Legion of Angels News Archive

NEW YORK - Amazon.com Inc. said Wednesday that its profit climbed 48 percent in the third quarter, but the company reduced its full-year sales outlook, showing that the online retailer cannot escape the weak economy. Its shares dived in after-hours trading.

Chief Financial Officer Tom Szkutak, speaking on a conference call with analysts, said the company experienced slower growth rates near the end of the third quarter, coinciding with the onset of recent turmoil in global financial markets.

Amazon said it now anticipates full-year revenue of $18.46 billion to $19.46 billion, below the $19.52 billion that analysts polled by Thomson Reuters were expecting. In July, Amazon had predicted 2008 sales of $19.35 billion to $20.10 billion.

Amazon shares fell $6.82, or 13.6 percent, in extended trading, after finishing regular trading down 24 cents at $49.99.

Analysts were widely expecting the company to lower its guidance, but some said they were not expecting it to be lowered so much.

Lazard Capital Markets analyst Colin Sebastian said Amazon is clearly “feeling the impact of the weaker economy,” but added that “at the same time, they continue to grow much faster than overall e-commerce, so the platform does remain strong from that point of view.”

RBC Capital Markets analyst Stephen Ju still feels Amazon is “the best house on the block.” Still, he noted that the company’s new revenue guidance range is much wider than usual.

“I think the Amazon management team is generally more conservative than not, so I think they probably did contemplate certainly a bad scenario at the lower end. But that could end up being what it is if the consumer doesn’t show up during November,” he said.

For the third quarter, Amazon’s report offered few surprises to investors. The company earned $118 million, or 27 cents per share — 2 cents more per share than what analysts polled by Thomson Reuters expected.

In the year-ago quarter, Amazon earned $80 million, or 19 cents per share.

The company said its profit in the most recent period included a $15 million foreign currency benefit.

Revenue rose almost 31 percent to $4.26 billion, just below analysts estimates of $4.27 billion.

Sales of items like books, CDs and DVDs rose 19 percent to $2.49 billion, and sales of electronics and other merchandise jumped 52 percent to $1.64 billion.

Amazon said that sales of book titles for the company’s wireless e-reader device, Kindle, account for more than 10 percent of its total book sales. Amazon has not released sales figures for the Kindle device.

Szkutak said the company will not launch a new version of the product until next year at the earliest.

Revenue from shipping — which includes earnings from Amazon’s membership-based two-day shipping program, Amazon Prime, and its third-party shipping program, Fulfillment by Amazon — climbed 12 percent to $191 million.

The company’s net shipping cost also rose, however, to $132 million from $89 million in the year-ago quarter.

Amazon did not say what the increase could be attributed to. It did say that during the quarter it cut the minimum order price for free shipping at its UK site to 5 pounds from 15 pounds.

Source — Yahoo!

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. - LinkedIn Corp. has raised an additional $22.7 million to help insulate the steadily growing online business network from the economic storm and provide more financial flexibility.

The investment announced Thursday was made by one of LinkedIn’s long-time backers, Bessemer Venture Partners, and three newcomers — the venture arm of business software maker SAP AG, banker Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc., which publishes Business Week.

The deal values privately held LinkedIn at slightly more than $1 billion, the same appraisal assigned the Mountain View-based company when it raised $53 million in June.

LinkedIn hasn’t drawn on any of that money yet, but still thought it was prudent to have more money in the bank as the economy slumps amid a credit crunch, said Dan Nye, LinkedIn’s chief executive officer. He also said LinkedIn wanted the extra cash in case an enticing acquisition opportunity crops up.

The new investors in LinkedIn are all intrigued with how they might be able to use information picked up from the Web site’s 30 million members to drum more sales in their own businesses, Nye said.

Goldman Sachs’ investment won’t give it the inside track to become LinkedIn’s investment banker should it ever pursue an initial public offering of stock, Nye said.

For now, LinkedIn is still trying to boost its revenue. Toward that end, LinkedIn also will begin offering a survey service that will poll its members about specific topics for a fee that will be negotiated on a case-by-case basis.

Source — Yahoo!

ATLANTA (Reuters) – Electronics retailer RadioShack Corp (RSH.N) reported a higher third quarter profit on Thursday helped by demand for digital television converters and video games.

But the company cautioned that sales and earnings trends slowed in September and expects the “challenging retail environment” to continue.

Net earnings were $50.2 million, or 39 cents a share, in the third quarter, compared with $46.3 million, or 34 cents a share, a year earlier. There were fewer shares outstanding as RadioShack repurchased stock.

Analysts expected profit of 36 cents, according to Reuters Estimates.

Sales rose 6.4 percent to $1.02 billion, helped by a 45 percent rise in online sales.

Same-store sales, or those at stores open at least a year, rose 7.7 percent, aided by analog-to-digital converter boxes ahead of the transition of TV broadcast signals to digital in early 2009. The retailer also cited strong sales of laptop computers, video games and navigation systems.

Source — Yahoo!

RALEIGH, North Carolina (Reuters) - Sequels may not always match up to the original in Hollywood but videogames can often get better the second or third time around.

