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The ten best places in America for second homes are presented. These include Maui, Kiawah Island in South Carolina, The Hamptons, and Park City, Utah.

Nokia commands 37% of the world's wireless handset market as their products gain strong reviews. The company has 8.3 billion euros and no long term debt. Nokia is well managed in a large and growing market while its shares are a discount compared to other major tech companies.

The fast adoption of cloud computing could benefit the stocks of computer services providers, some of which could become takeover targets. The pace of cloud computing adoption means that data processing services could be outsourced to these providers.

Technology companies are experiencing a growth in acquisition and merger activity as they look to grow by acquiring other companies. Companies which appear to be viable takeover targets include Brocade Communications Systems, Juniper Networks, F5 Networks, NetApp, and BMC Software.

Carol Bartz, the new chief executive officer of Yahoo! Inc., faces the challenge of turning around the company by improving its efficiency and profitability. Bartz will also try to hold off plans to sell the company to Microsoft by strengthening Yahoo! Inc.

The shares of Amazon.com have risen from below $40 in 2008 to $73.69 in March 2009 due to strong revenue growth. The company is benefiting from its business model and efficient logistics, while cloud computing services and the Kindle electronic book reader present more growth opportunities.

Hewlett-Packard improved its profitability and decreased its expenses under the management of chief executive officer Mark Hurd. He diversified the company's business, reducing the company's reliance on printers and printer supplies and improving the company's revenue stream.

Consumer spending is expected to grow at an anemic rate of 0.6 percent for 2008 and just 0.5 percent in 2009 which could affect the technology sector. It is best to look for well-run companies with strong balance sheets and outstanding technology when looking to invest in the shares of companies in this sector.

Larry Ellison, the chief executive officer of Oracle, is credited with transforming the company into the world's largest seller of business software through a series of acquisitions. Oracle has acquired 42 companies for more than $30 billion since 2005, a move that also increased the company's efficiency and operating margins.

Wells Fargo's lack of exposure to credit derivatives, structured-investment vehicles, and mortgage-backed securities make the bank a safe investment during the U.S. credit crisis. Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway has raised its holdings in the company to 9.4 percent because Buffett is a supporter of the bank's management team.

2007 seems to be the year when tech shares will outperform the broad market as evidenced by the tech sector's achievement of almost doubling the Dow Jones Industrial Average's 10% growth. Google still dominates Yahoo and the company is better positioned to capture advertising revenue. Nokia is expected to gain market share in 2008.

The business and financial success of Barclay's Global Investor are identified and discussed. Topics include performance of actively managed funds, institutional index funds, money market funds, and exchange-traded funds.

Apple Computer's stock price rose steadily more than 10-fold in the three years through January 2006 largely on the excitement about the portable music players, but have plunged by 40%, to about 51, mostly on fears that the iPod craze is losing steam. Apple is poised to pick up through the company's revamped Mac computers, which can run both Apple's operating system and Microsoft's Windows for the first time. The new models, featuring Intel chips is expected to triple the company's market shares over the next 10 years from 2006, powering hefty earnings gains.

Motorola, the pioneer of mobile phones, is making thinner handsets and larger profits and its stock has nearly doubled after the arrival of CEO Ed Zander. Motorola now plans to introduce a phone, called RAZRBerry that is as thin as its hugely successful, ultra-thin RAZR cell phone but wide enough to include a keyboard for e-mail messaging and some other promising gadgets.

Henning Kagermann, chief executive of the German software giant SAP, states that SAP with annual sales of nearly $10 million, accounts for 54% of the worldwide revenue of the top five players in business software. However, SAP is grabbing market share over two of its rivals, Oracle and People Soft, and the company has positioned itself to thrive in a new area of Web-based computing.

Hewlett-Packard Chief Executive, Carly Fiorina brought about the acquisition of Compaq Computer in 2002, and also went on to deliver $3.5 billion in cost-savings and lately started to boost the performance of the company's personal computers and corporate computing systems units. In 2004, the company appears to be moving from post-merger integration to orderly execution in its many business lines, which may soon earn its stock some respect.

Mountain resorts in the USA and Canada present cheaper alternatives to their European counterparts. These locations include Whistler, British Columbia; Sun Valley, Idaho; Vail, Colorado; Deer Valley, Utah; and Stowe, Vermont.

The shares of electronic payment company Visa appear cheap at $72 each and could rise to as much as $93 a share. The company is not expected to be heavily affected by proposed financial reform legislation in the US.

Michael Dell is turning Dell into a full-service, global enterprise-technology concern and this is a risky strategy that requires long-term investment and puts them away from their traditional position as a PC and server maker. Their shares appear fully valued as it can run into challenges as they change.

Greeting card company Hallmark uses cloud computing to enhance its development of new digital greeting card products. The company uses a private cloud managed by Savvis and benefits from the latter's expertise in data center technology.

Investors can invest in actively managed green mutual funds as a way of investing in the green industry. The selection of a green mutual fund for investing can be a challenge.

California Public Employees' Retirement System's Chief Investment Officer Joe Dear says that it is hard to see great earnings growth with consumption 70 percent of the U.S. economy. Dear says he expects lower returns in equities over the long term.

Barclays is in talks to sell its iShares exchange traded funds business which will help Barclays raise needed cash. Barclays is said to be looking to sell iShares to shore up its balance sheets to avoid the need for them to accept funds from the British government.

American Century Investments' LiveStrong Portfolio is one of two funds that received an overall A grade by Target Date Analytics . The portfolio seeks a particular financial goal for an investor. Portfolio Manager Jeff Tyler says that the company's partnership with the Lance Armstrong Foundation to market the funds means more than just riding bikes with lance Armstrong.

Hewlett-Packard's acquisition of Electronic Data Systems significantly improves the former's competitiveness, especially in the services sector. The acquisition, however, may put a short-term drag on the overall growth of Hewlett-Packard.

The shares of Qualcomm have been kept down by legal disputes with Broadcom and Nokia. Shares are expected to climb to $60 each in 2008 even if Qualcomm loses a big part of royalty payments.

A federal judge in Texas has orderd Nortel Networks to go to mediation with Ipernica in their intellectual-property dispute which could cost Nortel around $84.3 million. Apple's price cut for the iPhone suggests that sales of the device are sluggish and the rebates for affected customers of the price cut will hurt the company's cash flow.

The net earnings and stock prices of the market rivals, Akamai Technologies and Internap, are presented.

The increase in the shares of Apple Inc. due to demand for its iPhone is presented.