basis — that were converted to short-term licensing deals. Future revenue for software subscriptions — that should have been deferred or recorded as coming in the future but not yet booked — were stripped out and booked all at once.

John Schultz, HP’s general counsel, said there appeared to be what he called “a conscious effort by some former Autonomy employees to portray it as a pure software company.” The low-margin or loss-making hardware sales in particular, he said on the conference call, amounted to as much as 10 percent to 15 percent of Autonomy’s revenue during the eight-quarter period in question.

It had the effect, Schultz said, of not only closing the gap between actual financial growth and the consensus expectation of analysts — meeting the consensus is always a concern at a publicly held company — but also inflated the “growth metrics” of the company. “From an accounting perspective, there were improprieties, but also there were severe disclosure failures,” he said.

Lesjak said the problems are not only with the fact that revenue was inflated by itself, but the kinds of revenue. “These hardware sales were frequently reported as licenses. The VAR sales were reported as licenses, and they weren’t, in some sense, real sales, because there was no end user.”

The result, Lesjak said, was that Autonomy was able to boost its gross margins, a key measurement of profitability. Where Autonomy had been reporting gross margins in the neighborhood of 40 percent to 45 percent, Lesjak said a more realistic gross margin at Autonomy going forward is in the 28 percent to 30 percent range.

So what is HP going to do about it? First, it has reported the matter to the enforcement division of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, and to the Serious Fraud Office in the U.K. Once those authorities have their say, HP will likely sue someone. Whitman conceded that it will likely take years before it’s all done. It’s going to get ugly before it’s over.

The Wall Street Journal just got a statement from former HP CEO Léo Apotheker, who did the Autonomy deal during his 11-month tenure as CEO. In a word, he says he’s “stunned.” He will also make himself available to help HP get to the bottom of it all.

Whitman was just on CNBC for several minutes, going through the particulars and reiterating much of what she said on the conference call with reporters. Here’s the video:

RELATED POSTS:

• More From Mike Lynch: HP’s Autonomy Accusations Are Getting Weaker
• Mike Lynch Punches Back at Today’s HP Filing: Whither $5B Writedown?
• HP Confirms DOJ Is Investigating Alleged Fraud in Autonomy Deal
• Yes, There Are Layoffs Pending at HP’s Autonomy Unit in the U.K.
• Former HP CEO Shifts Blame for Autonomy Deal to Chairman
• Dell Passed on Autonomy Before HP Bought It
• Why Mike Lynch Is Playing PR Hardball With HP
• Autonomy Founder Lynch Asks Board to Explain HP Allegations
• Autonomy Founder Lynch Blames Accounting Standards in HP Flap
• The Red Flags That Were Obvious — To Some — In the HP-Autonomy Deal
• Oracle’s Ellison Vindicated in Autonomy PR Flap by HP’s $8.8 Billion Writedown
• Autonomy Founder Mike Lynch Rejects HP Charges, Alleges Mismanagement
• What Exactly Happened at Autonomy?
• HP Explains Its $8.8 Billion “Oops”
• HP Beats Street Amid Sales Declines, Takes $8.8 Billion Charge
• HP Names Microsoft Exec Robert Youngjohns to Run Autonomy
• Search Under Way at HP for Autonomy’s Next Chief
• Autonomy’s Mike Lynch Talks About Being HP’s Speedy Tiger Cub (Video)
• Britain’s First Software Billionaire Now Reports to HP CEO Meg Whitman
• Oracle Launches Exalytics Machine, Probably Ending Spat With Autonomy
• Autonomy: When All Else Fails, Blame the Bankers
• Mike Lynch to Oracle: Oh, You Mean Those Slides
• Oracle: You Have a Very Bad Memory, Mr. Lynch
• HP Reportedly Close to $10 Billion Buyout of Autonomy, PC Unit Spinoff
• Will Oracle and Microsoft Bid on Autonomy?

New York magazine just published what will doubtlessly be the first of many larger-scale profile pieces on new Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer (Fortune’s at work on one, too).

Titled “Can Marissa Mayer Really Have It All?” New York’s version is a very solid and fair effort that raises a lot of pertinent questions about the Silicon Valley Internet giant’s latest leader.

That, of course, includes pondering the high-profile issues around her coping with a newborn (really new) and work; her carefully crafted public glamour-geek-girl persona that is at odds with her sometimes more tetchy private one; Mayer’s mostly-up-and-then-down-at-the-end career at Google as a key exec; and the myriad challenges she faces in turning around the long-troubled Yahoo.

