On a conference call with brokers after Tuesday’s close, Eric Noll, Nasdaq OMX Group Inc.’s head of transaction services, said the exchange “by no means would have gone forward” with the much-watched Facebook debut if it had known problems would disrupt a “normal trading day.”

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The San Francisco game company, led by Mark Pincus, closed at an all-time low today of $7.12 a share, down 13.91 percent, on twice the amount of normal trading volume.

At least for now, we can expect the two companies to trade in lockstep, given their relationship status.

On one hand, Zynga is Facebook’s largest partner, and on the other, Facebook is where Zynga attracts most of its user base. Last year, Zynga accounted for 12 percent of Facebook’s revenue, consisting of both advertising and virtual goods sold from within social games.

At this point, Zynga couldn’t move fast enough in trying to limit its exposure to just one company, and is currently focused on increasing revenue from other sources, mainly mobile.

After Facebook opened only modestly this morning, Zynga’s stock fell 13 percent, tripping a standard circuit breaker rule that halts trading when a stock trades down more than 10 percent, according to sources familiar with Nasdaq procedures. When Zynga’s trading resumed minutes later, the company’s stock again was halted when shares shot up by 10 percent.

A Zynga spokeswoman declined to comment.

Zynga’s slide today can pretty much be explained by Facebook’s wild ride that started off at $38 a share, then shot up to $42 a share, before falling back down to close essentially flat at $38.23.

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The review by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, or Finra, is at an early stage, the person said. It follows unusually heavy trading in shares of the online-coupon company in the run-up to its release of strong financial results.

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Zynga has opened its stock-market debut at $11 a share, a small increase over its initial pricing from last night.

Late last night, the San Francisco social games company officially priced its shares at $10 apiece. It was hoping to sell up to 100 million shares at $8.50 to $10 apiece. At $10, Zynga was able to raise $1 billion in capital.

But investors aren’t going nuts for the stock. At one point this morning ZNGA shares were trading below their initial price at $9.50 a share.

That’s certainly not the kind of pop companies look for. On the bright side, perhaps the small (or non-existent) bump will make the company less likely to suffer the double-digit declines that recent Web IPOS like LinkedIn, Pandora, and Demand Media have all experienced this year.

At this price, the company is valued at $7.6 billion. That makes CEO Mark Pincus’s stake worth $1.2 billion.

What an amazing coincidence.

On the very day Yahoo’s board is considering actual bids from two private equity firms interested in deals to buy close to 20 percent of the company for between $16.50 and $17.50 a share, comes a spate of eerily similar breathless media postings that there’s another bid in the making for $20!

That’s totes better, right? I mean, how can Yahoo’s directors accept a real live lesser-priced bid now when there’s a prettier one in the fog just ahead?

No, really, it’s there — if you squint really, really hard.

Except it’s not even close, when you actually check with two of the key members of the group of alleged buyers, which would apparently be Blackstone, Bain Capital and Yahoo’s Asian partners, Alibaba Group and SoftBank.

Sources close to Blackstone and Alibaba said while there have been talks, which have been previously reported weeks ago here and elsewhere, there is no bid in the offing that is close to fruition and at that price.

In an unusual public statement, in fact, Alibaba’s John Spelich said flatly: “Alibaba Group has not made a decision to be part of a whole-company bid for Yahoo.”

This from a company whose voluble CEO Jack Ma is prone to making giant and noisy speeches to signal his interest in finding a way — any way — to get back shares of the Chinese Internet giant from Yahoo.

Not this time, and several sources close to Alibaba reiterated that it was nowhere near close to any bid as yet and that a price is still up in the air. In addition, sources added, Alibaba might decide to work with another PE group, such as Providence Equity.

In addition, sources noted that if Alibaba could strike an adequate deal with private equity bidders to get a large chunk of the stake back, it would be highly preferable to a hostile takeover of Yahoo that could end in tears and little else.

“The threat of a takeover is more useful than the damage an actual takeover would cause for everyone,” said one person close to the situation. “No one wants this to be unfriendly.”

So why the rumors — doubtlessly being spread around by hopelessly cynical Wall Street types interested only in stock manipulation — surfacing today?

Simple: To get some easy-to-play media outlet to bite, report it as speculative fact and cause the stock of Yahoo to take flight tomorrow.

Hey, it could happen!

Sadly, this junior-league trick has already worked — Yahoo shares were up a dollar to $16.72 in after-hours trading tonight.

It is likely to go even higher tomorrow, which could cause the board of Yahoo to delay accepting either of the partial bids from Silver Lake or TPG Capital, even if they were the best thing for the company and its employees.

Except that the job of the Yahoo board is to evaluate what’s before them and not what is perhaps, someday, soon, wait-by-the-phone, really soon, I promise is going to be delivered.