Videogame producers are hoping it will hold true with the latest games that will hit store shelves soon including Insomniac Games’ “Resistance 2″ PlayStation 3 exclusive, Epic Games’ “Gears of War 2″ Xbox 360 exclusive, Microsoft’s “Fable 2,” and Bethesda Softworks’ “Fallout 3.”

“Developers can hit the ground running with sequels,” said Ted Price, president and CEO of Insomniac Games. “The game’s story and art style have a solid base, the tech and tools are stable and the basic gameplay mechanics have gone through plenty of tuning in the first game.”

The second or third time around developers can devote more energy to building game assets instead of trying to get things up and running.

“It’s certainly a liberating experience when you’re no longer arguing over the main character’s name, or waiting for basic systems to be implemented,” said Price. “The end result is usually a game that’s bigger, more polished and has more innovative features than the original game.”

“Resistance 2,” thrusts players into an alternate 1950s America invaded by aliens called Chimera. In addition to a single-player campaign, the game offers an eight-player cooperative campaign and online gameplay with battlefields filled with 60 players.

Aliens also feature in “Gears of War 2″, which sends gamers into the depths of the planet Sera to tackle a race called the Locusts. The sequel offers a story that can be played with a friend. Online gameplay modes like “Horde” also pit up to five players against waves of heavily armed Locusts.

“We want casual gamers to play the game and be sucked into the universe and finish the game,” said Cliff Bleszinski, lead games designer, Epic Games. “We want them to potentially finish with a friend and become a fan of the characters and the setting.”

Attracting the mainstream audience was also a major goal of Peter Molyneux, creator of Microsoft’s “Fable II” for Xbox 360. He’s crafted a game that he believes will satisfy the 3 million gamers who bought the original, while opening up the fantasy role-playing adventure genre to anyone.

“We’ve designed this game to allow the player to do whatever they wish, including getting married and having kids, playing mini-games and creating a custom character that will evolve as you play,” said Molyneux.

“Call of Duty: World at War,” the latest game in the franchise focuses on the bloody Pacific Front and the Russian invasion of Nazi-occupied Berlin during the Second World War.

“The developer spent two years working on the technology behind this game, which includes four-player cooperative play and the introduction of new weapons like flame throwers and flame tanks,” said Daniel Suarez, executive producer of the game at Activision

Gamers have been waiting 10 years for Bethesda Softworks’ “Fallout 3,” for PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

“I think it’s good for people to miss things,” said Todd Howard, executive producer of the game. “Ten years between ‘Fallout’ is a bit long, but I think there’s this nostalgia factor.”

Fans of the post-Apocalyptic game, set in Washington, D.C., won’t have to wait another decade for “Fallout 4.” Howard said he believes three years is a good time frame between games.

Source — Yahoo!

PHILADELPHIA – A federal judge questioned why a white Ivy League student found during a computer hacking probe with thousands of images of child pornography was not charged with that crime, sparing him a decade-long prison sentence that a black convicted child pornographer faced at the same hearing.

University of Pennsylvania senior Ryan Goldstein, 22, of Ambler, was sentenced Tuesday to three months in prison and five years of probation for a hacking scheme that caused a Penn engineering school server to crash in 2006.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Levy said the decision not to charge Goldstein for the child pornography was appropriate given his extensive cooperation.

Voicing concerns about fairness, the judge took the unusual step of sentencing Goldstein alongside a Philadelphia man, Derrick Williams, who was facing eight to 10 years in prison for child pornography in an unrelated case.

Both men were found with several thousand images of child pornography, and each had copied some of the images, though Williams had also posted about 15 of them on a Web site, prosecutors said.

The judge said he could not help noting that Williams is black and Goldstein is white.

“This has weighed very heavily on my mind, as I think it would most judges,” U.S. District Judge Michael Baylson said. “That’s why I’ve brought this case together with the Williams case.”

However, he said the sentencing disparities were not connected to race. Baylson gave Williams a two-year prison term, noting his steady work history and minor criminal record.

Goldstein pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge and spent long hours helping the FBI investigate a worldwide hacking enterprise, lawyers for both sides agreed. But even as he was cooperating, Goldstein twice engaged in unspecified mischief with FBI computers, Baylson said.

“It was very detrimental to the investigation,” said Baylson, who heard details of the misconduct behind closed doors at the start of the sentencing hearing. “It’s very disturbing.”

According to the FBI, Goldstein worked with a New Zealand teen who allegedly gained control of thousands of computers and amassed them into clusters known as botnets.

Owen Thor Walker, known by the online name “AKILL,” was ordered this summer to pay more than $11,000 in fines in New Zealand but avoided a conviction so he can help police solve computer crimes.

Goldstein acknowledged at the hearing that he has been viewing child pornography since he was 11 or 12. A therapist who testified Tuesday described him as a bright but asocial child who spent long hours on the computer and rarely played with friends.

“Unfortunately, I didn’t begin to emerge from that computer world until the FBI knocked on my door,” Goldstein told the judge. “This actually may have saved me from a life of computer addiction.”

The case was part of an international crackdown on hackers who steal credit card information, manipulate stock trades and even crash industry computers, authorities said.

Goldstein’s parents, who attended the hearing, declined comment afterward, as did lawyers for both sides. Williams and his lawyer, Max Kramer, also declined comment.

Source — Yahoo!