That the question needed to be asked at all is indicative of how confused Wall Street is with Apple. And Cook’s follow-up remarks probably didn’t help at all.

The analyst said that the smartphone market was growing at 30 percent annually and that based on Apple’s guidance for the coming quarter, it seemed extremely unlikely that Apple would be growing anywhere near that fast. And while Apple owns a higher percentage of the tablet market, Android is starting to take a bigger bite there as well.

“Your point is not lost, and we do want to grow faster,” Cook said in response to the analyst after cautioning him to look at sell-through to consumers, not just sell-in to channel inventory. “We don’t view it however as the only measure of our health.”

The first part of the answer is exactly what Wall Street wanted to hear. The second part, not so much.

Source: MarketWatch

AAPL gains $20, then gives it right back.

Cook then talked about what really matters to Apple, including customer satisfaction scores, which the company typically leads in, customer loyalty rates — another bright spot for Apple — and the amount of ecosystem commerce that takes place within iOS when apps are purchased or items are purchased with apps.

Most of that was good, particularly when Cook said that “three out of four dollars spent on apps are spent on our ecosystem.”

But then he summed it up with a typically Apple-ish Kumbaya moment:

“Market share is important and unit share is important,” Cook said. “But we’re all about customer experience and enriching lives.”

Enriching lives is not at the top of a Wall Street analyst’s list of priorities. Nor does it make the daily agenda of a typical wealthy investor. Increasing market share and making money, however, rank high on both.

Which is one of the reasons why Apple’s stock gained $20 after its earning release hit the wires … and gave it all back by the end of the earnings conference call.

Apple and Wall Street, it would seem, are oil and water.

Image credit: Dean Takahashi/VentureBeat

Device sales:

• iPhone: 37.4 million
• iPad: 19.5 million
• Mac: just under 4 million

These numbers are down, naturally, from the first quarter of this year, in which Apple sold almost 48 million iPhones, 23 million iPads, and 12.7 million iPods. That quarter includes the Christmas shopping season, however, which is a big season for Apple.

Last year’s comparable quarter, Q2 2012, was a big growth period for the company, with revenue of $39.2 billion and income of $11.6 billion and an 88 percent increase in iPhone sales and a massive 151 percent increase in iPad sales, year-over-year:

• iPhone: 35.1 million
• iPad: 11.8 million
• Mac: 4 million
• iPod: 7.7 million

The company’s iPhone numbers beat the year-ago quarter, but just barely, while iPad numbers were up healthily, although probably not as much as analysts would have liked. Mac numbers, of course, were down.

In other news, Apple is hiking its quarterly dividend by 15 percent and is planning to buy back $50 billion of its own shares.

Analysts expect earnings of $10.12 a share on revenue of $42.6 billion, which sounds great for almost any company on the planet but Apple, it seems. Apple’s own guidance was a rather more modest $9.23 to $10.23 per share on earnings of $41 to $43 billion.

The question is whether those results — or better — will push Apple’s brutalized stock up … or down.

I talked to Pace University’s Darren Hayes about Apple, technology, and the stock market. Hayes is a professor at Pace’s Seidenberg School of Computer Science and Information Systems.

VentureBeat: What has driven Apple stock down over the past six months?

Hayes: iPhone 5 sales have failed to impress. There’s been a lack of innovation over the past few years to come up with the next great device, and consumers have failed to see any differentiation. Samsung has captured the market.

VentureBeat: Isn’t the stock undervalued?

Hayes: It’s possible. The short sellers have had a field day, but once the stock starts to rebound, they’ll have to cover.

With the amount of short selling that has been going on, it has been oversold. So with any kind of bump, the short sellers will have to cover, and there’s likely to be some rebound.

Short sellers are happy when the stock is going down … they may even increase their short position. But if there’s a couple of days of increase, short sellers may need to cash in on their profits and buy it back, so instead of it moving $2 it may move $12.

VentureBeat: So if Apple reports good news, the stock could jump significantly?

Hayes: It’s possible it could bump up $50 or $75.

VentureBeat: What does Apple need to do to make that happen?