In fact, several sources noted that it’s not clear if the Yahoo board has even asked for parties to submit whole-company bids yet.

When and if Yahoo’s board does that and if something better actually does come down the pike, with a much fatter price tag of $20 or more, then the directors can mull that over.

That would be the prudent thing to do for the company, its employees and its shareholders, even if Yahoo’s stock gets a temporary lift now.

Maybe I am just a hopeless Silicon Valley romantic and not a hardened Wall Street M&A type, but the survival of Yahoo is the real point here, rather than the lining of bankers’ already fee-stuffed pockets.

And anything other than that is just fog.

Liquidnet on Monday said it will expand into the fast-growing market of trading shares in private and pre-initial-public-offering companies in a bet that its institutional clients will be open to expanding into the private arena. The announcement comes as trading in unlisted companies has expanded rapidly in recent years on platforms such as SecondMarket Inc. and SharesPost Inc.

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As we reported Wednesday, Oracle decided to slap Lynch silly with a public rebuke concerning his comments to The Wall Street Journal that his company had never been shopped to Oracle.

Always eager to clear up the record — just, well, you know, because — Oracle went on to publish the PowerPoint slides sent by investment banker Frank Quattrone of Qatalyst Partners to Mark Hurd in January. The slides may or may not have had anything to do with a meeting held by Lynch, Quattrone, Oracle President Mark Hurd and its head of M&A, Douglas Kehring, in April. Or not! You see, the stories vary.

(Oracle, by the way, has since taken down the slides, but you can still read them here. Update: And we’re now told the slides are back up. Interesting!)

But what about the email those slides arrived with originally? Well, a kindly source has sent it to us. Dated Jan. 26 — you can read it below — it was sent to Hurd by Quattrone (whose address I’ve deleted as a courtesy). Judge for yourself, but to me it sure reads like the windup to a sales pitch.

From: Frank Quattrone
Date: January 26, 2011 7:48:37 AM PST
To: “‘mark.hurd@oracle.com’”
Subject: Fw: Autonomy slides

Hi Mark,
It was great to catch up earlier this month. I wanted to follow up by sending the slides I promised on Autonomy. Given its strong position in managing unstructured data (such as video, voice and photos), “meaning based” contextual enterprise search, data protection, compliance, archiving and content/web management, I beleive it’s a very strategic asset that could alter the balance of power in the industry for whoever might acquire it. And despite its strong track record of growth and very high profitability (50 pct margins), it trades at less than 20x earnings and around 11x Ebitda, huge discounts to the other strategic software assets of scale. Please let me know if you would like me to follow up with you, Doug K or otherwise.
Thanks
Frank

And it was! At least the email part. Quattrone weighed in on the whole kerfuffle via an email to Lynch, which Lynch then shared with the Financial Times Alphaville blog:

“The slides Oracle posted publicly were sent by me to Mark Hurd in January, were prepared by Qatalyst and were for the purpose of our independently pitching Autonomy as an idea to Oracle. These slides were not used in our April meeting with Mark and Doug.”

So what of the meeting in April? Well, apparently it wasn’t a sales pitch at all. No, really. As Autonomy said in a statement also sent to the FT:

“In April 2011, there was a meeting for approximately thirty or forty minutes between Autonomy and Mark Hurd, which was set up by Frank Quattrone as an introduction to Mark Hurd. Oracle is an Autonomy customer. It was made clear that Autonomy was not for sale and no sale process was under way. Mr. Quattrone’s company was not engaged by Autonomy at that time. There has been no other contact with Oracle since then. …

“Qatalyst have informed us that the slides Oracle has recently posted on its website were prepared and sent independently by Qatalyst to Oracle on 26 January (the content is clearly from January). This is the first time we have seen them. Autonomy was not involved in this nor was Qatalyst engaged by Autonomy until mid-year. Autonomy did not present these slides in the meeting.

“Oracle seems a little confused about the sequence of events and origins of the data it has received, something that would suggests it needs better management of and insight into the unstructured data on its internal systems. We would be delighted to help.”

Oh, snap! At least Lynch is learning the art of the snarky retort. So the slides were the work of eager bankers trying to get a deal cooking. And the meeting was just a friendly call by Autonomy’s CEO on a customer? With an investment banker and another company’s head of M&A — two people who have collectively done more Silicon Valley deals than any other people in the world — joining in just for kicks? Okay then.

While this tit-for-tat seems like a mildly entertaining tempest in a teapot, it’s a $12 billion teapot! One about which HP shareholders still seem to have a lot of questions, especially in light of the management change that has gone on there since the deal was announced. Time, however, is short: HP is said to be about ready to close on the deal Monday.

