VentureBeat

The Dow Jones Industrial Average has not closed below 10,000 since 2004. Today it might. Well below. As of a little past 9 AM PST, the Dow is down just over 470 points to 9,854.59. The market is seeing a continuation of the bloodbath it saw last week when the Dow fell nearly 1,000 points.

The Nasdaq is once again doing even worse percentage-wise. It’s down well over 100 points today, off over five and a half percent. Many of the big name tech stocks are once again getting killed.

Today, Microsoft, which has largely been insulated from the massive hits its rivals have taken, is one of the largest losers, down $1.81 (6.88 percent). Apple is down $6.10 (6.28 percent), Yahoo is down $0.71 (4.44 percent), Sun Microsystems is down $0.42 (6.22 percent), Google is down $20.26 (5.25 percent), IBM is down $4.32 (4.18 percent), HP is down $2.51 (5.84 percent), Sony is down $1.17 (6.11 percent), Nokia is down $1.42 (8 percent), SanDisk is down $2.02 (11.04 percent), eBay is down $1.35 (7.13 percent).

I think you get the point.

While the reason for most of the tech losses can likely be attributed to the overall poor form of the market, eBay is leading the surge downward after it announced it would cut 1,000 jobs this morning. Its stock is at its lowest level in six years.

Meanwhile, Yahoo’s price target for its stock has been slashed from $24-a-share to $21-a-share by Sanford Bernstein analyst Jeffrey Lindsay. The analyst feels the likelihood of a deal between Yahoo and Time Warner to merge the Internet giant with TW’s AOL property remains relatively low, according to CNET.

The online and DVD-by-mail service Netflix meanwhile is getting killed today (down over 10 and a half percent) because it cut its fourth-quarter revenue estimates thanks to the bad economy. We can probably expect a lot more of that in the coming days.

Update: The Dow is now down over 700 points as of 11:30 AM PST. Right now it’s at 9,620.34, which means it has nearly lost 2,000 points in less than a month. On September 8, the market closed at 11,510.74.

The Nasdaq continues to have even worse losses. It is currently down 154.42 points, right around 8 percent off (the Dow is off nearly 7 percent).

Update 2: After bottoming-out at 9525.32, the Dow rallied to close at 9,955.50 — “only” down 369.88 points (3.58 percent). It still could not get above the 10,000 mark at close for the first time in nearly 4 years.

The Nasdaq rallied a bit as well. After bottoming-out at 1,777.02, it ended down 84.43 points at 1,862.96 (a loss of 4.34 percent).

Storage. Everyone always wants more of it, and going forward that demand will only increase. Likely knowing that, today, computer maker Hewlett-Packard made a purchase to bolster its storage offerings: A $360 million cash deal to buy LeftHand Networks.

LeftHand Networks is a company that allows businesses to cost-effectively manage their data remotely. Using a technology known as iSCSI SAN, LeftHand offers scalable storage on existing hardware. iSCSI is able to send SCSI (Small Computer System Interface) data over IP networks.

The company also uses virtual environments to reduce disk space used for storage by up to 97 percent, it claims. This also helps it reduce power consumption.

This deal is similar to a $1.4 billion dollar one Dell made last year to buy EqualLogic, GigaOM points out. That purchase was the biggest cash purchase of a private tech company. This one is significantly smaller, but perhaps that has something to do with the current economic climate.

HP, one of the country’s biggest computer companies, is boasting that it boosted its PC sales by 10 percent in May after it leveraged the blogging community to promote the launch of one of its computer systems.

I’d have shrugged off this announcement, had it not been so unbelievable. Bloggers? Boosting PC sales by 10 percent? In a sluggish economy like this? And how much did HP have to pay these bloggers for them to shamelessly pimp themselves and their blogs to promote the PCs to their readers?

Skeptical, I talked with Scott Ballantyne from HP, VP & General Managers for Personal Systems Group, who oversaw the program. He said HP didn’t pay the bloggers a dime. All HP did was give away 31 new HDX Dragon computer systems to 31 influential members of the PC blogging community, so that the blogs could give them away in a competition among their readers. The bloggers went nuts. They made videos of the systems, wrote up engaging posts and cross-linked to each other — all of their own accord. The publicity this created spurred an increase in sales, according to Ballantyne. Since the bloggers were credible to their readers, and they were talking about the HP systems on their sites, the readers went out and bought systems even if they didn’t win one in the competitions.

HP has strong evidence to back up this up. Until May, the Dragon system was already out on the market for nine months, and they weren’t performing as well as HP expected. Sales had flatlined. But in May, during the blogger competitions, sales of the Dragon system shot up by 85 percent compared to the average monthly sales of the three months before hand. More impressively, overall HP PC sales grew 10 percent higher in the U.S. than the company had forecast, as HP PC systems overall got more publicity from the Dragon campaign. Visits to HP.com increased by 15 percent.

