Here’s a quick rundown: Hewlett-Packard fell more than 6 percent to $20.88. Dell fell more than 1 percent to $14.04. Apple fell slightly to $434.33. Intel fell 2 percent to $21.83. Advanced Micro Devices fell 3.5 percent to $2.52. Microsoft fell almost 4.5 percent to $28.93. Hard drive manufacturer Seagate fell 3 percent to $36.53. Western Digital fell 2.5 percent to $17.53. All told, they fell by an average of about 2.85 percent.

It was that kind of day, and the financial analysts who track the stocks of the PC makers had to jump in with their own assessments.

“We ultimately don’t believe that tablets are ‘replacing’ PCs (very few people we have met have actually retired their PC because of a tablet),” analyst Toni Sacconaghi of Bernstein wrote in a note to clients today, “but they are contributing to PCs being used less — which, in turn, is pushing out the replacement cycle for PCs. This is a big deal.”

He also said that HP in particular, which according to IDC’s reckoning saw a decline in PC sales of more than 23 percent year on year in the first quarter, may miss sales estimates by more than $700 million as a result. “A key question is whether the contraction in volume (potentially $1 billion in revenue) will have a material impact on PC margins,” he wrote. “We suspect that some of HP’s share loss was the result of increased pricing discipline and a focus on margins in the quarter.”

Shaw Wu, analyst with Sterne Agee, placed at least some of the blame for the market’s poor performance at Microsoft’s door. “We frankly believe Microsoft’s strategy of forcing user interface changes that nobody wants has proven to be a disaster,” he wrote in a note issued today. “Not to mention the customer confusion with too many choices with multiple form factors.” He now expects the PC market to contract in 2013 by 5 percent, down further from his earlier 2 percent guidance.

Reserving judgment, two analysts wondered in notes to clients today if even the most optimistic outcome for Moonshot is enough to get HP on track.

Moonshot is a “step in the right direction,” wrote Shaw Wu of Sterne Agee, but he wondered if large Web companies could be persuaded to buy from HP rather than have their own custom servers built for them. “But we are not sure if big customers including Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Twitter would switch from their current model where they procure customized server and storage components from Quanta and Compal.”

And even if successful, Moonshot might not have a big enough impact to nudge HP sales upward, Wu wrote, noting that servers account for roughly 25 percent of sales, versus PCs and printers, both in decline, which combined account for about half. “We believe the company’s turnaround remains tough as it remains to be seen whether its enterprise efforts are enough to offset continued challenges in its PC, printer, and services businesses,” he wrote.

It’s also going to take a while for revenue from Moonshot sales to start showing up in HP’s results, says Brian Marshall of ISI. “While we do not anticipate meaningful revenue from Moonshot in the next few quarters, we see it as a positive step towards maintaining HPQ’s number one share position in servers longer-term.”

Not all voices were so reserved. Patrick Moorhead, an analyst with Moor Insights and Strategy who was on stage with HP execs at the launch today, said the most interesting thing about the Moonshot line is not the fact that it uses less energy or takes up less space than conventional servers, but that it works with all sorts of different chips to attack the computing job at hand. Yes, it supports conventional CPU chips like Intel’s Atom and ARM-based server chips like those from Calxeda, but also GPU chips from Nvidia; digital signal processor chips, like those made by Texas Instruments; and field-programmable gate arrays, the software-defined chips turned out by companies like Altera and Xilinx. That, he says, gives it “the potential to change the game in scale-out data centers.”

Sterne Agee’s Arvind Bhatia upgraded Groupon to “buy” from “neutral” this morning, sending the company’s stock up 27 cents, or 5 percent, to $5.56 a share in afternoon trading. At one point in pre-market trading, the stock hit as much as $5.74.

While those gains are significant considering where the shares have been trading for the past few months, the stock overall is still down more than 70 percent since Groupon’s IPO in November.

Bhatia acknowledged how out of sync his upgrade is with the bigger picture: “This is an out-of-consensus upgrade predicated on a more constructive longer-term view of the company,” he wrote in a letter to investors. He also warned that the upgrade was not a reflection of the company’s fourth-quarter results, which are being released on Feb. 27. (Bhatia believes the stock can go as high as $9 over the next 12 months.)

Rather, his thesis is based on the belief that the Chicago company — and therefore its CEO and founder Andrew Mason — can execute on a number of fronts, by turning around its international business and leveraging its mobile commerce foothold. And, even more importantly, he believes that Groupon can evolve beyond its core push business of delivering offers by email to a model where consumers will discover deals on the site through search engines and direct traffic to the site.

In November, I wrote about this evolution to a marketplace approach, which Groupon was rolling out in Chicago and New York. At the time, Jeff Holden, the company’s SVP of Product, explained that Groupon had mastered serendipity by sending offers to people they thought might like them.

But now they are trying to become a destination where people shop for things they already know they are looking to buy. In a handful of markets, consumers can now browse and search a catalog of offers — they don’t disappear after one day. Categories span everything from local deals, including auto, restaurants and spas, to products, like bed linens and pet care.

At the time, Groupon said it had amassed 27,000 deals in North America as part of the company’s new direction. That will be a critical number to watch, since having a lot of inventory will be a crucial component to its success.

Bhatia claims that the benefit to this approach is that the deals can now be marketed effectively through search engines, like Google and Bing, as opposed to sending emails (which people are tiring of). “Currently less than 5 percent of Groupon’s revenue comes from search engine marketing,” he wrote. “In contrast, an estimated 25 percent of queries on search engines are local and 50 percent of mobile searches are for local, which suggests meaningful untapped opportunity.”

Rakesh Agrawal, a business consultant and outspoken critic on Groupon, disagreed with the company’s prospects of using Google and Bing to drive sales going forward. “Search marketing is a much more complicated sell,” he said. “Even if it were successful, the revenue they could generate pales in comparison with what daily deals were throwing off.”