Why is it so important to Lynch that the world believe that Autonomy was not shopping itself, and not engaging in any discussions about selling itself? Because laws in the U.K. about corporate acquisitions are very strict, for one thing. And companies engaging in discussions about being acquired without disclosing that fact to shareholders quickly find themselves in hot water with regulators! That means CEOs in the U.K. get ticklish on this subject very easily.

Of course, the first official public disclosure about Autonomy being in discussions to sell itself to anyone crossed the wires at 1:32 pm New York time on Aug. 18, which, by my watch, is about two minutes after markets had closed in London. The disclosure, however, came about an hour and change after Bloomberg News reported that a deal was near. About 90 minutes after Autonomy’s disclosure in London — and with 52 minutes left before the close of markets in New York — came HP’s confirming statement that it was “in discussions.” Then, just after markets closed in New York, the deal was done. That leaves plenty of room for people on both sides of the Atlantic to ask all kinds of fun questions. Anyway.

And as we all know, Oracle — whether in January or April — passed on the opportunity to bid on Autonomy, primarily because the price was, as CEO Larry Ellison put it on a conference call last week, “shockingly high” at about $6 billion. And four months later — or eight, depending on when you start counting — on Aug. 18, Hewlett-Packard announced its plans to acquire Autonomy at nearly twice that price.

So what was the purpose of the April meeting in Oracle’s board room in Redwood Shores? Was it really a “lively discussion about databases,” as Lynch has previously claimed? Or an innocent customer call during which two masters of tech M&A just happened to be in the room? We don’t know exactly.

But we do know one thing: Having first characterized Ellison’s description of the matter as “just inaccurate,” then copping to a previously undisclosed meeting of some kind, Lynch does know how to change his story.

The Hewlett-Packard board will meet as a whole today, after all kinds of committee confabs yesterday, in what sources describe as an intense debate over the fate of its current CEO, Léo Apotheker.

You know, the Léo who is now painfully twisting in the wind, after AllThingsD and Bloomberg broke the news that he might be ousted after only 11 months on the job, and replaced — at least for now — by director and former eBay CEO Meg Whitman.

If appointed, even without many critical credentials in the enterprise business, Whitman would be HP’s seventh CEO since 1999. That’s more corporate marriages and exec beheadings than England’s Henry VIII!

The possibility of one more, including other internal and external candidates, sent long-suffering HP shares soaring yesterday, and the stock was still up almost seven percent in after-hours trading.

That Wall Street glee is surely to come crashing down and very soon today, if the current crisis at the Silicon Valley tech giant — which has stumbled from one to the next over the last few years — is not quickly and definitively resolved by the board.

That means, of course, the likely firing of Apotheker, whose tenure has been rocky, articulating a strategy that the company actually plans to stick to and getting a new leader into place.

Translation: Don’t pull a Yahoo board here and drag out the situation to the most excruciating level possible.

Beyond the moribund stock and pissed-off shareholders, the uncertainty will be wearing on employee morale, including HP’s top execs.

According to sources close to the situation, leaders of HP’s many huge divisions had no idea that Apotheker’s head was on the block — although many I spoke to said they had hoped for a while that it would be.

“Leo is a very nice guy, but he has been an ineffective leader for HP at a very important time, with all that has been changing in the tech industry and the pressure from our competitors,” said one person at the company.

Said another, “[Apotheker will] get the blame, but this board needs to get a plan into place we can all follow, and then march this giant army in some direction, because all these shifts have been disheartening.”

I would imagine so.

Still, said sources, the board might not resolve the problem until later today, or Friday, even.

“The board really can’t look like it is making rash decisions,” said one person close to the situation. “And it cannot be hurtling from one mess to another and making an even bigger one in the process.”

That, given the many troubles at HP in recent years — from ever-shifting strategies to disappointing forecasts — is what you might call an understatement.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average sank 632 points at 10,813, ending at the day’s low, in preliminary closing figures at 4 p.m. Eastern time.

The Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index tumbled 78 points, or 6.5 percent, to 1123, with financial and energy stocks falling hardest. The Nasdaq Composite slumped 168 points, or 6.6 percent, to 2,364.

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In a move reminiscent of one done by Facebook in 2009, Twitter is close to completing an $800 million funding deal that will include a second part in which around $400 million of the total will be used to cash out current investors and also employees.

According to several sources close to the situation, the complex transaction could be completed within two weeks.

Along with basic funding needs, this is largely being done this way to give those with stakes in the San Francisco microblogging company an ability to monetize their privately held common stock and also to do this selling in a more organized — and legal — manner.

That is especially important since the company is not likely to go public for at least a year or more. And, while it could also be sold to a bigger company such as Google, that is also not in Twitter’s immediate future.