Writes Lisa Miller quite astutely: “This newest version of Marissa, the mom-geek-CEO, will surely test Mayer’s iterative powers, for she’s playing to a tougher crowd, one that won’t be placated by tweets, Manolos, and rapturous praise for pineapple malts.”

Indeed not, which is why sources said Mayer is likely to begin to make postpartum appearances back at Yahoo as early as this week. She delivered her first child with husband Zach Bogue, whom she dubbed “Big Baby Boy Bogue,” on Sept. 30.

Among the initiatives she has been working on up to and after her son’s birth, said numerous sources, is the redo of Yahoo’s powerful home page, a reorganization of top management duties, and an announcement about whether it will buy back shares or give a dividend from its recent multibillion-dollar sale of part of its lucrative stake in China’s Alibaba Group.

In addition, said sources, Mayer is also putting into place her new methodology of keeping track of employee performance and rewards. There is an all-hands meeting scheduled today, in fact, apparently to go over the system, which Mayer spoke about in her last all-hands meeting.

The home page redo is also in the late-stage works for unveiling soon, said sources. Those who have seen it said it has a starker and simpler design ethos, and will stress user personalization, customization and more social elements. It will also have ample opportunity for third-party developers to offer a variety of services on it (maybe Mayer can save Zynga by copying a little bit from Facebook!).

The reorg will also be interesting. Mayer has made a number of top exec appointments, including adding a new CFO and head of HR. She will also be rejiggering other roles of existing management.

For example, expect tech and operations EVP David Dibble — who got a mess of new responsibilities right before Mayer was appointed — to have some of that dialed back.

The disposition of all $3.6 billion of Alibaba cash is perhaps the most immediate issue, especially for investors, who are largely hoping for a buyback of stock. Such a move will likely cause Yahoo shares to rise, as happened at AOL.

That would be nice, since Yahoo stock has stayed pretty flat since Mayer got to the company in July. (That compares, ironically, to a 31 percent rise at Google since she left.)

But Wall Street analysts and others have been making bullish calls on Yahoo recently, including CNBC’s screamy stock guru Jim Cramer of “Mad Money.”

Boosted by the growing value of its Asian assets — in China, as well as in Japan, which Yahoo is trying to sell — and also anticipating some kind of magic mojo from Mayer, price targets for Yahoo shares have been as high as $22.

That was from Goldman Sachs, which reinstated coverage of Yahoo with a “buy” rating recently. Analyst Heath Terry noted that “while user engagement continues to decline, the company lacks a mobile strategy and significant talent has left the company, Yahoo still has hundreds of millions of users, valuable Web properties, and the financial resources to fuel a potential turn around over time.”

Translated: Yahoo kinda stinks, but it still might be able to buy itself out of this mess with a $10.6 billion pile of dough from Asia.

All eyes will be on the actual business Yahoo operates itself in two weeks on Oct. 22, when the company announces third-quarter results. Sources said the quarter will come in as expected, but will still tell a story of lackluster growth in advertising, engagement and, well, every key part of its native offerings.

That said, Mayer is expected to be on the call — her first at Yahoo — to outline her grand vision in more detail, as a spokeswoman has noted.

That’s good, since shiny profiles of her can only do so much. It’ll be nice to finally hear her say something definitive in public about how she’s going to fix the company that has given the mediagenic exec even more press.

(And, let’s hope, without the tweets, Manolos and pineapple malts.)

Asa Mathat / AllThingsD.com

In the TV interview (see it below), Ellison made news, saying that Oracle will not be doing any large acquisitions, especially NetApp, the storage concern that has been occasionally mentioned as a possible target. Ellison said there would be no large acquisitions.

“We think we have all the assets in-house to grow very rapidly on an organic basis,” he said.

Baritoromo had clearly been reading AllThingsD because she made a point to call out Ellison’s 45 percent share of NetSuite. In a subtle dig at Salesforce.com and its CEO Marc Benioff, Ellison has been calling Oracle “the first cloud computing company.”

Then it was on to his keynote — his second of the conference — where he revisited in additional detail some of the points he made in his first keynote from Sunday, but also did some demos.