Groupon is expecting fourth-quarter revenue ranging between $625 million and $675 million, an increase of 27 percent to 37 percent, compared with the same period a year earlier. It expects income from operations to be between breakeven and $20 million, compared with a loss of $15 million in the fourth-quarter 2011. Analysts are forecasting a loss of two cents a share.

Sterne Agee analyst Arvind Bhatia downgraded the company’s shares from “buy” to “neutral,” calling the Street’s estimates “overly optimistic.”

Bhatia is concerned about the company’s performance when it came to its big console game titles of the year. But Electronic Arts is increasingly offsetting its declines in the traditional packaged goods market through the sale of digital content.

But will digital will be able to generate enough revenue this time to make up for its poor-performing console games?

In a note to investors, Bhatia said that he believes EA should have lowered full-year guidance “following disappointing early performance of Medal of Honor Warfighter and the cancellation of NBA Live in October of last year.”

This morning, EA’s shares were down 3.6 percent, or 52 cents a share, to trade at $13.93. Yesterday, after the note went out, shares fell 2.9 percent. The videogame publisher is still trading way below its 52-week high of $20.64, but is still above its low of $10.77 a share.

Electronic Arts’ guidance for third-quarter earnings per share was 50 cents to 60 cents, which at the time, was well below consensus estimates of 71 cents (excluding some items). For non-GAAP revenue, it guided $1.25 billion to $1.35 billion, which was lower than the consensus estimate of $1.38 billion. For the full year, Bhatia is now projecting revenue of $3.87 billion, which is 5 percent below consensus and 6 percent below the midpoint of management’s guidance range of $4.05 billion to $4.25 billion.

Bhatia figures that the company will have a tough time matching its 2012 performance, which saw strong sales from the first-person shooter Battlefield 3.

He estimates that Battlefield 3 sold 13 million units; in comparison, Medal of Honor Warfighter has shipped roughly three million units, creating a 10 million unit gap, which pencils out to $500 million. In addition, EA’s title slate in 2013 was smaller, with only 14 titles, compared to 2012, when it shipped 22 titles. By his estimate, that creates another $200 million hole.

However, EA continues to talk about how digital revenue is more than making up for the drop it is seeing from packaged-good sales.

In the second quarter, it reported that digital revenue was 40 percent higher year over year.

For instance, the FIFA soccer game generated more than $115 million in digital revenue in the first half of 2013, and Battlefield 3’s premium service has sold more than two million subscriptions to date (all of that revenue will be recorded in the fourth quarter). Additionally, the company’s Simpsons game on iOS, called Tapped Out, has been the top-grossing game for the past four weeks.

While digital revenue is up, the company is not as bullish on Facebook as it once was, and is scaling back its investments in the platform. In addition to developing fewer games for Facebook this year, EA also started shutting down underperformers such as World Series Superstars, EA Sports PGA Tour Golf Challenge, Monopoly Millionaires and Age of Immortals.

Similarly, social games leader Zynga recently said it would shutter 13 titles.

EA’s CFO Blake Jorgensen told AllThingsD last quarter that the company believes social will be key for games going forward, but not necessarily as an individual platform. “I would say that, overall, digital is growing the fastest, and within digital, it’s the mobile business that’s growing the fastest,” he said. “Clearly, mobile is up dramatically, and it’s no surprise — it’s driven by smartphones, tablets.”

That would be Activision Blizzard, which is expected to blow away expectations for the third quarter when its results come out later this afternoon.

That also happens to be Robert Downey Jr.’s line in Activision’s new commercial for Call of Duty: Black Ops II, which will likely play a large role in contributing to the company’s bottom line.

Activision is forecasting to report a third-quarter profit of seven cents a share on revenue of $690 million. Analysts are even more bullish, projecting that the company will report a profit of eight cents a share on revenue of $708 million, representing a 13 percent increase compared to the same quarter a year earlier.

Wedbush analyst Michael Pachter says the company is also likely to raise full-year expectations — the second time this year. Pachter says the performance will be driven by strong subscriptions of Blizzard’s World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria, and healthy sales of Call of Duty, which he calls “the King of first-person shooters.” Activision is also expected to talk about strong digital sales that it generates through downloadable content, while it has also largely missed the downturn in social games by not exposing itself to the Facebook platform.

Arvind Bhatia, an analyst at Sterne Agee, also expects the company to beat third-quarter expectations and to affirm its full-year guidance. In a note to investors, he wrote: “We believe Activision is a defensive stock play within the interactive entertainment industry as at least half of its profits (i.e., Blizzard) are PC-based and not dependent on the ongoing console transition. That said, Activision’s console presence is very strong with titles such as Call of Duty and Skylanders.”

Bhatia noted that GameStop has said that Call of Duty: Black Ops II is shaping up to be “the biggest Call of Duty game ever.” That’s impressive, given that its last release, Modern Warfare 3, surpassed $1 billion in sales faster than the blockbuster movie “Avatar.” The new game, which is currently being presold for $60, will hit store shelves in six days.

The only reason to hesitate in naming the winner of the first-person shooter battle is that, after a five-year hiatus, Microsoft is releasing Halo 4, the latest installment in the Xbox blockbuster. Over its life, the franchise has generated $3 billion in revenue, and Microsoft is pulling out all the stops to ensure a big launch. The game went on sale yesterday for $60.

It’s the latest of several options that have been floated, including whether Facebook or others might try to swoop in to buy the company.

Most of these scenarios are moot, given Zynga’s founder and CEO Mark Pincus controls the troubled company, owning more than half of its shares. It is not clear if he would be willing to give up now.

That said, he has do something — the company’s stock hit a new low on Friday, tumbling 12 percent to $2.48 a share. At that price, investors are valuing the business at very little, since Zynga has the equivalent of $2.10 a share in hard assets.

