Last night, Yahoo’s board gathered for a pre-meeting dinner, a precursor to a day-long meeting today to weigh several bids from private equity firms to buy part of the Silicon Valley Internet giant, including Silver Lake and TPG Capital.

Among the thorniest of issues will be the low price that the firms want to pay for a 19.9 percent stake in the company. Silver Lake has offered $16.50 and TPG a dollar more.

In the past year, Yahoo share prices have seen a low of $11.09 and a high of almost $19. It closed yesterday at $15.70 — a price that is mostly due to sale rumors — making the offers not much of a gain on current market valuation.

The transaction type being contemplated is called a PIPE — or a Private Investment in Public Equity — with the investment below 20 percent, which allows Yahoo to avoid a shareholder vote on the issue.

While the Yahoo board had hoped for bids above $20, they are not expected to be forthcoming, considering the weakness in its business over recent years and the difficulty of returning it to health and growth.

Results in its upcoming quarter, for example, are expected to be weak again, with trouble in its advertising business, largely due to uncertainty around the business.

The low price, along with the attempt to bypass shareholder approval, is sure to infuriate Yahoo’s major investors, given they have watched the value of their stakes wilt over the years under current board management.

In the last five years, due to continually muddled leadership and the missing of key Internet trends, Yahoo shares have dropped 44 percent in value, which compares with huge gains from companies like Amazon and others.

Major Yahoo stakeholders are already irked by the PIPE idea itself, which could transfer power to private equity firms at preferential terms.

Another possible bone of contention will be the preservation of at least some parts of Yahoo’s current board.

Under a plan by Silver Lake, for example, it would get three board seats, as well as another one for a CEO of its choosing. Another seat will go to Yahoo co-founder and current board member Jerry Yang. There will be six independent board members, but it is not clear if they would be new or include some current directors.

One of the Silver Lake choices would be well-known Silicon Valley legend Marc Andreessen, who is now a powerful VC. The appeal of Andreessen is important to some major shareholders who have turned sour on Yang.

Who will be CEO of the rejiggered entity will also be discussed at the meeting. Sources said Silver Lake and TPG have definite candidates in mind and Yahoo has also been conducting an official search.

In other words, there’s a lot on the plate of Yahoo’s board today, which also needs to revisit continued proposals from its Asian partners — China’s Alibaba Group and SoftBank of Japan — to sell back its stakes in Alibaba and Yahoo Japan in various tax-free schemes.

Sources said Yahoo — which has thus far rejected such efforts — might now consider selling a part of their shares back, up to half. This would allow the company to give a cash dividend to its disgruntled shareholders.

If thwarted, as has been previously reported ad nauseum, Alibaba and SoftBank are considering their own bid with the help of other U.S. private equity firms, such as Blackstone.

Other PE firms — especially ones who have not signed Yahoo’s non-disclosure agreement related to any deal — are also hanging under the hoop, so to speak, to see what happens. At least one firm hopes the Yahoo board will reject the low-priced partial bids, leaving the court wide open again.

“It’s still anyone’s game,” said one possible bidder.

Except for Yahoo’s put-upon employees and shareholders, this is anything but fun. More on that soon.

According to multiple sources close to the situation, Groupon plans to conduct its road show for investors next week, starting either on Monday or Tuesday.

While the decision to move forward could still change, it comes amid continued criticism of the Chicago-based daily deals company, which has had one of the rougher IPO processes for an Internet company in recent memory.

Just yesterday, the New York Times took aim at Groupon and its Wall Street bankers, retreading over the same list of issues, including controversial accounting, a too-large payout to its founders and issues around its marketing costs.

In addition, the social buying service has had some management turnover, with two COOs departing.

Lastly, it has amended its S-1 filing several times, for a variety of reasons, including an email to employees by its CEO Andrew Mason that struck regulatory agencies as a bit blabby.

That said, the initiation of the road show — where company execs will pitch its business to possible shareholders — might be an indication that Groupon’s results have improved in its recent quarter.

In the last quarter, the company lost $102.7 million on revenue of $878 million.

Also of concern is the stock market itself. Groupon, like several Web IPO candidates, had delayed its offering due to turbulent conditions.

Now, sources said, the company will go public on the Nasdaq exchange soon after the road show is complete and after pricing by its bankers.

That valuation will also be under scrutiny. Some had previously estimated that Groupon would have an IPO of up to $25 billion. Now it could be half that, sources said.

Well, we will presumably soon see, as Groupon plans to proceed.

In the end — the bitter end, that is — there really is no good time to fire someone.

But the timing of the ouster of Carol Bartz as CEO of Yahoo is one of the more curious things about the corporate mishegas at the Silicon Valley Internet giant of late.

That included drastically moving up the clock on Bartz, which was not part of a plan until recently. In fact, several sources were told only last month by Yahoo board members that evaluation of her status — her contract ended at the beginning of 2013 — would not take place until the end of 2011.

That obviously changed.

And, because it is Yahoo — which never met a crisis situation it could not hopelessly complexify — there are numerous and conflicting accounts about the reasons it was done so quickly and abruptly.

They include the board’s feeling that Bartz had not responded to their requests for a credible strategic plan; worries that she would not ever meet annual performance goals, including improving its stock price; upcoming weak third-quarter numbers, which will continue a troublesome downward trend in Yahoo’s key advertising business; and, perhaps most intriguingly, the need to make a move before it was revealed that another activist investor, this time Third Point’s Daniel Loeb, had decided to target Bartz and the Yahoo board.

One thing is certain: The firing of Bartz was messier than it needed to be, mostly because several sources said she was caught unawares.

“She did not know it was happening, even if she probably should have seen it coming,” said one person familiar with the situation. “And she had no allies at the company to warn her, either.”

Indeed, at the time Bartz was fired over the phone by Chairman Roy Bostock — who had until late this summer been her fervent supporter — she was set to appear at a high-profile Citigroup investor conference in New York.

“It had to happen then, because you can’t put a CEO in front of investors and analysts and then fire her soon after,” said one person close to the situation.

Actually, former Yahoo CEO Terry Semel stepped down only days after appearing at the company’s annual meeting and telling the gathering he was in for the long haul.

The Loeb problem also played a part. According to several sources, while Loeb did not surface until after Bartz’s firing, several directors and Silicon Valley players were aware of his plans to target Yahoo.

While Loeb was not the more heavyweight threat that activist investor Carl Icahn had been in the past, sources said he was planning to call for Bartz’s firing, as well as a board re-do.

The large part of the reason for letting her go finally, of course, centered on not meeting performance goals set by the board.

While the overhaul of a hairball of systems and a rejiggering of staff was quickly done by the longtime and experienced manager, the turnaround and renewed product innovation promised by Bartz was slow in coming.

In addition, advertising sales results had worsened and recent quarterly reports showed little progress.

To remedy the situation, directors had asked Bartz to present a strategic plan earlier this year, which she did with the help of top execs. It further underscored the idea of Yahoo as a top-level digital media company.

But the board pressed for more details and felt Bartz was not the right exec to carry out the kind of dramatic renewal of Yahoo that is needed.

Looming, too, was the third-quarter earnings results on October 18, which sources said will show continued weakness at Yahoo.

