Filed under: Earnings reports, Forecasts, Good news, Management, Consumer experience, Competitive strategy, Marketing and advertising, Abercrombie and Fitch (ANF)

Fears over further economic slowdown are dragging most stocks down as market trading is blood red again after a Labor Department report showed a rise of 1.7% in U.S. import prices in January. But not all the companies are pulled down by investors’ economic concerns. In fact, shares of teen retailer Abercrombie & Fitch Co. (NYSE: ANF) have gained a tiny over 0.5% in early morning trading, after the company posted a rise of 9% for its fourth-quarter profit.

For the quarter, Abercrombie & Fitch reported that its profit climbed to $216.8 million, boosted by strong sales from its Hollister Co. chain. Lower theft rate and higher profit margins also offset deeper discounts and the company posted earnings of $2.40 per share. Analysts were expecting the retailer to show earnings of $2.36 per share in the quarter.

Abercrombie & Fitch also announced an 8% growth in revenues, to $1.23 billion, up from $1.14 billion a year earlier when the company benefited from an extra week. For the quarterly same-store sales though, the retailer posted a decline of 1%.

Revenue during the period was helped by a 0.8% increase in gross profit that benefited from higher margins early in the quarter. In addition, smaller values for the rate of shrinkage overshadowed the company’s discounts during the holiday and post-holiday periods. Analysts had forecast $1.25 billion in revenue, according to Thomson Financial.

The apparel retailer had a pretty volatile 2007, as the company had to face continued fears over a possible recession. The slumping housing market and credit crises brought a slowdown in consumer spending whose effects are reflected in the company’s earnings.

However, Abercrombie showed an improved performance from 2006 and posted a full-year profit of $475.7 million, or $5.20 per share, up from $422.2 million, or $4.59 per share, the previous year. Sales also gained 13% to $3.75 billion, up from $3.32 billion a year ago.

Looking ahead, the retailers plans to boost its earnings this year by adding 110 new stores in North America and four in Britain. Abercrombie also forecast a profit in the range of $1.61 and $1.65 a share for the first half of 2008.

Eliza Popescu is a financial writer for the on the internet investment advisory service Investor’s Observer.

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Filed under: Design, World wide web, Utilities, Web services, web 2.0

If there’s one thing we love more than an image editing application with a ton of features, it’s an image editing application with a ton of features that are incredibly simple to use. And FotoFlexer seriously fits the bill. Much like Picnik, Splashup, and PikiFX, FotoFlexer is an on the web image editor.

You can either create an account or simply upload an image to start using FotoFlexer. You can also edit live images from your webcam or import an image from Photobucket, Facebook, Flickr, MySpace, or Picasa.

The editing application is incredibly simple to use. You can perform a ton of advanced transformations with a easy mouse click. For example, we clicked the “cartoon” button to make the image above. You can also turn any image into a blueprint, Andy Warhol-like pop art image, or make your picture look like an old black and white photo.

There are also more practical tools for eliminating red-eye, reducing blemishes or wrinkles, cropping, resizing, rotating, slicing and pasting your images. If you know what you’re doing, you can also add layers to your images, much as you would with PhotoShop or GIMP.

[via Mashable]

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Filed under: World wide web, Windows, Web services, Freeware, web 2.0

Like having Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Flickr, and other web services at your fingertips, but don’t feel like keeping RAM-hungry Firefox open all day? Bubbles is a Windows application lets you run web services in their own individual windows, no Firefox, Opera, or Internet Explorer required.

When you first run Bubbles, you’ll see a list of web sites which you can open with the application. You can also add any page you want just by entering the URL. You can begin a web app by clicking the “Go” button and you should see icons for each application pop up in your Windows system tray. Click on one to bring up the web app of your choice. Clicking the X bar doesn’t close the window, but minimizes it to the system tray. In order to really close a window you’ll need to right-click on its icon and choose close.

Bubbles appears to use less memory than Firefox when accessing some web pages like Gmail or Yahoo! Mail. But we noticed a window running Google Reader swiftly grew to use 50MB. Overall Bubbles seems like a slick and simple to use substitute to Mozilla Prism. But there’s room for improvement. For example, when you click on a link in a Bubble window, instead of opening a new Bubble, the program opens your default web browser, which sort of defeats the purpose if you want to do anything besides read web pages.