Hayes: The company needs to look at business alliances. We’ve all heard about BlackBerry’s difficulties maintaining market share. Apple has failed to grasp that opportunity … failed to capture a tremendous business opportunity.

For example, even with servers — Apple had tremendous servers, but never looked to expand their market. They need to talk more about how they’re going expand their reach in corporate markets.

Google and Android have had a very effective strategy — it’s easy for developers to develop for Android, it’s open source, integrated in the auto industry, into appliances — and its adoption rate is far great than Apple’s.

In terms of of security, Apple does have better security, but businesses are going with the cheaper option.

VentureBeat: What is Apple’s biggest challenge?

Hayes: Apple has the market share in terms of tablets and they’ve been able to compete in computers, but what people are really interested in is the smartphone market. Smartphones are the most important thing people are looking at right now. For example, look at HP and Dell — it’s clear people are buying smart devices and not investing in traditional computers.

There’s about one billion smartphones in use, and that’s likely to double by 2014 according to Gartner.

The problem is that the iPhone has really failed to impress – demand has been very soft for iPhone 5.

VentureBeat: What about a cheaper iPhone?

Hayes: That’s definitely a good move, but what’s really important is the incentives they offer to carriers. Apple has already incensed a lot of carriers by offering very, very small incentives, so many carriers feel they’ve been squeezed by Apple and now would rather promote Samsung and Android.

So it’s not just about improved features and better pricing … it’s about carriers.

VentureBeat: Can Apple ever get back to $700 stock price territory?

Hayes: They need to get more hype about their products. And they need to think about the next big device that would really create some interest and buzz. Apple TV is probably not it … there’s not many details about it — they need to come out with something new.

We’ve been spoiled for years by Steve Jobs unveiling some new device year after year.

Image credit: Marco aka MenfiS/Flickr

Today, Bloomberg announced that it will be the first financial information platform to integrate real-time Twitter feeds directly into investors’ data workflows. Two days ago, the SEC had said that, yes, Reed Hastings could communicate to the public via social media after staff at the securities watchdog had recommended he be charged for revealing material company information via Facebook.

With new capabilities come new requirements, Bloomberg says:

“When important news is shared on Twitter, traders and investors need to be able to access it, and validate its importance in order to incorporate that information into their decision making process,” Jean-Paul Zammitt, the head of sales and product development, said in a statement.

But it won’t just be a firehose of tweets in your Bloomberg terminal, the company says. Rather, tweets will be classified by company, asset class, person, and topic. And they’ll be integrated with Bloomberg’s existing financial services data stream, so there’s no switching views or checking different systems. Users can also create custom alerts to monitor “unusual bursts of social media chatter about a company.”

Whether this is helpful for notoriously rapid-fire day traders or harmful remains to be seen. But you can bet that legendary long-term value investor Warren Buffet won’t be checking the tweetstream before making his investments.

At least some are sold.

“It is extremely valuable to our business to be able to access this information on the Bloomberg Professional service in the same manner we use it for other market related applications and analytics,” said Karl Braasch, a fund manager and cofounder of Bristlecone Capital Partners.

photo credit: Christopher Chan via photopin cc

Bay Area-based Marin Software is set to sell its initial shares late on Thursday. Analysts expect to see a strong debut from the digital ad management company.

Trading begins Friday when CEO Chris Lien will ring the opening bell on the New York Stock Exchange.

Fortune is reporting that Marin Software’s IPO is more than 2x oversubscribed, and that it is expected to price above its range. Marin is likely to perform on par with Model N and smart grid business Silver Spring Networks. Both newly-public companies saw their stock jump about 30 percent over the target IPO price.

This recent string of hot IPO’s is evidence of the public’s confidence in Bay Area tech.

Marin plans to sell 7 million shares at a price range of between $11 and $13, which would raise about $91 million. It will be the first ad-tech company to go public this year.

The company helps advertisers and agencies manage and track paid search ad campaigns across Google, Bing, Yahoo, Baidu (China’s search behemoth), and other search sites. Annual revenues have steadily risen, which is a strong sign for investors.

