Shares of Apple (AAPL) are up $5.89, or 1.7%, this morning at $358.01, retaining the glow of yesterday’s iPad 2 announcement that seems to have been met largely very favorably.

It doesn’t hurt that Gartner today cut their PC forecast for this year and next, based in part on their belief that the iPad and its ilk are delaying some consumer PC purchases.

Charlie Wolf, Needham & Co.: Reiterates a Buy recommendation and a $450 price target. Apple showed once again, he thinks, that “it’s more about software than hardware,” with the unveiling of the GarageBand and iMovie apps for the device. “iPad 2 immediately obsoletes a flood of media tablets that are finally beginning to appear a year after the iPad’s introduction,” writes Wolf. “Competitive tablets can emulate the hardware features of the iPad. But none can or probably never will match its software. Nor can they match its price.” Wolf left his estimates for this year unchanged.

Our conclusion is the sky’s the limit. And on that note, it was recently reported that the FAA has approved the iPad as a substitute for the paper charts pilots have traditionally used. This report suggests that the iPad could eventually become a fixture in the cockpits of every commercial plane. At this early stage it’s virtually impossible to size the iPad and media tablet market. In a previous note ( we estimated that the addressable market for media tablets could reach 875 million units. But its ultimate size might be far larger, depending on the imagination of software developers and users in the consumer and business markets.

T. Michael Walkley, Canaccord Genuity: Reiterates a Buy rating on Apple and a $460 price target. He’s impressed with the features and pricing on iPad 2 relative to the tablets he saw at the Consumer Electronics Show in January and Mobile World Congress in February. The price alone will “pressure sales of competing offerings including the Motorola [Mobility (MMI)] Xoom ($599/$799) as we believe consumers will overwhelmingly choose iPad 2 versus other tablets at these prices.”

Keith Bachman, BMO Capital: Reiterates an Outperform rating and a $410 price target. The iPad 2 was about as expected, no surprises. It’s a better produce in terms of industrial design and software, with iOS 4.3′s enhancements, and it has “several key competitive advantages,” including an early lead, the iOS “ecosystem,” the apps selection; the distribution channel (retail and carriers), the price, and the “supply chain optimization” Apple’s got.

Robert Cihra, Caris & Co.: Reiterates a Buy rating on Apple, while raising his price target to $460 from $450. He notes the March 11th ship date is a month earlier than he’d expected for the iPad 2. Echoing observations made yesterday by Sanford Bernstein’s Toni Sacconaghi, Cihra notes that, “Apple’s more aggressive iPad cost-vs-price strategy leaves no premium umbrella for commodity vendors to undercut on a spec-for-spec basis.” Any vendor thinking they can match Apple on that basis is “kidding themselves,” he writes. Cihra raised his March quarter (fiscal Q2) revenue estimate by a half a billion dollars to $24.5 billion and hiked his EPS estimate to $5.76 in EPS, up from $5.59, to reflect a higher iPhone estimate, at 16.6 million, up from a prior 16.1 million units, and higher Mac sales, at 3.85 million units, up from 3.7 million, and a higher-than-expected gross margin of 39.7%, versus his prior 39.4% forecast.

Brian Blair, Wedge Partners: The iPad was “significantly upgraded,” in his opinion, and a “technology leapfrog over the competition.” He reiterates a forecast for 45 million iPads sold this calendar year, and a 70% market share for Apple. On the component side, he expects that Qualcomm (QCOM) is supplying the baseband for the tablet. Blair notes that as far has he can tell, the rear-mounted camera on the iPad 2 is a 1.2 megapixel device, not a 5-megapixel sensor, which he believes may be a “slight disappointment” for OmniVision Technologies (OVTI), which might have been expected to sell its higher-end camera sensors into the iPad 2.The worst news for competitors is the price: “The critical price is the entry-level model, which at $499 sets a difficult bar for competitors to meet this year.”

