Adobe just announced a bunch of upgrades to Acrobat.com, its suite of web collaboration applications. The most important: It’s releasing an application for the iPhone and BlackBerry.

Mobile support has been a big missing piece for Acrobat.com, since a big selling point of applications like Adobe’s (as well as Google Docs and the upcoming web versions of Microsoft Office) is the ability to access your documents anywhere. Now Acrobat.com users can not only read and share files from their phones, but also upload documents and send faxes.

Acrobat.com started out as a free service, but in June it launched premium versions, where users pay for web meetings and the ability to create PDF documents. The mobile app follows that model. Free users can send two faxes and upload up to five documents from their phone each month, but if you want to do more, you’ll have to upgrade to a pay version.

The other major improvement is the creation of a central environment to view all your files in Acrobat.com, rather than having to view all your documents in Buzzword, all your spreadsheets in Tables, and all your presentations in, uh, Presentations. This may be what Product Manager Erik Larson was referring to when I asked him in June about future improvements, and he said, “I don’t necessarily think presentations, spreadsheets, documents are these three separate things, even though I know that’s the way the world thinks right now.”

The new version of Acrobat.com will launch at 3am Pacific on Saturday, Nov. 21. Larson told me in June that the site has 5 million registered users. (I’ve asked for more recent numbers and will update if I receive them.)

Amazon shares hit an all-time record -- Today’s $118.49 price is higher than the $400-plus days of 1999, because of splits in the years since. Today’s share price would be about $700 without the splits, says the Wall Street Journal. The Journal hauled out Mary Meeker, a big booster of Amazon and other dot-com stocks in the late 1990s who still follows the sector:

Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker attributed Amazon’s recent surge to “continued success in adding new customers.”

She added that the rally “indicates that Amazon.com’s value proposition (lowest prices + best selection + great customer service) is succeeding in attracting consumers as they transition from offline to online in search of value.”

Another factor driving Amazon is sales of third-party products sold in its marketplace, a business once dominated by eBay Inc. Third-party units rose 32% from a year ago and 14% from the second quarter.

About 31% of Amazon’s sales now come from third-party merchants who sell goods on the site and give Amazon a percentage of revenue.

Wall Street, which refused to reward Yahoo for beating the street’s estimates a few days ago, went ga-ga for AMZN today, sending prices up 27% and boosting Amazon’s market value to $51.2 billion. VentureBeat will not make fun of the Kindle today.

Microsoft’s results add to continuing hopes for a tech-sector recovery – Microsoft is the General Motors of the tech sector, so today’s report of an 18% drop in quarterly results from last year could likely have triggered a selloff. Instead, investors bid Microsoft shares up 5.4% to $28.03 today. The Journal attributes it to consumer demand that offsets weak business spending.

Fifteen percent of adult Americans don’t have cellphones — Claire Cain Miller at the New York Times tracked down and interviewed people across America who have chosen to live — for now — without a mobile phone.

“It’s a luxury not to be reached when I’m out and about,” said Gregory Han, a 34-year-old writer and editor living in Los Angeles. Life for him is a lot more planned than most, the consequence of not having a cellphone — or even a landline — at home.

[Photo: J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times]

Netflix to roll out streaming-only service outside the U.S. — CEO Reed Hastings wouldn’t tell ReadWriteWeb in which countries Netflix will test streaming-only subscriptions that don’t require the customer to sign up for Netflix’ DVD-by-mail service. But those countries will not be the USA. Hastings said he wants to prove the business model before trying to serve it to the entire United States of America.

Windows 7 reader questions answered by our man Pogue — The guy is kind of touchy about his hatemail from Mac fans, but he takes one for the team today by answering the most broad, what-do-I-do questions about Windows 7 from his inbox. Send this to your parents.

As for PC pundits who trash-talk Windows Vista, former PC World editor Harry McCracken looked up all of the major reviewers’ write-ups of Vista from its debut days. All but one liked it. None forecast the sprawling, deep disinterest with which the general public responded. I’ll repeat my quickie review from yesterday: Windows 7 is a complicated operating system that I use to run a browser, in which I do all my work. Google’s Chrome OS is starting to appeal to me: A simpler, more stable browser with a Unix filesystem beneath it. For free. I’m not saying Windows is going to be gone from most desktops anytime soon, but it may be gone from mine.

Billionaire investor Carl Icahn is resigning from Yahoo’s board of directors. According to MarketWatch, he said “there was not a need at this time for an activist investor” at Yahoo anymore and that he’d rather focus on other companies. The subtext there being that either A) he feels that his work is done and he can move on now that the search deal with Microsoft is moving towards government approval, or B) he can make more money by trying to control some other company.

