TechBiz

By Richard Saintvilus

 

Now that we have celebrated U.S. independence on July 4, it's worth looking at three troubled companies that may soon lose theirs.

 

There are plenty of other companies that are doing well and have solid balance sheets with plenty of cash.

 

By Anton Wahlman, Contributor

 

The Nexus 7 is here. Should Apple be afraid?

This is a 7-inch tablet made by Asus that is running the pure Google (GOOG) "Nexus" version of Android, and it will be shipping within the next couple of weeks. You can buy it directly from Google for a bargain $199 by going to play.google.com and order it already.

 

The first thing on the investor's mind is of course: Is this a threat to Apple (AAPL) and Amazon (AMZN)?

 

Plenty of people found themselves bored this weekend when a powerful Atlantic storm disrupted Amazon's (AMZN) cloud storage centers Friday night, taking down Facebook's (FB) Instagram, Pinterest, and Netflix (NFLX), among others.

The outages, which sent Amazon into damage control mode for the better part of the weekend, underscores how dependent a large chunk of the web is on the search giant to provide affordable cloud storage.

Here, a brief guide to the Amazon architecture that secretly fortifies the web.

 

Facebook (FB) gave users their own @facebook.com email addresses a while ago, but no one really seemed to care. People liked the email accounts they already had, thank you very much.

Facebook went a step further recently, swapping the email address on user profiles with their @facebook.com addresses. And that move seems to be blowing up in the company's face.

Users say that contact email addresses on their phones have changed, or duplicate contacts have popped up. Others say their email messages are disappearing. Facebook, for its part, acknowledges user confusion. 

By Richard Saintvilus

 

Warren Buffett once said: "Should you find yourself in a chronically leaking boat, energy devoted to changing vessels is likely to be more productive than energy devoted to patching leaks."

 

I think what Buffett understands is that sometimes even the captain of the ship has to worry about his own survival. At some point it is better for investors to just cut his or her losses and move on to more prosperous companies.