HP Documents Hit Congress

Hewlett-Packard was scheduled to deliver on Monday a batch of documents related to its snooping scandal to the U.S. House of Representatives’ Energy and Commerce Committe. Word is it did.

Tomorrow and through the week should be plenty interesting as people familiar with the documents start jabbering about their contents.

Toshiba Notebooks Got Game

Toshiba is making a move into the battlefield for notebooks fashionable among games players.

With its Satellite P100, button-down PC maker Toshiba is offering three laptops that will sport a souped-up graphics from Nvidia, among other features. The company is offering laptops with the GeForce Go 7900 GTX. The laptops presumably aim at the same market Dell’s XPS line of games machines target.

These machines from Toshiba are chunky. The Satellite P100-ST9012, the P100-ST9412 and the P100-ST9612 have 17-inch displays, weigh in at just over 7 lbs and are 1.41-inches thick. Prices start at $2,000.

Can you say Google and coupons and Dell?

Circuit City Beats Estimates

Circuit City Stores on Monday reported a first-quarter profit that beat analyst expectations by 3 cents.

The electronics retailer reported for the quarter ending May 31 a profit that increased to $6.4 million, or $0.04 per share, from a loss of $13.1 million, or $0.07 per share, in the same period last year.

A survey of analysts from Thompson Financial had expected Circuit City to post a profit of a penny per share.

Net sales increased to $2.62 billion in the quarter from $2.23 billion in the same period last year. The company reported a 15 percent surge in domestic sales for the quarter compared with same-store figures for its first quarter last year.

“We believe that an improved in-store customer experience contributed to increases in average ticket and conversion rate,” Circuit City CEO Philip J. Schoonover said. “Our multichannel marketing efforts drove improved traffic trends in all channels, and we saw an increase in Web-originated sales picked up in our stores.”

Electronics retailer Best Buy posted results last week that blew past expectations.

Vonage: Patent Suit. What’s Next?

Verizon on Monday filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Internet phone service Vonage.

The suit comes after Vonage’s IPO flop and shareholder suits.
Verizon’s suit over voice over Internet Protocol technology involves seven patents. Vonage said it plans to have its intellectual property outside counsel investigate the matter.

“Vonage believes that its services have been developed with its own proprietary technology and technology licensed from third parties and intends to vigorously defend the lawsuit,” the company said in a statement.

Best Buy Beats Street Solidly

Electronics megastore Best Buy on Tuesday reported that first-quarter net earnings rose 38 percent, blowing past analyst expectations.

Best Buy earned $234 million, or 47 cents per share, for the quarter that ended May 27. That compares with earnings of $170 million, or 34 cents per share, during the same period last year.

Analysts surveyed by Thompson Financial were expecting earning of 36 cents per share.

Wall Street applauded Best Buy’s results, as shares rose $2.66, or 5.43 percent, to $51.69 by market close Tuesday.

A Commerce Department report said that while spending is somewhat slow that it continues to chug along and is still up, perhaps a factor feeding Best Buy stores. The report said the retail sales were up .1 percent compared with .8 percent.

Luxury Link(s) Up $9 Million

Luxuriating with a $9 million venture capital investment might come more naturally if you’re Luxury Link.

That’s because the online luxury travel company specializes in luxury vacation accomodations in hotels, resorts, cruises, tours and other options. It claims to offer tips for the “sophisticated” traveler. Translation: the wealthy traveler with money to burn.

San Francisco’s Equity Partners and El Dorado Ventures made the investment on Wednesday.

The funding will be used for growth initiatives in customer acquisition, brand awareness, and expansion of consumer access to the more than 1,000 upscale hotels and resorts, cruises, tours and villas in over 60 countries it offers on its Web site.

LoopNet IPO Blasts off in Trading Debut

While the real estate market is in pull-back mode, who says Internet real estate LoopNet site should be? The newly public company’s shares surged nearly 27 percent in its opening Wednesday.

LoopNet priced at $12 per share and was at $15.23 in midday trading. The IPO will give the real estate site $42.1 million in net proceeds.

Credit Suisse Securities managed the offering, and Thomas Weisel Partners, Pacific Crest Securities Inc. and Pacific Growth Equities were the co-managers.

Interest in online real estate sites has remained steady. ZipRealty went public in 2004 but has traded lower ever since. Last week, investors backed by Paul Allen took a stake in Redfin.

Yahoo Grabs 10 Percent Stake in Korea’s Gmarket

Yahoo has planted another flag overseas: It’s staked Korea’s online retailer Gmarket.

“We look forward to working with Gmarket to leverage their e-commerce expertise to further expand Yahoo’s leading position in commerce in Asia,” Yahoo Chief Operating Officer Dan Rosensweig said Tuesday in a statement.

Yahoo agreed to acquire a 10 percent stake in the company from Oak Investment Partners, which manages $8.4 billion in assets. Oak Investment Partners, the No. 2 Gmarket investor, holds 29 percent of the company, according to reports.

Interest among U.S. companies continues to be high for the prospects in the Asia region.

Yahoo took a multibillion-dollar stake in China’s Alibaba.com in what has been called the largest foreign Internet investment to date taken by a U.S. company. Google has a piece of search giant Baidu.com and eBay has made moves into the region’s e-commerce through several acquisitions.

IPO in the Offing?
However, it gets better. The investment comes right after Gmarket applied for an initial public offering on the Nasdaq worth up to $100 million, according to a Reuters report.

Gmarket has been eyeing a run at the Nasdaq for some time, according to China’s business paper The Standard. The market in Korea has been receptive to consumer-focused IPOs, as other companies have positioned to go public there as well.

Financial terms of Yahoo’s stake in Gmarket were not disclosed.

Unable to Delete MySpace, Member Resorts to Posting Porn

Consumerist’s blogger Ben Popken only wanted to delete his MySpace account.

But apparently three weeks into the ordeal, he still hadn’t gotten instructions from MySpace. That’s when he took matters into his own hands.

“Myspace is a Loser, So We’re Resorting to Porn,” Popken writes, describing what he did. (Credit for this item: Valleywag.) He posted the following:

“So we’ve just replaced our MySpace profile photo with shemale porn.
We’re also uploading a lesbian strapon movie … It’s 4:27pm EST, let’s see how long it takes for our profile [NSFW] to finally get deleted.”

Both MySpace and YouTube have pledged to keep their sites cleansed of porn, as both attract a young audience.

When I checked at 7:30 p.m. PT, his account was off like Jenna Jamerson’s panties. I guess it worked.

Nvidia Touts Chip Design for Intel Mobile Set

Nvidia is thinking small: It wants to be the graphics processor used inside devices running Windows Mobile 5.0.

On Tuesday, it announced design references to work with Intel’s XScale mobile chip. Intel and Nvidia recently announced an alliance pairing Nvidia’s graphics technology with Intel’s third-generation mobile XScale processor family, code-named Monahans, to enhance applications on mobile devices.

“Next-generation devices based on the Windows Mobile 5.0 operating system will have specific demands, both for application processing as well as the acceleration of the multimedia content within those applications,” said a statement from Barry Evans, general manager of Intel’s Applications ProcessorBusiness Unit.

Microsoft’s Window Mobile 5.0 is quickly taking over across smart phones as a popular choice. Palm has even conceded to Window Mobile 5.0’s demand and offered the OS as an option, making it available on its Treo 700w.