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By Eric Bleeker | More Articles
January 31, 2012 |

It's started out as a great 2012 for technology stocks. So far, the tech-heavy Nasdaq has stomped the Dow Jones Industrial Average, returning 7.7% versus the Dow's 3.6% return.

Taking a peek at the top performers in the Internet and services space, you'll find a few key themes.

It's a global list. The top four performers are all from China. In addition, Net 1 Ueps hails from South Africa. Many of these stocks were horribly beaten down in 2011. Renren (NYSE: RENN  ) is of particular note for being one of the biggest busted IPOs of 2011. Did I mention China? Seven of these companies on the list are from China. While the Shanghai Composite is up a reasonable 5% so far in 2011, we're talking some extreme outperformance in the list below.

Top 10 Internet and services stocks of January

Company

% Price Change

VanceInfo Technologies (NYSE: VIT  )  57.0 AsiaInfo-Linkage  50.2 Renren  47.9 Youku.com (NYSE: YOKU  )  47.5 Net 1 Ueps Technologies  44.1 Parametric Technology  41.3 SouFun Holdings  37.4 NetQin Mobile  36.6 Ancestry.com (Nasdaq: ACOM  )  35.1 SINA (Nasdaq: SINA  )  34.5

Source: S&P Capital IQ. Includes only companies with U.S. listings and market caps greater than $300 million. All prices through Jan. 27.

Will the rest of 2012 be as kind to these highflyers of the new year? Here's an amazing fact: While outperformer lists early in the year are normally riddled with companies that smoked earnings during the first few weeks of January, only one stock in the list above has reported earnings! That's Parametric, which unsurprisingly earned its spot by beating earnings. For example, top performer VanceInfo doesn't have any particularly exciting news this year aside from an analyst upgrade.

What's driving that level of outperformance? For one, many technology growth stocks were heavily sold across the summer of 2011. As investors begin nibbling on more risk again, those stocks have come back in vogue. China reported GDP far more robust than the market was expecting earlier in 2012, and that's led investors back into the country.

Also, there's some pretty key tailwinds at the backs of other companies. As players in the social media space, both Renren and SINA will get to ride momentum from Facebook's upcoming IPO. Likewise, both Ancestry.com and Youku are also seen as fringe social media players that could ride the momentum of a positive Facebook IPO.

That's it for our recap of the Internet space. However, if you're looking for a better stock idea to kick off 2012, we've uncovered one such stock with so much promise we've dubbed it "The Motley Fool's Top Stock for 2012" and created a special free report for investors to uncover this soon-to-be rock star. The report highlights a company that is revolutionizing commerce in Latin America, and you can get instant access to the name of this company. Thousands have already requested the report, which is free today, but it won't be forever, so access it now.

Read the rest here:
The Top 10 Internet and Services Stocks in January

28-01-2012 06:03 People with sensitive ears or headphones may have a vested interest in adjusting their volume near the 22 minutes mark. Ah... man, that last bit. I think it's a little unfortunate. Like, I understand the 'why' of it, dude needed a way to get rid of all the lives, and more or less a way to 'punish' getting lives along the way, that makes sense. But the method just seems strange to me, since the level more or less encourages you to just get all those lives anyway so you actually have the abilty to run fast enough. Otherwise you just can't catch up unless you perform in some crazy flawless way that has nothing to do with the game's previous platforming expectations. Again, it's just too bad! But think of it this way: that last dot took me litteraly as much time to go through as the rest of the whole video. http://www.raocow.com http

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KAROSHI MARIO (a common first name's death through overworking) - Video

30-01-2012 11:14 Ahnaris: http://www.youtube.com FOLLOW ME ON FACEBOOK: http://www.facebook.com FOLLOW ME ON TWITTER: http://www.twitter.com

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HUSKY Vs INTERNET - Team Games - Dual Cast - Part 1 - Video

A study finds that blogging is therapeutic for teens -- and that having an open comments section makes it even more so.