That price could get lower, with Wall Street investors and many others becoming even more relentless in their criticism of Zynga.

There have been many concerns already that began after its once close partner, Facebook, changed the way it operates, with the result that its platform did not perform as well as it once did for Zynga, especially for its once popular Ville-style games.

It’s been made worse as consumers continue their shift to mobile, which Zynga says does not always monetize as well as Facebook.

To add to the pile, Zynga has suffered mass exodus of talent, some for better and some not. Over the past few months, it has lost several high-ranking managers, including its COO John Schappert and Chief Marketing Officer Jeff Karp, who were both brought on board for their experience in gaming. Last week came the departure of Paul and David Bettner, the creators of Zynga’s enormously successful Words With Friends franchise.

There was plenty of other fodder for criticism this past week, after the company also wrote down the acquisition of OMGPOP by as much as $95 million, or about half of the total price.

In a memo issued to employees on Friday, Pincus wrote that he was disappointed and is focused on rectifying the situation.

In the near term, he said it might mean considering “targeted” cost reductions. And in the longer term, he noted that Zynga would have to invest more in mobile and a platform approach that enables it to publish third-party game titles.

Whether he can do that easily with intense shareholder scrutiny is questionable, and ditching the public markets would have its advantages.

To get a sense of where Zynga stands, and whether going private is feasible, I talked to a handful of analysts and experts, all whom had mixed opinions.

Michael Pachter, Wedbush Securities:

At this price, yes, Zynga can go private, but I don’t think that will happen. That would trigger more unrest by shareholders, who would say you sold shares at $10 and now you want to buy them back at $3? It would have the appearance of some sort of scheme.

If he [Pincus] wants to send a signal to investors that they are done making acquisitions — since they obviously didn’t do a very good job at it — they should take some of its war chest and buy back stock. He should also personally buy stock. We need to see that kind of commitment.

Peter Relan, executive chairman of CrowdStar, which pivoted from social to mobile gaming this year:

I have three solutions: Mobile, mobile, mobile. Mobile gaming this year globally is a $2 billion to $3 billion business and is expected to hit $18 billion by 2016. I don’t think there’s a lack of growth in gaming; it’s more product strategy.

Mark is a competitive guy and he’s going to fight like hell to transform the company and take it to the next level.

Arvind Bhatia, analyst, Sterne Agee:

They need to restructure the business significantly and do it very quickly, too. We think that they are considerably overstaffed for the level of revenue that they’ll be generating in the coming years.

They need to right-size and preserve the cash. Going private won’t solve the problem … the question is, where will the cash be in a year from now?

Rich Greenfield, analyst, BTIG:

They will generate zero EBITDA in the back half of 2012 based on their new guidance and earnings in 2013 and beyond are totally unclear — the company’s assets are literally walking out the door — you see the Words With Friends team left.

Why would they want to lever up and go private — sounds petrifying … Zynga clearly has no idea how to model/project their business/earnings, in turn, going private would appear to be a very dangerous move, don’t you think?

They need to make great games that have staying power.

Intel

According to new research from Barclays, Ultrabooks accounted for only about 5 percent of all laptops sold in the second quarter. That’s not even half of what the PC manufacturers who make them had been expecting. Clearly, Intel’s Ultrabook concept — which was supposed to prop up the PC market and win over consumers to whom Apple’s MacBook Air and iPad appeal — isn’t gaining quite the sort of traction the chip giant had hoped for.

And that traction isn’t likely to show up until PC manufacturers are able to lower their prices. According to Sterne Agee analyst Vijay Rakesh, 75 percent of the Ultrabooks currently available at Best Buy cost more than $950. Of those, several command prices of more than $1,300.

Those are heady prices, and they have been putting consumers off.

Said Rakesh, “We believe overall the high price points continue to be a challenge for the PC manufacturers and also consumers. This has held back [Ultrabook penetration], well below the expectations of the PC market.”

Of course, this could all change in the months ahead. Ultimately, component costs will drop and Ultrabooks will become more affordable. And with Microsoft’s new Windows 8 operating system in the offing, consumers may have one more good reason to look to the Ultrabook as they consider their next PC purchase. Certainly, that’s the way Intel sees things playing out.

“When we first introduced the Ultrabook concept we were clear that the designs would be evolving,” Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy told AllthingsD. “As the category of Ultrabook devices evolves and new features are added over time, we expect the volume to go up and then volume economics will kick in and help drive system costs down.”

Wall Street analysts, having held back their approval for several quarters, all acted like teenagers at the last pool party of the summer, and jumped in with a batch of upgrades.

Shaw Wu of Sterne Agee raised his estimate on Cisco’s sales to $48.3 billion in fiscal 2013, which is $200 million higher than the Street’s consensus. He also expects Cisco to report a per-share profit of $1.95 next year. He left his $23 price target unchanged. “We continue to believe Cisco is an underappreciated turnaround story similar to what we have seen with Apple, IBM, and EMC in the past,” he wrote.

Sanjiv Wadhwani of Stifel Nicolaus had a similar call. He boosted his fiscal 2013 revenue estimate to $48.9 billion, and his EPS call to $1.92 per share, up from $1.86 previously, and said he was impressed with Cisco’s relatively strong enterprise sales. “While too early to call a trend, the improvement could be a signal that spending is picking up despite the uncertain macro. We characterize the tone as markedly better versus three months ago,” he wrote.

Other analysts upgrading Cisco shares include Troy Jensen at Piper Jaffray, who raised his price target to $23 from $22; Mark Sue at RBC Capital, who boosted his price target to $19 from $17; Drake Johnstone and Davenport & Co., who upgraded the shares to “buy,” with a price target of $24; and Jason Noland at Robert W. Baird & Co., who raised his target to $21 from $19.

