Google announced on Thursday that it acquired the restaurant rating company ZAGAT. “ZAGAT will be a cornerstone of our local offering — delighting people with their impressive array of reviews, ratings and insights, while enabling people everywhere to find extraordinary (and ordinary) experiences around the corner and around the world,” Marissa Mayer, vice president of local, maps and location services at Google said in a blog post. “I’m incredibly excited to collaborate with ZAGAT t...

Research In Motion will benefit in the near term from the ongoing launch of its new BlackBerry 7 smartphones, which are being described as the vendor’s strongest devices in some time. Sterne Agee analyst Shaw Wu upgraded his rating on RIM stock to Buy from Neutral, increasing his price target to $35 from $28. Wu sees near-term opportunity in RIM, and he thinks new BlackBerry handsets like the Bold 9900 will be well received. ”The key differences this time include a refined user interface and i...

It remains to be seen whether Hewlett-Packard’s upcoming overhaul will pay off in the long run, but one things seems clear: the manner in which HP revealed its plans was ill-conceived at best. HP’s announcements sent its stock tumbling, and analysts continue to lose faith in the company as unrest builds. In a note to investors on Thursday, RBC Capital Markets analyst Amit Daryanani cut his rating on HP stock to Sector Perform from Outperform, and he lowered his price target $5 to $30. Daryanani s...

In a note to investors on Tuesday, BTIG Research analyst Walter Piecyk raised his rating on Sprint stock from Sell to Neutral without indicating a new price target. Piecyk had previously set his price target at $3.13, but noted that the stock now trades under five times BTIG’s 2012 earnings estimate, which is below consensus. The firm notes that it is not moving to a Buy rating because Sprint’s stock may fall further still, due to uncertain earnings, high debt leverage, lack of free cash flow and...

BGR took hands-on looks at the all new BlackBerry Bold 9900, the BlackBerry Torch 9810 and the BlackBerry Torch 9850/9860 last night, and while we were pleasantly surprised with RIM’s new hardware, several analysts were not impressed. Jefferies & Co.’s Peter Misek and Sterne Agee’s Shaw Wu each cut their price targets on RIM stock Thursday morning, suggesting that the Waterloo, Ontario-based vendor’s BlackBerry 7 phones just aren’t enough to reignite the public’s interest in Bl...

Greenpeace recently released a report titled How dirty is your data: A look at the energy choices that power cloud computing, which graded Amazon, Akamai, Apple, Facebook, Google, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Twitter, and Yahoo across three “green” categories: transparency, infrastructure siting, and mitigating strategy. While Greenpeace offered some praise to the Cupertino-based company for improving transparency and its efforts to move towards cleaner energy, it failed Apple in the “infrastructure ...

In a note to investors Monday, Barclays Capital analyst Jeff Kvaal restated his “overweight” rating and set an $85 target for shares of RIM’s stock. Kvaal thinks the company will report a solid third quarter, and he believes current demand for the BlackBerry Torch to be “solid.” AT&T’s decision to drop the BlackBerry Torch to $99 last month played a big role in bolstering sales, the analyst believes, and he raised his Q3 estimates from 13.9 million units to 14.1 million...

Right before Q2 earning go live, Deutsche Bank has knighted Sprint with the coveted “buy” rating. DB noted that they “expect Sprint’s 2Q results to highlight continued improvements in its post paid ops,” which prompted Deutsche Bank to reduced their estimate for post-paid net losses from 500,000 to 400,000 for the quarter. The firms analysts credit strong sales of the HTC EVO 4G — the first 3G/4G hybrid smartphone — for Sprint’s lower churn rate (2.05%) and 4...

In a move guaranteed to attract well deserved controversy, Andy Burnham, Britain’s Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, has publicly stated that delegates from the British government hope to meet with members of the Obama administration to pitch the idea of creating a content-based rating system for all English-based websites. Essentially what Burnham is proposing is having the internet follow the same rules as British TV where it is against the law to air violent programs before 9pm. But si...