Filed under: Internet, Web services, Social Software

Love them or hate them, Facebook applications are what makes the social networking site what it is. Back when MySpace, Friendster, and other sites let you connect with friends, leave messages, and maybe even play some music, Facebook let you send snowballs, play Scrabble, and graph your bestest friends.

The only problem with Facebook applications is that up until now, you’ve had to actually visit Facebook to access them. OK, sure, that makes sense. But as Google promotes its OpenSocial initiative which will let people develop applications that can run on any website, Facebook’s approach was starting to look a bit antiquated.

Now Facebook has upped the ante by releasing a JavaScript client library that lets you add a Facebook application to any site. That means you can visit Joe Schmo’s home page and still play a game of Scrabulous with your Facebook contacts. You know, if Hasbro and Mattel don’t shut it down.

There appears to be some debate in the developer community about how significant this announcement was. Facebook had already released an API for writing applications. And some developers have created applications that can be hosted on other sites. But by releasing the JavaScript library, developers can create multi-site applications that don’t require any server-side code, making it incredibly easy for anyone to embed an application on their site.

[via All Facebook]

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Filed under: Earnings reports, Forecasts, Products and services, Management, Consumer experience, Competitive strategy, Starbucks (SBUX), Marketing and advertising, McDonald’s (MCD)

It has definitely been a rocky earnings season thus far, and on Monday, fast food giant McDonalds Corp. (NYSE: MCD) will get its turn to impress Wall Street when it reports its fourth quarter numbers. Shares of the company traded up slightly on Friday in anticipation of the upcoming event. Shares completed the day up 0.19% to $54.10.

So what exactly are analysts expecting to hear from McDonalds for the quarter? Consensus estimates for the company ’s most recent quarter are running at 71 cents per share. During the fourth quarter of 2006 the company had actual earnings of 61 cents per share, so Wall Street is looking for a slightly higher than 16% jump year over year.

One thing that we can definitely expect to hear more about during the quarterly conference call will be the company’s plan to start offering mochas, lattes, cappuccinos, and espressos at all of its American locations. This is a strong move by the company to break into the coffee market, but has met some resistance from store owners.

The coffee move was first introduced back in November, and at first, store owners were pretty hesitant, citing the approximate $100,000 cost tag to get stores fitted with all the necessary equipment. As Douglas McIntyre wrote earlier this month, the company thinks that by adding coffee bars and baristas it will eventually be able to add on about $1 billion in annual sales. This is a direct attack on Starbucks (NASDAQ: SBUX) which has been struggling to keep its market share over the past year.

What are the analysts saying? Citi Investment Research analyst Glen Petraglia says that McDonalds remains his top pick in the restaurant sector. Stating that the stock isn’t exactly what he would call “cheap,” Petraglia says that he still feels that the downside is pretty limited on this one.

The last time that the company reported earnings was back on October 19, when it matched Wall Street estimates with 61 cents per share. To find the last time that the company was unable to at least come in in-line with analyst estimates you would have to look all the way back to January 2005, when it missed estimates for its fourth quarter 2004 by one penny.

Will the trend continue for McDonalds, or will we see a repeat of fourth quarter 2004. We will find out early Monday morning, and will update you as soon as the numbers come in, as well as gage Wall Street’s reaction to the quarterly numbers.

Let’s close with a one year chart to see how the stock has been performing over the past 52 weeks:

Michael Fowlkes has worked as a stock trader for seven years and spent the last four years working as an analyst for the on the internet investment advisory service Investor’s Observer

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Tokonamu sends a note about the release to a private testing group of a new build of Windows Vista SP1, possibly presaging the imminent release of the long-awaited service pack. Speculation about a Feb. 15 release date has been fueled by a report out of Taiwan, according to the article. Microsoft also issued a new build of Windows XP SP3 this week, but it’s getting next to no publicity out of Redmond, what with XP being the main competition for Vista and all.