For that, it’s likely the fired Bartz will get the blame, giving the board — which is also being criticized by large shareholders and others — a bit of breathing room as it figures out what to do next.

In other words, with no good news to report, the Yahoo board decided to deliver some bad news to Bartz.

(In related news, according to an 8-K filing by the company, interim Yahoo CEO and also CFO Tim Morse got a small bump in base salary from $600,000 to $750,000, effective September 15, 2011.)

And here is a video I did on WSJ.com’s Digits show yesterday about the buyer interest in Yahoo I previously wrote about, as well as its weak board:

Demand Media handily beat Wall Street expectations in its first quarter results today, released after the market closed.

The company reported revenue of $79.5 million and six cents a share in adjusted net income.

Investors were expecting the company to report about $69.6 million in revenue for the three months, with four cents a share in adjusted profits.

On a GAAP basis, the net loss per share was 13 cents compared to 94 cents a year ago.

The decent results could boost Demand’s stock, which has been hit hard since Google launched “Panda,” an overhaul of its search algorithm to improve results and remove poor quality content.

In a conference call at 2 pm PT today, which BoomTown will be liveblogging, most will be paying more mind to what the online content company’s top execs–especially CEO Richard Rosenblatt–have to say about the impact of the updates from Google to Demand’s various Web offerings.

As a first strike, some of Demand’s execs briefed the media earlier today on efforts to improve the quality of its content–you can read the official press releases here on that and also here.

In them, Demand said it will remove some online posts that were substandard and created under a now-suspended writers’ compensation system. It said it is also improving reader feedback tools and adding more substantive stories to its sites.

Those are all good ideas, since Google’s tweaks have been chewing away at a range of Web sites–such as those owned by Demand–which rely heavily on search engine optimization to bring in huge traffic.

One big hit for Demand, due to Panda, has been to its flagship eHow site.

All the mishegas has hurt the Santa Monica, Calif., company’s stock. It’s down just over 30 percent since Demand’s IPO in late January, as bearish investors fret over the implications of Panda.

Still, in its report, Demand said its content and media revenue was up 72 percent to $51.9 million, compared to $30.2 million last year.

While no one inside or outside Myspace owner News Corp. expects fireworks and giant piles of money, the tire-kicking for the long-troubled social-networking-turned-entertainment site actually starts Wednesday.

That’s when about a dozen interested parties will finally get a walk-through of the books and more by management and the serious talks begin.

But, said several sources, despite a variety of reports of various interested buyers, no deal for the Beverly Hills, Calif.-based Myspace is imminent with any one of them.

Instead, most expect some kind of outcome within two weeks at the earliest.

Among the possibilities is anything from an outright sale to partnership that continues to involve News Corp., which has engaged Allen & Co. to conduct the sad proceedings.

Among those in the fray are, as has been reported, music video network Vevo, owned by several media giants. It is the most prominent strategic suitor for Myspace.

But talks with Vevo are preliminary, as are all others.

In fact, most of the others interested are as expected: moneybag private equity players, such as Providence Equity Partners and Silver Lake Partners. Both have been in discussions with News Corp. in earlier efforts to offload Myspace.

Interestingly, Criterion Capital Partners, which bought AOL’s Bebo social networking site for less than $10 million last June, is not in the bidding as yet.

Neither is Zynga, the San Francisco casual gaming start-up. Various stories had rumored of its interest in Myspace, but they are inaccurate. In addition, neither AOL nor Yahoo seem likely bidders either.

And it goes without saying that the Silicon Valley social networking site that did Myspace in–Facebook–is also not a buyer. So too Google, which–back in the headier days–handed Myspace a fortune as part of an ill-advised advertising deal.

In any case, whoever buys Myspace needs a lot of patience, which seems to have run out at News Corp., where top execs take turns bashing it to shareholders.

That’s no surprise. After a laudable though glacial redesign as a music and entertainment hub last fall, traffic has declined 44 percent in a recent month from a year ago, to 37.7 million unique visitors in the U.S.

Worse still, the News Corp. unit that houses Myspace showed an operating loss of $156 million in the recent quarter, mostly related to a severe drop-off of advertising revenue at the site.

That plunge in fortunes will surely have an impact on the price buyers are willing to pay for the once iconic brand.

(Full disclosure: News Corp. also owns Dow Jones, which owns this site.)

BoomTown always enjoys the maiden voyage of a newly public company, so liveblogging Demand Media’s first quarterly earnings seems like a must-do.

It’s also the first public outing for CEO Richard Rosenblatt, who has sold off his previous entrepreneurial efforts.

And it seems like a good start, as the Santa Monica, Calif.-based online content company, which had its IPO in late January, finally out to rest some controversy about how much is actually earns by posting $1 million in net income in the last three months of 2010.

Okay, that is a weensy amount, to be sure, but it beat expectations, as well as for revenue, with sales of $73.6 million for the fourth quarter.

Of course, Demand wants Wall Street to look at “Adjusted OIBDA” results, which was up 88 percent, and which it is a much prettier $20.1 million in earnings.

Also on deck, as MediaMemo’s Peter Kakfa noted today:

“Expect to hear at least one riff on whether or not the company feels threatened by Google and changes the search engine is making to push “content farms” out of its results. CEO Richard Rosenblatt insists that his company is not a content farm, and that Google is just fine with his stuff, but I have a feeling the issue won’t go away just yet.”

We’ll see–here we go:

2:05 pm PT: It took me a bit to get into this conference call, since I could not get the live broadcast from the Web site at all and the teleconference operators were snoozing.

And I tuned in just as Rosenblatt (pictured here) was talking about how Demand was helping people get information about how to ripen avocados.

No, really.

(Memo to self: Curb the snotty journalist tone, especially since I love me a good, ripe avocado.)

Rosenblatt, who seems only a little nervous, pressed on by talking about its massive eHow site, as well as Cracked.com and other major branded sites Demand has.

The latest is TypeF women’s health and beauty site, which is guided by supermodel Tyra Banks.

Rosenblatt then linked it all to advertisers and how much they want to spend on sites like this.

“We are not limited to just a few key verticals,” he said, touting its sales staff, including Rosenblatt’s daring raid of Chief Revenue Officer Joanne Bradford from Yahoo.

“The company is well positioned to capture an increasing share of brand revenue,” said Rosenblatt.

2:18 pm: Rosenblatt then zeroed in on the juicy issues, which center around the quality of the content Demand churns out.

Or, as critics have argued, lack of quality.

“The level of specificity is arcane to some,” noted Rosenblatt, using the example of flying paper lanterns and how to make a roof rake as examples of the kind of niche content Demand produces.

Arcane is right, but it takes all kinds!

Plus, insisted Rosenblatt, it’s good! Accurate! Edited! Useful!

He took the gloves off here, which made me want a Demand piece about taking care of leather gloves (linseed oil?).

“We’re just getting started,” said Rosenblatt, about the company and not the glove care tips.

2:24 pm: The CEO turned it over to the CFO, Charles Hilliard, which meant I was off on my critical Web search about taking care of my gloves.

That’s because he immediately said: “Adjusted OIBDA.”

Which-let’s be honest–sounds like a communicable disease.

