It might not pack the same thrill as the rumors of in-feed video, but Twitter has added clickable stock symbols on tweets. This now throws up search results for both the stock and the company, using a new 'cash' tag, like $FB, to differentiate from typical links and tags. As noted by TNW, it's bad news for the founder of StockTwits, a service that offered similar functionality to gather tweet-based financial nuggets. The new feature is live across Twitter's web client -- though it hasn't hit TweetDeck just yet -- and should make discovering exactly how many millions companies have made (or lost) all a bit faster.
Alltel customers brought under the Verizon umbrella have been getting more and more signals that it's time to let go of that legacy phone. The latest red flag is a letter that Droid-Life understands is making its way to holdout customers. According to one copy, Verizon will start shutting down the remnants of Alltel's data service on or near January 10th, 2013. Alltel's mobile data should be completely inert after April that year -- and those still clinging to the past will be down to basic phone calls and SMS until they get Verizon-blessed devices. At least corporate customers are getting incentives to cross the divide, so you can't accuse Verizon of forgetting to use the carrot along with the stick. We'll admit that we aren't exactly mourning the eventual loss ourselves: customers by that point will have had four years to make the leap, which in this era can feel like an eternity.
Toshiba's most recent fiscal results (the first of its 2012 financial year) show that while the company pulled in $16 billion in turnover, it slumped to a $154 million loss for the last three months. While its "social infrastructure" unit (power plants, LED light bulbs and radiation detectors) generated a $107 million profit, the consumer electronics and white-goods sectors continued to lose sales. The company attributes the loss to further restructuring costs as well as pointing an accusatory digit toward the European financial crisis and concerns about power generation capacity in Japan. Despite the gloom, the company says that it still expects to hit a target of $81 billion turnover and $3.8 billion profit before March 2013.