Before this secondary follow-on, the first part of the deal will be a $400 million investment for preferred shares by new and also existing shareholders, as was reported by the New York Times last week.

That round will indeed value Twitter at $8 billion, as the Times reported, which is a higher number than in other earlier reports.

This is more than double what Twitter was valued at when it got $200 million in venture funding from Kleiner Perkins in December at a $3.7 billion valuation.

Once the latest investments are complete, Twitter’s total cash haul since it was founded five years ago will be $760 million.

Key new moneybags are expected to be Russian investing heavyweight DST Global, which has invested in Facebook, Zynga and Groupon; as well as the digital growth fund of J.P. Morgan and perhaps others.

Current investors include Benchmark Capital, Union Square Ventures, Spark Capital and several other venture firms, as well as a spate of prominent angel investors.

The latest funding is an important one for Twitter and will up the pressure for its management, including CEO Dick Costolo, to really get its business growing in terms of revenue and profits.

Twitter is still struggling with coming up with a truly lucrative business model, and its execs have presented a number of them, such as promoted tweets, largely based on advertising.

It reportedly has $200 million in annual revenue from its efforts, which is still small in comparison to other Web 2.0 start-ups.

Interestingly, that was a similar situation to where Facebook found itself two years ago, when it allowed its employees to sell 20 percent of their shares.

That financing was part of a $100 million add-on to a $200 million investment in the social networking company by DST. At the time, the tender offer valued the company at $6.5 billion for the common stock, or $14.77 a share.

Of course, Facebook is worth upward of more than 10 times that now, so any Twitter sellers might want to consider their options carefully.

It is not clear exactly who can sell their Twitter shares, and in what amount, in the new deal. When Facebook did a similar move, for example, its top leadership could not sell any of their stakes.

A Twitter spokeswoman would not comment about any fund raising.

But, interestingly, in an onstage interview at a Fortune magazine tech conference this week, Costolo criticized stock trading of the shares of popular start-ups on secondary exchanges as a “distraction.” Like other companies, he said, Twitter had instituted stricter policies to limit the ability of its employees and investors to trade on those markets.

How starved are investors for high-profile, high-growth Internet companies?

Hungry enough to lift the value of Pandora to just under $4 billion in an hour of trading for the first time on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol “P.”

That would be close to $24 a share right now, although the music streaming company — which was once near death — has risen as high as $26 at one point so far this morning.

In any case, its stock opened at $20 a share, well above the $16 pricing yesterday, which was already a far cry from its $9 price when it first announced its IPO.

Insiders unloaded about nine million shares in its initial public offering of the close to 15 million sold to the public, with the company raising $235 million from its six million shares sold.

The high price echoes the recent IPO of LinkedIn, which priced a lot lower than the prices the stock fetched as soon as it hit the market.

Shares on the social business network jumped 100 percent out of the gate a month ago to above $100.

LinkedIn has now settled in at about $75 a share, which is still high.

Back in April of 2009, like all the rest of the parts of the Chinese Internet giant Alibaba Group, its Alipay unit was listed this way on its Web site: “Alipay is wholly owned by Alibaba Group.”

And right now, describing the online payments platform? (my italics): “Alipay is an affiliate of Alibaba Group.”

Memo to Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz: You might have noticed that critical change in Alipay’s corporate status, which happened last August, given the company you lead owns 43 percent of the Alibaba Group.

More to the point, Alipay accounted for $1.7 billion of Yahoo’s valuation.

Not surprisingly, Yahoo shares are down more than six percent in after-hours trading, likely in reaction to an unusual statement by Yahoo yesterday, in which the company said it had no idea until March 31 that Alibaba CEO Jack Ma had transferred ownership of the Alipay unit to a separate entity.

Sources said that apparently happened in a letter from Alibaba to Yahoo’s accounting department. Since then, the company said it has been trying to figure it all out.

Said Yahoo:

On March 31, 2011, Yahoo! and Softbank were notified by Alibaba Group of two transactions that occurred without the knowledge or approval of the Alibaba Group board of directors or shareholders. The first was the transfer of ownership of Alipay in August 2010. The second was the deconsolidation of Alipay effective in the first quarter of 2011.

Yahoo! disclosed this restructuring in its 10-Q after discussions with Alibaba Group and obtaining a better understanding of this complex situation.

Yahoo! continues to work closely with Alibaba and Softbank to protect economic value for all interested parties. We believe ongoing negotiations among all of the parties provide the best opportunity to achieve an outcome in the best interest of all stakeholders.

Translation: Alibaba’s Ma–who cites upcoming new rules about foreign ownership from People’s Bank of China related to operating its payment business–just snookered us and we need to play dumb until we decide whether a lawsuit will be one disaster too many for our much-beleaguered investors.