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James Hardine writes “Following an announcement this week that the infamous Japanese Monju fast-breeder nuclear reactor would be re-opened with a new plutonium core, Wikileaks has released suppressed video footage of the disaster that led to its closure in 1995. The video shows men in silver ’space suits’ exploring the reactor in which sodium compounds hang from the air ducts like icicles. Unlike conventional reactors, fast-breeder reactors, which ‘breed’ plutonium, use sodium rather than water as a coolant. This type of coolant creates a potentially dangerous situation as sodium is highly corrosive and reacts violently with both water and air. Government officials at first played down the extent of damage at the reactor and denied the existence of a videotape showing the sodium spill. The deputy general manager, Shigeo Nishimura, 49, jumped to his death the day after a news conference at which he and other officials revealed the extent of the cover-up. His family is currently suing the government at Japan’s High Court.”

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Tokonamu sends a note about the release to a private testing group of a new build of Windows Vista SP1, possibly presaging the imminent release of the long-awaited service pack. Speculation about a Feb. 15 release date has been fueled by a report out of Taiwan, according to the article. Microsoft also issued a new build of Windows XP SP3 this week, but it’s getting next to no publicity out of Redmond, what with XP being the main competition for Vista and all.

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E5Rebel sends in an article from Computerworld.uk article that reports: “IBM believes Linux on the enterprise desktop is finally ready for widespread adoption. To meet future demand it is preparing to deliver its next versions of Lotus Notes enterprise collaboration software and Lotus Symphony office productivity applications for the first time with full support for Ubuntu Linux 7.0… The Ubuntu support for Notes and Symphony were a direct response to demand from customers.”

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Statistical Resources on the Web/Finance and Banking
Finance studies and addresses the ways in which individuals, … The term finance may thus incorporate any of the following: * The study of money and other …

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Senate committee charged with writing tax legislation and bills affecting Social Security, Medicare, and other entitlement programs.

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The Campaign Finance Information Center is administered by IRE and the National Institute of Computer-Assisted Reporting. It's dedicated to helping …

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Finance studies and addresses the ways in which individuals, businesses, and organizations raise, allocate, and use monetary resources over time, …

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Microsoft CRM suggests a long AP article laying out the nightmare scenario of RFID chips in everything tracking not only things but people. The darker possibilities of a technology capable of enabling ubiquitous surveillance are not news to this community, but it’s not so common to see them spelled out for a wider audience. “Microchips with antennas embedded in virtually everything you purchase, wear, drive and read, allowing retailers and law enforcement to track consumer items and consumers wherever they go. Much of the radio frequency identification technology that enables objects and people to be tagged and tracked wirelessly already exists and potentially intrusive uses of it are being patented, perfected and deployed… [A director at FTI Consulting] said:] ‘It’s going to be used in unintended ways by third celebrations — not just the government, but private investigators, marketers, lawyers building a case against you.’”

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An anonymous reader tips us to a note up on the IPKat blog, written by one of the four law-professor types behind that venture. The British High Court has ruled on appeal that the UK Patent Office mustn’t reject software patent applications out of hand, as it has been doing for some time now. “In a surprising (to this Kat at least) turn of events, the Honourable Mr Justice Kitchin has ruled this day that the current UK Patent Office practice of flatly rejecting patent claims to personal program products is wrong… Kitchin J found that the appeals should be granted. Each application concerned a computer related invention where the examiner had allowed claims to, in effect, a method performed by running a suitably programmed personal and to a computer programmed to carry out the method… The cases were remitted to the [UK Intellectual Property Office] for further consideration in light of the judgment.”

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Microsoft CRM recommends a long AP article laying out the nightmare scenario of RFID chips in everything tracking not only things but people. The darker possibilities of a technology capable of enabling ubiquitous surveillance are not news to this community, but it’s not so common to see them spelled out for a wider audience. “Microchips with antennas embedded in virtually everything you purchase, wear, drive and read, allowing retailers and law enforcement to track consumer items and consumers wherever they go. Much of the radio frequency identification technology that enables objects and people to be tagged and tracked wirelessly already exists and potentially intrusive uses of it are being patented, perfected and deployed… [A director at FTI Consulting] said:] ‘It’s going to be used in unintended ways by third celebrations — not just the government, but private investigators, marketers, lawyers building a case against you.’”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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