For one thing, Ellison reminded the audience that while Oracle may not yet be the biggest software-as-a-service company by revenue, it does offer more applications on a SAAS basis than anyone else — which, given Oracle’s just-completed rewrite of its entire suite of applications for the cloud, is a factual claim.

But he also made some important pronouncements around his view of how the cloud runs, again making subtle digs at the competition. “When you run in the cloud, you also pick the infrastructure that it runs on,” he said. That’s a dig at Salesforce and other smaller SAAS companies that seek to compete in some manner or another with Oracle. Sign on for the application, you’re stuck with the platform and other infrastructure that the company selling it has running in their data center.

It was an easy segue from there to Oracle’s public and private cloud offerings. Ellison said Oracle has about 400 customers using its new Fusion applications. He said about two thirds of those customers were running their applications in Oracle’s public cloud, while about one third were doings so on dedicated machines on premise.

But since both the public and private cloud are essentially equivalent — after all, they run on the same hardware and the same software — it’s easy for a company to change its mind. “They can move to an Oracle private cloud or public cloud without changing anything,” he said. “It’s very easy to move applications back and forth.” He thinks many of those customers will do just that and switch over to the public cloud within a year. “We’ll have more visibility into that by this time next year,” he said.

Part one of Ellison’s CNBC interview is below. The other parts, where he talks about increasing Oracle’s dividend, explains why the hardware business shrank, why he bought all those houses, calls his late friend Steve Jobs irreplaceable, and then kidded Baritoromo about buying the LA Lakers are also all online.

Hurd appeared on CNBC from the Oracle OpenWorld Conference in San Francisco. “There isn’t a customer we have that’s not on both an austerity plan and an innovation agenda at the same time,” Hurd told CNBC’s Maria Baritoromo in what I think was his first televised interview since joining Oracle in 2010.

He said customers are spending incrementally more of their IT budget simply storing the deluge of data they’re gathering, and repeated the company line that the Exadata line of database hardware helps both shrink the amount of data a company needs to store and then turn that data into useful information.

He also dodged a question about what he thinks is going on at his old stomping grounds, Hewlett-Packard, where he was CEO for five years. Asked where he thinks Oracle’s growth will come from in the near future — it has been rather acquisitive over the last year — he said the company will continue with its balanced approach, buying both companies and shares, and finish beating the market. “Whatever the market does, we’re going to beat it.”

Watch it below.

On Wednesday, the daily deals giant rolled out Groupon Payments, which will allow merchants to accept credit cards using an iPhone for as little as 1.8 percent plus 15 cents per transaction, a rate Groupon guarantees is the cheapest available.

Immediate investor reaction was positive, pushing the company’s beleaguered stock up 14 percent this week to $5.38 a share, and it managed to hold on to most of that, closing Friday at $5.28.

Groupon hopes the payments feature and its low transaction costs will give merchants another good reason to use its deal services, even if Groupon Payments does not end up generating a lot of additional revenue on a standalone basis.

“We think this will help us sell more Groupons,” said Groupon’s CEO Andrew Mason, in an interview with CNBC. “We are not focused on these businesses boosting the bottom line; they don’t need to be wildly profitable on their own. What we are really focused on is using additional services to strengthen the value proposition that we have for our merchants.”

And that may be a good way to look at it, since many critics believe it is a race to zero as new competitors entering the payments business are forcing prices down.

Here’s Mason’s interview with CNBC:

Chambers was on CNBC just as the earnings news hit the wires to talk about it all. Europe isn’t getting better any time soon. So the key is going to be taking share away from competitors like Juniper. As Chambers put it: “Our market share gains have never been better than they have in the last 12 months.”

Also: This is the part where I pick a song to try and illustrate Cisco’s results. Every time I talk to Chambers he asks about it, and it’s become a tradition that I happen to enjoy. This quarter I picked “Tuff Enough” by The Fabulous Thunderbirds. Listen to the lyrics and the song totally fits the situation. I embedded a live performance of that song below the CNBC clip. Enjoy them both. Cisco’s currently fighting its way through a difficult marketplace and doing what needs to be done. It’s tough enough for sure.

The pay-TV part, though, is going to seem very familiar: They’ll pay Google $120 a month, and they’ll get a bunch of TV channels, whether they want all of them or not.

