It’s been a while since German business software maker SAP has stated exactly how much of a market share it has.  And no matter how much journalists prod and badger SAP CEO Leo Apotheker he will not divulge that figure. Even when analysts say they believe that SAP’s main rival Oracle has been taking market share from the German company, Apotheker will not be moved to shed some light on the issue.  In several TV interviews on Wednesday, the day SAP presented its second-quarter results, and in a call with analysts, Apotheker not only declined to provide even a range, in fact he could not bring himself to call his company’s fiercest rival by name. “We have about twice as much market share as Number 2,” he said.  In the Harry Potter series the hero is the only one who calls his nemesis by name - Lord Voldemort - instead of ”he who must not be named”.  C’mon Leo, if Harry Potter can do it, so can you.

Get ready for another big week of earnings, with Apple, Microsoft and Yahoo the highlights (at least in our world).

Interestingly, talk about both Microsoft and Apple has been pretty positive ahead of their quarterly results, despite the rancid economy. When it comes to Apple, whose stock has been among the best performers in tech this year, the chatter is about the new iPhone, which it launched in June to big fanfare.

“I think the key is that core consumer demand is there,” Hudson Square Research analyst Daniel Ernst said in a recent Reuters story. “There are lines for $400 phones. Clearly they’re well positioned, and when the PC market comes back, we believe they’re going to take significant share.”

As for Microsoft, quarterly results may not be so hot, but the company is lately benefiting from some upbeat buzz. Investors appear excited about the roll-out of Windows 7, talk has resurfaced about a possible deal with Yahoo (which also reports this week), and its search engine, Bing, seems to be making headway against Google.

Here’s how Todd Lowenstein, a portfolio manager at HighMark Capital Management, summed it up in another Reuters story. “There’s been a sentiment shift,” he said. “They’ve turned the corner in a lot of their businesses.”

We’ll know soon enough if so much optimism is justified. We could be witnessing a sea-change in technology, after IBM and Intel’s positive reports. But, then again, are we expecting too much? Are Microsoft and Apple setting up investors for disappointment? And what about Yahoo? Could negative comments from the web company about advertising prove a major setback?

Pay close attention. This is no week for the beach.

Keep an eye on:

• AOL’s Tim Armstrong is all over the media today, offering up bits like this in a series of interviews about the web company: “Advertisers are going to be driving to Internet Road and AOL is a major property on Internet Road.” (Reuters)

• The Boston Globe’s biggest union will vote today on a new contract — and it looks like it may be another close one (NY Post)

• Harry Potter shows no signs of slowing down, even at his age (Reuters)

(Photo: Reuters)

Media companies report their quarterly results during the next few weeks, time that should help us determine the state of advertising. Has it stabilized? Is it growing? Or is spending still trending down?

Google, which kicked off earings yesterday, probably isn’t a great bellwether. After all, it was held up better than almost any other media company during the recession. Still, the largest U.S. Internet search engine hasn’t been completely immune. Revenue was up in the second quarter, but only by 3 percent.

Google executives told analysts and investors on a conference call that they believed their business had begun to stabilize, but were unwilling to predict when a broader economic recovery would prevail.

A number of analysts were unconvinced that Google has overcome the worst of it. (Just look at the stock, which was off 3 percent right after the report).

As Signal Hill analyst Todd Greenwald wrote in a report today: “Management noted that the business “stabilized” in the quarter and that the worst of the crisis was behind them. While we agree that the overall environment did improve, we remain concerned by the dramatic deceleration in Google’s core business, and believe that future quarters may slow down further.”

What is bad for Google is probably terrible for the rest of the media business. Look at NBC Universal, for instance. Parent General Electric reported that the media division’s profit fell by 41 percent.

Where does it go from here? Media executives will likely paint the brightest picture possible in the coming weeks — just as they did last quarter. Then, nearly every one of them said during conference calls that advertising had steadied and spending was set to start picking up. Now, three months later, we’ll be able to judge the accuracy of those statements for ourselves.

Keep an eye on:

• Harry Potter is still huge. The movie brought in $104 million in worldwide during its first day in theaters, setting a new record (Reuters)

• And brace yourself… Kara Swisher reports that “unless there is some major glitch, there might finally be a search and online advertising deal struck between Yahoo and Microsoft.” (All Things Digital)

(Photo: Reuters)

Cheaper? Easier?!??? Those words are the lifeblood of the advertising community.

Now Chief Executive Jerry Yang is using them to tout Yahoo’s new advertising system, telling Reuters in an interview that the so-called APT will make life better for advertisers and publisher.

“This system allows cross-selling between sales forces, it allows us to have visibility of what pricing is happening and where,” Yang said in the interview.