So there you have it. Embracing blogs apparently paid off big time for HP. And HP didn’t pay a thing. “This was for the community, by the community, with the community,” said Scott Ballantyne. If this is true — and I have no reason to believe it isn’t after talking with HP — it’s amazing.

Here’s the list of the 31 blogs that participated.

Here’s an example of a blog post during the campaign.

Buzz Corps is the agency behind the campaign.

Apple notebook computers which include the MacBook, the MacBook Pro and the MacBook Air are hot items. How hot? Their North American market share grew 60 percent in the second quarter of 2008 as compared to the same quarter last year, according to a report by DisplaySearch.

Consider this: While Dell and HP rose slightly during the same time period (Dell from 21.6 percent to 21.9 percent and HP from 21.2 percent to 21.4 percent), other players in the notebook business saw their market share plummet. Acer, which includes both the Gateway and Packard Bell brands, fell from 18.6 percent to 14.4 percent of the market. Toshiba fell over two percentage points as well.

But Apple rose a full four percentage points, taking its share from 6.6 percent to 10.6 percent.

This news comes on the heels of rumors that Apple is prepping a refresh of its notebook line of computers. Specifically, numerous reports suggest that Apple is close to unveiling a redesigned MacBook Pro. An update to the MacBook Air, which was released last January, could also be in the cards. These updates may come as early as next month.

One reason for the surge in market share could be that small and medium-sized businesses are getting more comfortable with operating on the Mac platform, John Jacobs, author of the DisplaySearch report, told the Apple blog Cult of Mac. “The reliability of Apple is now starting to trump reluctance because of price,” he said.

For all its success in North America, Apple still hasn’t made enough gains to dent the top 5 notebook manufacturers in the EMEA region of the world, which including Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Digital rights management (DRM), for better or worse, is still the cornerstone of digital content. But the name has such a negative connotation now that major players in the entertainment and electronics industry appear to be trying to change it.

According to Reuters, some of the Hollywood studios are working on a consortium with various retailers, service providers, and consumer electronics/information technology companies that’s set to be unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January in Las Vegas. It will be called the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE), and the goal is apparently to create an environment that will allow consumers to easily store and access their digital content from various places.

Specifically, it sounds like DECE will offer a new set of standards for the transfer and storage of copyrighted digital content. This could make it easy to, say, move a digital copy of a movie you own from your computer to a box connected to your television. Or from your television to a portable device.

If that sounds familiar, it’s because Apple already offers such an ecosystem between its devices like Mac computers, the Apple TV, iPods and the iPhone. The problem is that Apple’s system is for the most part closed — and Apple largely sets the rules. It sounds like DECE wants to offer a viable alternative.

In fact, DECE’s aim is to turn Apple’s system on its head, DECE president Mitch Singer told Reuters. But at the same time he says he’s open to having Apple join it. I wouldn’t expect that to happen.

Apple has it’s own DRM, and to join such a consortium it would likely have to rework most of its devices as well as its iTunes software. Instead, look for a stand-off of two rival ecosystems.

That is, of course, assuming DECE is a meaningful alternative to Apple’s system. If it’s just a slightly more open system that lacks Apple’s ease of use, it will fail. Unless the consortium members decide to pull their content out of Apple’s system in order to boost DECE.

With members such as Alcatel-Lucent, Best Buy Co Inc, Cisco Systems Inc, Comcast, News Corp’s Fox Entertainment Group, Hewlett-Packard Co, Intel, Lions Gate Entertainment Corp, Microsoft Corp, General Electric Co’s NBC Universal, Viacom Inc’s Paramount Pictures, Philips, Sony Corp, Toshiba, VeriSign, and Time Warner Inc’s Warner Bros Entertainment, that could be a nightmare for Apple.

But with the iPod owning the personal electronic device market and the iPhone quickly rising up the mobile phone ranks, would those companies really risk alienating customers to avoid Apple? It’s possible, but unlikely. Just look at NBC. It pulled its content from iTunes upset with the deal it was getting from Apple, but now it’s right back on iTunes with what may only be a marginally better deal. And that’s after NBC launched its own successful online video alternative, Hulu.

[photo: flickr/freeparking]

Hewlett Packard, Intel and Yahoo today announced a cloud computing research project to promote the use of computing using centralized servers in the Internet “cloud.”

The companies will create big data centers that researchers can tap for internet-wide research. The initiative will promote collaboration among industry, academia and government by removing the financial and logistical barriers to research in data-intensive, large scale computing. Researchers can use the internet-wide testing environment to explore cloud-computing software, data center management and hardware needs.

“We will foster a sense of an intellectual commons, where we all contribute and benefit from a pipe that is larger,” said Prabhakar Raghavan, (pictured left) head of Yahoo Research, in a conference call. “It’s about what kinds of interesting projects you can do, once you take the cloud for granted, as if it were a utility.”

