Dell blames aggressive price cuts for a 17% drop in quarterly profit, as the highly competitive PC market hampers its bid to revive growth

Tags: dell

Royal Dutch Shell Plc and BP Plc plan to finish shutting oil and gas production platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, and Enbridge Energy Partners LP will close pipelines as Hurricane Gustav gains strength and moves toward the region.
Shell and BP plan to complete the shutdown of the equivalent of 800,000 barrels a day of [...]

A rumor is circulating that the iPhone may be finally making its way to China. The original source of the rumor is China Communications, which has cited a China Mobile insider as its source. According to the source, China Mobile will be offering the iPhone at a heavily subsidized discount in order to court the [...]

After a few weeks, Elevator Pitch Friday is back with a vengeance. This week’s featured video comes to us from a self-funded, young male-oriented, yet-to-launch startup called BeTheBetterMan.com, with the pitch delivered by founder Eric Mayville.
The video’s a bit dark, but it’s enthusiastically delivered and straight-forward. Here’s the pitch:

Tags: tech news

Google have enhanced their website optimizer to allow advertisers to disable low performing ad variations and send the remaining traffic to higher performing ones. Previously, to achieve this, advertisers would have to stop the entire test (and lose all test data), so the improvement is a big timesaver for webmasters.

Tags: google, Google Website Optimizer

Google has launched a new tool in their Webmaster Tools suite that allows website owners to create custom 404 pages. 404 pages are those that don’t exist and therefore return a “not found” error when users try to view them in their web browser.

Tags: diy tip, Google Webmaster Tools

Microsoft is paying $486 million for Greenfield Online, which runs an Internet survey businesss and Ciao, a European comparison shopping engine. Redmond plans on immediately selling off the survey business to an unnamed buyer. From one of two releases Microsoft put out to explain the deal:

Tags: microsoft

Google has unveiled its long-awaited answer to the iTunes app store for the iPhone: The Android Market, which will sell programs for the upcoming “Gphone” from T-Mobile, and every other handset that runs on Google’s mobile OS.

Tags: google, google android app

Comcast bandwidth pigs won’t just have to deal with a slower Internet connection — they’ll reportedly have to pay more per month to use the Internet, too.

Tags: comcast, diet

Firefox owner Mozilla has extended its lucrative search deal with Google (GOOG) for three more years, through Nov. 2011, chair Mitchell Baker writes. What’s that mean? The Web browser dot-org will continue to make a lot of money

Tags: firefox, google money, mozilla