Which isn’t to say it won’t be cool. The TV service should offer a bunch of nifty features that will make it easier to find and watch what you want.* And it comes with a free Nexus 7 tablet. And unlike the cable box you have now, it should get better with some frequency, via software updates. Etc.**

But if you were hoping that Google was going to use its fiber project to reorder the TV landscape, you’re going to be disappointed. At least in this incarnation, Google is playing by the TV establishment’s rules.

That is, if you want to get stuff from the cable guys, you have to buy everything they bundle. Discovery’s TLC comes with Animal Planet and the Science Channel. NBCUniversal’s CNBC comes with Bravo, Oxygen and the USA Network. Etc.

And the cable guys are happy to sell Google their shows, because they love having more buyers for their stuff, as long as they don’t break the bundle model they love so much.

Just like they were happy to sell TV to the satellite guys and telco guys. “We view them the way we view [Verizon’s] Fios,” says one programmer who’s working with Google.

Not everyone is in, yet. Time Warner (TNT, TBS, HBO), Disney (ESPN, Disney Channel), News Corp. (Fox News, FX) and AMC Networks (AMC, IFC) don’t have deals with Google. And if Google launches without all of them, the service will look crippled. But the Google folks are saying positive things about getting deals done, and I’ve heard similar murmurs from some of the TV guys.

One exception to the happy talk: News Corp., which owns this Web site, has butted heads with Google repeatedly. The two sides had a particularly unsuccessful discussion about Google TV at CES in January, which led to a Twitter outburst from Rupert Murdoch. So that deal could be extra-hard to nail down.

Then again, Viacom also has problems with Google — you may recall they are still suing them over YouTube. And Viacom has signed on for Google Fiber, too.***

Money solves all sorts of problems, especially when it comes with a promise not to screw up the ecosystem that makes the cable guys fat and happy. Right now, Google’s willing to offer both.

*A lot of these features, by the way, are similar to features Google has been showing off with its latest version of its Google TV software. But this being Google, the Google Fiber service is completely separate from Google TV — they’re handled by different teams, using different hardware, different software. So odd. So Googley.

**You can watch the Google guys pitch this themselves, by checking out yesterday’s demo video, starting at the 25-minute mark.

***Boy, did this dummy get that one wrong. Sorry!

(Image courtesy of Shutterstock/BortN66)

Later this afternoon, Kayak is planning to sell 3.5 million shares at $22 to $25 each, to raise as much as $100 million, according to its latest document filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

But based on strong demand, the company could end up pricing its shares even higher, reports CNBC.

At the top of its current range, the company would be valued at nearly $1 billion.

Starting tomorrow, the online travel company will trade under the ticker symbol KYAK on the Nasdaq exchange.

Since the company first filed to go public last year, a lot has happened, making it difficult to gauge how it will be received by investors.

Across the broader technology sector, several tech companies have gone public in recent months, some faring better than others, like LinkedIn and Yelp versus Zynga and Groupon.

In the online travel business specifically, several big moves could value the company higher.

Google acquired ITA Software for $700 million to add travel airline information to its search results, and TripAdvisor spun off from Expedia to create two separately traded companies. Since then, both are trading at almost $48 a share, up from $27 at the time of the split.

As for Kayak, the wait also gave it the time to report four consecutive quarters of profitable growth.

In the first quarter, it reported a profit of $8.1 million, reversing a loss of $12 million in the same period a year earlier. (The loss was mostly attributable to a $15 million impairment charge related to the discontinuation of the SideStep brand name.) Revenue in the first quarter totaled $73.3 million, compared to $52.7 million a year earlier.

In Kayak’s online road show video, the company stressed that it’s not just another online travel agency, but a technology company. It believes it can out-innovate many other companies, because it isn’t busy managing call centers or flying planes.

But as a customer-facing service, why doesn’t it need call centers?

Kayak CTO and co-founder Paul English explained that customer inquiries are handled by engineers, connecting a very close bond between what they are creating and what the customers are saying about it. The complaints aren’t considered resolved until the bug is fixed on the site.

Maybe now that the company is going public, that’s how Kayak will take calls from shareholders, too?

But bankruptcy is not likely one of them.

At the end of trading today, Groupon was down 6.5 percent, or 54 cents, to finish at an all-time low close of $7.77 a share. The Chicago company is now valued at roughly $5 billion, or about a third of what it was worth on its first day as a public company.

However, a complete financial meltdown is far from feasible at this point. At the end of the first quarter, the daily deals giant reported that it had $1.2 billion in cash and was cash-flow positive.