Essentially, said Hilliard, it’s up, up, up for Demand, in terms of revenue, earnings, page views and more.

You can read all these gory financial details in the press release here.

For some reason, Hilliard is using the retail term, “same store sales,” as a comparison. I covered retails for years, so it is a surprise for this to be the metaphor, but Demand obviously sees itself as a content store.

2:39 pm: Q&A time and the Google-fights-spam question came first!

Rosenblatt said he welcomed it and appeared unconcerned. His avocado-ripening, roof-rake-making, flying-lantern company needed to make no excuses!

The next question is about expansion, including internationally. Sure, Western Europe.

Then, a sneaky follow-up on content farms.

“We consider ourself very white hat,” declared Rosenblatt.

I wonder what the best way to clean a white hat is?

Voila! It’s right here on eHow:

“1. Wash your white hat in the washing machine if it is made of cotton or polyester. Just add laundry detergent and one cup of bleach. Wash the hat using the hot water setting. Do not put the hat in the dryer. The hat will shrink and then it won’t fit your head.”

Call the Pulitzer Prize committee!

(Wait, snotty again! I also love clean, white hats.)

I was so riveted by the white-hat thing, I completely missed the next question, but tuned in again to one about revenue momentum.

Essentially, Bradford–who looks great in a white hat, I might add–is on the case.

Then some internal technical questions and about guidance for Q1. CFO Hilliard said that the company was guiding for growth, despite more public company expenses.

(Needless to say, you can find out about how to run a public company here on eHow.)

The last question was about how much branded advertising will make up total revenue. Between five and 10 percent of 2010, said Hilliard, but it is the fastest category of growth.

And also one about curation of content and use of social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter for feedback.

Rosenblatt said that feedback can even become content, which will be part of new eHow redesign to come.

Want some tips on that? Of course, Demand Media has the answer, at least to this easy question.

In a bold and definitive move, AOL is paying $315 million, mostly in cash, to buy the Huffington Post, one of the Web’s most prominent news and opinion sites.

As part of the deal, Huffington Post co-founder Arianna Huffington (pictured here)–who was derided by some when she co-founded the left-leaning site in 2005 with investor and well-known communications exec Kenneth Lerer–will become president and editor in chief of the Huffington Post Media Group within AOL.

The deal was signed late this afternoon, and the board of directors of each company and shareholders of the privately held Huffington Post have approved the transaction.

In an exclusive video interview BoomTown conducted earlier today in Dallas, just before Super Bowl XLV, both Armstrong and Huffington were jovial that the whirlwind deal, begun in November, actually worked out so quickly.

Perhaps giddy, they hit upon a common motto:

“One plus one equals 11.”

Get it? One and one next to each other is the number 11!

Let’s move on, shall we?

AOL said it is expected to close in the late-first or early-second quarter of 2011.

Once culminated, it will put Huffington in charge of all AOL content and other properties, including well-known names such as Engadget, Moviefone, MapQuest and TechCrunch.

She said she plans to move to New York from Los Angeles, although she will also maintain her longtime Brentwood home there.

And content for all these sites will be integrated deeply into the Huffington Post, giving it a huge new infusion of editorial material.

More to the point, the flashy acquisition–which essentially came together in less than two weeks in January–will become the linchpin of AOL CEO Tim Armstrong’s aggressive, if risky, strategy to focus the long-troubled company as a content and advertising powerhouse.

For AOL, the deal gives it a popular branded site that is very good at generating lots of page views and impressions very efficiently–which is the company’s whole thrust these days.

That means lots more ad inventory to sell and an injection of content talent, giving AOL the scale it desperately needs.

The move also obviously gives AOL a much-needed editorial identity and cohesion, which it doesn’t really have.

In fact, many think AOL needs a rallying point to bring clarity to its hodgepodge of recent acquisitions that all center on the notion that a strong company has yet to emerge in the premium content space.

Here is a mock-up of the front page of AOL tonight (click on it to make it larger):

While it all makes for a riveting narrative by the charming Armstrong, AOL still has not delivered the business turnaround promised after its spinoff from Time Warner in 2009.

Wall Street, which has given Armstrong a lot of rope, has become more impatient of late to see results–especially more robust increases in its display advertising business, as its access business dies off–after AOL spun off from Time Warner in 2009.

In its quarterly report last week, AOL reported earnings of 61 cents a share on revenue of $596 million.

But, as MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka wrote:

The bigger picture is that Armstrong’s turnaround is still in progress. Ad revenue was down 29 percent in the last quarter, although that number is worse than it looks. A big chunk of the decline comes from moves AOL has intentionally made that will cut revenue in the short run in return for more profitable sales down the road.

A more representative data set for Armstrong are his display ad sales, which are down 14 percent overall and eight percent in the U.S..

The bad news is that the rest of the Web ad industry is well into rebound mode; the good news is that AOL has trained Wall Street to expect numbers like these. If you’re waiting to see positive sales numbers, Armstrong said during AOL’s earnings call this morning, wait until the second half of this year.

In any case, the move is a good one for the Huffington Post since it will vault it to the next level of growth.

Other companies, such as Yahoo and NBC Universal, had looked at the company as a purchase target, and many expected it to eventually sell out to a larger company.

Sources close to the Huffington Post said that that outcome seemed the most likely, and the recent expansion of the site and its audience made it a good time to do a deal now.

Talks with Yahoo last year went nowhere, sources said, but Armstrong was not as slow to act.

Indeed, the actual deal happened quickly, said Armstrong and Huffington in a video interview with BoomTown earlier today (which you can see here).

The pair started talking in early November of last year at the Quadrangle Conference in New York and continued their discussions through the holidays.

Armstrong made the official offer to Huffington by phone in January, while she was at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and he was snowed in in New York.

Five time multiple to the Huffington Post’s upward of $60 million in expected revenue for the coming year, and nearly 10 times the $31 million for 2010, the offer was accepted quickly.

AOL used cash for $300 million of the purchase and $15 million in stock for the rest.

“The idea of turning a fire hose of traffic onto our content made enormous sense,” said one person close to the situation. “Everything is changing so fast, it seemed like the time was right.”

An IPO was also considered for the Huffington Post, sources said. But since the site only recently moved into profitability–although barely–such an event would have been farther out.

That’s despite the fact that the Huffington Post has seen fast-growing traffic and influence, spurred in part by Huffington’s larger-than-life persona in both the mainstream media and blogosphere.

The wide-ranging site–which has added a number of content areas in recent years beyond its flagship political offering–currently has almost 26 million unique monthly visitors, according to recent stats, moving in close range to established news organizations such as the New York Times.

That kind of success seemed unlikely when the Huffington Post launched on May 9, 2005, positioning itself as as a liberal counterweight to the popular right-leaning Drudge Report.

But the Huffington Post’s heady mix of celebrity bloggers, personality and voice, as well as aggressive curation of links from other sites, quickly caught on.

To fund its efforts, the New York-based online media company has raised $37 million from angel investors such as Lerer–the largest individual shareholder, followed closely by Huffington–and venture firms such as Greycroft Partners, Softbank Capital and Oak Investment Partners.

The growth has not been without controversy around issues such as lack of payments to bloggers who contribute and accusations that the site uses too much content from other Web sources when linking.