Really pissed off shareholders is more like it–BoomTown has been on the receiving end of an explosive series of calls from Yahoo’s investors today asking a variety of questions.

They include:

1. How could Alibaba have reported its results with Alipay consolidated in, even though it was a separate entity since last year? And does that spell trouble for Yahoo, since it used those numbers in its own regulatory filings in the U.S.?

2. How could Ma initiate such a transaction without approval from shareholders and its board, as Yahoo claims?

3. In any case, why weren’t Yahoo execs paying more attention to the swirling changes related to foreign ownership in China, especially since Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang is on the Alibaba board, anticipating that there could be real problems ahead?

4. Why did Yahoo execs not tell shareholders about the situation immediately or even at its April earnings call? Or perhaps before David Einhorn’s hedge fund Greenlight Capital hedge fund took a big position in Yahoo last week, specifically noting the value of the company’s Asian assets as highly attractive.

5. Does this move mean that those pretty Chinese assets Yahoo has touted are not so pretty after all, given that these kinds of things can happen there?

6. Should U.S. investors remove themselves from that Chinese market, given that these kinds of things can happen there?

7. Is Bartz’s extraordinarily tense personal relationship with Ma a big part of the problem, creating a distasteful public feud over issues better left to quiet backroom negotiations?

There will be plenty more, of course, especially around Yahoo’s disclosures to investors.

Yahoo execs will argue that it did disclose in the proper manner from a filing point of view and that it did not reveal the fissure so as not to put its negotiations with Alibaba over the situation at risk.

But–especially given the myriad of continued missteps by Bartz that have worked investors’ last nerve–that probably is not going to fly.

In fact, that irked sentiment will surely be on display at Yahoo’s upcoming investor day on May 25.

Yahoo had hoped to show off its new team of execs and talk about some legitimate momentum the company is making.

Now, it will doubtlessly all be about China and what happened there.

So, Bartz has to have a better line than a take on a Hollywood classic: “Forget it, Wall Street. It’s China.”

Maybe so, but it’s her problem to solve now.

And here’s my favorite version of that line:

Software giant Microsoft soundly beat Wall Street expectations in its third-quarter earnings released after the market closed today.

Microsoft said it had revenue of $16.43 billion for the quarter ended Mar. 31, 2011, which was up 13 percent from a year ago. Net income was $5.23 billion, or 61 cents per share, a rise of 31 percent and 36 percent, respectively.

Investors were expecting the Redmond, Wash. tech company to have profits of 56 cents per share, up 45 cents per share in the same quarter last year. Revenue was expected to come in at $16.2 billion.

As usual, Microsoft beating of expectations still has not helped its lackluster stock, which is down almost 14 percent year over year.

Its shares are currently down more than two percent in after-hours trading, to $26.09.

That’s due to worries about PC market growth, in the wake of an explosion of tablet and smartphone devices from competitors such as Apple and Google.

Most of Microsoft’s divisions were up in terms of revenue, especially its Xbox, Kinect and Office businesses. That offsetted slowing PC growth, Microsoft said, as well as a 4.5 percent drop in revenue in its flagship Windows and Windows Live division.

BoomTown will be liveblogging the earnings call at 2:30 pm PT.

Until then, here is the official press release:

letterheadFY11Q3 –

Dell just reported quarterly earnings, and the numbers are a bit mixed. First off, sales in the fourth quarter were $15.692 billion, just a whisker short of consensus analyst expectations of $15.72 billion. That represents a 5 percent improvement over a year ago.

Per-share earnings, however, were way ahead of the consensus at 53 cents versus 37 cents, amounting to a change of 89 percent over the year-ago quarter.

In its outlook, Dell said it expects revenue to to grow in the range of 5 to 9 percent in its fiscal year 2012 (underway as of Jan. 29), and for profits to grow in a range of 6 to 12 percent. Cash flow from operations will exceed profits.

Dell shares are up more than 6 percent in after-hours trading.

Here are some highlights:

• Enterprise sales and services grew 7 percent to $4.6 billion, or 29 percent of overall sales.
• Server revenue increased 16 percent.
• EqualLogic sales grew 49 percent and, combined with Dell PowerVault sales, accounted for almost two-thirds of storage sales and north of 80 percent of storage gross margin dollars.
• Sales in the combined large enterprise, the public and small- to medium-business sector was up 9 percent to $12.4 billion in the quarter, with revenue for commercial laptop and desktop computers growing 10 percent.
• PC profitability (Dell calls them clients) improved in the second half of the year, driven by improvements in the supply chain, lower input costs and improved product quality. For the full year, PC revenue grew 14 percent to $33.7 billion, driven on a refresh cycle from corporate buyers.