If there was a grump in the room, it had to be Brian Marshall at ISI. He maintained his “neutral” rating on Cisco shares. “While Cisco surpassed a low bar and reported solid metrics in a few areas … overall trends are still deteriorating in our view,” he wrote. Referring to Cisco’s 75 percent boost of its quarterly dividend, and a promise to commit 50 percent of free cash flow to dividends and share buybacks, Marshall wrote: “We believe Cisco’s focus on its capital allocation and dividend policy is a sign of its maturation and limited growth opportunities.”

Since reporting first-quarter earnings in May, no board members have stepped down; it hasn’t restated any of its financials, and it even promoted one of its new executive hires, Kal Raman, to an even loftier title.

All of those are good things for the Chicago-based deals company, which for a while appeared to not get anything right. Now, if it can manage to report results that are in line with second-quarter expectations tomorrow, for the second quarter in a row, it might just have a chance to do something about its stock price.

And based on fairly low expectations, just meeting — not exceeding — estimates may be enough to make a big splash.

In fact, investors may already be getting their hopes up.

On Friday, Groupon’s shares saw a small gain, jumping 79 cents, or nearly 12 percent, to trade at $7.44 a share. That’s in the right direction, but it is still down 70 percent since its public offering in October.

In a note to investors, Citigroup’s Mark Mahaney says he’s mixed on the company’s prospects. On one hand, he conducted a survey with 150 local businesses and 1,200 consumers, and discovered that Groupon is gaining market share. On the other hand, Mahaney worried that revenue growth has slowed. In the second quarter, he’s expecting sales to grow by 49 percent year over year compared to the first quarter, in which revenue doubled over last year.

In general, the Wall Street consensus calls for Groupon to do slightly better than the first quarter and report a profit of three cents a share, excluding some non-cash items, on revenue of $578 million. Last quarter, the company reported a two-cent profit per share on revenue of $559.3 million.

Internally, Groupon is also projecting slightly better revenue than the first quarter. It said revenue should fall between $550 million and $590 million, representing year-over-year growth of 40 to 50 percent. Income from operations is expected to fall between $25 million and $45 million, compared to a loss of $101 million in the second quarter of 2011.

Sterne Agee analyst Arvind Bhatia was less optimistic than Citi’s Mahaney, and on Wednesday, he lowered its rating on Groupon to “neutral” from “buy,” based on suspicions that it will report second-quarter revenue and earnings at the lower end of its guidance. Bhatia also worries that Groupon is losing ground to LivingSocial, its next-closest competitor, and would be affected by the macroeconomic climate in Europe. ”Given the recent decline in the share price, we are clearly late in the downgrade,” Bhatia wrote. “However, we see risk to forward estimates and believe the upside in the stock may be limited until Street estimates are adjusted downwards.”

The good news is that before accounting for those huge charges, HP’s business is doing slightly better than expected. It raised its earnings outlook slightly for the quarter ended in July, saying it expects to earn about $1 per share, up from a range of 94 cents to 97 cents previously.

The shares rallied, gaining more than 2 percent and closing at $19.41. The announcement also gave some analysts hope that the slowly unfolding turnaround at Hewlett-Packard under Meg Whitman is entering a new phase: The difficult part where the charges are big and the layoffs and voluntary retirements are plentiful.

Analysts Amit Daryanani of RBC Capital Markets and Shaw Wu of Sterne Agee both saw the move as a positive one. Daryani maintained an outperform rating, the equivalent of a “buy” with a $33 price target, which would amount to a 70 percent boost over yesterday’s closing price. But for now he says the shares will stay in a “penalty box” until HP is done taking restructuring and impairment charges.

Wu at Sterne Agee was surprised by the upward revision in HP’s outlook: “This raise is surprising given the consensus negative view and expectations of a potential miss,” he wrote. “We view restructuring as a positive as the company is taking steps to clean up its balance sheet and reignite growth.”

While HP didn’t say anything about its revenue outlook for the quarter, Wu thinks it will be better than expected. The consensus view had HP expected to report sales of $30.3 billion this quarter. Wu kicked his estimate up a notch and says he sees HP coming in at $30.5 billion. “While the company did not provide details, we believe the EPS beat is based on better than expected revenue, as well as tight cost controls,” he wrote. His rating: “Buy” with a price target of $33.

Word of the dividend came a day ahead of today’s meeting with analysts in Austin, during which CEO Michael Dell said he plans to make $2 billion in cuts over the next three years. Most of the cuts — about $800 million — will come from a simplifying of sales operations. Another $600 million will come from savings in Dell’s supply chain.

Meanwhile, Dell’s evolving strategy of essentially assembling acquisitions into a credible enterprise-focused IT organization will continue apace. Dell’s target is to make data-center products and services grow by more than 40 percent to north of $27 billion by 2016. During that same period, it expects PC sales to grow by only 8 percent to $47 billion.

The problem, wrote the analyst Rob Cihra of Evercore in a note to clients sent out today, is that no matter how you slice it, half of Dell’s business is PCs, and the pressures of profit margins in that business aren’t going away. Despite Dell’s assurances that it can maintain operating margins on PCs at north of 5 percent, Cihra wondered if sagging margins might force Dell to price its machines higher and lose more ground to rivals Hewlett-Packard and Acer. “We are a bit more concerned than management that Dell can continue walking away from aggressive pricing in the name of margin stability,” he wrote. “We see this setting up as Dell’s seventh straight year of market share erosion.”

So what did analysts think of the dividend? Thumbs down. Shaw Wu of Stern Agee, in a note to clients today, worried that paying a dividend would eat into the cash that Dell needs to keep buying companies to help it continue its enterprise-focused shift.