Tavis McCourt, Morgan Keegan: Reiterates an Outperform rating on Apple and a $441 price target. There was nothing extremely surprising, he notes, but “other vendors will have difficulty selling 10-inch tablets at similar price points and functionality as Apple.” But the tablet category as a whole is still “incrementally positive for nearly every smartphone vendor adding this form factor.”

Brian White, Ticonderoga Securities: Reiterates a Buy rating and a $550 price target. White, who on Tuesday said Apple would have to make a “compelling case” to consumers for the device, writes that “the day could not have gone better.” “We believe Apple made a compelling case for why iPad 2 has the potential to further accelerate the momentum initially provided by the iPad 1, and in the process, provided investors with greater confidence that Apple is well positioned to maintain its leadership position in the rapidly growing tablet market.” White argues the price gives consumers “bang for their buck,” and he lauds Apple’s “Smart Covers,” flaps made of leather or polyurethane, that snap on with magnets, as partly “granting our wish” for the iPad to come in colors, something he sees as a differentiator.

Richard Gardner, Citigroup: Reiterates a Buy recommendation and a $415 price target, while standing by his prior estimate for sales of 6 million iPads in the current fiscal Q2, and 27 million units this fiscal year. He sees Apple retaining 80% share of the tablet market this year. “Based on the announced tablet offerings, we believe comparable tablets will need to price meaningfully below the iPad in order to take share in this market,” writes Gardner. “We view this as highly unlikely given that competitors would essentially be breaking-even or losing money at those prices.”

Mark Moskowitz, JP Morgan: Reiterates an Overweight rating and a $450 price target. Apple raised the bar for the tablet market. “Considering the competitive launches so far, with higher price points or clumsier form factor/technical specs, our assumption of Apple’s tablet market revenue share at 68% in 2011 may be conservative, particularly after today’s iPad 2 rollout.” The improvements in the form factor are “more than good enough,” writes Gardner, and the tech improvements, such as the new A5 chip, are also more than good enough, as far as he’s concerned. GarageBand and iMovie may extend the devices appeal to the 8- to 18-year-old age category, he thinks.

Article courtesy of Tech Trader Daily

Analysts at Detwiler Fenton this morning write that Motorola Mobility’s (MMI) “Xoom” tablet, which went on sales last week at Verizon Communications’s (VZ) Verizon Wireless, may be having a rough first go of it.

The tablet computer debuted last week to fairly favorable reviews from, among others, The New York Times’s David Pogue, with The Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg calling it the first real competitor to Apple’s (AAPL) iPad.

“After almost one week on the market, it appears that the sell through of Motorola’s Xoom has been extremely light,” reports the firm, without specifying sources for the information. Detwiler attributes the apparent lackluster results to, “its high price, lack of consumer applications and the anticipation for today’s expected Apple (AAPL) iPad 2 announcement,” which is expected to be this afternoon.

Reports out of Asia, moreover, that the Xoom might be coming out of factories at a rate of 700,000 to 800,000 units this quarter are “outrageous,” Detwiler asserts, given the shortfall in this first week.

Moreover, Best Buy (BBY) having the exclusive to retail the thing, combined with its high price, appears to have been a mistake on Motorola’s part:

We believe that total channel sell-in for Q1 will only amount to 150K-200K units, depending on how aggressive Verizon (VZ) gets with inventory stocking. It appears that BBY is sitting on enough inventory to get the retailer through the end of Q1 without problem at this point. Note that VZ and Best Buy (BBY) have a 60 day exclusive on the product in the US a major marketing mistake by MMI in our opinion. While MMI launched the Xoom at $799 at retail (or $599 subsidized with 2-year contract at VZ), retail contacts believe an unsubsidized price point of $649 and subsidized price point of $499 is about the price ceiling for such a product. However we don’t expect to see such a price point anytime soon unless MMI is willing to sacrifice margins and/or VZ ramps up subsidy support.

Detwiler expects Best Buy will “rethink” the pricing of the device to try and boost sales.

No wonder, then, that The Journal’s Ben Worthen today writes of looming talk of a tablet price war.

Motorola shares today are down 53 cents, or $1.80, at $28.97.

