China's Alibaba Q4 net profit falls 57 pct

China's top e-commerce firm Alibaba said on Thursday fourth quarter net profit dropped 57 percent from the year-ago period, as rising marketing costs to counter falling global exports and imports squeezed margins.
Alibaba, whose online site connects traders of goods into and out of China, earned 199.4 million yuan or 3.94 cents per share in the October-December period, down from profits of 466 million yuan a year earlier and 308.6 million yuan in the third quarter.
The earnings result lagged an average net profit of 281 million yuan forecast by three analysts polled by Reuters.
Shares in Alibaba rose 3.8 percent on Thursday ahead of the results announcement. The stock lost 20.5 percent of its value in the fourth quarter of 2008, in line with the slide in Hong Kong's benchmark index in the same period.

::From Reuters.com::

HCL has got $350 million outsourcing deal with "Reader's Digest"

HCL Technologies, a leading global IT solutions major, Monday announced a $350-million deal from Reader's Digest spread over seven years to provide a wide range of outsourcing services.
The scope of the deal with Reader's Digest Association includes development of software applications, infrastructure support, network security, data storage, disaster recovery and support for data centres, a company statement said.
These solutions will be enabled through an integrated helpdesk in 14 languages - Portuguese, French, Russian, Czech, Spanish, Polish, Finnish, German, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Chinese, Romanian, Slovak and Turkish.
HCL will support such services across 45 countries through its global delivery locations in Poland, the US and India, supported by a worldwide onsite support network.
The $5 billion HCL group, founded in 1976 and among the early entrants in the country's information technology industry, comprises two companies listed on India bourses - HCL Technologies and HCL Infosystems.
Its team comprises over 59,000 professionals in some 20 countries who work with several leading Fortune 1000 firms, including leading IT and Technology firms, the company said.
Headquartered at Pleasantville, New York, Reader's Digest Association publishes 92 magazines, including 50 editions of Reader's Digest - touted as the world's largest-circulation magazine.
It also operates 65 branded websites to generate 18 million unique visitors per month and sells some 68 million books, music and video products across the world each year.

Yahoo! has new location application - Friends on Fire

Yahoo, the number two search engine has released “Friends on Fire”, an application that lets Facebook members share their physical location with those on their list of friends.
It uses Yahoo's Fire Eagle technology, a service that can store and share your location with authorized applications. Fire Eagle is an intermediary and has privacy issues. It also relies on other services to tell it where you are and on other services to do something useful with that location data.Through the advances in mobile communications and the mainstream embrace of social networking the online service are becoming popular.
Yahoo described the Fire Eagle technology as a switchboard with which users can manage and share their geographic location with varying degrees of detail and access controls. Currently, about 70 applications use the Fire Eagle technology. The company also released a Fire Eagle 'updater' for Firefox by which users can update their location information within the browser's interface.
Last month, Google launched Google Latitude which is a location-aware mobile application. It allows a mobile phone user to allow certain other people on his or her Gmail contact list to track where he or she is.

Satyam wins biz worth $250 mn in seven weeks

Satyam Computer Services limited, an IT service provider, today announced that it had won a new business of over $250 million in last seven weeks.

Kiran Karnik, chairman of the Board, said, " The board is satisfied with the progress of the company's stabilization program and appreciated the sustained efforts of Satyamites that has helped the company's revival on a fast track mode."

A.S.Murthy, chief executive officer, Satyam, said, " The indomitable spirit of Satyamites has helped us to win new purchase orders and work extension totaling to over $250 million since Jan 7, 2009. The recent successes include a single order of $50 million and multiple orders from across the industry verticals, technologies and geographies, reflecting an all round positive trend."

He added that more than half of this value comes from new POs that reinforces the confidence that customers have been sharing with them in their discussions.

Commenting on the use of funds, Manoharan, director, stated, " We are using the bank funding in a controlled and phased manner to meet immediate and near term operating requirements, including payments to vendors. The good news is that we are receiving unsolicited offers from banks for funding."

The board has recommended to the ministry of corporate affairs for the removal of Price Waterhouse as the statutory auditors of the company. PW has tendered its resignation to act as Statutory auditors of the company. The company is now intending to appoint new statutory auditors, the release said.