Wu says at least one motivating factor for Dell to initiate a dividend now is that other companies are doing it, so investors expect it, especially after Apple initiated its first dividend in two decades earlier this year. “While the company did not mention this, we believe a key reason for Dell implementing a dividend policy is that it needs to do so to stay competitive,” he wrote. “In our view, the company not only competes with Apple, HP, Cisco Systems, and IBM in the marketplace, it also competes for shareholders.”

Apparently the final reassurance analysts and investors were looking for was that the company is indeed still growing.

Despite taking several measures over the past couple of months in the wake of an awkward fourth-quarter earnings revision, Groupon has not been able to regain investor confidence and has watched its stock price slowly dwindle to half its IPO price of $20 a share.

Today, the company’s stock opened at $14.93 a share before settling at $12.17 at the close, up 3.7 percent.

At least two analysts were bullish on yesterday’s first-quarter results, upgrading Groupon’s stock to a buy.

Sterne Agee upgraded Groupon from neutral to a buy and set a price target of $20. In a note to investors, analysts Arvind Bhatia and Brett Strauser wrote that the strong first quarter “alleviated several concerns,” including Groupon’s ability to have operating leverage. An additional plus, they wrote, is that the stock is trading so far below its IPO price.

Likewise, Mark Mahaney from Citi wrote that “we’ll grab this deal,” and upgraded the stock to a buy with a $22 price target. Four factors drove his decision: 33 percent quarter-over-quarter revenue growth in North America, international margins turning positive for the first time, marketing spending declining for the fourth quarter in a row and the very low stock price.

As my colleague Ina Fried reported yesterday, Groupon’s first-quarter revenues topped the company’s prior forecast as well as analyst expectations, totaling $559.3 million during the period, compared with $295.5 million a year ago. Operating income was $39.6 million, including an expense of $28 million related to non-cash stock-based compensation.

The strong results helped overshadow the company’s previous follies, which included the financial revision in the fourth quarter due to higher than expected holiday returns and the disclosure that auditors had determined it had a material weakness in its financial processes.

In a conference call with analysts, Groupon’s CFO Jason Child, who is under fire over the gaffes, said: “There’s some specific tasks that we have implemented and are going to implement. We’ve certainly added some people, and have some more work there. We have 48 countries and so we do have accounting personnel and controllers in every single country.”

In addition, Groupon has taken several precautions over the past couple of months to ensure the mishaps won’t happen again.

For example, Groupon has hired Kal Raman to build out the company’s internal controls and processes as the SVP of Americas. He previously held executive roles at Amazon, eBay and Drugstore.com. Groupon also nominated two new members with accounting prowess to the board and has been working on its financial controls.

Child said that since being tripped by holiday returns, the company has implemented a more granular statistical model that maps returns on a weekly basis.

“From a process standpoint we are in good shape, and there’s some technology that is especially helpful with a company like ours,” he said. “We made a lot of progress this quarter, and will make a lot of progress next quarter, and hopefully in the next quarter or two, we’ve done all the steps necessary.”

Groupon’s auditors won’t review whether the company has rectified its financial processes until the end of the year, so even if the company moves faster the label will remain.

In a recent letter to shareholders, Groupon’s CEO Andrew Mason said he did not have regrets on moving too fast.

“Although there are risks in moving too fast, companies often don’t survive long enough to apologize for moving too slow,” Mason writes. “Perhaps more importantly, by moving quickly, we reached a scale that has helped us solidify our market leadership, and accumulated data that is enabling our future and helping us continuously improve the experience of our customers.”

Stern Agee analyst Arvind Bhatia initiated coverage on Facebook shares on Monday morning with a “buy” rating, setting a price target at $46 for the next 12 months. Bhatia’s take comes on the heels of a similar, though informal, coverage note issued to media last Friday from Wedbush Securities, where the firm targeted Facebook’s share price at $44.

Both targets are set squarely above Facebook’s estimated share price range of $28 to $35, and would value the company at close to $100 billion.

Bhatia’s report cites Facebook’s upheaval of the online ad industry, a harbinger of change similar to the likes of Google almost eight years previous. Taking into account Facebook’s massive 900 million user reach, steadily growing average revenue per user numbers and the company’s high — though as yet untested — hopes for mobile monetization, Bhatia’s outlook on the company is bullish.

Though some say it’s not just about ads. “If you look further into the future, I believe they want to compete directly with the likes of Google, Amazon, Apple, companies with diverse product portfolios,” Gartner Research VP Brian Blau told AllThingsD in an interview. “They have the users, and they’re doing well with advertising, but they just don’t have all the products that its other competitors do. At least, not yet.”

The fervor for Facebook’s stock is at an all-time high in light of the company kicking off its roadshow to potential investors this week, with Zuckerberg and CFO David Ebersman making pitches in person.

Though it doesn’t seem like investors need much convincing; the roadshow festivities began midday on Monday at the Sheraton Hotel in Manhattan, with more than 500 investors and analysts flooding in to get a peek at Zuck’s performance. An onlooker said the CEO looked “likeable and affable,” according to an article in The Wall Street Journal.

And no, there was no half-windsor around Zuck’s neck — he made the pitch in his trademark hoodie.

Is this simply a buying opportunity ahead of another monster quarter?

That seems to be the consensus among the majority of analysts following the company, who expect big things from Apple come Tuesday. As of Saturday, the Street’s consensus estimate was for earnings of $10 per share on sales of $36.63 billion.

And despite whatever concerns have been addling investors the past week or so, it’s highly unlikely that Apple is going to miss those numbers. With the iPhone 4S selling well and demand for the new iPad running high, a soft quarter just isn’t in the cards. If there is an area of weakness, it will likely be in Macs, where sales might be softer than usual in anticipation of an expected refresh of the line this summer.

But beyond that? Probably not much to worry about, and we can likely anticipate another strong quarter.