What Yahoo wants is a system as efficient for online display advertising as the one run by Google in search advertising. APT will roll out in the fourth quarter, and from early 2009, will place Yahoo’s own inventory on the system as well as other publishers and advertisers. Yahoo has teamed with nearly 800 newspaper websites.

But can they pull it off? That remains to be seen. As Ben Schachter, analyst at UBS says, “Given Yahoo’s scale and position as the leader in online display advertising, it is Yahoo’s position to lose. The problem is, given Yahoo’s execution history over the past few years, we are afraid that they could lose it.”

What do ad executives think? The New York Times spoke to one…

If Yahoo can use its data well, said Darren Herman, the head of digital media at the Media Kitchen agency, “they can target, hopefully, much more effectively, and when I’m calling up for an advertiser, they can give me the exact audience I want.”

Mr. Herman said, however, that Yahoo had made promising announcements for years, “but then it gets lost.”

 We’ll see if Yahoo can make good on this on.    

Keep an eye on: 

• News Corp’s MySpace unveiled a long-expected joint venture with all four major music companies in a bid to compete with Apple Inc’s market-leading iTunes store (Reuters)
• Publisher Scholastic Corp Thursday said its quarterly loss widened from a year-ago period that included sales of the blockbuster final Harry Potter book (Reuters)
• Fantasy sports, where fans select real athletes for make-believe teams, are exploding onto new platforms like smart phones and social networking sites, grabbing the attention of advertisers, wireless carriers and software companies (Reuters)

(Photo: Reuters) 
 

Now this should be one good duel.

The New York Times is reporting that T-Mobile will be the first carrier to offer a mobile phone powered by Google’s Android software. And it will go on sale… soon!

Talk about anticipation. This is right up there with Apple’s introduction of the new iPhone, which, of course, is only appropriate since the two high-end phones will directly compete with one another in an Olympic-worthy battle. 

From the New York Times:

The phone will be made by HTC, one of the largest makers of mobile phones in the world, and is expected to go on sale in the United States before Christmas, perhaps as early as October.

The high-end phone is expected to match many of the capabilities of Apple’s iPhone and  other so-called smartphones that run software from Palm, Research in Motion, Microsoft and Nokia to access the Internet and perform computerlike functions.

The report says that the phone will have a touch screen that slides out to offer a five-row keyboard. It also says that one person who has seen the HTC phone confirms that it matched the one in a recent video on YouTube.

And here’s an early review from Silicon Alley Insider:

Someone who’s actually seen the gadget — similar, if not identical to the one in the photo — tells us that both the hardware (from handset-maker HTC) and Google’s Android software suffer from a similar problem: They’re technically powerful but not as elegant as Apple’s iPhone and OS X.

Specifically, the phone — apparently a hot item to show off in Google’s cafeterias these days — is big and bulky, and not as sleek as the iPhone. And Android, while extremely powerful, has a less-elegant, less-user-friendly interface than the iPhone (AAPL)

Does this mean it won’t sell well? Of course not. There’s a lot more variables, like device and contract pricing, software and services, etc. that will help determine its commercial success.

Keep an eye on:

• Gannett Co Inc plans to eliminate 1,000 positions from its local newspapers around the U.S. because of declining advertising and circulation revenue (Reuters)
• After the Olympic Games, the naming rights to China’s “Bird’s Nest” National Stadium go up for sale (WSJ.com)
• The release date for the sixth Harry Potter movie, “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,” was pushed back July 2009 from its original slot in November 2008 (Reuters) 
• U.S. video game sales rose 28 percent in July from a year earlier, boosted by continued strong demand for Nintendo’s Wii console (Reuters)

(Photo: Reuters)

Whose kids are these, anyway? A new survey released by Scholastic Corp, the U.S. publisher of the Harry Potter books, shows that book publishers, newspaper proprietors and massive forest logging concerns have a future:

75 percent of kids age 5-17 agree with the statement, “No matter what I can do online, I’ll always want to read books printed on paper,” and 62% of kids surveyed say they prefer to read books printed on paper rather than on a computer or a handheld device.

And if you think that that dastardly Internet is going to turn the minds of children to pulp, guess again, the study says:

Kids who go online to extend the reading experience - by going to book or author websites or connecting with other readers - are more likely to read books for fun every day.

To break it down a bit, we see that boys tend to prefer the Internet for “fun” reading (54 percent vs. 46 percent) while girls prefer books (63 percent vs. 37 percent).  And two-thirds of children believe that fun reading will be a primarily digital pastime in 10 years, as opposed, we suppose, to MANDATORY reading, which will still be on paper.

(Photo: Reuters)