Icahn wrestled his way onto Yahoo’s board last year when Jerry Yang was still CEO. Initially, he wanted to try to revive Microsoft’s interest in acquiring Yahoo outright, but when it became clear Microsoft didn’t want to do that deal anymore, he supported the search deal as the best way to move forward.

It’s hard to determine whether Icahn is throwing in the towel on Bartz or this is actually a vote of confidence. If he really believes in where Bartz can take the company after the search deal is done, then you’d think he’d keep his board seat to have a stronger influence on the company’s direction. But Icahn has always been a transaction-oriented investor. He tries to push companies to do things that will move the stock in a big way, and then he takes his profits and he leaves.

More likely than not, Icahn doesn’t see another big shift he can push the company to take that will affect the stock in any major way. And with the stock price moving in the right direction, he probably doesn’t see the need to keep shaking the boat. It is much easier for him to just keep selling his shares (he sold almost $180 million worth in August alone) and move on. With the stock trading at $17, some of Icahn’s shares are still underwater, but he also bought a bunch at $10 last November. At this point, he’ll probably be happy just to get all of his initial investment back, which he is still far from doing.

(Photo by Sam Lustgarten)

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Microsoft reported its revenues for its first fiscal quarter today were down 14 percent at $12.92 billion, but the company beat Wall Street estimates.

Net income was $3.57 billion, or 40 cents a share. Analysts had expected 32 cents a share, and the  stock is up today. Revenues from yesterday’s launch of the Windows 7 operating system will be recorded in the second fiscal quarter which closes on Dec.31. While business demand was weak in the quarter, consumer demand was good. The overall PC business grew zero to 2 percent compared to a year ago, the company estimated.

Going forward, Microsoft predicted that its Windows sales would be in line with PC industry growth, which should be higher because of Windows 7. Emerging markets will grow at double digits, while Microsoft’s business division is expected to lag behind the PC market. The big variable is how soon businesses start buying computers again.

This quarter might have been hurt by both the recession and delays in purchases in anticipation of the Windows 7 launch. Windows revenues fell 37 percent to $2.6 billion, while Microsoft’s business division revenue was also down significantly from a year ago. The company predicts consumer spending will be strong as a result of the Windows 7 launch, while businesses are likely to start spending money next year as they upgrade to Windows 7.

“Into next year, we expect to see businesses start spending again,” said Chris Liddell, chief financial officer, on a conference call this morning. “We are reasonably cautious about the business cycle. We think it will begin next year and stretch over a couple of years. How quickly that will happen, we won’t speculate yet.”

One worry for Microsoft is that consumers have been opting for netbooks, the low-end web-surfing computers that are cheaper and smaller than laptops. Some are using cheaper versions of Windows, but many are using versions of the Linux operating system.

Servers and Tools division revenues was flat at $3.4 billion. Entertainment and Devices group was also flat compared to last year, with revenue of $1.9 billion. Microsoft sold 2.1 million Xbox 360 game consoles in the quarter, bringing the total to 34 million consoles sold. Revenues for the full fiscal year are expected to be flat for the Entertainment and Devices division, which also includes Zune portable sales.

Xbox 360 hardware revenue was hurt in part because of a $100 price cut, but the company had a $100 million increase in game revenue, thanks to sales of Halo 3: ODST, which was the No. 1 game in September. Profits in the division were nearly double year over year at $312 million, helped by a 50 percent growth in Xbox Live revenues. Microsoft said it has sold 8.7 games for every console, the highest in the industry.

Microsoft’s online division lost money, with a loss of $480 million on revenue of just $490 million. The company is investing heavily in its Bing search engine, which launched in June and has gained market share steadily. Search ads from Bing were up slightly, but online ad revenues were down 3 percent.

For the full year, Microsoft said it expects to spend about $26.2 billion in the full fiscal year ending June 30, 2010, down from its earlier estimate of $26.5 billion a year earlier. Liddell said the company is cautious about spending because of the uncertain nature of the economic rebound.

Microsoft ended the September quarter with $36.7 billion in cash and short term investments.

Microsoft announced this week that it has made a deal to include public updates from Facebook in its search engine Bing. Some Facebook users expressed concern that their private activities might be exposed to search. The real story is a little more complex. To put it simply: Facebook is not ever going to knowingly expose private activities on the site to public search. We can say that with as much assurance as we can say almost anything about the internet.

None the less, Facebook has a clear agenda to convince you the user to willingly expose more information publicy by changing your privacy settings. Multiple Facebook execs have told us so when we asked point blank.

Sponsor

Facebook believes that sharing is good for the world. It was founded on making sharing private and secure between friends – so you’d share more – but it hopes in time to make hundreds of millions of people more comfortable sharing publicly.

As is, searching public activity is good for search users (though many are skeptical), it’s good for search engines and it’s good for the social networks serving up the data.