And Huffington herself has also been a lightning rod, which has been both positive and negative for the site.

But, there is no question she is one of the Web’s most prominent players, along with writing books, appearing on television frequently and being a fixture at high-profile events in New York, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.

That includes a never-ending panoply of parties that feature a potent mix of movie stars, corporate poo-bahs, glad-handing politicians and lots of journalists from all over the media.

In fact, full disclosure, I was at one of those parties this past weekend for actor Colin Firth and others involved in the making of the Oscar-nominated film “The King’s Speech.” (Apropos of nothing, actor Helena Bonham Carter is as smart as you would expect, but much more delicate.)

As part of the AOL deal, CEO Eric Hippeau–who has been integral to professionalizing the business and will be joining Lerer Ventures–and Chief Revenue Officer Greg Coleman will leave the Huffington Post.

Ironically, Coleman was replaced by Armstrong as head of ad sales at AOL after he took over as CEO. Coleman got a big payout and will now apparently get another.

But the rest of the 200 Huffington Post employees are moving over to AOL with Huffington, who Armstrong hopes will be the company’s ace in the content hole going forward.

There are likely to be changes to come too at AOL, within weeks, especially in its content-side management and site staffs.

AOL provided some quotes in support of the deal from prominent Internet figures who know Huffington well.

“Arianna is one of the preeminent authors and editors of our time, and Tim has a remarkable track record of business success,” said Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. “Bringing them together creates tremendous potential for AOL.”

And Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said:

“Editorial vision and leadership are essential in order to transmute our shared cacophony of voices into a valuable dialogue. Arianna’s expertise, empathy, and entrepreneurial enthusiasm forms a kind of alchemy turning mere words and phrases into powerful expressions of humanity.”

Inter-Internet harmony: How sweet!

Here is the official press release, with all the details, but there is also an 8 am ET AOL conference call tomorrow:

AOL AGREES TO ACQUIRE THE HUFFINGTON POST

Acquisition Will Solidify AOL’s Strategy of Creating a Premier Content Network With Local, National and International Reach

Arianna Huffington To Lead Newly Formed The Huffington Post Media Group Which Will Integrate All Huffington Post and AOL Content, Including News, Tech, Women, Local, Multicultural, Entertainment, Video, Community, and More

The New Combined Media Group Will Reach 117 Million Americans and 270 Million Globally

Group Uniquely Positioned To Redefine the Future of Brand Advertising and Marketing For an Engaged and Influential Audience

New York, NY–February 7, 2011–AOL Inc. [NYSE:AOL] announced today that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire The Huffington Post, the influential and rapidly growing news, analysis, and lifestyle website founded in 2005, which now counts nearly 25 million unique monthly visitors*.

The transaction will create a premier global, national, local, and hyper-local content group for the digital age–leveraged across online, mobile, tablet, and video platforms. The combination of AOL’s infrastructure and scale with The Huffington Post’s pioneering approach to news and innovative community building among a broad and sophisticated audience will mark a seminal moment in the evolution of digital journalism and online engagement.

The new group will have a combined base of 117 million unique visitors a month in the United States and 270 million around the world**. Following the close of this transaction, AOL will accelerate its strategy to deliver a scaled and differentiated array of premium news, analysis, and entertainment produced by thousands of writers, editors, reporters, and videographers around the globe.

As part of the transaction, Arianna Huffington, The Huffington Post’s co-founder and editor-in-chief, will be named president and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post Media Group, which will include all Huffington Post and AOL content, including Engadget, TechCrunch, Moviefone, MapQuest, Black Voices, PopEater, AOL Music, AOL Latino, AutoBlog, Patch, StyleList, and more.

“The acquisition of The Huffington Post will create a next-generation American media company with global reach that combines content, community, and social experiences for consumers,” said Tim Armstrong, Chairman and CEO of AOL. “Together, our companies will embrace the digital future and become a digital destination that delivers unmatched experiences for both consumers and advertisers.”

Armstrong continued, “Arianna is a singularly passionate and dedicated champion of innovative journalistic engagement, and a master of the art of using new media to illuminate, entertain and enhance the national conversation. Arianna is a remarkable person and she will continue to create remarkable outcomes for the combined company.”

“This is truly a merger of visions and a perfect fit for us,” said Huffington. “The Huffington Post will continue on the same path we have been on for the last six years–though now at light speed–by combining with AOL. Our readers will still be able to come to the Huffington Post at the same URL, and find all the same content they’ve grown to love, plus a lot more–more local, more tech, more entertainment, more finance, and lots more video. We are fusing a legendary and powerful new media brand with a vibrant, innovative news organization, known for its distinctive voice, a highly engaged audience, an expertise in community-building, and a track record for demystifying the news and putting flesh and blood on the data while drawing our audience into the conversation.”

Huffington continued, “By uniting AOL and The Huffington Post, we are creating one of the largest destinations for smart content and community on the Internet. And we intend to keep making it better and better.”

Kenneth Lerer, The Huffington Post’s Co-Founder and Chairman, said, “The Huffington Post team has created a potent brand with the proven track record of knowing how to grow traffic, inform and entertain its readers and build a one-of-a-kind online community. Add that to the powerful scale and resources of AOL and you have the perfect combination for today and the future. Together these two companies will be a premier online content provider. From local citizen reporting through AOL’s Patch, to The Huffington Post’s national reporting on politics, business and culture, consumers will have access to everything they want whenever they want it.”

AOL has agreed to purchase The Huffington Post for $315 million, approximately $300 million of which will be paid in cash funded from cash on hand. The Huffington Post is privately owned by its two cofounders, as well as a group of investors. The proposed transaction is subject to customary closing conditions, including receipt of government approvals. The boards of directors of each company and shareholders of The Huffington Post have approved the transaction. The transaction is expected to close in the late first- or early second-quarter 2011.

The Huffington Post over-indexes on educated, affluent users, reaching the key decision makers in C-suites around the globe. The Huffington Post speaks to this influential audience via a host of prominent voices on its group blog. Among those who have blogged on The Huffington Post are: President Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Larry Page, Diane Sawyer, Buzz Aldrin, Nora Ephron, Bill Maher, Madeleine Albright, Robert Redford, Katie Couric, Neil Young, Rahm Emanuel, Mia Farrow, Senator Russ Feingold, Senator Al Franken, Ari Emanuel, Harry Shearer, Senator John Kerry, Representative Nancy Pelosi, Madonna, Lawrence Summers, Jamie Lee Curtis, Ryan Reynolds, Craig Newmark, Alec Baldwin, Aaron Sorkin, Natalie Portman, Scarlett Johansson, Russell Simmons, Sean Penn, Bill Gates, Norman Lear, Charlie Rose, Elizabeth Warren, Tavis Smiley, Sheryl Sandberg, George Clooney, and former President Bill Clinton. And the audience speaks back, generating four million comments a month***.

The Huffington Post’s affluent, influential audience, that is growing at a rate of 22 percent (December 2009 vs. December 2010)****, when combined with AOL’s massive scale, video offerings and local expertise, will represent an incredibly desirable demographic for a broad range of advertising partners across the board.