Unlike the tech giants of the dot-com era, these IPO candidates are drumming up interest without overstating their revenue potential. Marin Software admitted in the months prior to going public that it would be unlikely to reach profitability “in the foreseeable future.”

For the entirety of 2011, Marin had revenues of $36.1 million and a loss of $17.4 million, and the company failed to book an annual net profit in 2012.

“Once you go public, you want to make sure you can provide very predictable estimates to the street,” said Jim Moore, founder of mergers and acquisitions firm J Moore Partners, in a recent interview. “People won’t trust the story otherwise.”

I do not think those two facts are unrelated.

To borrow a phrase from Gary V, Google is crushing it. The search/advertising/mobile giant had its first $50 billion year in 2012, and ended the fiscal year with a monster fourth quarter that was up 36 percent year-over-year. That’s not just big and not just an increase, it’s also an acceleration from Q4 2011 numbers, where were already up 25 percent from 2010.

Big companies usually just don’t grow at this pace.

But it’s been a long tough road for Google, in some ways. The undisputed search engine heavyweight champion of the world was long an investors’ darling, running up to $700 heights in December 2007, only to sink as low as $262 near the end of the following year. It was only returned to those rarefied heights in late 2012, and it has continued its slow but seemingly inexorable climb to the current $802.09.

Google’s primary product development focus as a company is driven by the masses of data that its search engine, advertising business, social network, and mobile operating systems generate. Iteration and innovation is driven by data on what people are doing with the tools. Apple’s innovation focus is on designing products with an overarching human ethic: software, hardware, and services melding into a single simple tool.

The difference could not be clearer than in Apple’s Maps fiasco: data was the difference.

The contrast in the last three months with its biggest mobile rival, Apple, could not be more stark. AAPL has shed hundreds of billions in value, and not even a Wall Street insider fireside chat with CEO Tim Cook helped: the stock dropped another two percent.

The ironic part?

Apple’s revenue for the company’s first quarter of 2013 — $54.5 billion — was more than Google’ revenue for all of 2012. And its profit for that quarter, $13.1 billion, is more than Google’s profit for all of 2012. And Google is a more expensive share, at a 24.7 price/earnings ratio, to Apple’s 10.4.

But stock price, unlike revenue, is not a trailing indicator. It’s a bet on the future. And analysts seem to believe that Android is going to eat Apple’s lunch (probably because 76 percent of Apple’s revenue is dependent on Android competitor iOS).

If that does happen, a bet on Google’s future is probably a good one. But the fat lady hasn’t sung quite yet.

Image credit: Google Finance/John Koetsier

Apple may be bold and ambitious. Apple may have $137 billion in the bank. Apple may have generated record revenues and record profits last quarter. And Apple may be banking $50 million in revenue from each of its 400 retail stores around the globe and adding 30 more this year.

But apparently, Wall Street doesn’t really care.

Apple CEO Tim Cook talked more directly to the financial world today at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet conference than, perhaps, he ever has before, telling the pinstriped and necktied money managers of the world that Apple’s focus is on the long term, is still the center of innovation in the technology world, is not likely to acquire any major companies any time soon, probably won’t increase the screen size of the iPhone to match Android tablets, and won’t rush to produce a cheaper iPhone just to ship more units.

“I’m very proud that we’re out front, that we’re changing people’s lives, that we’re doing what’s right and just in moving the ball forward,” Cook said today. “I don’t mean to gush, but it’s how I feel.”

In response, Apple’s stock, which is down over $200 billion since its peak in 2012, drooped a little more, losing over $11 a share, or another 2.3 percent of its value:

Source: Google Finance

Apple stock February 12

In other words, Wall Street ain’t buying what Cook has to sell.

By the end of the day, the picture had not changed much: AAPL was down $12.03 — a 2.5 percent drop in value, equivalent to about $12 billion. That’s a little shocking for a company with dominant smartphone market share in the U.S. and a price-earnings ratio well under 10 when you take out its cash on hand. But analysts are worried that Android is going to eat Apple’s lunch in smartphones and tablets, and Apple’s desktop numbers in its last quarter were nothing to write home about either.