CEO Michael Dell sounded an optimistic note, the first I can recall in some time:

“I’m very pleased with our fiscal year results and the strong performance we’re seeing in our commercial businesses. We remain focused on developing and acquiring new technologies and capabilities, and our IT solutions portfolio has never been stronger. Customers are now seeing Dell in a fresh light, and we’re heading into the new year with strength and optimism.”

The company said it is performing well, as deal seekers around the world–from North America to Western Europe to the Asia-Pacific region–look for deals on hotels and rental cars, specifically, and benefit from improvements in the economy.

The company’s stock is trading at $463.33, up $6.32 a share today. A new 52-week high was hit yesterday, trading at $459.57 a share.

Yesterday, Priceline announced it entered its fifth straight year of its well-known advertising campaign, featuring William Shatner–a.k.a. “the Priceline Negotiator.”

Shatner is portrayed as a James Bond-like character who will stop at nothing to obtain the best travel deals and maximum savings for Priceline customers–although he does silly things along the way, too, like watch a gorilla wrestle a scrawny man.

Shatner will be joined in the campaign–created by Butler, Shine, Stern & Partners–by new sidekicks Naomi Pryce and the NBA’s all-time leading scorer, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

The Norwalk, Conn.-based company will release its fourth-quarter and full-year results Feb. 23.

Expect the focus to be on growth.

Priceline is forecasting total gross travel bookings to jump year-over-year by 36 to 41 percent, with most of the growth coming internationally.

International bookings are expected to jump by 54 to 59 percent vs. minimal growth in domestic gross travel of 5 to 10 percent.

Annual revenues are forecasted to jump by 31 to 36 percent, and gross profits are expected to soar by 49 to 54 percent.

As a close competitor to Priceline, Expedia.com hit a 52-week high of $29.85 back in September, but has fallen considerably since, to trade around $21.69 a share.

Yesterday, Expedia relaunched a new price-savings campaign called ASAP: A Sudden Amazing Price. The  promotion will offer two discounts a day on hotels and other items of up to 50 percent, aimed at both sides of the country.

Today, he says it’s all “new eBay.”

At the company’s analyst meeting at its headquarters, the company demonstrated the major changes made over the past couple of years and laid out plans for how local, mobile and social will lead the next wave of commerce.

In the afternoon, Bob Swan, eBay’s CFO, took the stage to give the financial rundown that everyone had been waiting for since the morning.

Swan highlighted PayPal’s growth trajectory by saying that it expects to double revenues over the next three years to between $6 billion and $7 billion, compared with $3.4 billion in 2010.

He also talked up how mobile was gaining speed by saying that PayPal mobile transactions were estimated to double to $2 billion in total payment volume, and that mobile on marketplaces will double to $4 billion in gross merchandise volume.

Meanwhile, when looking at the company’s gross merchandise volume, he sees the business increasing from $60 billion in 2010 to $75 billion in 2013. And, to support the strength of the business, the company anticipates generating $7.5 to $8 billion in free cash flow by 2013.

Swan wants to stress that these growth rates are being driven from the company’s core businesses, and not from the more innovative stuff eBay is working on in local, mobile and social. “We are in a  different state than we were in March 2009, where the crystal ball was murky and full of potholes. Now the crystal ball is full of opportunities. We have unmatched advantages that position us to win.”

That’s possible because of the improvements the company has been making over the past two years.

“We’ve made significant and necessary changes necessary for growth. Two years ago, search was optimized for auctions and suffered. Two years from now, search will be a competitive advantage for eBay,” said Mark Carges,” eBay’s CTO of marketplaces. “We’ve rolled out many tailored experiences and selling on eBay will be vastly simplified.”

To illustrate the change, Carges showed how there’s no more irreverent banner ads on the search results page, and instead of returning up to 19 paid results, it gives shoppers the “best matches” and cuts the time in half that it takes to return results.

The company also launched the buyer protection program, which will return the price of the item and the cost of shipping to customers unhappy with purchases.

Christopher Payne, VP of eBay marketplaces North America, said the company will start to increase marketing spend on these improvements to drive awareness: “We’ve been intentionally quiet as we fixed fundamentals, but starting in the second half, we’ll start marketing this new experience.”

At lunch, analysts were so eager to talk to Donahoe he wasn’t even able to get to his seat. They crowded around him in the lobby to grill him on what impact Facebook, Apple and Google were going to have on the company’s payments aspirations.

Donahoe wasn’t phased, saying that PayPal is technology agnostic. He will support BlackBerry, Google’s Android, Apple’s iPhone — and all of the iterations they produce from phones to tablets. What’s more, he says, the company is building the tools and technology for merchants to keep up in what can be a daunting world.