Previously: Apple: Pricing Of iPad A Formidable Moat, Says Bernstein, March 2nd, 2011.

Article courtesy of Tech Trader Daily

Shares of Salesforce.com (CRM) are up $2.90, or 2%, at $130.95, after Canaccord Genuity analyst Richard Davis today raised his rating on the stock to Buy from Hold, writing that a 10% decline in the last few days belies the fact that Salesforce is “the same industry-leading juggernaut” it was last week.

Two things threaten the stock, he writes, a breakdown of the financial results, or a market correction. On the latter score, “We spend more time thinking about how those issues affect our company-specific projections than we do trying to play market maven on top of digging like mad for fundamental data points,” writes Davis.

Our view has been that the “Buy GARP for at least a catch-up trade” strategy could work as long as six more months, after which the growth stock would resume their natural place in the hierarchy of stock price returns and ramp in the traditional Q4 software rally. Given this opinion, we debated whether to wait to see if CRM trades down more to get an even better entry point. While we fully admit that we might be jumping the gun, we have no doubt that when investors rotate back into growth, CRM will be at the top of the list for new money inflows.

As for financials, the recent Q4 report was “impressive,” with operating cash flow up 54%, year over year. The other big concern that Davis had was that cash flow is decelerating this year, a lot of that driven by adding more people and paying higher commissions as software bookings grow.

But he’s no longer as concerned about that, given that, “We view these headwinds as temporary (and in some cases “good problems”) and expect OCF growth to re-accelerate in 2012 and thereafter to roughly match the firm’s total revenue growth.”

And one other rather amusing note:

We suppose the last risk that does echo in the back of our minds is that we always get nervous when a company builds a new headquarters – or in this case, campus. This is a vestige of the old rule that you should always sell the stock of a company that builds a monument to itself or gets a stadium named after itself. We haven’t done a statistical test to determine if this is an urban legend or not, but we do think about it.

Davis has a $170 price target on the stock, based on what he expects will free cash flow per share of about $4 in 2013, for a multiple of 40 times, after backing out $12 per share in cash by then.

Article courtesy of Tech Trader Daily

On the one hand, the Street continues to mull the consequences of Nokia’s (NOK) decision a week ago to dump its Symbian operating system software and strike a partnership with Microsoft (MSFT).

RBS analyst Didier Scemama today lowered his rating on the ordinary shares of Nokia to Sell from Buy and cut his price target to €5.80 from €10, writing that the risk-reward trade-off for Nokia shares is unfavorable at the current price.

Nokia’s ordinary shares on the Helsinki exchange today fell 2% to €6.48. Nokia’s American Depository Receipts on NYSE fell 32 cents, or 3.5%, to $8.87.

Scemama sees 15% downside to Nokia shares in a “base case” where Nokia’s smartphone shares falls to 11% by 2013.

In the worst case, assuming “substantial disruption” in the change to Windows, Nokia could see its share decline from 33% in 2010 to 6.4% by 2013 and see its stock drop 53%. In a best case scenario, the company could increase its share to 15% and see a 54% rise in shares.

Even the “base case” sounds fairly grim:

Base case: Nokia Symbian device shipments would reach c. 143m units over the next three years, broadly in line with Nokia guidance of ë150m units over the next few yearsí. Symbian smartphone ASPs fall to Ä97 by 2013. In the meantime, Nokia starts shipping WP7 late this year and ships 25m units in 2012 and 45m units in 2013. ASPs for WP7 fall to Ä255 by 2013. While WP7 is not a major success, Nokia manages to leverage its distribution network in emerging markets and its brand in Western Europe. Consumers and developers overall do not embrace the platform wholeheartedly. Nokiaís overall smartphone unit share declines from 33.3% in 2010 to 10.8% by 2013.

“We cannot help but think Microsoft got the better deal in this partnership,” writes Scemama. “Instead of joining the [Google (GOOG)] Android (operating system software] camp, which had the advantage of being the fastest-growing OS in terms of volume shipments and benefiting from strong developers’ support, all for free, Nokia chose an unproven OS (Windows Phone 7 only sold 1.5 million copies in Q4 of 2010, i.e., 1.5% unit share), with only 8,000 apps on its apps store, and that requires a royalty payment per device without exclusivity.”