Additionally, the biggest liability it has on its books is “merchant payables,” which is running at less than $600 million, or about half the company’s cash balance. Groupon currently owes that money to retailers that are in the process of running deals with the company.

A bankruptcy would also imply that the company was not able to raise more capital. While it wouldn’t want to at these depressed prices, and it would likely be difficult, Groupon has plenty of equity left to sell.

But none of these factors kept people from speculating that a meltdown was on the horizon.

In a post today on TheStreet.com, which included a rant about a car-washing deal from Groupon, the author concluded in his final paragraph that “it would be a huge surprise if there is not a bankruptcy filing by this time next year from Groupon.” The bankruptcy rumor, which is not even a new one, gained a bit more credence after being mentioned live on CNBC.

However, if you take a closer look, there are more near-term concerns that are likely at the root of the stock collapse.

In a note issued late Tuesday, Citi analyst Mark Mahaney reiterated his “buy” rating on Groupon’s stock, but lowered his price target from $22 to $19 a share. So far, Mahaney said, the company’s growth has been extremely impressive, but there are at least three ongoing debates that must be settled to determine whether it can continue to be a success. He wrote:

1.  Could GRPN’s growth be sustained? 33% Q/Q North America revenue growth in Q1 — due in part to personalization & new products & Mobile — suggests Yes.
2. Could GRPN’s model really scale to the company’s 30% l-t Operating Margin goal? Two consecutive quarters of 50%+ incremental margins, with a similar outlook for Q2, strongly suggest Yes.
3. Could GRPN address its accounting issues? Beefing up its finance staff and Board (CFO of Amex and Vice Chair of Deloitte) suggests Yes.

As the stock continued to slide, a Reuters report suggested the collapse had to do with economic weakness in Europe, where Groupon gets about a quarter of its revenue. Sameet Sinha, an analyst at B. Riley & Co., told the wire service, “Europe is a concern, obviously.” But Mahaney was less concerned about Europe, saying that there’s not much evidence it will cause a material risk to estimates. Rather, he tweaked his price target because of lower 2013 estimates.

Additionally, the stock has not yet stabilized since last week when Eric Lefkofsky, Groupon’s executive chairman and co-founder, said he had stepped back from day-to-day work with the company so he could devote more attention to his venture capital firm, comfortable with that step given the recent additions to Groupon’s executive team.

Groupon is expected to report second-quarter results in late July or early August.

Keep in touch via Facebook, this is critical to your future success. And we’re public now, so can you click on an ad or two when you’re there?

– Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, speaking at Harvard Business School’s “Class Day” event Wednesday

That’s an easy one: Kayak.com.

The travel search company, which has been putting off its plans to go public for more than a year and a half, is now getting ready to pull the trigger, according to sources.

The Norwalk, Conn.-based company is by default one of the prime candidates to go public because it has already filed its paperwork and has been dutifully updating its financial statements with the Securities and Exchange Commission every quarter.

A Kayak spokesperson declined to comment, but the timing is good for a number of reasons.

Not only has Facebook priced at the high end of its range, which makes investors a bit more hungry for tech stocks, but other travel companies have been warmly received by the markets over the past few months.

In December, TripAdvisor spun off from Expedia to become an independently held public company. Since then, the company’s stock has soared, trading at $41 a share, up from $27 a share. Expedia is also trading higher, up 50 percent to $41.10 a share.

Kayak could begin its roadshow as soon as Monday and may be seeking as much as $150 million at a $1 billion valuation, according to CNBC. In its original documents, it said it would raise a minimum of $50 million, which served more as a placeholder than what it was intending on raising.

As recently as last week, it updated its filing to report its first quarter earnings, announcing that it earned $4.1 million on $73.3 million. In the year-ago period, it recorded a lost of $6.9 million on revenues of $52.7 million.

Last month, Kara Swisher reported that Schultz and Accel Partners’ Kevin Efrusy were suddenly stepping down from the Groupon board.

Schultz’s departure was effective immediately, while Efrusy will not be standing for reelection at the company’s annual meeting in June.

In the interview on CNBC, Schultz said, “I only committed to one year. It just so happens that my exit was timed with the problem they had last quarter, and no one should read anything into that.”

When asked whether the company has enough adult supervision, he added: “I have confidence in the board and Andrew, and that’s all I have to say at this time.”

