dell

Shares fall as earnings miss in fourth quarter

Dell's fiscal fourth-quarter earnings came in below Wall Street's view as strength in its corporate business unit was offset by the weakness in the division that caters to public businesses.

Chief Financial Officer Brian Gladden said profit margins for the quarter were hurt by a combination of weakness in U.S. public spending, discounting of the leftover inventory of its previous generation phones and the lingering impact of the Thailand flood on its product mix.

"We just didn't get the mix of drives that we wanted and it really forced us to sell less configured lower-end systems and prevented us from accessing higher margin more highly configured systems," he said.

google

Finance service to offer real-time London trades

Google (GOOG) is set to bolster its Google Finance service by giving retail investors free access to real-time London Stock Exchange share prices.

These were previously available only with a 15 minute delay and the move demonstrates the growing power of the Internet to deliver data that used to be available only to subscribers of specialist services such as those provided by Thomson Reuters and

"The addition of real-time quotes from the London Stock Exchange and Borsa Italiana will enable our users to better monitor market changes, manage their portfolios and track economic and financial developments in Europe," Maxim Edelman of Google Strategic Partnerships said in a statement Tuesday.

twitter

Service partners with Google's Russian rival

Twitter and Russian search engine Yandex have agreed to a partnership that will allow Yandex to show new tweets in its search results almost instantly, as Twitter becomes an increasingly important source of real-time information.

Twitter will give Yandex access to its so-called firehose of all public tweets, the two companies said Tuesday, in an agreement similar to the one the social short-messaging site has with Microsoft search engine Bing.

Google no longer partners with Twitter, favoring its own fledgling Google+ for social search results.

-- Reuters

alibaba

Chinese firm plans to go private for $2.5 billion

Alibaba.com's parent company wants to take the Chinese e-commerce company private for $2.5 billion, the firms said Tuesday, part of a shift in business strategy that also includes plans to buy back a stake from Yahoo (YHOO).

Alibaba Group said it is offering to buy the Hong Kong-listed shares of Alibaba.com that it doesn't already own at a cost of up to $2.5 billion.

After years of rapid growth, Alibaba.com expects to add paying customers at a slower rate.

-- Associated Press