Below we explain the significance of search market share for the stocks of both Yahoo and Microsoft. We also highlight how there may be additional downside to our Yahoo forecast and upside to our Microsoft forecast based on the trends indicated by the recent Comscore report.

F2Q10 (Qtr End 01/31/10) Earnings Call

March 11, 2010 5:00 pm ET

Like Friendfeed, Lifestream aggregates a number of third party social networks – Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Foursquare, Delicious, Digg, Flickr, YouTube, etc., so if you follow a Lifestream user you’ll see all of the content that user publishes on those networks, and Lifestream automatically pulls in content from people you already follow on those various social networks, so you don’t have to create yet another new friend list. Lifestream isn’t yet integrated with Google Buzz, but Aol says it may be coming soon.

Google (GOOG) just launched a new feature on the mobile version of Google Product Search which could take local shopping search startup Milo out at the knees. Whenever you do a Google product search from a mobile phone, blue dots will appear next to items which are in-stock at nearby stores. The image at right is from a search I just did for “HDTVs.” The blue dots are subtle, but they certainly distinguish those results. Google has partnerships with Best Buy (BBY), Sears (SHLD), Williams-Sonoma (WSM), Pottery Barn, and West Elm to show local inventory, and it is inviting other merchants to apply to participate as well. Google VP of engineering Vic Gundotra previewed the local product search last December, but it is now live.

That question doesn’t have any immediate answers, but the tug-of-war between analysts is just heating up.

As noted on Monday, JMP Securities analyst Sameet Sinha upgraded Yahoo and argued that the company’s search pact with Microsoft (MSFT) will deliver meaningful returns. Those financial gains—along with a rebound in the broader economy—should propel Yahoo in the next few years. On Wednesday Barclays Capital analyst Douglas Anmuth said that Yahoo is likely to rebound even though its search share is falling. Anmuth’s big theme: Better trends in display advertising will bolster Yahoo. “Yahoo is well leveraged to an advertising rebound in both display and search, and we believe these trends are starting to show up in numbers,” said Anmuth in a research note.

No one argues that Aol underpaid for Bebo. And the social network has fallen from 22 million monthly unique visitors when it was acquired to just 14.6 million today (Comscore worldwide). But even so, Bebo clearly has some value on the open market.

But rather than debate this topic, Jan Ozer, a technical writer for StreamingMedia.com and encoding guru, decided to spend the time to actually test Flash versus HTML5 and published all of his testing methodology and results on his blog. While you should check out his entire post to see all the details, here are some of the highlights of what he says.

From what we can see, Google actually gained market share since then. And while Microsoft’s Bing made a huge splash initially, it appears that it was more of a statistical improvement rather than anything else.

While the whole China fiasco seemed very overblown to me, the action by the herd is what it is. Today the stock seems to be responding to a news report out that there will be "a development" in talks soon.

Business to business software can be a tough sell. Online B2B can be even a harder sell. While there is certainly money to be made, unless you’re one of the big players, the likelihood you’re going to succeed is pretty small. Now, Google (GOOG) is taking their roll as one of the big players and extending a platform to boost some smaller players.

Fiscal Q2 2010 Earnings Call

March 4, 2010, 8:30 a.m. EST

As Google revenues continue to rise and they look to take over the world (including their position in China), they are enlisting others to assist them in Washington as well. Through three quarters of 2009, the company increased their lobbyist budget by 41% to approximately $3 million, according to the Associated Press (AP).

I buy into the hype. I do think CSCO’s CRS-3 will change the Internet. Everyone was saying they thought CSCO would put out some new iPhone-like product for consumers so that was why the market was supposedly disappointed. This is far bigger. Think about what this will eventually mean: the dream is finally beginning to come true: a world where everywhere you go you are connected to the Internet, all the time, at super high speeds. It won’t happen tomorrow, but it's getting there and the CRS-3 will be leading the charge. Here are the initial companies that I think will be long-term beneficiaries:

We expect Apple to generate ebook revenue of $400 million in 2010 by selling around 48 million ebooks at an average price of $8. You can access our full forecasts and rationale for AAPL here:

However, it's been showing up on my value screens for several reasons: large cash hoard as a percentage of its enterprise value, high return on tangible assets, and very low EV/EBIT and P/E ratios. At first glance, it seems management has the right sense of running this company to maximize cash generation and not waste shareholder value on corporate adventures.

Rankingwise, there weren’t many changes. Google Sites (which is essentially YouTube) is still the reigning champion, with Hulu and Microsoft Sites still rounding out the top three. Fox Interactive Media fell from 4th to 6th place as its views dropped from 550 million December to 293 million in January.

VeriSign (VRSN) has fought its way back to a key chart level, but traders apparently think that it will take a breather.

Online retail sales aren’t growing at the torrid pace they once were, but they continue to grow steadily. Forrester Research put out a new five-year forecast today predicting that e-commerce sales in the U.S. will keep growing at a 10 percent compound annual growth rate through 2014. It forecasts online retail sales in the U.S. will be nearly $250 billion, up from $155 billion in 2009. Last year, online retail sales were up 11 percent, compared to 2.5 percent for all retail sales.

The Microsoft-Yahoo pact received regulatory approval last month. Under the 10 year deal, Microsoft will power Yahoo’s algorithm and paid search. Yahoo sells ads for the Microsoft’s search properties. Microsoft will hire Yahoo employees and the implementation will be complete in 24 months, or first quarter of 2012. Yahoo will get a $275 million boost to operating cash flow.