Analysts appear impressed with the improvements. Today, the company’s shares traded up nearly 8 percent, or $2.57, to $34.53, coming close to marking a 52-week high.

Posting fourth-quarter earnings this morning, Sprint said it added 1.1 million total wireless subscribers, 58,000 of them two-year contract customers. Quite a milestone for a company that hasn’t seen a gain in postpaid subscribers in 13 quarters and a sign that Sprint may finally be turning a corner. Another good sign: Postpaid churn fell to 1.86 percent from 2.11 percent in the third quarter, and prepaid churn fell to 4.93 percent from 5.32 percent. And another: For the quarter, Sprint added almost 1.1 million wireless subscribers, its best showing in nearly five years.

All welcome news, even if Sprint is still losing money. The company reported a fourth-quarter loss of $929 million, or 31 cents a share, on revenue of $8.3 billion, up from $7.9 billion a year ago. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters most recently forecast a loss of 30 cents a share on $8.15 billion in revenue. Said Bernstein analyst Craig Moffett, “Sprint CEO Dan Hesse might be forgiven for the temptation to hang a “Mission Accomplished” banner on the aircraft carrier that is Sprint. To his credit, he expressly declined to do so. Still, the company has at last achieved post-paid and total subscriber growth, customer service levels have improved, churn rates have been brought under control, and revenues were up.”

At $4.41, Sprint shares are up 1.15 percent in early trading as I write this.

CEO John Chambers said in a company statement that the quarter “played out as we expected” and that the company is “going through a period of transition as we move aggressively in the market with our architectural strategy….Simply put, we are owning our evolution and the next generation of industry leadership.”

That’s a change from the “air pockets” phrase Chambers used to describe the surprise downward in Cisco’s guidance when it last reported earnings in November, and the stock has yet to recover from the drop that resulted. More as I go through the numbers.

4:38 pm: Chambers: Our routing architecture is in the best shape in its history.

Chambers: We are in the middle of a major product transition with dramatically higher price performance advantages. With this in mind we did see our switching revenue decline 7 percent.

4:41 pm: Chambers: We are seeing pricing pressures on our Catalyst portfolio. This is where our competitors are targeting us and this is where we intend to own our evolution.

We are moving very aggressively to prevent any future erosion of our product share.

Services revenue increase 18 percent year over year.

International bookings are okay. Italy was the only country to see a fall.

Enterprise solid. Grew 10 percent year over year. Public sector grew 7 percent. U.S. public sector orders grew 9 percent. [He thinks orders will worsen in this sector in the coming quarters.]

Set-top business declined.

4:44 pm: Initial customer and industry feedback to Videoscape is being received well

4:45 pm: Chambers: There were a number of areas where we are pleased with our progress.

Guidance coming up.

4:47 pm: Q3 revenue 4 to 6 percent year over year.

Q4: 8-11 percent increase year over year.

4:48 pm: As I look, stock is now trading down nearly 4 percent after-hours.

Frank Calderoni, Cisco CFO is now on the call.

Calderoni: There are multiple product transitions in areas such as switching, which, although expected, are happening faster than expected.

4:56 pm: Cash and equivalents: $40.2 billion. Cash flow from operations: $2.6 billion

4:58 pm: Calderoni says Cisco would issue a dividend in fiscal 2011 with a yield in the 1 to 2 percent range.

4:58 pm: Shares now down about 6 percent.

More guidance coming up from Calderoni.

5:00 pm: Q3, we exepect revenue growth of 4 to 6 percent year on year.

That’s with one less week this year than last year.

Q3 we expect non-GAAP operation 23 to 24 percent

EPS 35 to 38 cents per share.

In Q4 we expect 8 to 11 percent growth in revenue year over year.

FY11 will be mid to lower end of 9 to 12 percent given in previous guidance.

5:03 pm: John Chambers is back on the call.

Enterprise orders growth good. Grew high 20 percent range.

Shares are down 9 percent on that “lower range” guidance for the full year.

We believe we are not losing market share with developed-world governments.

This growth will be severely challenged in the next several quarters, and will grow in the low single digit.

5:11 pm: We believe the growth in enterprise will balance out the challenges in government business.

5:12 pm: Decrease in gross margins was affected by several factors.

He says the company has started something called a working group to study the decline in gross margins. What does that mean?

5:17 pm: Shares are within sight of trading down 10 percent after hours.

5:18 pm: Chambers: I think we will look back on this period of time and wish we could have avoided it, but it will make us stronger.

Q&A about to start. Should be interesting.

5:20 pm: Chambers: Bookings were comfortably above the revenues. In terms of momentum in switching I would expect them to be positive.

5:39 pm: Chambers is now talking about tax policy. Echoing a point he’s made repeatedly about bringing cash that’s held overseas into the U.S. He think the taxes are too high.