Groupon’s stock has continued a downward spiral after it revised its fourth-quarter results to account for higher than expected returns during the holiday period. Today, the stock is down 1.3 percent, or 13 cents, to trade at $9.94 a share.

At that price, it is worth half as much as at the time of its initial public offering.

On the same day that Schultz and Efrusy announced their departures, Groupon said it planned to appoint both Daniel Henry, CFO of American Express, and Deloitte Vice Chairman Robert Bass. Henry joins immediately, in Schultz’s place.

Activist shareholder Daniel Loeb of Third Point just got an unlikely and powerful ally in his proxy fight against Yahoo: Berkshire Hathaway’s famed Warren Buffett.

In a wide-ranging interview on CNBC this morning, when asked about the controversy, Buffett said about the Silicon Valley Internet giant’s excuse that the addition of a false computer science degree to Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson’s bio was an “inadvertent error”:

“It doesn’t sound like an inadvertent error … If I thought as a director, if I thought that an officer had consistently misstated some fact to me, I think I’d probably do something about it,” said the legendary investor, in part, who also noted he did not know all the facts.

Still, said Buffett: “If you can’t trust the people you’re working with, you’ve got a problem.”

Ziiiiing, because if the sage of Omaha thinks it’s bad, it has moved to worse.

And, indeed it has — earlier today, Loeb lobbed a legal demand for information about Thompson’s hiring and more.

Yahoo’s board is conducting an investigation into the matter, led by independent director Fred Amoroso.

RELATED POSTS:

• Yahoo’s Parting With Thompson Will Be for “Cause” (a.k.a. CSLie)
• Ross Levinsohn’s Yahoo Plan: Back to the Future
• Here’s New Yahoo CEO’s First Note to Troops! (The Leaking-Internal-Memos-to-ATD Policy Remains in Effect As Usual)
• Yahoo Officially Confirms ATD Report on CEO Changes and Proxy Settlement
• Meet the Man I Call “The Hair”: The Video Stylings of Yahoo’s Newest CEO Ross Levinsohn
• Will Thompson’s Ouster Mean a Yahoo-Facebook Patent Settlement Too?
• Exclusive: Yahoo’s Thompson Out; Levinsohn In; Board Settlement With Loeb Nears Completion
• Heidrick & Struggles Slaps Back at Thompson’s Yahoo in Blame Game Over ResuMess
• Is He In or Is He Out? Crunchtime for Scott Thompson at Yahoo.
• Not So Scott Free? Yahoo’s Other Big Shareholder — Cap Re — Leaning Toward Supporting Loeb Over Thompson ResuMess.
• Tech Nation’s Gunn Says She and Yahoo CEO Discussed Their CS Degrees Before 2009 Show (Video and Audio)
• Loeb Calls Again for Thompson Firing From Yahoo, as Former eBay Boss Supports Him
• Place Your Bets: Will Loeb Drop Another Bomb on Yahoo at Vegas Confab Later Today?
• Exclusive: Yahoo Director in Charge of Botched CEO Vetting to Step Down From Board
• CEO Says Sorry to Yahoos for Borked Bio “Distraction” — But Will Mea Culpa Work Without an Apology for Error? (Memo)
• Buffett Comments on Trust Issue in Yahoo CEO BioGate: “You’ve Got a Problem”
• Loeb Lobs Lawsuit, as Expected, at Yahoo’s Borked Bio Mess
• As Yahoo CEO Reaches Out to Top Staff, Board Meets to Weigh “Options” (I.E., Deciding Who Gets to Take the Borked Bio Blame)
• Yahoo Should Expect Incoming Lawsuit Lobbed by Loeb Tomorrow on CEO Hiring
• They Shoot Yahoo CEOs, Don’t They? But Not Without a Really Smoking Gun and a Much Stronger Board.
• Yahoo’s Thompson Asks Employees to “Stay Focused” — Except Not on Him
• In 2009 Interview, Yahoo CEO Does Not Deny He Has a CS Degree, and Calls Himself an “Engineer” (Audio)
• Yahoo’s Board Will “Review” Resume Discrepancy of CEO
• How Did a Phantom CS Degree Get on CEO’s Bio in SEC Filings? Yahoo’s Not Saying.
• Yahoo’s Response on CEO’s Computer Science ResumeGate: “Inadvertent Error”
• Dan Loeb Alleges “Discrepancies” on Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson’s Resume Related to Computer Science Degree

Oh, you surely already saw the Winklevii — the famous twin godlets who did not invent Facebook — on CNBC yesterday, but we had to also shove it up to maintain our 100 percent we’ll-post-whatever-those-goofs-do record.