Bubbles has actually been around a lot longer than Prism, but it works pretty well with modern web applications and supports Greasemonkey. There’s even a Gmail notifier that works even with the newer version of Gmail.

[Thanks Jim Mauro!]

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Filed under: Deals, Competitive strategy, Yahoo! (YHOO), New York Times’A’ (NYT), Gannett Co (GCI)

Several huge publishers will set up a joint ad sales operation in the hopes of getting more revenue for their online businesses. According to The Wall Street Journal, “Gannett (NYSE: GCI)., Hearst Corp., the New York Times NYSE: NYT). and Tribune Co. are setting up the network as a stand-alone company called quadrantOne.”

The new operation will have access to funding from the four companies and will cover 120 newspaper websites with a combined 50 million one-of-a-kind users. The new firm will not sell ads in the New York Times and USA This day which already have big on the internet sales forces.

The venture will likely be a failure. By holding out the two most prized newspaper websites and selling smaller papers to advertisers the quadrantOne is prone to do no superior than the unit Yahoo! (NASDAQ:YHOO) has set-up to sell newspaper ads. While newspaper websites are attracting more readers as people moves away from print products, ad agencies can already purchase inventory from these properties with ease.

The new company might offer “one stop shopping” for on the internet newspaper ad inventory, but it isn’t inventory that advertisers really want.

Douglas A.. McIntyre is an editor at 247wallst.com.

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bosoxsux writes “Rogue DNS servers are an increasingly popular tool for scam artists, according to a new report. Their numbers are on the rise, in part because they’re difficult for antivirus software to deal with. ‘There are now approximately 68,000 rogue DNS servers across the World wide web, The authenticity of the sites such servers redirect to varies greatly, from near-perfect duplicates to laughably bad, but the problem they represent is quite serious. Once an end user’s computer has been modified to use a poisoned DNS server, the system can be directed to any fake web site the malware author feels like serving up.’”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Echostorm writes with word that Windows Vista SP1, which began rolling out via Automatic Update, has left some users’ machines unbootable. The update loops forever on “Configuring updates: Stage 3 of 3 — 0% complete. Do not turn off your personal.” “Shutting down”… restart and loop. Echostorm notes having found traces of what sounds like the same bug in early beta releases of SP1. It’s unclear how many users are affected. So far there is no word on a fix from Microsoft.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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I Don’t Believe in Imaginary Property writes “In response to a query from a member of the EU Parliament, an EU commissioner issued an official statement (.DOC) saying that, while they don’t violate any laws, secret printer tracking dot codes might violate the human right to privacy guaranteed by the EU’s Convention of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. If you don’t remember what these are, Slashdot has discussed the issue before. In short, most color printers print small yellow dots on every sheet in a code that identifies the printer and, potentially, its owner. The EFF is running an awareness campaign, and a couple of years back made a begin on deciphering the yellow dot code.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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freedom_india alerts us to news that the Home of Representatives declined to bring the surveillance reform bill to vote, prompting Home Republicans to walk out in the middle of a session. The bill, recently passed by the Senate, includes retroactive immunity for the telecommunications companies who assisted with illegal domestic wiretaps. The walk-out comes after a proposal was shot down on Wednesday that would have extended the current legislation for another three weeks.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Filed under: World wide web, Blogging, Web services, web 2.0

We’ve to admit we haven’t given much thought to blogging community site MyBlogLog over the last year or so. The service launched as a way for bloggers to get in touch with one another and find new sites they might be interested in. But Technorati and Google Blog Search are both much more useful for finding blogs covering topics you care about.

But that doesn’t mean there’s no value in MyBlogLog. The service offers a couple of web site tools including a free and subscription analytics package and a “recent visitors widget,” that shows the profiles of other MyBlogLog members who have visited your page. And this week MyBlogLog rolled out an updated and much improved version of that widget.

Not only does the new widget have a slick Web 2.0 look and feel, but when you hover your mouse over the name or image of a recent visitor, you see link to their MyBlogLog profile and links to their web sites. This adds value for anyone who publishes the widget on their site, and also creates an incentive for bloggers and web publishers to sign up for a MyBlogLog account since there’s a superior chance that someone might see their profile on a random page and click through to their site.

To get the widget, just login to your MyBlogLog account and click the “Get Widgets” button to get the HTML embed code.

Continue reading MyBlogLog updates reader widget, releases API

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