“Based on our supply chain checks, we anticipate a sizeable EPS beat based on iPhone and iPad strength despite Macs likely coming in a little light,” said Sterne Agee analyst Shaw Wu. “We believe concerns over slowing iPhone and iPad momentum are overdone and are buyers on recent share weakness.”

It’s also the first of several chip stocks to report in the coming days. Sterne Agee analyst Vijay Rakesh summarized a few to watch in a research note to clients today.

Generally, he says to expect semiconductor companies to report results that range from in line with expectations to slightly up, and the outlook for the June quarter should improve.

One reason for that: PC sales estimates came in higher than expected from both Gartner and IDC last week. “We believe improving shipments were primarily a result of restocking rather than end-market demand. We believe both AMD and Intel should deliver in line to modestly better” results for the quarter ended March, he writes. Of the two, he says, AMD could deliver more upside on its results when it reports earnings on April 19 because its consensus estimates are low. Analysts expect it to report earnings of 9 cents a share on $1.56 billion in sales.

Intel, its strength already established, has higher expectations more consistent with its recent performance. The consensus of analysts calls for it to report 50 cents of per-share earnings on $12.84 billion in sales.

A supply chain disruption in hard drives that for a few months messed with the PC industry is coming to an end. But sales of Ultrabooks aren’t impressing anyone, Rakesh says. “Ultrabook sell-through is weak primarily on higher retail pricing versus mainstream notebooks. There are only 15 Ultrabooks on Best Buy versus 280 Notebooks listed,” he writes.

In the server space, Intel’s Romley chip is ramping up to full capacity, but he expects the competition from AMD to increase in coming months. One reason: AMD’s acquisition earlier this year of micro-server vendor SeaMicro.

One more chip company he likes among those reporting this week: Qualcomm. Rakesh says it has strong tailwinds, including Apple’s expected iPhone5, the latest iPad and wins with phones and tablets at Samsung.

Dell’s earnings were 51 cents and missed the consensus of analysts by a penny; the company also said that revenue would decline by 7 percent in the current quarter. In a note to clients today, Shaw Wu of Sterne Agee dropped his rating to “underperform,” the equivalent of a “sell,” arguing that Dell’s PC business continues to suffer at the competitive hands of Apple, Acer and rejuvenated Hewlett-Packard. “We are concerned with the company’s longer-term fundamental position and may face more difficulty making further operational improvements,” Wu wrote.

Richard Kugele, of Needham and Co. in New York, downgraded Dell to a “hold” from a “buy.” Rich Gardner of Citigroup also cut his rating to “hold” and dropped his target price to $19 from $20, citing declining prospects for improvements to Dell’s gross margin in the current quarter.

But the chorus of analysts wasn’t all negative. Chris Whitmore of Deutsche Bank, who last week suggested that, all things considered, Dell’s results might turn out “pretty good,” saw it differently. He blamed the ongoing shortage of hard drives brought on by last year’s flooding in Thailand and weak public sector buying, and still finds Dell attractive. The shortage, he says, was the primary reason that Dell’s gross margins — which came in at 21.7 percent — missed estimates. “Gross margins were light due to negative hard drive impact — shortages hampered the ability to sell richer high-end systems — and soft public sector results,” Whitmore wrote in a note to clients today. He maintained his “buy” rating.

Brian Marshall of ISI maintained his “neutral” rating. He wrote in a note today that Dell’s plan of shifting its revenue base away from consumer and business PCs and toward higher-value enterprise IT, software and services is going to take years. “We believe changing the composition of a $60 billion revenue base is non-trivial and takes years not quarters to successfully navigate. [We're] still scratching our heads on how earnings per share grows in 2012. … In the face of flat revenues, declining gross margins and continued operational expense growth, we struggle on how EPS will be up in 2012. We like the plan, just not the set-up.”

(Michael Dell photo by Asa Mathat)

Recent reports have added 4G LTE connectivity and a quad-core processor to a rumored spec list that already includes Siri voice recognition, better cameras, a higher-capacity battery and a much-improved display with double the pixel density of the iPad 2.

All of which sounds entirely reasonable, and certainly like the makings of a formidable successor to the iPad 2. Enough of one that analysts are already tweaking their sales estimates upward.

“We believe this significant refresh will likely help drive higher iPad sales and help further differentiate from arguably the only real competitor in the market, Amazon’s Kindle Fire, and not to mention the myriad of Android offerings out there,” says Sterne Agee analyst Shaw Wu. “We are currently modeling 48 million iPad shipments for calendar 2012.”

That’s an awfully big number, but it could prove too small before the year is out. Says Wu, “[48 million] could turn out conservative.”

No matter how elegant the mythical Apple Television may be in its design, no matter how intuitive its interface, it won’t be worth much to anyone without great content. For an Apple Television to truly succeed it must crack the content code, as well. And that’s a very difficult proposition, indeed.

Which isn’t to say it can’t be done. Just that there are a lot of content partnerships and licensing terms to be ironed out before the device can ever be brought to market (if that is really Apple’s intent). Among the most important: Deals for live-broadcast TV and truly customized programming.

As Sterne Agee analyst Shaw Wu observes, the first of these could be solved relatively easily, by integrating the subscription services cable and satellite TV providers already offer their customers.

But that doesn’t jibe well with Apple’s existing iTunes and iCloud services. And it’s not all that disruptive. If Apple truly wants to upend the TV industry, it needs Internet-based programming subscriptions with customizable channel lineups. And, according to Wu, that’s what the company is really gunning for.

“We continue to hear what Apple would love to do is offer users the ability to choose their own customized programming, i.e., whichever channels/shows they want for a monthly subscription fee,” Wu says. “This is obviously much more complicated from a licensing standpoint. … In our view, it would change the game for television.”

It would also differentiate Apple’s television, giving it a big advantage over the competition. An easy-to-use, all-in-one TV solution similar to the iMac, plus the ability to create your own custom channel packages? To many TV viewers, that would be a godsend.