But is it good for social network users that don’t want their messages showing up in search results? That’s the wrong question to ask because that’s not going to happen.

Your Facebook profile is private by default. Your messages and media can’t be seen by anyone but your friends. Some small number of users have chosen to change those settings, some even making everything they do on Facebook publicly visible to the whole world. Clearly some users would find programatic analysis of their activities anonymized and made available in builk to be a violation of privacy – but many more would not and are all ready wide-open.

That group is probably made up mostly of self-promoters, marketers, overcompensating lonely people and other exhibitionists. (My profile is public, I fall under the self-promoter category, unfortunately.)

Facebook would appreciate it if you would put yourself in this category, too. The company believes that sharing leads to understanding between people, empathy and progress towards world peace. Sharing also provides nice opportunities to advertise.

Facebook wants to display lots of your information publicly, but it won’t shoot itself in the foot by breaking its promise to respect your privacy settings – whatever they may be. Is it strange that Facebook, now more populous than all but three nations in the world, has such a clear agenda to change the world’s culture? It is certainly something to be aware of. But Facebook is not going to make your private messages public.

Discuss

FY10 Q1 Slides Flattened –

Microsoft announced another down quarter this morning. Revenues in the September quarter were down 14 percent to $12.92 billion, and net profits declined even further to $3.57 billion, or $0.40 a share. The consensus estimate was $0.32, so Wall Street is happy and the shares are rallying (up 10 percent in early-morning trading).

Investors will forgive the poor performance coming out of the recession (are we out of that yet?), because they hope that yesterday’s launch of Windows 7 will bring back the shine to the stock. If you look at revenues for the Windows business, it certainly looks like both businesses and consumers have been delaying purchases and upgrades in anticipation of the new operating system. The Windows business saw revenues decline by 37 percent, or $1.7 billion, from last year, to $2.6 billion. The closely-related Business division, which includes Office, was down $500 million in revenues, to $4.4 billion.

Microsoft needs to revive these franchises with Windows 7 at a time when it is increasingly under attack by cloud-based productivity apps from Google and others. But Windows 7 should give Microsoft some cover as corporations go through their robotic upgrade exercises. The company recorded $1.5 billion in deferral revenue associated with Windows 7, which pretty much covers the gap from last year.

The two businesses which held steady in terms of revenue were Servers and Tools ($3.4 billion) and Entertainment ($1.9 billion). Microsoft sold 2.1 million Xboxes in the quarter, and is no selling an average of 8.7 games per console, more than any other videogame console. Profits nearly doubled to $312 million, and Xbox Live revenues grew more than 50 percent, although Microsoft does not specify the absolute number.

Looking at Microsoft’s online business, once again the loss in that business ($480 million) almost matched its revenues ($490 million). We saw the same trend last quarter, as Microsoft continues to invest heavily in this business via Bing and other products. Online advertising revenues were down 3 percent (at least that was better than Yahoo’s 12 percent decline), and search ads from Bing saw a “mid single digit” increase.

Below is a table breaking down Microsoft’s revenues by operating division (click to enlarge):

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This week brought news that Google and Microsoft are now incorporating Twitter into search results, solidifying the importance of incorporating social media content into search results. And startups like OneRiot have also recognized the value of tapping into the Twitter stream for search. Startup Kikin is doing the same with its newly launched plug-in.

Once installed, Kikin will integrate content from social networks (like Facebook and Twitter) and other social sites (like Amazon, eBay and YouTube) alongside results from search engines (like Google, Bing and Yahoo!). So if you search for chocolate labs on Google, Kikin will provide a pane of YouTube videos of chocolate labs and a Twitter stream of mentions of chocolate labs.

You can filter Twitter search results to just the Tweets from those users you are following. The pane also acts as a Twitter client where you can retweet Tweets and more. And the search results will tap into your Facebook account via Facebook Connect and search your news stream. Kikin lets you alter your settings so you can only see results from Twitter or YouTube.

While Google, Bing and other search engine embrace social media content in their search results, I’m a fan of Kikin’s plug-in because it lets you moderate what content you want to see and which content isn’t useful to you. You may not be interested in results from eBay for your searched, which you can disable (of course, it will still show up in your Google results). And I like that Kikin accesses your Facebook stream and YouTube videos. And if you tire of Kikin’s results, you can easily minimize the pane.

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Here’s our collection of photos from the Web 2.0 Summit, which ran from Tuesday through Thursday in San Francisco. It’s also our 30-second summary of what you may have missed at the big digerati event. We’ll start with the last man who spoke at the conference, Tim Berners-Lee, who created the World Wide Web. He never made any attempt to own his creation and gave it to the world for free, he said, because “that was the only way it would have worked.” He said he was concerned about attempts by companies or countries to control the Internet.