Next chapter: They are VCs. Everybody laugh. Now, please move along.

Here’s the video, and also our much more favorite one about the social networking loser pair, from “The Simpsons” (thanks for the reminder, BostonInno):

I was a big Clinton and Gore supporter in the 90s … I turned 40 last year and so I figured it was time to make the switch.

– Marc Andreessen, on CNBC, talking about his support for Mitt Romney

What’s so confusing, though, is that Salesforce is still growing like crazy and adding new employees at a relatively fast pace. Faster than ever before, in fact, and yet it still doesn’t need the new building? Apparently, Salesforce can satisfy its office-space needs by sticking with the traditional leases upon which it has relied so far. As Salesforce chief messaging officer Bruce Francis told Reuters: “We are growing now faster than we were growing at the time when we originally made the decision to build the campus. We are going to need space faster than we could build it.”

But the decision is going to add another log on the fire for Salesforce’s critics, who have argued that its shares are too expensive, and that its CEO, Marc Benioff, has no discipline when it comes to controlling expenses.

And they are growing at an alarming clip: Salesforce’s combined annual operating expenses grew 46 percent year over year to $1.8 billion in 2011, or about 80 percent of sales; up from $1.2 billion, or about 74 percent of sales, in 2010. That’s notably faster that the growth in annual sales, which grew 37 percent from $1.7 billion to $2.3 billion. And let’s not forget that Salesforce finished the year with a $35 million operating loss, versus a $97 million operating profit in 2010.

Salesforce defenders would say that deferred billings are really where you look for indications of growth in a cloud-computing company, and that’s fair: Future billings say more about the uptake of a subscription product like Salesforce.com’s primary cloud-based customer-relations management software than revenue that’s already been booked. And to that point, deferred revenue grew 48 percent, or ever so slightly faster than expenses.

Still, none of that helps explain why Salesforce management felt it was: A) justified in spending $278 million on 14 acres of real estate, and going to the expense of hiring architects and contractors; and B) why it no longer thinks it needs it. The purchase felt like a rash decision then, and backing away from the project feels just as rash now.

Anyhow, the news comes on the heels of Salesforce reporting quarterly results that blew by the expectations of analysts and undid much of the negative buzz that emerged in the quarter before that. Benioff made his regular appearance on CNBC’s “Mad Money” with Jim Cramer to talk about it. Cramer is apparently still liking the taste of the Salesforce Kool-Aid. In his remarks, Benioff discloses that Salesforce just closed a big deal with Hewlett-Packard, along with some other monstrously large transactions with other companies. What neither one of them bothers to talk about is the growth in expenses.

(Image courtesy of I Can Has Cheezburger)

According to several sources close to the situation, the Facebook board has been meeting early this afternoon at its Silicon Valley HQ to give the go-ahead to a massive initial public offering.

Facebook is expected to file regulatory documents as early as tomorrow morning for what will certainly be one of the most-watched IPOs in tech in recent years.

Sources also noted the filing could happen after markets closed tomorrow, too.

While sources said the filing time could still change even later this week, that seems unlikely, especially given the furor over every detail — including entirely meaningless ones — about the much hyped Facebook offering.

But it’s finally here and will be much scrutinized.

As I previously reported, the offering is expected to be below an overblown valuation number of $100 billion that has been widely reported and the amount being raised is also less than the $10 billion being bandied about.

I would tell you those numbers if I knew, but the offering has been locked down tight by Facebook — much different than blabbier recent IPOs from Internet companies. (Heeelllloooo, Groupon!)

That’s because Facebook management has been determined to conduct an IPO with as little drama as possible and is seeking to minimize a bubble atmosphere around the event.

(I might start liveblogging the IPO countdown right now, just to ramp up the noise and send CNBC into a frenzy.)

The board of Facebook is chaired by co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who has been the most insistent about conducting the IPO with more deliberation and care.

One notable difference, for certain, has been Zuckerberg’s patience in growing the business before taking Facebook public. Still, it is important to remember that its history has actually been very short in time — the start-up was launched as thefacebook.com from his dorm room at Harvard University in early 2004.

If you are counting, that is only eight years ago.