And given that Apple, which had established a reputation for exceeding analysts’ expectations for years, missed the Wall Street consensus numbers by about $500 million, analysts are adopting a wait-and-see attitude.

Perhaps anticipating this reaction, Cook did end his chat with a bit of a barb:

“We don’t care if people are lobbing grenades from the sidelines.”

photo credit: WanderingtheWorld (www.LostManProject.com) via photopin cc

I’ve done extensive research on the company revealing its ‘Quantum Strategy’ in a paper for Organizational Dynamics, and though Apple’s results saw $50 billion wiped off its market value I don’t feel it is the first sign of strategic weakness as some analysts are suggesting.

Apple reported no rise in profits for the final quarter of 2012 and slightly missed revenue estimates, prompting speculation that its period of hyper-growth is coming to an end.

The company sold 47.8m iPhones over the Christmas quarter, missing a forecast average of around 50m and revenue growth of 18 per cent year on year to $54.5bn was below the $54.9bn forecast, while profits were flat on the previous year at $13.1bn.

But before we write Apple off with premature assessments, we need to appreciate that its so-called disappointing performance is still extraordinary by many measures, and that it has the capabilities to keep winning in its markets, which it may yet redefine with more blockbuster products.

Apple is thought by many to have posted poor results, but this would be a rushed assessment. Apple’s revenues continued growing at a fast pace, with an 18 per cent rise over the previous year and 25 per cent more when adjusting for the fact that this quarter was for a 13-week period while the previous year was for 14 weeks.

Profits were $13.1 billion, same as the previous year, but actually seven per cent higher if the 13 week vs 14 week issue is taken into consideration. Gross margin fell to 38.6 per cent compared to 44.7 per cent year-on-year, but Apple had prepared the market about the lower margin and actually delivered above its own guidance.

Lower margins would be expected given Apple’s rising sales in emerging economies, introduction of iPad mini and appearance of more competing products that are much cheaper. The 38.6 per cent margins in the markets where Apple operates are still extraordinary.

Speaking of emerging markets, Apple’s higher transparency in reporting sales by geography shows that its revenues in China went up 67 per cent in this quarter compared to last year, with a huge potential upside. Further, its products are on different stages of the product life cycle, a pretty robust risk management strategy.

Even if in the long term Apple has lost some of its innovative edge, its substantial liquid assets still give it an advantage in the technology market.

The main issue for the medium and long term is whether Apple has sustained its innovative capabilities, which seems likely given that it’s part of the company’s DNA. But the proof will be in the pudding, and we’ll know over the next 12 to 18 months.

What many forget though is Apple’s safety net of $137 billion in cash and liquid assets. Apple could easily buy any new technologies that appear to pose a threat to it, that offer synergies to its own offerings, or that can open up new markets for it.

Stock markets react, and sometimes overreact, immediately, but what matters is the big picture and Apple seems to be on a solid footing by that measure. Even though its shares fell based on the earnings announcement, this could be a useful correction.

Loizos Heracleous has authored six books and over 50 articles published in leading journals including the Harvard Business Review and MIT Sloan Management Review. His research has been honored by three noted Best Paper awards from the Academy of Management and received an Emerald Literati Award for 2007 for his research on the role of biometric technologies in service excellence, a second Emerald Award in 2009 for the Paper with the Best Practical Implications for his work on human resource strategy at Singapore Airlines, and a third award for the Paper with Best Practical Implications in 2010 for his article entitled “Can business learn from the public sector?” Loizos has trained or advised executives from several leading corporations including IBM, Total, Rolls-Royce, KPMG, Standard Chartered, O2, and Bank of China. He has been listed in the Marquis Who’s Who in the World since 2003. Before joining Warwick Business School, Loizos was Reader in Strategy at the Said Business School and Official Fellow of Templeton College at Oxford University, and Associate Professor of Business Policy at the National University of Singapore.

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — Hedge fund managers — those masters of the universe — are a little less godlike than you might think.

“We printed out articles to keep in huge stacks of manila folders, we would save a million bookmarks to our browsers, and we dumped everything into a totally disorganized ‘share drive from hell,’” said former hedge fund manager Danny Donado. “I hated it – and I know my colleagues did too.”

Now Donado has left the hedge fund business and, as an MBA student at Stanford, is launching a company called BipSync that is aimed at taming those mountains of manila folders and bookmarks.

“You can think of us as ‘Evernote for Investors combined with Salesforce.com for investment opportunities,’” Donado said onstage at DEMO Fall 2012 today.

The tool is aimed at simplifying the process of gathering, retrieving, and analyzing information about investment opportunities. It’s also got tools for managers to track how efficiently market analysts’ research is turning into actionable investment decisions for the firm.

The company is very early-stage, having raised no outside money. The founders, including Donado as well as James Cameron and Dan Zamboni, are Stanford business school students. The team came to this week’s DEMO Fall conference as part of the “Student Alpha” program, which invites qualified student startups to apply for special demonstration slots in the two-day program.

BipSync is in early alpha-stage tests with professional investors in the Bay Area, and hopes to move to an invitation-only beta test shortly after DEMO. See below for screenshots from the current product.

BipSync is one of more than 75 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, most of the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Top photo: BipSync cofounder Danny Donado. Courtesy Danny Donado

That micro level of analysis isn’t going to be very helpful in predicting Facebook’s future. For example, here are two of the types of charts that Wall Street analysts look at:

This chart plots average revenue per user (ARPU) for Facebook on a quarterly basis. This number jumps around a bit. I expect that in the short term, it will drop as Facebook growth focuses on users in markets where online advertising isn’t well established.

This chart shows Facebook’s sequential revenue growth per quarter for the last two years. Wall Street absolutely hates seeing zero growth, as happened in the first quarter of 2011. The best quarter the company saw in terms of revenue growth was a year ago, in December 2010.

Some companies will actively manage their numbers to present the picture that Wall Street expects. This can lead to really stupid product decisions. Facebook could track revenue on a daily basis and crank up ads if it looked like it needed more revenue for a quarter. Or the company could take off ads if it thought they were doing too well. It could also stop expanding into new markets that deflate ARPU.

These charts indicate that Facebook isn’t playing those games. The S-1 spells it out:

Our culture also prioritizes our user engagement over short-term financial results, and we frequently make product decisions that may reduce our short-term revenue or profitability if we believe that the decisions are consistent with our mission and benefit the aggregate user experience and will thereby improve our financial performance over the long term.

And with control of 57 percent the voting shares, Mark Zuckerberg can afford to ignore the graphs and build for the long term.

Rocky Agrawal is an analyst focused on the intersection of local, social, and mobile. He is a principal analyst at reDesign mobile. Previously, he launched local and mobile products for Microsoft and AOL. He blogs at http://blog.agrawals.org and tweets at @rakeshlobster.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Steve Jobs introduced a lot of important products to the world, including the Macintosh, iPod, iPhone, and iPad. But one of the most important things he ever helped produce may be a product that didn’t even fully launch until after his death.

iCloud, a virtual storage drive for your personal content, is just getting off the ground this month. Along with the iOS 5 operating system, it was the last product Jobs showed off in July, 2011 at the Worldwide Developers Conference.

At the time, Jobs said, “We’re going to demote the PC and the Mac to just be a device. We’re going to move your hub, the center of your digital life, into the cloud.” The iCloud software would act as a storage solution for your media as well as a bridge that connects all your devices for purchased media and personal photos and videos.

iCloud finally went public Oct. 12, a week after Jobs’ death on Oct. 5. While iCloud may have been overshadowed by the iOS 5 release the same day, its impact will be much more substantial over time.

Tying everything together

Ever since the introduction of iTunes, Jobs’ intention with Apple has been about presenting a unified ecosystem. Jobs wanted to control the hardware and software experience to make each aspect better and uniquely suited to purpose.

That’s a good business model for Apple, which makes most of its money on selling you hardware. But it also uses its often-great software to keep you happy and to get you to buy more media and apps from the iTunes Store, generating further revenues for the company. If you continued to buy more Apple hardware, you would be rewarded for that with various connections and integration. That idea expressly stood out with its digital hub strategy of having users connect their iPods and iPhones to a single computer running iTunes.