Who would have thought the chief executive of General Electric would show up at a tech conference? But Jeff Immelt came to show off a new gadget that lets doctors monitor patients with a portable ultrasound. He also touted GE’s efforts to move into the green technology space.
Carly Fiorina had a close-shorn look because she is recovering from breast cancer. But she was frank in a Q&A where she talked about her ambition to run for Barbara Boxer’s U.S. Senate seat. She actually supported Obama’s policies on a more holistic effort to win the war in Afghanistan and using technology to make government more transparent. Yet she said she was a Republican because she feels government shouldn’t make choices that people should make themselves.
Mark Pincus couldn’t make his slide clicker work. But the chief executive of Zynga says a new era of social apps is coming that will create a vast virtual economy. He touted the integration of charitable donations into the actions gamers can take inside the company’s FarmVille game, which has 56 million monthly active users.

Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker said that leading indicators show we’re climbing out of the recession, but lagging indicators such as the 10 percent unemployment rate show there is still a lot of pain in the economy. She predicts that mobile technology will lead to a huge new wave in computing. And she went through a huge slide deck in 17 minutes.

Justice Department antitrust honcho Carl Shapiro said, “I’m from the government, and I’m your friend.” He explained that Justice hasn’t intervened in all that many antitrust cases, but will act when there are attempts to illegally monopolize markets, eliminate competition through mergers, or fix prices through collusion.
Brian Roberts, chief executive of Comcast, dodged questions about whether he was going to buy NBC Universal from General Electric. But he said that he likes to invest in content because it gives him multiple revenue streams. He politely listened as several speakers complained about Comcast’s high-speed Internet service.

Jonathan Miller, chief digital officer at News Corp., was glad he wasn’t at AOL anymore. But he has his own set of challenges as News Corp. makes sense of all of its different digital properties and tries to restore growth at MySpace, which has lost its market leadership to Facebook.
Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, was a surprise guest. He showed off his comfy shoes and admitted he was embarrassed about the lateness of Google’s Chrome browser on the Mac platform. But he said that Google wasn’t to blame for all of the old media’s business problems.
Sean Parker, managing director at Founders Fund, founded or was an early executive at Napster, Plaxo and Facebook. He got booted out of all three companies, but he advanced an interesting theory about network effects and why it was inevitable that Facebook would overtake Google in importance.
Tim Armstrong, chief executive of AOL, said that the company’s spinoff from Time Warner is going as planned. He believes that content investments will be key to AOL’s future, and he noted that real-time communication (think some kind of mashup of instant messages and Twitter) is going to be a big part of AOL’s future.
The teens had the next-to-the-last word. They loved Apple and Facebook, but just didn’t grok the value of Twitter. One of them seemed to think that Apple had defeated Microsoft already, saying, “They won when they came up with the PC vs. Mac ads.”

Now that Windows 7 is being met with mostly positive reviews and green-lighting by software professionals, no doubt many will be making the switch to Microsoft’s new operating system in the next couple of weeks. Which is a bit of a pain if you stuck with Windows XP and skipped Vista altogether, because then the best thing for you to do is perform a complete clean install after backing up your data and programs.

Wiping out your data is one thing, but you’ll also need to install all your applications from scratch again once you get Windows 7 up and running on your computer. The same goes, of course, for people who buy a new PC and start with only a few pre-installed programs – or none at all.

Installing multiple software applications can be quite a painstaking, time-consuming chore, but a Y Combinator-funded startup has just pushed a tool that aims to make the process very, very easy. And free of charge on top of that.

Meet Ninite, a multi-app installer tool that’s as useful as it is simple.

Ninite has aggregated a bunch of popular PC applications in a range of categories on its website, and allows you to check multiple software programs and run the setup process for each of them in one go. No installation of additional software required, and Ninite will even automatically refrain from including toolbars and whatnot with the software you’ve opted to install. The only disadvantage I can see is actually a feature: default settings for software programs you’ve chosen to install will automatically be selected, so there’s little customization you can perform during the set-up process.

Once you’ve selected all the apps you want, you’ll get a single executable file which will run all installations in one go while you go have an espresso.

Ninite, which was called Volery while in private beta, is a product from Secure by Design, a YC-funded startup which discovered people were yearning for this type of tool when marketing the BaseShield App Store, essentially an app store for Windows apps.

The company aims to make money off Ninite by offering premium features like local download caching, network share download caching and a silent mode to paying users.

(Via Hacker News)

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I upgraded three computers to Snow Leopard a couple of months ago, and one of them, a newish iMac, is still a brick. So even though I’m a loyal Mac user (just not the iPhone any more), it still pisses me off to see them trashing Windows 7 in a new Mac v. PC commercial. Windows 7 looks like a very solid operating system. It might even work just fine on that iMac. So give it a rest already, Apple. (via Erictric)

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