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

Botched CEO bio. Activist shareholder. Screwy board of directors. Mix it all together and what do you get?

More legal filings, natch!

This — as I reported this weekend would happen today — from Dan Loeb of Third Point, which is waging a proxy fight against Yahoo.

The aggressive hedge-fund investor — who owns close to 6 percent of Yahoo — recently scored a direct hit by revealing that new CEO Scott Thompson had added a faux degree in computer science to his bio, which somehow made its way into regulatory filings of the Silicon Valley Internet giant.

This, despite a supposed thorough vetting by Yahoo’s board of the former president of eBay’s PayPal payments unit.

Not so much, as it turns out — which is why Loeb is asking for all the information about Thompson’s hiring process and more.

Third Point said it was making a demand “under Section 220(b) of the Delaware General Corporation Law to inspect books and records relating to the hiring of CEO Scott Thompson, the appointment of Patti Hart to the Yahoo! Board, and the selection of Board Members Peter Liguori, John Hayes, Thomas McInerney, Maynard Webb, Jr., and Fred Amoroso.”

And its press release added:

“Third Point believes that Yahoo! shareholders and employees will be best served if the Board accepts responsibility quickly for this latest debacle … We believe that this internal investigation by this Board must not be conducted behind a veil of secrecy and shareholders deserve total transparency.”

Well, it looks like it will eventually be all out in the open, what with all the legal motions flying.

Expect a Yahoo response soon, which sources said will focus on a board investigation — using an outside law firm, and headed by independent director Amoroso.

Here you go on Loeb’s shot today:

Third Point May 7 Demand Letter Release

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

Looks like the software glitch that plagued early versions of the handset — and prompted Nokia to offer replacement devices to consumers affected by it — hasn’t had much of an effect on inventory. The company says that far more consumers have opted to patch their Lumias with the software Nokia has provided than have swapped them for new ones at a local AT&T store.

In other words, if the cyan version of the Lumia 900 is out of stock at AT&T’s online store (as it currently is), it’s because it’s sold out for the time being, not because Nokia is scrambling to update and recertify returned handsets.

“The inventory situation is primarily a function of demand because we are seeing that most customers are opting to keep their units and simply update via Zune,” Nokia spokeswoman Karen Lachtanski told AllThingsD. “So the impact of customer swaps is insignificant. We are producing more devices to satisfy demand as quickly as possible.”

That’s a good sign, indeed. And further evidence that sales are exceeding expectations, as Paul Roth, AT&T’s president of retail sales and service, recently claimed.

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