But there were problems with the digital hub strategy. Jobs’s idea was not fully realized because it wasn’t easy to manage your media on local machines, which meant there wasn’t as much incentive to buy into the Apple ecosystem for all your hardware needs. Plus, Apple’s iPods and iPhones continued to depend on a PC connection for syncing.

Apple’s first attempt to solve that problem was MobileMe, the company’s first stab a versatile cloud solution. Apple introduced MobileMe in 2007 as a $99-a-year solution for syncing your e-mail, contacts, documents and calendar across devices, but it was ultimately a failure because it wasn’t reliable.

Jobs got so mad at the MobileMe team that he fired its head and replaced him with Internet content leader Eddy Cue. “Let me just say it wasn’t our finest hour,” Jobs said of MobileMe during iCloud’s on-stage introduction. In private, he was even harsher, berating the MobileMe team and telling them that they “should hate each other for having let each other down.”

Out of the ashes of failure

But out of the ashes of MobileMe came iCloud, which is free, offers more features, and will end up being the application that completes Jobs’ original vision.

iCloud finally solves the syncing problem by cutting the USB cord and giving you the flexibility to download and consume media across any equipped device. When you purchase a song on your iPhone, you can download or listen to that song on your PC running iTunes 10.5, your iPad, a MacBook Air running Lion OSX and more.

Jobs told biographer Walter Isaacson last fall that Apple would revolutionize the media hub and take it from your hard drive into the cloud. Jobs described it as such in his biography:

We need to be the company that manages your relationship with the cloud — streams your music and videos from the cloud, stores your pictures and information, and maybe even your medical data. Apple was the first to have the insight about your computer becoming a digital hub. So we wrote all of these apps—iPhoto, iMovie, iTunes—and tied in our devices, like the iPod and iPhone and iPad, and it’s worked brilliantly. But over the next few years, the hub is going to move from your computer into the cloud. So it’s the same digital hub strategy, but the hub’s in a different place. It means you will always have access to your content and you won’t have to sync.

In the book, Jobs also admitted that Apple considered putting a music application on Google’s Android OS to give more users access to its content and effectively let them participate in iCloud. But instead, he chose to make iCloud’s mobile apparatus only work for PCs, Macs and iOS devices.

“We put iTunes on Windows in order to sell more iPods,” Jobs said. “But I don’t see an advantage of putting our music app on Android, except to make Android users happy. And I don’t want to make Android users happy.”

A potentially revolutionary development

Not only does iCloud solve the problem of user-based content storage and accessibility, but it also helps solve the piracy problem for content providers. Filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino and movie studios like Disney have expressed a more open view about content accessibility and want to give buyers the flexibility to watch movies on any device they want. But because of rampant Internet piracy, this concept hasn’t really taken hold. Music companies are a bit more open now that streaming services like Spotify and MOG are beginning to take off, but they’re still concerned about piracy.

The best way to defeat piracy is to make it easier to buy and consume content, rather than downloading a free copy that may not work on several devices. With iCloud you’re encouraged to buy media and let Apple keep a backup copy, ultimately giving you more freedom and more convenience. You don’t have to worry about storing the media long-term and can watch or listen to the purchased media across devices. And with the soon-to-launch iTunes Match component, which runs $25 a year, you’ll be able to access all of your music in your iTunes library on iOS devices legally.

What started as MobileMe has turned into something on the cusp of being revolutionary. Unified cloud storage solutions already exist with services Dropbox and Box.net, but having cloud storage integrated into the operating system itself makes the experience more seamless. Accessing your iTunes tracks or movies you’ve purchased at any time on a PC, Macbook, iPad or iPhone makes digital media more valuable and means you’re more likely to purchase media, instead of pirating it, and you’ll purchase more of it.