RELATED POSTS

• In Its First Acquisition as a Public Company, Facebook Buys Social Gifting App Karma
• Zynga’s Stock Tanks After Facebook Fails to Pop
• The Price Is Right: Facebook Closes Near Opening Price
• And We’re Off! Facebook Shares Hit the Nasdaq at a Slight Increase Before Settling Back.
• Hear That?
• $$FB$$ Has Arrived: So Now What?
• Facebook Cheers On Mark Zuckerberg. Wall Street Gets Its Chance Soon.
• The Verdict Is In: Facebook Share Price Set at $38
• How Will Facebook’s Zuckerberg Adapt to Working in the Public Eye?
• Facebook IPO Halo Boosts Social Media Stocks
• How Will Facebook Ring in the IPO? With a Hackathon, Of Course.
• What to Expect When Facebook Is Expecting: Five Predictions for Facebook’s First Public Year
• Facebook Is Still Figuring It Out. Will Advertisers and Investors Wait Around?
• Investors Told Facebook IPO Will Be in $34 to $38 Price Range
• Facebook Roadshow Bloopers (Comic)
• Facebook’s Latest S-1 Amendment: Yep, We’re Still Weak on Mobile
• $FB Is a Buy, Analysts Say
• Facebook’s Road Show Kicks Off Electronically With Zuckerberg in a T-Shirt (Video)
• After Public Offering, Mark Zuckerberg Will Still Control More Than Half of Facebook
• Facebook IPO Docs Could Get Approval This Week, Followed by Road Show With Zuckerberg (No Guarantee on Tie)
• Updated S-1: Facebook’s Yearly Revenue Growth Up 45 Percent, But Down Six Percent From Last Quarter
• SecondMarket Lays Off 10 Percent in Light of Facebook IPO
• SEC Cracks Down on Firms Trading Facebook Pre-IPO Shares
• Tidbits From the Facebook IPO Filing: I’ll Have What SV VCs Marc Andreessen and Jim Breyer Are Having!
• During the IPO Quiet Period, Please Enjoy the D Stylings of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg (Video)
• Facebook’s Ad Business Is a $3 Billion Mystery
• Viral Video: Farewell to the No-IPO Mark Zuckerberg
• Zuckerberg Is the Billion-Share Man: Who Owns What, Who Makes What in the Facebook IPO
• Zuckerberg Tells Investors, “We Don’t Build Services to Make Money”
• Mobile Highlighted as Key Risk Factor (and Opportunity) in Facebook Filing
• Stop All That Poking: Facebook Filing Temporarily Crashes SEC Web Site
• Zynga Accounted for 12 Percent of Facebook’s Revenue in 2011
• Facebook Has 845 Million Users
• On Its Eighth Birthday, Facebook Files to Raise $5 Billion in Massive IPO (Get Your S-1 Here!)
• Go the F**k Back to Sleep, Silicon Valley: Facebook IPO Likely to File Later Today at Earliest
• Dude, Where’s My Facebook IPO Filing? (Ashton’s on Hold!)
• The Quiet Man: Meet the Less-Known Face of the Facebook IPO, CFO David Ebersman
• Facebook Board Meeting Today for Final IPO Okays
• Facebook (Eye)PO: Tracking the Truth of the Biggest Deal of Web 2.0
• Viral Graphic: Visualizing the Facebook IPO
• Is Facebook IPO on Track for Late May?
• IPO Watch: Facebook Hiring Brunswick to Help With Comms for Expected Public Offering
• Complete Facebook coverage

So why did Omega take a position in RIM, when other investment advisory firms are fleeing the company? Brookside Capital Investors, Janus Capital Management and Greystone Managed Investments, for example, have all unloaded their shares in recent months.

In an interview with CNBC this week, Cooperman explained his rationale. Short answer: Omega’s position in RIM is quite small — less than 1 percent of the firm’s total portfolio. And RIM could rise again when it finally gets its new QNX operating system. It’s still got a hell of a user base.

“We think the new operating system is constructive,” Cooperman told CNBC. “RIM has over 70 million users. … There is tremendous intellectual property and the possibility they could resurrect themselves and go on a better track. We took a speculative position.”

In other words, RIM may well be a value purchase right now. So why not make a small bet?

“Hopefully we’ll develop greater conviction after they come out with results in December,” said Cooperman. “We’re hoping they’ve seen the worst.”