5:39 pm: Cash in the U.S. is $3.1 billion versus total cash holdings of more than $40 billion. Calderoni is talking about the $3 billion debt offering. He said Cisco has about $3 billion in long term debt that’s coming due soon, and that the debt it’s issuing will carry a lower rate.

I’m going to close this early because I have to make another meeting. I’ll be posting more on Cisco earnings shortly.

It turns out that if you don’t use the part of the chip that has the problem, it works just fine. The problem is with the SATA port connections on the Cougar Point chipset. There are six such connections and only one is of which four are affected. (For the finer technical points about the design problem, read this post at AnandTech.)

In the days after Intel disclosed the design error on its Cougar Point chipset, PC makers called up to ask if they could continue to ship if they tweaked their designs in such a way that used only the SATA port connections on the Cougar Point chipset that worked. Intel said this was A-OK, and has restarted shipping the chips to those PC makers that have promised to make the necessary changes.

Meanwhile, Intel says it has started manufacturing a new version of the chips, and it should start shipping to new customers later this month

News of the flaw hurt Intel stock last week, mainly because of the potential for financial impact. Intel said it will reduce its revenue forecast for the first quarter by $300 million as it ends production of the old chip and gets volume of the new one ramped up, and that the full impact could reach $700 million for the fiscal year. However, today’s disclosure suggests that Intel may have initially outlined a worst-case scenario just in case. Still, it hasn’t changed its forecast for the quarter. Intel shares, however, are up in after-hours trading.

Update: I corrected this post because I got the number of affected SATA ports on the chip wrong. Sorry about that.

Microsoft on Thursday reported earnings and revenue that topped expectations and rose significantly from a year ago amid strong sales from its Xbox unit.

For the three months ended Dec. 31, Microsoft earned $6.63 billion, or 77 cents per share, on revenue of $19.95 billion. The per-share number is up from 74 cents a year ago and ahead of the analysts’ average prediction of about 68 cents per share.

“We are enthusiastic about the consumer response to our holiday lineup of products, including the launch of Kinect,” CFO Peter Klein said in a statement. “The 8 million units of Kinect sensors sold in just 60 days far exceeded our expectations,” said Peter Klein, chief financial officer at Microsoft. “The pace of business spending, combined with strong consumer demand, led to another quarter of operating margin expansion and solid earnings per share growth.”

Not only were the results ahead of estimates financially–they were also ahead of estimates chronologically, as the company accidentally released the information before the end of regular trading on Thursday. Results were expected to be released after the closing bell.

“A preproduction draft of our earnings release was discovered by one or more media sources who then published our results to the web before market close,” Microsoft said in a statement. “After consulting with NASDAQ, we have posted our official numbers. We apologize for any confusion and will review our procedures to ensure this does not happen again.”

With the results from the past quarter, Apple passed Microsoft slightly in quarterly revenue, but did not–as some analysts thought might happen–surpass Redmond in profits as well. The company also noted it bought back $5 billion in shares during the quarter and handed out $1.3 billion in dividends to shareholders.

The gaming unit wasn’t the only part of Microsoft going strong. Redmond said its Office unit also had a big quarter, growing 24 percent from a year earlier, and that Windows 7 license sales have now passed 300 million.

“Business demand for our productivity and infrastructure products and cloud solutions is strong,” COO Kevin Turner said in a statement. “Office had a huge quarter, exceeding everyone’s expectations, and our roadmap for cloud productivity with Office 365 makes products like SharePoint, Exchange, Lync and Dynamics CRM even more attractive to our customers.”

The company noted in a PowerPoint presentation accompanying its results that nine out of 10 businesses have now started their formal migration to Windows 7. Turner also pointed to Microsoft’s longer-term move to bring Windows to ARM-based processors.

“Windows 7 continues to be the fastest-growing operating system in history, and our recent system-on-a-chip announcement demonstrates our commitment that Windows will have the power and flexibility to run everywhere and on every device,” he said.

The company also said its online advertising sales were up 23 percent during the quarter.

However, Microsoft’s outlook was limited, offering guidance only for what it expects its operating expenses to be. In the PowerPoint, Microsoft offered a bit more information, detailing its unit-by-unit expectations relative to their markets. For example, the company said that Windows growth should roughly track the PC market, adjusting for some boost the company got a year ago from the launch of Windows 7. Server sales should also track the hardware market, with long-term licensing and services revenue growing in the high single digits for the current quarter and low double digits for the full fiscal year, which runs through the end of June. The company said the entertainment unit should enjoy year-over-year revenue growth of 50 percent for the current quarter and 40 percent for the full fiscal year.

Here’s a full look at the company’s segment-by-segment results (click to enlarge):