Scemama cut his “devices and services” revenue estimate for this year to €26.9 billion from €31.99 billion, and cut his EPS by over 40%, to €0.36 per share from €0.61 previously.

As I noted earlier today, Sanford Bernstein’s Stacy Rasgon similarly predicts that a long, slow decline is the most likely scenario for Nokia, given that the choice to go with Windows was the wrong one, in his opinion.

Article courtesy of Tech Trader Daily

“We collectively, the group of us, we should have just grabbed [Paulson and other Treasury officials] and shaken them and said, ‘Look, you guys cannot do this,’ ” Thain told FCIC interviewers in a Sept. 17, 2010 interview. “In my opinion, allowing Lehman to go bankrupt was the single biggest mistake of the financial crisis.” [Bloomberg]

Article courtesy of Dealbreaker

Shares of Netflix (NFLX) were up $8.58, or 5%, at $187.88 today, helped no doubt by a fairly bullish report from Goldman Sachs analyst Ingrid Chung, who ruminated on her observations at last week’s Consumer Electronics Show.
Netflix, in her opinion, is a “killer app” for tablet computers, of which some [...]

Article courtesy of BARRONS.com: Tech Trader Daily

When you walk out of the office and down the street today, are you planning on asking some strangers their opinion on whether or not you should get paid this year? No? Well give it a shot- the answers may surprise you, if you were under the impression the general population thinks you deserve that money. Apparently they don’t but they do have some ideas about how you should be compensated moving forward. Here’s what 70 percent of Americans have come up with– you get nothing.

More than 70 percent of Americans say big bonuses should be banned this year at Wall Street firms that took taxpayer bailouts, a Bloomberg National Poll shows. An additional one in six favors slapping a 50 percent tax on bonuses exceeding $400,000. Just 7 percent of U.S. adults say bonuses are an appropriate incentive reflecting Wall Street’s return to financial health. A large majority also want to tax Wall Street profits to reduce the federal budget deficit. A levy on financial services firms is the top choice among more than a dozen deficit-cutting options presented to respondents.

“The American people bailed them out and immediately they went and paid their employees very large bonuses,” says poll respondent Michael Robertson, 43, of Wayne, Michigan. “I don’t believe they should have a bonus at all for a while.” Robertson lost his job in retail management in the auto parts industry three years ago when his company cut workers and is now in school studying computer electronics. “Of course I’m bitter about this Wall Street thing,” he says.

Banning Big Wall Street Bonuses Favored By 70% Of Americans [Bloomberg]

Article courtesy of Dealbreaker

As few probably remember, back in February we pointed to an account of an anonymous group of London bankers spending £44,000 in one evening as indication that Team RBS may not have fared so badly in the bonus department (at the time they weren’t ID’d as the Queen’s bitches but we’ve got a sixth sense for these things). In addition to celebrating getting paid, the men were said to be in good spirits over the fact that they’d profited off the recent election, having “correctly guessed the results in constituencies over a large spread bet.” Today, as in approximately ten months later, RBS chief Stephen Hester was asked his opinion about the celebration. He chose not to congratulate or take any pride at all in his employees’ mad gambling skills.

Hester was questioned at the Commons Treasury select committee by Labour MP Chuka Umunna following a report in the Standard about a group of investment bankers who celebrated a huge payout from a bet on the election by running up a £60,000 bar bill. The six men ordered the most expensive bottle of champagne at the Merah nightclub in Fitzrovia – a methuselah of vintage Cristal at £36,000. They also asked for a jeroboam of Cristal at £5,000 and a methuselah of Dom Perignon, which was £9,000.

Appearing to have come straight from the office, they were soon surrounded by about 20 women, according to one witness, and were singing anti-Labour songs. “They were consuming large quantities of drink, Cristal and the rest of it, chanting ‘Down with Brown, down with Brown’,” said Mr Umunna, MP for Streatham.

