TechBiz

By Chris Ciaccia

Yahoo (YHOO) CEO Marissa Mayer is making an enormously bold bet by buying the six-year-old social blogging company Tumblr for $1.1 billion, mostly in cash. Tumblr has sufficiently massive traffic to boost Yahoo's already huge global audience.

There's also the mobile aspect of Tumblr, which Mayer has repeatedly said is something Yahoo needs to focus on to compete in the future.  And buying Tumblr helps address the issue of personalized content to help drive display revenue growth.

Considering the company only did $13 million in revenue last year, though, Mayer had better find a way to make the acquisition pay off or this could be her first major flub.

By Jonathan Blum

What's it take to stay secure in today's digital slum?

Take it from Chris Doggett. "You want to be touching as little of it as possible," he told me about a month ago. "You want to be turning off as much of the Web as you can."

Doggett is the head of North American corporate sales for Kaspersky Lab, a Woburn, Mass., security company. And to this geek's credit, he's become a brother in arms about the reality of not being the next AP Twitter hack victim in the Internet hood.

By Chris Ciaccia, TheStreet

To say that Tesla Motors (TSLA) has been a wild ride in recent weeks would be an understatement. The company is now profitable, and Wall Street analysts are falling over themselves to raise price targets on the stock. Tesla is no longer referred to as an electric car manufacturer. It's being referred to by one analyst as America's fourth car manufacturer.

Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas raised his price target to $103 from $47, reiterating his "overweight" rating on the shares, noting that Tesla has addressed fundamental concerns about its market. "Competency in technology is migrating to engineering, manufacturing and marketing," Jonas wrote in a research note. "Detroit, Munich, Wolfsburg and Toyota City must feel a sense of astonishment . . . with a hint of anxiety."

By Chris Ciaccia

Much has been made of the decline in Apple's (AAPL) share price, from $700 in September to below $400 this spring. That fall has prompted more than a few analysts and investors to write off the the company and the stock. Others, however, want to know whether a recovery may be at hand.

It is, if you believe one Wall Street analyst.

Brian White at Topeka Capital Markets has identified what he calls Apple's three-pronged approach to achieving a sustainable recovery in the price of its shares: Returning cash to shareholders; a rebound from a trough in the company's profit cycle; and new areas of growth.