While everyone will benefit from the test bed, the research will clearly pit Intel, HP and Yahoo against IBM and Google, which have their own cloud-computing research underway. Andrew Chien, vice president at Intel Research (pictured at bottom), said that this effort is broader in terms of its availability to researchers. It also allows for research on all levels, not just on the application level as Google and IBM are doing.

The companies have partnered with the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA), the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany to form the research initiative. The partnership with Illinois also includes the National Science Foundation.

The test bed will initially consist of six research centers at IDA, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Steinbuch Centre for Computing of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, HP Labs, Intel Research and Yahoo. Each location will host a cloud computing infrastructure. The machines will use HP hardware and Intel processors — 1,000 to 4,000 processor cores. The test bed locations are expected to be available to researchers worldwide through a selection process later this year. Prith Banerjee, head of HP Labs (pictured left), said each company would contribute researchers and data centers.

HP said it will focus on five research projects. One, dubbed “cells as a service,” is a prototype management system for the cloud infrastructure. It creates “service cells,” or secure self-contained virtual infrastructure, that are isolated from the rest of a cloud. Such cells can expand as needed and be automated. Banerjee also said HP is working on another project to cut the costs and improve the service of future data centers.

The test bed will run Apache Hadoop –- an open source, distributed computing project of the Apache Software Foundation -– and other open source, distributed computing software such as Pig, the parallel programming language developed by Yahoo Research.

HP Labs recently sharpened its focus to help HP and its customers capitalize on the industry’s shift toward cloud computing, a driving force behind HP’s vision of Everything as a Service. Under that vision, internet devices and services will interact seamlessly through the cloud, and businesses and individuals will use services that anticipate their needs based on location, preferences, calendar and communities.

In November 2007, Yahoo! announced a data center, called M45, for cloud computing research; Carnegie Mellon University was the first institution to take advantage of this supercomputer. Yahoo also announced this year an agreement with Computational Research Laboratories (CRL) to jointly support cloud computing research and make one of the 10 fastest supercomputers in the world available to academic institutions in India.

Here’s the latest action:
Hewlett-Packard confirmed today that it is in advanced talks to buy EDS — It wants to acquire the data center outsourcing service company for $12 billion to $13 billion, well above the company’s current value of $9.5 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal, which first reported the story. If the deal is consummated, HP would have a lot more legs to compete with IBM’s global services division. HP’s services division brought in $16. 6 billion of the company’s $104 billion in revenue last year. EDS had revenue of $22 billion last year, so don’t expect the new company to be call HPEDS. The big fish can swallow this one whole.

Google extends its lead in online video in March, according to new figures from comScore — People watched about 11.5 billion videos in March, with Google accounting for 38 percent of the entire tally. YouTube, in turn, accounted for 98 percent of Google’s results.

Jeff Raikes has been named CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which is committed to improving health in the developing world –Raikes is retiring as the president of Microsoft’s business division and will work as a full-time philanthropist along side Bill Gates, who is also joining the foundation full-time in June. Raikes will start in September. Reporters asked on a phone call if the foundation will take on the same culture as Microsoft as a result. Will we see the Gates Foundation, which has an endowment of $37.3 billion, make a hostile takeover bid for the Ford Foundation — and then give up?

XM Satellite Radio posted a wider loss than Wall Street estimated, as Silicon Alley Insider reports. But the CEO Nate Davis said he expected that the merger with Sirius Satellite Radio will be approved in the second quarter. Clearly, running a business on its own isn’t going so well, with a loss of $129.3 million and rising costs for acquiring new subscribers.

Apple is reportedly in talks with Time Warner’s HBO division to sell popular HBO programs — Update: The deal’s just been announced. Programs will include “Entourage,” for Apple’s iTunes service. Apple may charge a higher price of $1.99 for HBO videos. This may be the first time that Apple has created a separate price structure with a content provider, signaling the importance of the HBO content. I guess it shows there is life after the Bada bing.

Knowledge Adventure, the maker of kids’ educational-game software JumpStart, will begin selling virtual-world software aimed at three-year-olds to five-year-olds. The JumpStart Advanced Preschool World will encourage kids to learn their ABCs by playing games in a 3-D version of a beach or a jungle.

Hackers managed to steal the identities of six million Chileans — This included the daughter of the country’s president. The data included identity cards numbers, addressses, phone numbers, e-mails and academic backgrounds. The data was taken early Friday from servers at the Education Ministry, as first reported by the daily newspaper El Mercurio. You can read more about it CNN.com.

Picitup launches a test version of its search engine for finding matching images — It can be used for celebrity face matching and a variety of other image related functions. It reminds me of the combination image-text search engine under research at the Palo Alto Research Center.

Advanced Micro Devices shuffles management — Randy Allen, former head of the company’s server chip business, will be the senior vice president of the computing solutions group. He replaces Mario Rivas, an apparent victim of Intel’s spectacular success against AMD. AMD has had a tough time competing because of delays in launching its Barcelona products. AMD has more details on the reshuffle on its web site.