Mr Hester was clear in his condemnation of the bankers’ conduct last May. “I think anyone who would behave like that in any walk of life I would consider stupid,” he said.

Over-the-top City parties are stupid, says RBS boss Stephen Hester [This Is London via BI]

Article courtesy of Dealbreaker

Here’s one: despite all we know about hedge fund manager Tom Hudson– that the depths of this grown man’s pirate obsession have translated to one firm named Pirate Capital (where a swashbuckling mascot stood in the lobby and minnow fights took place on the floor for the staff’s entertainment); an interim organizations where receptionists answered the phone “Good morning, Captain Jack”; and a second act firm called Doubloon Capital, whose flagship flagship fund is called Pieces of Eight, which refers to both the nickname of the Spanish dollar, “long tied to the lore of piracy” and the Pieces of Eight Cruise Ship, “fun for the whole family” if you’re in the Ft. Meyers, Florida area– would you still think he’d take the pirate theme one step further? That he would be of the opinion that using it in pitches with potential investors would get them to want to hand over their money not less but way more? No? Then you have underestimated this captain’s fetish.

Bess- This is Doubloon’s version of a leave-behind from a pitch to potential investors. It was tucked in with the marketing material. Can’t figure out what metal it’s made of- it seems too heavy (1/2 oz. or so) to be aluminum yet it won’t attract a magnet so it can’t be steel… other side has a compass rose in the center and Doubloon’s web address and phone number around the edge where a real coin would say “In God we trust” or some such thing.

Would certainly not want to have to carry around a bag full of the things, let alone get them through airport security. Makes me wonder if Doubloon has a size/strength requirement for marketing/IR staff.

Article courtesy of Dealbreaker

Well-connected early-stage investor Christine Herron is leaving seed-stage venture-capital firm First Round Capital to join Intel Capital, the chipmaker’s corporate venture arm. The move adds another voice to the ongoing controversy over whether there is a bubble in early-stage investing that’s causing tension between angel investors and established venture capitalists.

Does Herron’s jump show that corporate venture-capital funds are no longer waiting on the sidelines when it comes to seed-stage funding?

Well, in Herron’s own opinion, yes—and with good reason.

The movement toward established corporate venture arms putting serious money into early-stage deals is definitely gaining momentum, Herron told VentureBeat, though they will continue to invest in startups of all sizes and levels of development.

Herron was a principal with First Round Capital, a firm widely regarded as innovative in its approach to seed investing. Still based in the Bay Area, she will seek out early-stage consumer and Internet deals for Intel Capital starting next month.

She said it is clear that larger companies have begun to realize that they need to get involved as soon as possible if they want a piece of any major startup action, and need to move faster in general.

“It is definitely happening, it’s not just a one-off,” said Herron. She was impressed with Intel’s rapid turnaround in an investment she was involved in this summer that she began to change her opinion about working for a massive corporate operation.

“They were fully aware of wanting to be in this space, they put in the same amount we did, and they did it even more quickly because it was strategic for them to be there,” said Herron.

That’s a trend happening across almost all corporate venture arms she’s worked with recently, added Herron, as they add early-stage funding to a much broader strategic playbook.

“Whether you look over at Google or Samsung, they have the same pressure to get in early as any of the other players at different levels. And corporates get that, definitely,” Herron told VentureBeat.

“If there’s a company or space that you know you like, getting in early is the best way to make sure that you are going to be involved in the future,” she said. “If you want a seat at the table, you have to show up on time for dinner.”

Herron would know about showing up on time.

Before joining First Round, she was a director at Omidyar Network, after holding operational roles with Mission Research, NetObjects and Microsoft. Prior to that, Herron was the founder and CEO of software-as-a-service developer of international trade logistics systems Mercury2.

[Photo of Herron at DEMO Fall 2009 by Brian Solis/Bub.blicio.us]

Tags: angel investing, corporate venture capital, seed funding, seed-stage funding, superangels

Companies: First Round Capital, Intel Capital, Omidyar Network

People: Christine Herron

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals