This is, of course, bad news if you’re in the business of making the commodity Dynamic Random Access Memory chips that go into PCs, servers and smartphones. A state of oversupply coupled with weak demand means the chips command lower prices than they otherwise would. The situation can be good, however, if you’re buying computers, because memory upgrades get cheaper.

The problem, as related by the research firm IHS iSuppli, is a rise in inventories of chips that its analyst Mike Howard describes as “alarming.”

ISuppli measures how much unsold inventory the chipmakers themselves have in their warehouses — which include Micron Technology in the U.S., Elpida in Japan, and the South Korean pair of Samsung and Hynix. The higher the number is, the more intense the downward price pressure becomes.

The stockpile of DRAM chips as of the end of the third quarter of 2011 stood at 12.8 weeks, which is nearly a third higher than it had been three months earlier and double what it was in early 2010. It’s also a lot higher than the typical average of 9.2 weeks.

There are a lot of factors creating the glut. Tablets like the iPad and Kindle Fire are eating into notebook sales, and don’t require nearly as much DRAM as notebooks do. And new operating systems don’t require the incremental boost in onboard memory as had been typical.

Nor is the economic uncertainty caused by the sovereign debt crisis in Europe helping. Flooding in Thailand has also disrupted the supply of hard drives which has in turn affected the overall demand for PCs and servers. Computer makers who can’t get hard drives simply won’t build as many computers, and thus won’t be buying the DRAM they otherwise would be.

Something similar happened in 2008 when the global recession sapped computer demand and caused a pileup of DRAM chips that lasted nine quarters. This cycle could turn out to be worse, iSuppli says.

Overall, iSuppli reckons the market for DRAM chips was worth about $6 billion in the fourth quarter of 2011, down by 11 percent from the prior quarter, and it’s only heading further south. The worst, Howard says, is apparently yet to come.

If the economy turns upward, or even is perceived to be on the mend, the glut can work its way down pretty quickly. In 2009 the stockpile dropped by more than half over three quarters.

And if it seems obvious that these chip companies should just stop making DRAM and let demand catch up with supply, it’s actually not that easy. Chip factories, or fabs, contain billions of dollars worth of manufacturing equipment running processes that are difficult to stop and start. Also, it’s more expensive to have them sitting there doing nothing but depreciating than turning out a product that brings in revenue, even if it’s running at break-even or a slight loss.

Groupon has priced its public offering at $20 a share, several dollars above the expected price range of $16 to $18. That will garner $700 million for the start-up, which is only several years old, at a valuation of close to $13 billion.

The offering for the Chicago-based daily deals site — which has had a controversial IPO process — was well upwards of 10 times oversubscribed, meaning there was a lot more demand than supply of its stock.

To alleviate the difference, Groupon has apparently added five million more shares to its offering, totaling 35 million shares sold.

Groupon has endured an unusual amount of criticism over a variety of issues — including accounting treatments, executive turmoil and growth prospects. But investors did not seem to mind all the noise and clamored to get into a possibly lucrative IPO.

The relatively small float of shares — about six percent of total — and that intense interest allowed Groupon to cherry pick its new shareholders.

It will be interesting to see if, as it endured loud critics when it was private, if short sellers will pile onto the social buying company now that it is public.

Executives from Groupon, including its CEO Andrew Mason (who has seemed to have gotten a nice haircut and suit for occasion), have been hawking the company — which sells an assortment of discounted services from a variety of local merchants — to investors all over the country over the last several weeks.

The company is set to go public tomorrow under the GRPN ticker on the NASDAQ.

As first noted by Apple 2.0, shipping estimates for the device have dropped to one to three business days, after a long stretch at one to two weeks.

The improvement in ship time comes a little over four months after the U.S. debut of the device and a crush of heavy demand that initially forced Apple to push deliveries out four to five weeks. And it’s a clear indication that iPad production is no longer running tight due to component shortages and a deadly explosion at a Foxconn plant in Chengdu, China, where some of the devices were produced.

That bodes well for Apple’s financials going forward, since the company has been selling iPads pretty much as fast as it can make them. As COO Tim Cook said during Apple’s Q2 earnings call, “We sold every iPad 2 we made during the quarter … I wish we could have produced more iPad 2s because there were certainly a lot of people waiting for them.”

The company, which is set to price Wednesday night and begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol LNKD on Thursday, had originally set out to sell 7.84 million shares at $32 to $35 apiece. In an updated filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission Tuesday morning, the company set the range at $42 to $45.

While companies sometimes raise their price ranges by as much as $3 to $4, a $10 increase is very uncommon. It’s a clear sign that investors are jockeying for shares ahead of the offering and are willing to pay far more than the company was originally asking in order to get a piece of the IPO.

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Reports of stock-outs are widespread, coming in from Canada,  Germany, Australia, and Great Britain, where the iPad 2 evidently sold out in 24 hours. An ATD reader in Paris tells me that both Apple Stores in the city–Opéra and Louvre–were sold out by weekend’s end. Another in the U.K. says Apple’s Regent Street Store–which, ironically, sits across the street from Nokia’s now shuttered flagship shop–had a line “so long I expected to see the Pied Piper at its head” (see video below courtesy of Only Gizmos).

Clearly, demand for the iPad 2 is as “amazing” abroad as it is at home. Which makes you wonder if some of those early sales estimates were a bit too conservative–bullish ones, too.

By providing us with an easy, intuitive way of viewing and editing documents, tablets are reducing printing demand in the consumer and enterprise markets. And by increasing demand for e-books and digital magazines and newspapers, they’re doing the same thing in the commercial printing market as well. In fact, Morgan Stanley expects a decline of up to two percent in printer supplies revenue in 2011 and a two percent to five percent decline in 2012.

“CIOs in the enterprise space already expect to cut spending on printer supplies in 2011,” the research outfit said in a vast new report on the tablet market. “As the installed base of tablets–a digital document viewer that reduces the need to print both standard black and white documents and expensive color presentations–grows, we expect printed page volumes to shrink. What?’s more, 90% of iPad users already believe they would print less with access to work documents on their tablets.”

Given that, it’s no wonder HP is putting so much effort into the TouchPad. If tablets are reducing printing demand across all market strata, its printing business is clearly going to take a hit. What better way to ease that blow than to sell a tablet of its own?

Worth about $7.8 billion, the deal is believed to include liquid-crystal display panels for the next iteration of the iPad, as well as mobile application processors and NAND flash memory chips used for the U.S. company’s iPhones and iPads.

One unknown: Whether the displays reportedly included in this deal are the rumored Super PLS panels that offer not just a wider viewing angle, but superior visibility outdoors. Another: Whether this deal is somehow related to the $3.9 billion component supplies and capacity contract Apple COO Tim Cook mentioned during Apple’s first-quarter earnings call.

“In the past several quarters we’ve identified another area and come to some recent agreements that [CFO Peter Oppenheimer] talked about in his opening comments, in that these payments consist of prepayments and capital for process equipment and tooling,” Cook said back in January. “And similar to the flash agreements, they’re focused in that area we feel is very strategic. And so I’d prefer not to go into more detail about what specific area it’s in, but it’s the same kind of thinking that led us to those deals that led us to the flash deal.”

PREVIOUSLY: Apple Using Cash to Secure Cache of Components

“Our proprietary checks in Apple’s supply chain suggest slight increases to our production forecasts for CY1Q11,” Fidacaro said in a note to clients today. “Our read on CDMA iPhone production shows a ramp up from prior forecasts and positive revisions for the GSM iPhone as well. Early indications from the Verizon presale of the CDMA iPhone were [also] strong. Thus, we are raising our iPhone shipment estimates substantially.”

Fidacaro had been looking for Apple to ship 17.7 million iPhones in the March quarter and 70.5 million in fiscal 2011. Now he’s forecasting 19.8 million and 76.7 million–a 92 percent increase year-over-year.

That, along with a significant upward revision to his iPad shipment estimates, driven by the presumed debut of iPad 2–32.1 million in fiscal 2011, up from 27.3 million (a 330 percent increase year-over-year)–prompted Fidacaro to raise his price target on Apple to $465 from $445.

Spare change for Apple shares?

While Verizon declined to put a specific number on how many iPhones were allotted for pre-sales, RBC analyst Mike Abramsky estimated it was fewer than 100,000 units.

“Though the quantity of iPhones for the pre-order were very ‘limited,’ likely less than 100k, the stock out on the one day of pre-orders affirms the strong pent-up demand for the Verizon iPhone, and bodes well for initial sell-through,” Abramsky said in a research note on Friday.

For what it’s worth, the company didn’t sell out of whatever unspecified number of devices it had allotted for pre-order until 8 pm ET, although pre-sales were limited to existing Verizon customers. The device goes on sale broadly on Feb. 10 and will be at all company-run Verizon stores, Apple stores and Best Buy locations, as well as at select Wal-Mart stores and through the Verizon and Apple Web sites.

It’s indisputable that Verizon is going to sell a lot of iPhones when the device finally arrives on its network. The question is how many? And the answer is as varied as the research houses trying to pinpoint the number. On the low end, analysts have been calling for nine million, and at the highest end, 12 million.

Until today, when R.W. Baird & Co. analyst William Power reset those parameters with a bullish new potentiality: 23.8 million iPhones sold to Verizon subscribers in the first year.

That’s about double the top end of the range I mentioned (it’s also more than a quarter of Verizon’s current subscriber base). But according to Power–who cautions that this is a “directional number” and not a forecast (there are constraints around how many devices Apple can actually ship)–a recent Baird survey of 1,000 smartphone users supports it. From the survey:

• 29 percent of current Verizon feature phone owners said they will “probably” or “definitely” upgrade to the Verizon iPhone in the next three months. The carrier has roughly 64 million postpaid feature phone users, so that’s 19 million potential iPhone upgrades, assuming eligibility.
• 25 percent of Verizon’s current smartphone users said they will “probably” or “definitely” switch to the iPhone. That’s 4.8 million additional potential iPhone sales, again assuming eligibility.

Grand total: 23.8 million potential Verizon iPhone sales–from the carrier’s installed base alone. Add to that the 5.6 percent of current AT&T iPhone users who told Baird they planned to switch to Verizon and that number rises to nearly 25 million.

Which sounds fantastical, seemingly even to Power, who is standing by his current forecast of 10 million iPhone activations at Verizon. But it does suggest, strongly, that demand could be far greater than anyone has anticipated.

That’s great for Verizon (though perhaps less so for its network) and even better for Apple. Not too bad for AT&T, either. Doesn’t bode well for Android handset makers like Motorola Mobility, though. As CEO Sanjay Jha said during an earnings call yesterday, the company has already seen a slowing of device shipments around news of the Verizon iPhone. “Since the announcement of the iPhone, we have seen some slowdown in our sell through of devices at Verizon,” Jha said. “There was anticipation of devices coming to Verizon even prior the announcement of the iPhone.”

Below, a carrier-by-carrier breakdown of interest in the Verizon iPhone. Each pie chart represents the base of subscribers at each carrier who plan to purchase a smartphone in the next three months. Note: the 25 percent / 29percent numbers above refer to the percentage of the total base of Verizon respondents (i.e. Verizon respondents who plan to purchase a smartphone in the next three months plus those who don’t).

The Santa Clara, Calif., company reported its best year ever in 2010, helped by a surge in demand for tech products after a pullback in spending during the recession. Yet Intel’s shares are up only 3.1% since the end of 2009 as investors have focused on the company’s struggles to expand in the fast-growing mobile arena.

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However, its forecast that it will sell 8.5 million smartphones this quarter may not be enough to satisfy some analysts. According to Reuters, some firms had recently hiked expectations for HTC, predicting the company would sell 9 million smartphones or more. The company sold 9.1 million phones in the December quarter, though of course that includes the seasonally strong holiday period. HTC noted that any drop in the first quarter will be less than typical.

“Demand remains visible and solid,” the company said. “Management expects a relatively muted seasonal slowdown than previous years.”

For the fourth quarter, HTC reported that sales rose to $3.58 billion (104 billion Taiwanese dollars), up from $1.4 billion (41 billion Taiwanese dollars) a year ago, with per-share earnings growing to nearly 63 U.S. cents a share, up from just over 24 cents in the year-ago quarter.

HTC announced a number of new Android devices earlier this month, including the HTC Evo Shift (a lower-priced 4G phone for Sprint), the HTC Thunderbolt for Verizon and a new phone for AT&T that packs more Web-based services direct from HTC.

However, Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster did say it would be helpful to know just how far out Apple plans its products.

Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook wouldn’t say whether Apple plans its products one year out or five years out.

“That’s a part of the magic of Apple,” Cook said. “I don’t want to let anyone know our magic because I don’t want anyone copying it.”

He did say the company is happy both with how it is doing now and with what is to come.

“In my opinion, Apple is doing its best work ever,” he said. “We are all very happy with the product pipeline.”

Cook noted several times how Apple is struggling to keep up with demand for the iPhone. He also said that the company has “unparalelled breadth and depth” among its employees.

“Excellence has become a habit,” Cook said. “We feel very very confident about the future of the company.”

Cook said that despite recent blowout sales, Apple still has just a tiny portion of all computer sales or all phone sales.

“It would seem like there is enormous opportunity still there,” he said.

Update, 3:02 pm PT: Apparently no one wanted to be “that guy” and ask a question related to Jobs’s health. The conference call just ended and Munster’s question was as close to the subject as any analyst was willing to veer. All the rest of the questions were directly product related.

• A lot of iSales: Apple sold 7.3 Million iPads, 16.2 Million iPhones in December Quarter
• Apple’s Earnings Insanely Great

DRAM is the ultimate commodity chip market, and its boom-or-bust cycles are legendary. When demand picks up, manufacturers like Samsung, Hynix and Micron always rush to add manufacturing capacity–prices pick up; chips become scarce.

Everything seemed to be going well for the chip companies until the third quarter of 2010. After five straight quarters where the average price for a DRAM chip increased, it suddenly turned south as demand for notebook PCs slacked. That’s in line with what Gartner and IDC reported yesterday about the PC market.

There’s good news for consumers, however. All that stacked-up inventory has to go somewhere. If you’re planning to buy a notebook this year, the base models will now start shipping with four gigabytes of memory instead of two. And for those who bought a machine with only two in the last year or so, upgrades will be more affordable.

The one bright spot for the memory companies? You got it: Smartphones and tablets. Memory content in phones is expected to increase by nearly two-thirds. And the 57 million tablets that iSuppli expects will ship this year will also need some DRAM. More details here from iSuppli.

Of course, I didn’t let the company’s silence stand in my way and proceeded to bug several executives, asking about it in all sorts of clever ways (okay, maybe not really that clever.). But, of course, Verizon has lots of practice carefully avoiding all mention of the iPhone or Apple, unless referring to a fruit grown in Washington.

I tried asking Chief Marketing Officer Marni Walden whether Verizon’s network will be strong enough to handle a crush of data demand from the iPhone, but she saw right through me.

“I obviously won’t comment on iPhone at all–rumor and speculation here,” she said. That said, she noted that the company has spent $65 billion over the last 10 years on its network to make sure that any device can run smoothly on it.

Okay, I said, but you know the company’s full roadmap for the year–are you sure that your network will be able to handle all those devices, including perhaps some unannounced ones?

“I am confident we have built a network and invested in a network that will continue to provide customers with the best possible experience,” Walden said.

So there you have it. Well, as much of “it” as you are going to get.

But it turns out that the party line extends beyond the employees and all the way down to the Verizon phones themselves. When handed a demo unit of the new Samsung LTE Android phone, I proceeded to do a Google search for Verizon iPhone–I got an error message saying that that page could not be reached (see image). Now that’s what I call good corporate messaging.

With strong global demand for its products and few retail stock-outs over the holidays, Deutsche Bank analyst Chris Whitmore believes the company racked up sales above already lofty expectations. And he raised his estimate on Apple today, following channel checks that revealed better-than-anticipated iPad and Mac demand and unwavering demand for the iPhone–even ahead of an expected Verizon announcement.

Over the holidays, Whitmore’s team checked up on 50-plus Apple Stores and retail partners, and found long lines, heavy store traffic and limited stock-outs at the majority of them.

“Apple continues to benefit from the strongest product offering in its history and the strong double-barreled product cycle is driving massive global demand for iPads and iPhones,” Whitmore said. “Both categories are benefiting from additional carriers, international expansion and limited competition. In addition, while we expect an onslaught of new tablet announcements at CES this year, we do not expect material competition to arrive until the second half of 2011. We have not seen anything that matches Apple’s iOS product suite in terms of form factor, usability, integrated hardware/software and the breadth and depth of the App store.”

Whitmore now expects Apple to sell 60 million iPhones in calendar 2011, up from 55 million. And that’s without a Verizon iPhone. With it, he says, iPhone sales should rise by another five million to seven million units. “We expect a CDMA based iPhone to be a significant positive for AAPL with limited cannibalization at AT&T,” he said. “Our DB colleague Brett Feldman, who covers Telecom Services, estimates that Verizon will add roughly 15M iPhones in 2011 with 6M cannibalized from AT&T.”

Driven by the steady proliferation of multitouch smartphones and tablets–one in particular–the worldwide touchscreen industry will probably see 30 percent year-over-year growth in 2010 by the time the year is over. So says NPD DisplaySearch, which figures suppliers shipped 6.3 million tablet/mini-note touchscreens in the first half of 2010 and more than 20 million in the second half. Quite the upward trend and one that we’ll almost certainly see continue next year as the iPad juggernaut rolls on, more Android tablets arrive at market and consumer and enterprise demand for all of them grows. Wintek and TPK Touch Solutions have a lot to look forward to next year.

Richard Blumenthal and the Connecticut Department of Consumer Protection last week issued a civil investigative demand–the equivalent to a subpoena–for data collected by Google’s Street View vehicles. Friday was the deadline to comply with the demand.

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Apple has not yet responded to a request for comment.

In court papers filed Friday, the company demanded SAP pay it $212 million in interest on top of the $1.3 billion in damages it was awarded in the TomorrowNow lawsuit. Should Oracle’s demand be approved, SAP’s total penalties would rise to $1.63 billion.

SAP, which argued in court that it should be held liable for no more than $28 million, clearly has no plans to pay Oracle the interest to which it says it’s entitled.

Said an SAP spokesman, “We don’t believe that Oracle is entitled to any additional compensation beyond the final judgement in this case.” 

Reached for comment, Oracle declined to give one.

PREVIOUSLY:

• Oracle-SAP Verdict: SAP Owes Oracle $1.3 Billion
• Oracle-SAP: Closing Statements Followed by Closing Insults
• Oracle-SAP Case Closes With $1.67 Billion Difference of Opinion
• LOLCatz: Safra on The Stand Again in Oracle-SAP Trial
• Plattner and White No-Shows at Oracle-SAP Trial
• Damages Expert to SAP: You Owe Me $14 Million and Oracle Four Times That
• Oracle, SAP and the Apotheker Sideshow
• Better Late: SAP Co-CEO Apologizes for Oracle IP Theft
• SAP Co-CEO Expected to Testify in Oracle Trial Today
• HP to Oracle: Leave Léo Alone
• Oracle Still Hoping to Snag HP’s Apotheker for SAP Trial
• HP CEO to Oracle: Here’s Looking at You, Kid–Suntory Time!
• Ellison to Self: Damn, Damn. I Knew I Should Have Said $4.5 Billion
• SAP Attorney: Board Knew TomorrowNow Was Infringing at Time of Acquisition
• Oracle Co-President on SAP’s Damages Offer: “It’s Crazy”
• Oracle Enlists Process Servers, Not PIs, to Find HP CEO
• Oracle-SAP Trial: Ellison Swaps Katana for Poison Darts
• Objection: Mr. Ellison Is Referring to the Defendant as “Choleric of Temper” Again
• Oracle Lands Early Shots in SAP Trial
• Your Honor, We Object to Mr. Ellison’s Repeated Use of the Term “Slimy Weasels”
• Oracle to HP CEO: Chicken!
• Oracle Vs. SAP: We Got a Right to Pick a Little Fight–Bonanza!
• SAP’s Tab in Oracle Case: $120 Million and Counting
• Gag Order Denied in Oracle, SAP Trial
• Ellison Taunts HP CEO a Second Time
• SAP to Ellison: Save the Drama for Your Mama
• Ellison to HP CEO: “Warrior, Come Out to Plaaeeay!
• SAP: Please Gag Oracle
• HP Scandal Sucks in New York Times Columnist Over Conflict of Interest
• Welch to HP Board: You Don’t Know Jack!
• Insiders Criticize Ellison For HP CEO Slam
• Was Apotheker HP’s First Choice of CEO?
• HP Names Ex-SAP Chief Apotheker as CEO

According to AFP, an Indian government minister told Parliament on Friday that no solution has been reached in the standoff.

RIM faces a January 31 deadline to meet the country’s demand for a way to monitor communications.

In a statement on Friday, RIM said it is still “fully cooperating” with the Indian government and remains “confident that any outstanding concerns between RIM and the Government of India can be resolved to our mutual satisfaction.”

RIM said it is still pushing to have the security concerns handled on an industrywide basis rather than seeing itself singled out, and it repeated its statement that it won’t create “special deals” for specific countries and that it can’t share the data its business customers encrypt, even if it wanted to.

And we’ve just added an exciting new speaker to the already top-drawer list: Daniel Ek, co-founder and CEO of Spotify.

For those living under a rock, Ek (pictured here with co-founder Martin Lorentzon) leads one of the most exciting music services on the Web right now.

In fact, the Swedish entrepreneur is shaking up how and where people listen to and consume music.

As MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka–who will be interviewing Ek onstage–recently wrote of Spotify’s efforts to bring its hugely popular (and legal) streaming offering to the U.S. market:

In Europe, where Spotify has been a very big success, listeners can stream an unlimited amount of music, on demand, without ever paying a cent. But in the U.S., rival streaming services like Rhapsody, MOG and Napster generally only offer a very brief trial period of a few days before requiring that a pay wall go up.

For the past two years, Spotify has insisted that free, unlimited streaming is the only way the service will work, because that’s Spotify’s most effective marketing technique. Subscribers who do pay up get benefits like ad-free music, and the ability to port their songs to mobile devices like iPhones.

But the labels, most notably Warner Music Group, have insisted that unlimited free streams only serve to strip away their product’s remaining value–if you can listen for free on Spotify, why would you ever buy another CD or iTunes single?

The whole mobile music space is a riveting one to dive into, of course, and we think Ek is the perfect person to help us do so.

Ek will appear Tuesday morning, December 6, but D: Dive Into Mobile opens on Monday, December 6, with an evening onstage interview with Google Android majordomo Andy Rubin.

The new conference represents the very first brand extension of our D: All Things Digital conference, now in its ninth year of grilling the big names in tech and media to sold-out analog audiences and scores more on the Web.

And, as always, there will be no PowerPoints, no panels and definitely no pontificating.

What there will be are unrehearsed, unscripted and unexpected interviews with top players, taking a big-picture view of the broader digital landscape.

But, unlike big D, D: Dive Into Mobile is topic-focused, drilling down deeply into the ubiquity of mobile technology and devices, and its implications for brands, organizations and consumers worldwide.

Offering a more intimate and focused conference setting, D: Dive Into Mobile will feature other industry heavyweights, including: Dan Hesse, President and CEO of Sprint Nextel; Mike Lazaridis, co-CEO of Research in Motion; Mike McCue, CEO of Flipboard; Joe Belfiore, Vice President of Windows Phone Program Management at Microsoft; Jon Rubinstein of Palm, now owned by Hewlett-Packard; Foursquare CEO and co-founder Dennis Crowley; Google Ad Products Management head Susan Wojcicki; and AT&T Emerging Devices President Glenn Lurie.

D: Dive Into Mobile will be held at the Ritz-Carlton in San Francisco and, as usual, we’ll be liveblogging the whole thing and also posting highlight videos.

Along with Walt Mossberg, Kafka and I, Mossberg Solution’s Katherine Boehret will be conducting the interviews.

You can sign up here for D: Dive Into Mobile.

Microsoft’s Kinect videogame motion sensor passed the one-million-sold milestone after just 10 days at market. And now, 15 days later, it’s passed another: 2.5 million sold in 25 days.

That’s 100,000 units sold per day.

Evidently, already strong demand for the device grew stronger still over the Black Friday weekend, so much so that there’s little doubt that Microsoft will hit the aggressive sales forecast it set for the device at launch. Said Don Mattrick, president of Microsoft’s Interactive Entertainment Business, “With sales already exceeding two and a half million units in just 25 days, we are on pace to reach our forecast of 5 million units sold to consumers this holiday.”

Below, video of Microsoft showing off Kinect at D8.