Zynga, which makes some of the better-known games on Facebook, like FarmVille and CityVille, is seeking to raise $1 billion in a public offering later this week. If successful, it will be the largest IPO from a U.S. Internet company since Google raised $1.7 billion in 2004.

But not everyone is buying the company’s growth story.

Sterne Agee analyst Arvind Bhatia said the bottom line is that the company’s hyper-growth is not sustainable, and that new titles, like CastleVille and Mafia Wars 2, are not tracking as well as such classics as FarmVille, or even CityVille.

That’s in steep contrast to bold claims made by Zynga as recently as last week that it will be able to double the number of paying customers it currently has.

But Bhatia argued that Zynga remains too dependent on Facebook despite efforts to diversify to mobile and to build its own game network.

Bhatia used a couple of pretty charts to help make his case. He tracked bookings over several periods to see how revenues were trending. Bookings can be a more accurate picture of the company’s current performance, rather than revenues, which may account for virtual goods sold over several quarters.

Bhatia’s report throws cold water on a couple of positive stories that emerged over the past couple of days pointing out that Zynga is currently dominating the social games charts, with its titles now holding all of the top five spots.

According to AppData, the top games are: CityVille, CastleVille, FarmVille, Zynga Poker and Words With Friends. Electronic Arts’ The Sims Social ranks No. 6.

Unfortunately, the daily rankings can be easily influenced. If a company has the budget, it can push titles to the top through the use of marketing campaigns. It may not be sustainable, but for a short period of time, it’s conceivable. Although, to be clear, there’s no way to tell if Zynga has increased its marketing in its run-up to an IPO.

The question remains whether Zynga will be able to achieve its goal of selling 100 million shares at $8.50 to $10 apiece.

Bhatia, who doesn’t own any shares and doesn’t do any investment banking work for the company, says a more appropriate price target is probably $7 a share.

The move to slash $200 and then $300 from the device’s retail price was evidently made to battle the Fire’s loss-leading $199 price. “Our understanding is that RIM was blindsided by Amazon pricing its Kindle Fire aggressively at $199,” says Sterne Agee analyst Shaw Wu. “We estimate that the company is losing $50-$75 per PlayBook sold.”

And it may lose more in the future.

Remember, when RIM announced last week that worse-than-expected sales of its PlayBook tablet will cause it to fall short of financial targets for its third quarter, it said it must expand its “aggressive level of promotional activity” to drive PlayBook adoption. It also said it “now believes that an increase in promotional activity is required to drive sell-through to end customers.”

Sterne Agee analyst Shaw Wu on Monday took a hatchet to his rating on the company, downgrading its stock to “neutral” from “buy,” and trimming his estimates for 2012 and 2013 earnings. And, notably, he conceded he should have done so earlier.

“Looking in retrospect, we should have downgraded in mid-October when the stock was $24 and our supply chain checks indicated that while its new flagship BlackBerry Bold 9900 was doing decently, the rest of its product line was lagging,” Wu explained. “We had trimmed estimates below consensus due to this. Since then, estimates have come down a bit but we believe will likely need to be reduced further.”

The main reason Wu isn’t advising his clients to sell their RIM holdings? “There is some intrinsic value in RIM as an acquisition target with its 70 million subscribers, push network, BlackBerry OS, and patent portfolio.”

Wu is latest in a conga line of analysts cutting their targets and/or ratings on the BlackBerry maker’s stock. RBC Capital Markets, Barclays Capital, Sanford C. Bernstein, Deutsche Bank, Citigroup, J.P. Morgan Chase — all have slapped downgrades on the beleaguered RIM in the past six months. And RIM’s stock has reaped the whirlwind for it. Shares in the company have plummeted more than 70 percent this year, slipping below book value earlier this month and consistently charting new 52-week lows.

In the run-up to RIM’s quarterly results in mid-December, the situation looks increasingly grim. Here’s hoping for some good news about the company’s new BBX platform come Dec. 15, when RIM reports third-quarter earnings.

While Siri still has a way to go if it is to popularize voice as the next major user interface, its natural-language processing and automation abilities are already good enough to be a real competitive advantage for Apple in the mobile market.

It’s pushing competitor costs up, as rivals scramble to come up with equivalent voice command offerings — not a cheap or easy feat, considering the level of Siri’s applied artificial intelligence and speech comprehension.

And better than that, it’s creating a consumer bias towards the 4S, Apple’s newest iPhone and presumably the one with the highest margins.

Sterne Agee analyst Shaw Wu says his latest checks with industry and supply chain sources show broad sales strength across Apple’s entire iPhone portfolio, but most of all for the 4S. Evidently lots of folks who could be spending $99 on the iPhone 4 are opting to fork over another $100 for the 4S — and a lot of them are doing it for Siri.

“Despite global macroeconomic headwinds, Apple continues to defy conventional wisdom with a higher-end product mix,” Wu says. “Talking to industry sources, what’s driving the 4S is better than expected reception of its new Siri software.”

The reason for that? Siri’s voice recognition actually works — and pretty consistently, unlike competing solutions, which are often unreliable. And as of today, it’s still in beta. So it will certainly get better and more powerful over time. And it will continue to drive sales.

To wit, Wu’s forecast for the December quarter, which we’re only about a third of the way through: 26 million iPhones — a new record.

That’s the gist of another rebuttal to Hong Kong-based J.P. Morgan analyst Gokul Hariharan’s claim that the company is cutting orders to vendors in its iPad supply chain, this one from Sterne Agee’s Shaw Wu.

In a Tuesday morning research note, Wu added his voice to others seeking to correct the evidently mistaken impression that iPad demand is flagging, saying build plans for the device remain “well above expectations.”

Though reports of production cuts may have some merit, they’re no cause for concern, said Wu.

