Every company that struggles inevitably reaches a stage in its life when managers introspectively ask: what kind of company are we?   Yahoo in the Carol Bartz era decided it’s a media company. The company wants to be at the center of people’s online lives.

For the last two quarters Yahoo has trimmed costs and refocused to try and deliver that experience.  The end is not yet within reach,  but an apparently stabilizing ad market seems to be helping the cause.

Tuesday, Yahoo reported third quarter earnings up more than three fold over the same period last year.  On revenue of $1.58b (down 12% year over year), Yahoo earned $186.1m or 13 cents a share.   

The third consecutive double digit revenue decline was expected.  The extent of earnings growth wasn’t. 

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There comes a point when calling each successive performance a record starts to get a little ridiculous.  Apple crossed that threshold a long time ago but the fiscal rocket ship flying out of Cupertino isn’t showing any signs of slowing down either.   Even in spite of lofty expectations and market acceptance of Apple’s generally conservative guidance, Apple yet again flew by the benchmarks laid down to measure its performance.

Monday,  Apple’s reported revenue for the September quarter up 25% year over year to $9.87b (the company’s second best total on record).  Profits surged 47%.

For the fourth quarter, Apple earned $1.67b, or $1.82 a share, compared to $1.14 billion, or $1.26 a share, in the same period a year ago. (more…)

Web enabled TV’s are becoming more common and eventually, they or some comparable TV to Internet bridge technology, will be the norm.  In the interim, though, consumers don’t seem to have any hesitation when it comes to satisfying their video cravings through today’s distribution platforms.

On September 28th, comScore Video Metrix released its measurements (release) detailing August viewing habits.

For the month, 161m US internet users watched online video.  Up from 158m viewers in July, the draw set the current (and sure to be broken) record for the all time high.

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When you talk about the magnitude of a business, there’s scale and then there’s SCALE.  Apple unequivocally reached the second plateau with its App Store Monday.

In a short press release, the company announced customers have downloaded more than 2 billion applications since the store’s debut.  That’s a jump of 500 million downloads since July, or an even billion since April.

Steve Jobs has to be happy in Cupertino.

To add some color and put 2 billion downloads in context, we’ve hit the spreadsheets.  Crunching the numbers:

• Average Downloads Per Day - The App Store has delivered approximately 4.5m downloads per day since its debut in July 2008.  Since mid July of this year, when Apple triumphantly announced it had delivered 1.5 billion downloads, the rate’s jumped to somewhere near 6.5m per day.  (Ed. Note: averages are approximate due to inexact information about the days on which Apple crossed each download milestone.   See table).

• Available Titles - Back in March, the App store had about 30k applications to offer.  Since July, the number of available titles has jumped from 65,000 to 85,000 and the number of developers has advanced from 100,000 to 125,000.

• Free or Paid - According to an App Store product survey maintained by 148Apps, the App Store had 83,618 titles available for download in the U.S. on September 28th (just under Apple’s report of 85k titles). Of these 83.6k downloads, approximately 23%, or 19,514 titles were free.

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How much weight does the iTunes music store have to throw around?  A ton according to new data released from market tracking firm NPD.

Measuring unit sale in the first half of 2009, NPD MusicWatch reports Apple’s music store now accounts for a quarter of U.S. music sales. That’s not a quarter of digital sales, it’s 25 percent of everything.

During the first half of 2009, while CD sales continued to erode, digital music sales grew to 35% of the market, up from 20 percent in 2007 and 30 percent in 2008.  According to Russ Crupnick , NPD’s vice president of entertainment industry analysis, “with digital music sales growing at 15 to 20 percent, and CDs falling by an equal proportion, digital music sales will nearly equal CD sales by the end of 2010."

iTunes’ lead in the digital market is massive. Apple owned 69 percent of the digital music market in the first half of 2009.  Amazon, in a very distant second, held 8 percent.

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With internet traffic and usage, there are any of number of firms that track behavior. ComScore, Nielsen, Quantcast, and Pew, to name a handful.  Each tries to provide insight into what’s popular, what’s growing – where the trends are.  Each can be valuable but each can have its limitations too.

From one to the next, results can often differ in the detail.  And even within the results of a single firm’s measurements, a pattern appearing in a short period of time often disappears across a broader swath.  

Such is the nature of statistics.  As an old saying aptly puts it: facts are stubborn but statistics pliable.  Slice em up or sort ‘em the right way and you can tell a lot of different stories.

That said, disclaimers thrown front and center, comScore released its search engine marketshare measurements for July on Monday.  (release)

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If you were to define irony by example, a book seller going “Big Brother” and secretly deleting your previously purchased copy of 1984 is about as letter perfect as you can get.  It’s the kind of thing you cannot script; the truth people deem stranger than fiction.   But believe it or not, that’s exactly what happened in mid July.

On July 16th and 17th, Amazon, after recognizing it had sold eBooks it didn’t have proper rights clearances to sell, attempted to fix the problem by dropping a heavy hand on the delete button.

Using previously undisclosed remote access technology the company systematically deleted the books from customer’s Kindles. Here today, gone tomorrow.

Though rebates were provided, the uproar and backlash was fast and loud.  And now the inevitable has happened: a lawsuit has been filed.

17 year old Michigan high school student Justin Gawronski filed papers Thursday seeking monetary and injunctive relief for the damage caused when the deleted files rendered linked notes on his Kindle obsolete. (court document follows below)

Reportedly, Gawronski’s primary interest is legal precedent.   He’s not in it for money but he wants more than to be able to tell a teacher, “the Kindle really did eat my homework.”

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