And here is Armstrong’s internal memo to the AOL staff:

AOLers,

We are taking another major step in the comeback of AOL. Today we are announcing that we have agreed to acquire The Huffington Post, one of the most exciting, influential, and fastest growing properties on the Internet. We believe in brands, quality journalism, and the positive role of communities in the world–The Huffington Post shares our values and the combination of the two companies will create the premier global and local media company on the Internet.

Co-founded six years ago by Arianna Huffington and Ken Lerer, The Huffington Post has grown to become an industry leader–one of the Web’s most popular and innovative sources of online news, commentary, and information. Arianna and team have created a brand and a destination that focuses on the consumer experience. By combining The Huffington Post with AOL’s network of sites, thriving video offerings, local expertise and enormous reach, we will create a company that is laser-focused on serving our audiences across every platform imaginable–social, local, video, mobile and tablet.

The Huffington Post is core to our strategy and our 80:80:80 focus–80% of domestic spending is done by women, 80% of commerce happens locally and 80% of considered purchases are driven by influencers. The influencer part of the strategy is important and will be potent.

The Huffington Post is a strong influencer brand and it attracts a valuable audience, including a great focus on women’s content. In addition, Arianna Huffington is a world-renowned expert on women’s topics and issues, and has enabled The Huffington Post to grow rapidly by continually developing new audiences.

In the local area, the combination of the two companies will create a scaled connection between global and local communities on one platform. This will create a new way for people to get local and global information in a timely and entertaining way.

The Huffington Post will join the family of AOL Brands that are destinations for an influencer audience, brands like TechCrunch, Engadget, AutoBlog, and Moviefone. Uniquely, The Huffington Post is the platform for influential people–the people that drive trends, commerce, politics, entertainment, news, and information. Adding this strategic platform to our already strong network of sites, including the AOL homepage, has the potential to make AOL the most influential company in the content space.

Arianna Huffington is one of the most successful entrepreneurs in the Internet space and someone that is even more successful in building communities and relationships in every corner of the globe. The Huffington Post and Arianna have created a company that has partnered with the most successful and well-known leaders in all aspects of society that touch important topics to give consumers direct access to the most influential decision makers and community leaders.

This acquisition will create a high-quality and diverse digital ecosystem encompassing local, national and international news, politics, entertainment, technology, fashion, sports, health, personal finance, green, lifestyle, the arts and more. This deal will combine the amazing talent at AOL with the innovative and talented staff of The Huffington Post. Here are just a few high-level points around what this deal brings to market:

* Together, AOL and The Huffington Post will have 117MM unduplicated domestic monthly UVs, and ~270MM monthly UVs worldwide (according to comScore Dec 2010).

* The Huffington Post is one of the fastest growing web properties on the Internet. It grew 22% last year–that’s faster than Twitter, which grew 18% – and 15x as quickly as the Internet grew last year (comScore Dec ’09-’10).

* Both AOL and The Huffington Post count powerful, affluent users among their top loyal visitors, significantly over-indexing in $100K+ income users.

* AOL passed Hulu in unique viewers on video in the fourth quarter of 2010; video views on AOL are up 400 percent year-over-year.

* Between AOL’s innovative Project Devil ad unit, engaging users for 27 seconds longer than traditional display ads, and The Huffington Post’s highly-vocal community, with 4MM+ comments per month, we will marry attention-grabbing content and brand experiences for both advertisers and consumers.

In the local area, the combination of the two companies will create a premier global/local syndication network at scale. This will create a new way for people to get local and global information in a timely, informative and entertaining way.

To maximize the strategic advantage of this great deal, we will be creating a new group at AOL called The Huffington Post Media Group. Within this group will be AOL Media, AOL Local & Mapping, AOL Search and our new friends at The Huffington Post. We will continue operating the towns structure, AOL.com and HuffingtonPost.com.

I’m thrilled to announce that Arianna Huffington will join AOL’s executive team as President and Editor in Chief of The Huffington Post Media Group. We have asked Jon Brod to lead the overall operational integration on the AOL side of the combined entities. Jon will lead the local group integration and work closely with David Eun and the teams in AOL Media. We will work quickly with The Huffington Post to create a combined organizational design to coincide with the deal closing. While we wait for the required regulatory reviews to be completed and the transaction to close before implementing the design, we will move very quickly to plan the details of the integration of the two companies. To this end, we will announce the new organizational structure as soon as possible.

In the meantime, we will continue creating great content and products for our consumers within the town structure and stay laser-focused on the aggressive goals we have set for our winter luge. We are on the right track and will continue our weekly operating cadence and town structure to drive successful results against our company goals.

Here’s a special message for all of you we taped to welcome The Huffington Post and Arianna to our AOL Family:

http://today.office.aol.com/company-news/2011/02/aol-agrees-buy-huffington-post

And of course we wanted to welcome Arianna to our “You’ve Got” video of the day–check her out on AOL.com.

We will be holding a company all hands meeting to address your questions related to today’s exciting news. We will video conference from our New York office on the 6th Floor at 9:30 AM ET and will be joined by Arianna Huffington and key executives from her organization. We will also be holding a call for our west coast offices at 2:00 PM ET and for our Patch offices at 2:45 PM ET. See below for meeting info (conference rooms will be sent out shortly).

AOL is playing to win…and The Huffington Post and AOL will occupy a unique place in the future of the Internet. Let’s go get it done.

–TA

(More full disclosure: As has been previously reported by MediaMemo, All Things Digital had the briefest and most preliminary of discussions with Armstrong about moving to AOL last year, while exploring several other options. All’s well that ended well: We stayed at Dow Jones, which is owned by News Corp.)

As Dan Frommer notes, that’s down one million from Q3 of last year, but it’s still AT&T’s second-best iPhone quarter ever. Overall, the carrier added a record 2.8 million more wireless customers.

This quarter, of course, is the quarter that AT&T’s U.S. exclusivity for the iPhone goes away, courtesy of Verizon.

AT&T also said it activated 442,000 wireless plans for tablets. That number includes both the iPad and Samsung’s new Galaxy Tabs running Google’s Android; reasonable to assume that the overwhelming majority of those activations are for Apple’s machines.

Investors hoping Yahoo might benefit from the same surge in online display advertising spending that drove Google to its recent big quarter are in luck–except for the big-quarter part.

Posting fourth-quarter earnings today after sacking one percent of its staff, the company reported net income of 24 cents per share on revenue of $1.21 billion. The Street doesn’t seem convinced, though. Yahoo shares are down 3.5 percent as I write this.

Analysts had been expecting earnings of 22 cents per share on $1.19 billion in net revenue–a big jump from the 11 cents per share the company reported in the same period last year, but a troubling decline from the $1.26 billion in net revenue that accompanied it. That said, display advertising did grow. For the current quarter, the company sees revenue in a range of $1.02 billion to $1.08 billion; analysts had been looking for $1.13 billion.

“We just completed a very encouraging quarter and year for Yahoo!, where we saw our plans to turn around the company gain momentum,” CEO Carol Bartz said in a canned statement. “For the year, operating income, margins, EPS, and return on invested capital doubled. Display advertising grew 17 percent. We completed the important North America Search transition to Microsoft on schedule and with high quality. We introduced new and updated products at a faster pace. And our content properties–like Yahoo! Sports and Yahoo! Finance–continued to innovate and extend their massive lead.”

Look for more coverage of the earnings call at BoomTown later this afternoon. Meanwhile, here’s the press release in full:

YHOO_Q410PressRelease_Final

(Also, you can see a slide deck of the financials here.)

[Image Credit: Byzantin3]

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.

But, when you look at what Apple gets in revenue per unit, Apple now gets slightly more revenue, on average, from the iPhone than it does from the iPad.

On Tuesday’s conference call with analysts, Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook said Apple’s average revenue per iPhone is about $625, while the average iPad revenue is closer to $600.

The figure for the iPhone has been growing in recent quarters and is up from an average of $595 six months ago. By contrast, average iPad selling prices have dropped, from about $640 in the April-to-June quarter to around $600 in the just-reported October-to-December quarter.

It will be interesting to see whether the current trends continue and how the numbers shift around when Apple introduces the next iPad and iPhone.

• Apple’s Cook Aims to Reassure Wall Street on Apple’s Future
• A lot of iSales: Apple sold 7.3 Million iPads, 16.2 Million iPhones in December Quarter
• Apple’s Earnings Insanely Great
• Apple’s Really Good Quarter Was Really, Really Good in China

As Oppenheimer analyst Yair Reiner said in a note raising his target price on the company’s shares to $425, “It’s no surprise when Apple tops expectations, but it’s fairly rare to see it trounce Street’s targets on almost every line. Bottom line: big as Apple is, it shows no sign of slowing, not with the Verizon iPhone launching in 2Q11 and China growth accelerating to 400% year-over-year.”

Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster raised his price target to $483 from $438, observing in a research note that this quarter was the first in three years in which Apple issued EPS guidance above Street consensus (10 percent ahead of the Street). “Apple’s vision for itself as a mobile device company has come to fruition,” he said. “[The company] guided the March quarter more aggressively than it typically guides the out quarter relative to the Street. We see this as sign that it is bullish on the prospect of the iPhone at Verizon.”

At Deutsche Bank, Chris Whitmore slapped a price target of $440 on AAPL. “Apple continues to show impressive growth despite its size and is well positioned to benefit from the confluence of three major product cycles, namely: iPad, Macs and iPhone,” he told clients. “These product cycles coupled with greater geographic expansion (Verizon iPhone, iPad 2, iPhone 5, China expansion, Carrier deals) increases our confidence in AAPL’s ability to continue to outperform.”

At Barclays, Ben Reitzes raised his target to $450 from $420 to account for higher unit sales across Apple’s product portfolio. His take on Q1: “This very strong quarterly report left no holes to punch in the fundamental story. We believe the above-consensus revenue and EPS guidance and new products to come bring potential for further upside. We continue to believe the company is in very capable hands with COO Tim Cook and the rest of the team.”

Raising his price target to $450 from $430, Goldman Sachs analyst Bill Shope said essentially the same thing. “While the news of Steve Jobs’ medical leave may continue to add some headwinds to the share price momentum in the near-term, we continue to believe improving underlying fundamentals and the strength of Apple’s overall management team will counter this uncertainty. In addition to the strength of the December quarter and the recent Verizon iPhone release, we believe the next-gen iPad launch and the June iPhone refresh will serve as critical catalysts in the first half of 2011.”

UBS analyst Maynard Um ratcheted his price target up to $465 from $415, predicting what “could be the largest pre-order & sales ever experienced by Verizon Wireless for the iPhone” and continued success for the iPad. Said Um, “Though there has been increasing concern with regard to ramping competition, we see Apple’s ecosystem and ease of use as offering a more compelling value proposition than its competitors today and expect its tablet market share to more closely match its iPod market share in the mp3 player market rather than its share in the more fragmented smartphone market.”

And, finally, there was Ticonderoga’s Brian White, who took a “F@&k Everything, We’re Doing Five Blades” approach and raised his target price to a staggering $550. That’s about 60 percent higher than the price Apple shares have been trading at recently, a target that if the company were to hit, would value it at $506.6 billion. Said White, “Despite Monday’s news regarding Steve Jobs’s medical leave of absence, we believe it will be difficult to keep Apple’s stock from reaching new highs given the much stronger than expected quarter and outlook reported by the company.”

Bullish, or another word with a lot of the same letters? Hard to say. But as you weigh that question, remember this: This is the 33rd consecutive quarter in which Apple has beaten estimates. And this time it beat them by $2 billion.

All of the device sales appear to be ahead of Wall Street expectations, with Mac sales at the low end of the range of what analysts were looking for.

On the Mac side, laptop sales continued to outpace desktops. Apple sold 2.6 million portables, up 37 percent from a year earlier, as compared with desktop sales of 1.2 million units, a 1 percent drop from a year ago. As for iPods, while total units were down 7 percent from the prior year’s holiday quarter, revenue was actually up 1 percent, indicating users were opting for pricier models, such as the iPod touch.

On the earnings conference call, which just started, CFO Peter Oppenheimer confirmed strong iPod touch sales, saying that the product’s sales were up 27 percent and accounted for more than half of all iPods sold in the quarter.

Unaffiliated analysts, who often do a better job of predicting Apple’s performance than their professional counterparts, are taking an even more bullish view. Bullish Cross’s Andy Zaky–who called Apple’s Q4 EPS almost to the penny–for example, is looking for the company to post a $2 billion top-line beat. He sees Apple reporting $6.29 in earnings per share on approximately $26.3 billion in revenue. That’s quite a bit more than the $4.80 EPS on $23 billion that Apple’s guided for. Is it possible? We’ll find out this afternoon.

“Apple’s stock could face headwinds for several weeks as the media feeds on a yet-to-be-determined mix of speculation and disclosures about Jobs’ future role at Apple,” Oppenheimer analyst Yair Reiner said in a note to clients today. “At the same time, Apple’s investors will theorize and worry about what Jobs’ status will mean for future innovation at Apple. But this worry stage will likely run out of fuel relatively quickly, because convincing evidence of how Jobs’ presence or absence is impacting Apple’s fundamentals won’t present itself for years. Lacking evidence, investors will shortly go back to trading AAPL’s stock based on measurable fundamental performance.”

J.P. Morgan’s Mark Moskowitz was similarly optimistic. “While not knowing the details behind the current medical leave, we point out that Mr. Jobs has demonstrated a great resolve to improve his health previously, emboldened by the attitude and philosophy that helped him lead Apple’s remarkable rise over the past decade,” he writes. “In our view, Mr. Jobs and his team have made Apple become the primal force in shaping consumers’ technology-driven ‘way of life.’ While the competition is increasing in the areas of smartphones and tablets, we do not expect Apple’s technology and user experience leadership to fade.”

PREVIOUSLY

• Steve Jobs’s Finest Product–Apple–Won’t Break Down
• Steve Jobs Asked for Privacy–and He Deserves It This Time
• Apple Shares Down Nearly 8 Percent in Frankfurt on News of Jobs’s Medical Leave
• Citing Health, Steve Jobs Steps Away From Apple, Again
• Deutsche Bank Joins the Running of the Apple Bulls
• Jobs: “I’m Vertical, Back at Apple and Loving Every Day of It”
• Apple Investors Are Wusses
• When Steve Jobs Said “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish,” He Did Not Mean This Foolish
• AAPL Sauce
• Apple’s Steve Jobs: “I Have Decided to Take a Medical Leave of Absence”
• The Entire Letter: Steve Jobs Explains His Health Problem: “Hormone Imbalance”–Predicts Recovery by Spring and Will Stay On as CEO
• Ain’t Nobody’s Business If Jobs Is or Isn’t

“The BlackBerry PlayBook is expected to begin shipping in the U.S. in Q1,” RIM said in an email statement.

And there you have it.

Meanwhile, the device is garnering mixed reviews at CES. After some hands-on time with it, Engadget described the PlayBook as “blazingly fast, comfortable to hold, and intuitive to use.” Gizmodo liked it as well, talking up its hardware, responsive display and UI. “RIM’s got something here that could really stand on top of the bajillion other crappy tablets that are going to launch this year,” the site concluded. “They just have to take it the rest of the way.”

Wunderlich Securities analyst Matthew Robison agreed. “RIM’s PlayBook strategy [is] exceptionally compelling— pending successful execution,” he wrote in a note from CES. “The company’s ace card in tablets is sure-fire security for IT departments who loathe adding another piece of client software to enterprise networks.”

But others, like Wedge Partners analyst and RIM bear Brian Blair, were not so impressed. Though he praised the device’s sturdy build and crisp screen, he slagged its lack of native email and calendar support.

“There is not a built-in e-mail program that we saw, nor is there a calendar: arguably the two most critical features of a Blackberry,” Blair said. “Calendar and Email are only available, if the PlayBook is “tethered” to a Blackberry. Short of that, users need to use the browser for e-mail and calendar.”

And, admittedly, that does seem silly. Unless you’re a CIO. In which case, you probably prefer to push data (and remotely wipe it, if necessary) from one device instead of two, and appreciate the gesture.

Still, Blair came away with the impression that the PlayBook isn’t yet fully baked, and to be fair, it isn’t–after all, this is a pre-release device.

“We know this is an early build and that bugs are being worked through over the next couple of months, but nearly every feature we tried on our demo unit was having problems,” he concluded. “The video player froze and the games wouldn’t play. The only thing that worked was the ‘Coverflow-like’ scrolling of the different applications, which the device did with ease.”

But as Blair himself observed, a lot can change in three months. And presumably RIM is doing its damndest to ensure that it does–before Apple debuts the iPad 2, which will undoubtedly become the new standard against which all tablets are compared.

In the meantime, here are a few PlayBook promo videos RIM released in conjunction with CES.

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.”

The latest to be arrested is Winifred Jiau, 43, of Fremont, Calif. Like others charged or arrested on Dec. 16, she has ties to Primary Global Research. She’s accused of providing inside information to Primary Global clients who were portfolio managers at hedge funds of Nvidia and Marvell Technology during a period from 2006 to 2008. Prosecutors say she collected $200,000 during that time. She’s facing charges of conspiracy and securities fraud.

In August of 2008, the complaint says, she provided managers of two hedge funds with detailed numbers for quarterly revenues, per-share earnings and gross margins for the quarter ending that month. The complaint says that in the conversations she made it clear she had obtained the information directly from an employee of Marvell. The funds in question–they were not named in the complaint–allegedly made $820,000 on trades from the information.

On Aug. 8, 2008, the complaint says, Jiau provided the hedge fund managers with an early look at Nvidia’s quarterly revenue and told them it planned to announce a stock buyback, which it did four days later.

I’ve embedded the complaint below.

Jiau, Winifred Complaint

Earlier on Thursday, RIM reported earnings that topped estimates along with sales that were just about what many analysts were expecting. The company said it expects revenue for the current quarter to be around $5.5 billion to $5.7 billion with per-share earnings in the range of $1.74 to $1.80.

It said that it shipped 14.2 million BlackBerrys, up 40 percent from a year earlier, and added 5.1 million new subscribers net in the quarter. However the company is expected not to forecast those figures for the coming quarter, nor does it plan to continue reporting those numbers in future quarters.

Among the things investors are likely to be interested in is what the company forecasts as far as shipments to Verizon in a quarter during which many expect the carrier to start selling the iPhone. Motorola has already warned that it expects its shipments to Verizon to take a hit.

Mobilized will have live coverage of the conference call starting at 2 pm PT.

1:55 pm: RIM shares, which had been trading lower in after-hours trading are now up around 3 percent.

2:02 pm: Call just getting underway with the usual warnings, caveats, etc.

2:06 pm: BlackBerry Torch now in 75 markets, just rolling out in Latin America.

2:06 pm: BlackBerry Style is one-third of BlackBerry sales at Sprint.

2:08 pm: Our relationship with Verizon remains strong, RIM says. A number of new products coming for Verizon including adding the BlackBerry 6 OS to the curve and Bold lines early in the new year.

2:08 pm: Recap of recent developer announcements, including payment service, launch of WebWorks, etc.

2:10 pm: Now more than 16,000 applications in BlackBerry App World, RIM’s App Store.

2:11 pm: PlayBook tablet expected to ship in first quarter in U.S. and will be Wi-Fi only. Other markets and models with cellphone radios will follow.

2:14 pm: Review of Q3 results. Average selling price for BlackBerry was approximately $315, with half of shipments coming in last month of the quarter as resellers prepared for the holidays.

2:16 pm: Company says it is comfortable with inventory levels.

2:19 pm: On to outlook. No plans for PlayBook revenues, with first revenues not expected until following quarter. Sounds like the availability of PlayBook won’t be until at least March. (RIM’s current quarter goes through Feb. 26)

2:24 pm: On to Q&A.

BB6 will eventually work on QNX operating system, but the company says it hasn’t given any sense of timing.

As for what QNX can deliver, co-CEO Jim Balsillie says “You’ll see more at CES.”

2:25 pm: Sorry, some technical problems here at Mobilized. We got disconnected a couple of times, but have switched to the Webcast and are back on.

Seems like the talk is on average selling prices.

2:32 pm: North America is still performing very, very well but dynamics here are different.

Balsillie says he expects stronger year here next year based on product plans in place.

“I feel very, very good,” he says.

“I feel great about where we are sitting in North America for 2011,” Balsillie says, and the company has “knocked the cover off the ball” in a lot of other markets.

2:37 pm: Question on China market. “I think you should have very positive expectations in China,” Balsillie says.

“China does well,” he says. “You’d always want them to do better….All you can do is keep doing the right things and investing in these places. The market is just so big.” Sometimes markets come faster than you expect, sometimes they come slower, he says. But, he says, “I’ve never seen a market not take off.”

Demand strong, he says, for PlayBook in China and Japan.

2:41 pm: Question on payments. Balsillie says one wouldn’t be going out on a limb to predict Near Field Communications integration.

2:44 pm: A lot of talk on why PlayBook is a good bet for businesses with Balsillie talking about its enterprise strength. Not much new information there.

2:46 pm: Will there be a media strategy to promote the tablet’s media abilities to consumers?

“Oh yeah, yeah,” Balsillie says–again, without giving any new details. Lots of game and media partnerships.

2:50 pm: Everything is fine. Things are great. (That pretty much sums up Balsillie’s statements the last few minutes–Just insert a different question or topic).

2:56 pm: “I think the PlayBook redefines what a tablet should be,” Balsillie says, adding that the fact one can create apps without needing to learn a new language are strengths that RIM’s approach s bringing to the table. “We’re way ahead on that and CIO friendliness, we’re way ahead on that too.”

3:02 pm: Call’s done.

The BlackBerry maker said it earned $911 million, or $1.74 per share, on revenue of $5.5 billion.

On average, analysts had said to expect around $5.4 billion in revenue and earnings around $1.64 or $1.65 a share.

However, shares of RIM initially slipped more than a dollar after the report, but then rebounded to levels above where they ended regular trading. Shares changed hands recently at $61.15, up $1.91, or more than 3 percent.

Looking forward, RIM said it expects revenue for the current quarter, which runs through February, to be between $5.5 billion and $5.7 billion, with similar margins to the just-ended quarter. Earnings are seen in the range of $1.74 to $1.80 per share.

The report and conference call are being closely watched, both because of all the competitive challenges facing RIM as well as the fact this is the last quarter the company plans to give out certain financial information.

For the just-ended quarter, RIM said it shipped 14.2 million BlackBerrys, up 40 percent from a year earlier. It said it added approximately 5.1 million net new subscribers in the quarter, bringing its base to more than 55 million. Both figures are among those RIM plans to stop sharing after this quarter.

The company also said that one of its directors, Jim Estill, has resigned “due to a business conflict” after 13 years on the board. Co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis will serve as co-chairmen with John Richardson remaining as lead independent director.

RIM’s conference call starts at 2 pm PT and Mobilized will have live coverage. One thing to watch will be whether the company expects an impact at Verizon from the expected arrival of the iPhone. Motorola warned last week that it expects to see its shipments to Verizon take a hit.

Note that iSuppli counts microprocessors differently than some of the other research firms. Its “other” category includes not only PC chip also-rans like Via Technologies, but also general purpose RISC chips like IBM’s Power chips that go into servers.

There’s better news, however, for the beaten-down hard-drive industry. After seeing shipments decline through the first half of the year, fourth-quarter shipments are up, as are revenues, iSuppli says. It’s clearly the result of the holiday-season demand, but welcome news, especially in light of all the worries that tablets–like Apple’s iPad–which use flash memory for storage, would whack hard-drive sales. (Though, as Digital Daily’s John Paczkowski noted this morning, the hard-drive guys still have lots to fear from tablets.)

Western Digital is holding on to its top spot as the world’s leading supplier, edging out Seagate, which has seen its share of troubles lately.

Seagate failed to come to terms with TPG Capital last month on a plan that would have taken the company private, and also spurned a takeover offer from Western Digital. Last week it moved to refinance more than $2 billion in debt, more than $500 million of which is due before the end of the year, with a combination of bonds and bank loans.

The latest domestic sales data from NPD shows Apple on pace to sell between 4.1 million and 4.3 million Macs in the December quarter. Which would make for another record breaker in an ever-lengthening string of them. After all, Apple’s U.S. Mac sales are up 20 percent year-over-year for the first two months of the current quarter. And with international sales growing faster than domestic, the company will likely see between 22 percent and 28 percent year-over-year growth.

If that trend continues–and with the recent refresh of the iMac and MacBook Air lines, there’s no reason to think it won’t–2011 could end up being the “Year of the Mac” as well.

Han and his company, Perceptive Pixel, are best known for creating the giant touch wall that John King and others at CNN use to break down elections.

While Apple, Microsoft and others have targeted consumers, Perceptive Pixel has focused on niche professional markets, especially the defense and government sector.

But, after years of watching the small touchscreen device market from the sidelines, Han said he thinks he is pretty close to creating his first products that will run on those devices.

“Mobile is interesting,” he said in an interview last month at his New York offices (in the Manhattan building that Google is buying, with the amazing roof view seen below). “How can you ignore a billion devices being sold every year?”

Han said there is a reason he has stayed focused on the high end of the market.

“I have a personal bias,” he told Mobilized. “I want computers to be functional, not just playful.”

The modern tablet, he said, is the first consumer device that has enough pixels and the precision sensors to potentially be of interest to Perceptive Pixel. In particular, Han said he is intrigued by the idea of using tablets to allow meeting participants to interact with a nearby larger touchscreen that might be in use by someone leading a meeting.

“We’re looking at mobile and slate devices as a way to tie into this family of collaboration [products],” he said, noting that’s where Perceptive Pixel is spending its energy when it comes to mobile, as opposed to coming up with some killer app that works only on smaller screens. “There are a lot of smart people creating mobile apps.”

Han said his first mobile efforts should come out early next year–in the first quarter or early in the second quarter, though he wouldn’t give more specifics.

Whatever Perceptive Pixel ends up doing in the tablet space, Han said his plan is to eventually have it support multiple operating systems, though Han said the company will probably only qualify certain devices. So far, he said, Apple’s iOS and the iPad seem best suited to the applications he has in mind, while the real-time touch performance on Android has certain issues.

“We’re not going to just let it run on anything out there,” he said. “Some of them just can’t guarantee a good user interface.”

Here is the video interview Mobilized did with Han:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101213/multitouch-pioneer-jeff-han-starts-to-think-small-devices/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101208/chinas-dangdang-says-rah-rah-to-ipo/ http://allthingsd.com/20101208/chinas-dangdang-says-rah-rah-to-ipo/#comments Wed, 08 Dec 2010 14:39:35 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://emoney.allthingsd.com/?p=351 Think of Amazon.com, but for the Chinese market.

E-Commerce China Dangdang is the No. 1 business-to-consumer brand in China, and like Amazon, it started off selling books, but now it’s a sprawling online mall, offering everything from beauty supplies to clothing and more.

Today, it’s selling shares to the public for $16 apiece, AP reports. The stock will trade on the New York Stock Exchange starting today under the ticker DANG.

The company really should be celebrating. The price is much higher than the already boosted prices of $13 to $15 a share the company originally was expecting. In all, it expects to make $168.6 million in proceeds, with the potential to sell up to $4 million more if underwriters exercise their option to buy additional shares.

The money will be used for general corporate purposes, including adding more product categories, or for acquisitions.

The 11-year-old company has about 1,142 full-time employees, and for the quarter ended Sept. 30 earned 32.7 million renminbi ($4.9 million), up from 8.3 million RMB ($1.2 million) in 2009. In the same period, its revenue rose to 606.7 million RMB from 389.3 million RMB.

Photo Credit: Skaines.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101208/chinas-dangdang-says-rah-rah-to-ipo/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101207/dennis-crowley-on-the-difference-detween-dodgeball-and-foursquare-video/ http://allthingsd.com/20101207/dennis-crowley-on-the-difference-detween-dodgeball-and-foursquare-video/#comments Tue, 07 Dec 2010 21:01:33 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=53904 If Dodgeball was, as founder Dennis Crowley claims, the perfect storm of bad timing, then his latest venture, Foursquare, is a sunny day. In the video below, Crowley talks about the mechanics of merchant relationships, valuations and frothiness, and the difference between Dodgeball and Foursquare.

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