“From our understanding, these production cuts are due to much improved capacity and Apple actively managing its inventory in front of what is likely an iPad refresh in the March quarter,” Wu explained. “The iPad 2 started shipping in March 2011 making the product likely due for an update near its 1-year anniversary. We would also like to remind investors that production changes are common throughout a quarter and through the lifecycle of a product.”

In other words, the Monday morning scare that sent shares of Apple briefly downward was unmerited. Said Wu, “Our distributor checks indicate demand remains strong.” His estimates for iPad shipments in the second half of the year: 12 million in the September quarter and 15 million in the December quarter.

It’s a mixed bag. While they all seem to agree that HP’s board is right to push out CEO Léo Apotheker, especially in light of the stock performance, a confused strategy and a jarring change in emphasis, none seem ready to endorse the ascendance of Meg Whitman, the former eBay CEO and current HP director, to that company’s top job. Yet like it or not, the HP board meeting that will make it all official is underway, and as AllThingsD has reported, Meg Whitman will be named HP’s CEO at the close of markets today.

Toni Sacconaghi of SanfordBernstein, the author of a widely circulated note last week describing how “exasperated” HP investors are, weighed in again. “We are not surprised by HP’s stock’s reaction yesterday, given that our conversations with shareholders and investors over the past month revealed a level of exasperation that we have not seen directed at HP or any other company in our universe in our 13 years following the sector,” he wrote in a note today.

He also slammed HP’s board. “Our conversations with major shareholders also indicate that they have been disgruntled with the board, given it has made and approved a series of decisions” — including the ouster of the prior CEO Mark Hurd, the Autonomy deal, the premature announcement of the PC-spinout — “that many shareholders believe were poor decisions and misaligned with their interests,” he wrote.

Nor is he a fan of the Whitman hiring. HP needs to search far and wide and also internally for another CEO, Sacconaghi says. “We would view any decision not to conduct a comprehensive search of internal and external candidates for a permanent CEO role as unsatisfactory and unnecessarily hasty,” he wrote. “We also believe that shareholder reaction to Whitman as a permanent CEO would be mixed.” He also thinks CFO Cathie Lesjak, notable for filling in as interim CEO during the Hurd-to-Apotheker transition, may be leaving.

Shaw Wu of Sterne Agee is pretty much in agreement with Sacconaghi. “Given the disappointing financial performance over the last few quarters and some questionable decision making including the high purchase price of Autonomy, handling of the spinoff of its PC operation, and abrupt shutdown of its webOS hardware business, we are frankly not surprised that a change is being considered,” he wrote in a note to clients today. “So far, investors and even some customers we have talked to don’t seem confident in where HPQ is heading so a change is likely needed.”

But he’s not sold on Whitman. “While we believe she has proven to be a very capable manager helping grow eBay from a start-up into one of the largest internet companies, we think an ideal candidate for HPQ should have extensive experience in the enterprise market. In addition, we believe expertise in supply chain management would be helpful as well.” He goes on to name a handful of insiders and outsiders he’d consider possible successors: Dave Donatelli, who runs HP’s enterprise business; Todd Bradley, who runs the personal systems group and would be a likely CEO of that unit if it’s spun out; Steve Mills, who runs software and hardware at IBM; and Gary Moore, the COO of Cisco Systems.

Wu also says it might be a good idea for HP to keep its PC unit after all is said and done. “We estimate the business generates $2 billion in operating income per year and is the second most profitable behind Apple,” he wrote. Also the PC business isn’t so bad when you think of it as being one and the same with the tablet market. He maintained a neutral rating on HP for now.

Lou Miscioscia of Collins Stewart isn’t encouraged by the shake-up, either. Many of HP’s problems aren’t necessarily Apotheker’s fault, he says in a note to clients issued today. And he’s not sold on Whitman, arguing that she’s never run so large a company as HP and has never run one focused on the enterprise before. He maintained a neutral rating.

And while a post-Apotheker HP may undo some of his decisions, like spinning off the PC business, one thing it probably can’t do is walk away from its $10 billion purchase of Autonomy Software, says Jeffries and Co. analyst Peter Misek. Corporate takeovers are governed by strict laws in the U.K., making it nearly impossible for HP to pull out of the deal now. He rates HP shares a buy.

Evidently the market is not buying into that logic. Because according to Stern Agee analyst Shaw Wu, iPhone 4 sales remain surprisingly strong, despite the device’s advanced age and a widely anticipated October refresh.

“The biggest surprise we are picking up is unexpected strength in Apple’s iPhone business,” Wu said in a note to clients. “The reason why this is remarkable is demand for iPhone 4 remains fairly robust despite it being well known that there will be an upcoming iPhone 5 refresh. We had modeled a sizeable quarter-to-quarter decline to reflect a pause and inventory drawdown ahead of a refresh and we now think this is conservative.”

Accordingly, Wu has revised his iPhone estimate for Apple’s last fiscal quarter of the year, raising it to 18.5 million from 15.7 million. That’s less than the 20.34 million iPhones the company sold in its third quarter, but it’s impressive just the same.

And Wu is not alone in noting strong continuing demand for the iPhone 4.

Last week, Canaccord Genuity analyst T. Michael Walkley noted that the device remains one of the top-selling smartphones in the U.S.

“Our checks indicated strong sales of the iPhone 4, as it remained the top selling smartphone at AT&T and Verizon despite increasing consumer expectations for the iPhone 5 launch,” he wrote. “During the holiday season, we anticipate strong sales of the iPhone 5, as we anticipate a strong global launch with increased distribution to new carriers including Sprint in the U.S. market.”

Astonishing demand for a smartphone that’s been on the market for a year now, but that’s perhaps to be expected. After all, the iPhone 3GS is two years old, and it’s still selling well at AT&T.