Finally, iCloud’s unification of media and content across devices could extend to future Apple products, furthering its usefulness and usability. Jobs told Isaacson that an Apple-made television was something he wanted to create. The television could sync with iCloud, a move that would let users watch all of their Apple-purchased movies and TV, listen to music, use all sorts of apps and more. And who knows what will come after that?

As of now, iCloud is still incomplete and flawed. Without the right OS update or the right settings checked on your Apple device, you can’t use it. Not every device is equipped for it and there are weird errors that pop up occasionally. If you use more than one Apple ID, there is no way to combine the two to grant full accessibility to your media in the cloud. It doesn’t “just work” in the way that Apple likes to claim its products do.

But soon, perhaps even in less than a year, iCloud should have all of the kinks worked out and its capabilities could even be expanded to include more devices and more types of files.

In the end, Jobs wanted to complete his futurist vision of device and content unification and to see all the incredible devices he helped bring to the world work seamlessly together. With iCloud, he may have finally put the last puzzle piece in place. And just in time.

Amazon‘s Q3 earnings in 2010 were $231 million, or 51 cents per share. Overall revenue for the quarter rose 44 percent, to $10.88 billion.

“September 28th was the biggest order day ever for Kindle, even bigger than previous holiday peak days — we introduced Kindle Fire for $199, Kndle Touch 3G for $149, Kindle Touch for $99, and our all new Kindle for only $79,” said Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com, in a statement included with the earnings report. “In the three weeks since launch, orders for electronic ink Kindles are double the previous launch. And based on what we’re seeing with Kindle Fire pre-orders, we’re increasing capacity and building millions more than we’d already planned.”

While pre-order numbers have been encouraging, the release of the Kindle Fire is also likely to super-charge digital revenue through the purchase of apps, as well as new subscribers joining Amazon Prime for access to streaming movies, TV shows and other digital content. As many as 5 million Kindle Fire units could be sold during the holiday season according to analysts’ predictions.

It must be a perplexing time for the company, as The New York Times reports, in deciding whether to ignore the movie and hope that it dusts into oblivion, or to fight back — legally or otherwise — to prevent it from misrepresenting the company and its CEO as it sets out to become the cultural sensation that it promises.

But with names like David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin attached, a trailer that’s received a fairly positive response, and a marketing campaign that makes it clear that the movie is no made-for-TV HBO documentary, the bets are against the former.

So far, the talks between the producers of the movie and Facebook have been glum. As a part of its privacy policy which prevents advertisers from using the Facebook brand name, the movie is barred from advertising on its platform, though it has been permitted a low-profile fan page. On the flipside, the producer of the movie, Scott Rudin, has shown it to top executives Elliot Schrage and Sheryl Sandberg, and admits candidly that “they did not like it.”

Zuckerberg himself has been open about his distaste for the movie. In a recent onstage interview at the Computer History Museum, he wrote it off as being fiction, and admitted that he wasn’t planning to see it, just like he hasn’t read “The Accidental Billionaires”, the book on which its screenplay is based on.

“They had two choices of books to base it on, and they chose to base it on a fiction book,” he stated in the interview. “I wish that when people try to do journalism or write stuff about Facebook, that they at least try to get it right.”

David Kirkpatrick, the author of “The Facebook Effect”, thinks that there is a chance, given how many details in the movie are distorted, that the company might be “forced to deliver a forceful rebuttal once the film has its premiere, especially if it turned out to be a hit,” according to the New York Times article.

The idea of this is obviously appealing to Kirkpatrick, who is behind the ‘other’ non-fiction book Zuckerberg cited in the statement and has been open about backing — he permitted Kirkpatrick to interview him for the book and has given joint interviews with Kirkpatrick himself, such as the one at the Computer History Museum, to promote the book.

If there is ever another ‘Facebook movie,’ there is little question that it would be based on Kirkpatrick’s non-fictional and heavily researched account of the story; one he has crafted based on actual interviews with the people involved rather than legendary folktales and fictional fillers.

If “The Social Network” turns out to be a “Wall Street” — and not just a “Pirates of Silicon Valley” — could the company want to clear the air and make its own version of the tale?

http://flash.sonypictures.com/video/universalplayer/sharedPlayer.swf