A study (PDF) from psychologists at the University of Haifa, Israel, is garnering some attention with for its findings that blogging can help socially awkward teens. The New York Times ran it in its "Studied" column, with "the gist" boiled down to "Blogging is therapeutic for teenagers." The site io9 ran it under the headline "Science proves blogging is therapeutic -- at least for teenagers." But read past the top findings and you'll find something more surprising, and, also, somehow, more comforting: The teenagers who got the most out of their blogging experiment were those whose blogs were open to commenters.

As the Times explains:

In all the groups, the greatest improvement in mood occurred among those bloggers who wrote about their problems and allowed commenters to respond.

Interestingly, the commenters on the blogs were overwhelmingly supportive. "The only kind of surprise we had was that almost all comments made by readers were very positive and constructive in trying to offer support for distressed bloggers," Dr. [Azy] Barak wrote in an e-mail.

. . .

"People will write in the comments, 'I remember when I was in your shoes' " and 'Don't worry -- you'll get through the SATs!' and it's wonderful," she said. "It really helps put everything into perspective."

For anyone who kept a journal growing up, the benefits of writing are obvious. But the Internet seems like a hostile place for a socially inept teen to open up. Aren't bullies and other trolls going to pounce on these kids?

In a way, the study is a welcome reminder that Internet comment sections have gotten a bad rap. In the defense of people everywhere, the claim is often advanced that the ranks of Internet commenters are not filled with a representative sampling of humanity, but the people who choose to participate. But as this study shows, this is true but it also doesn't go far enough: Bad Internet comment sections aren't even representative of Internet comment sections themselves.

The trolls, the bullies, they go where they can be seen. Some of the most well-trafficked sites on the Internet have the worst commenters. In general, smaller blogs with dedicated readers -- whether personal journals or niche-interest publications -- have lively, thoughtful, and smart conversations in their comments sections.

With commenters like that, who needs friends? And that's precisely the point: They *are* friends -- or at least they are another human, at some other far-off computer, providing the guidance or simply the listening ear that friends provide. Whatever therapeutic powers journaling has, they are amplified by the comfort of a human response.

The problem, of course, is the risk. For a teen going through a rough time, what is the power of one bully? Is the benefit of comments outweighed by the chance someone will use the comments section to mock or tease? The authors of the study recommend that question for further investigation.

Image: Magic Madzik/Flickr.

More From The Atlantic

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Surprise! Internet Comments Can Be Good for Your Health

Many Internet service providers have laid claim to the title of "fastest" broadband speeds over the years. But who's right?

By most standards, it's hard to argue with Verizon Communications Inc. Its FiOS service offers faster Internet service than other major providers—up to 150 megabits per second, compared with the highest advertised from a cable operator of 105 Mbps offered by Comcast Corp.

Probably more important, Verizon consistently delivers more than it advertises, according to a study conducted by the Federal Communications Commission published in August.

Last spring the FCC compared Internet speeds advertised by 13 broadband providers to the actual speeds experienced by a set of about 6,800 users for both upstream and downstream traffic.

[More from WSJ.com: Verizon Crosses Web Lines]

Upstream traffic describes actions like uploading pictures to Facebook, and downstream traffic measures the speed at which content like video is pulled off the Internet.

FiOS's service operated at about 115% its advertised speed over a 24-hour period, the study found, whereas broadband services operated by most cable operators as well as the slower DSL service offered by Verizon and other phone companies fluctuated through the day.

Most of these services saw noticeable dips in their speed between 8 p.m. and 10 p.m., some to well below 100% of their advertised speed.

Of the cable providers, Comcast, Charter Communications Inc. and Cox Communications Inc. had the most consistent performance.

New York-based Cablevision Systems Corp. had significantly poorer performance in the study than most other operators, averaging about 50% of the advertised download speed during peak the hours of 7 p.m. to 11 p.m. It claims now that it "has demonstrated significant improvements from the FCC's original data of nearly a year ago."

[More from WSJ.com: New YouTube Channel is All About Games, Brands]

Cablevision sent The Wall Street Journal what it said were test results in December calculated by the same service that ran the FCC's tests, broadband-testing firm SamKnows Inc., which showed Cablevision's Optimum Wi-Fi delivered 107% of its advertised maximum speed of 15 Mbps during peak hours that month. One of Cablevision's recent ads claims that "Optimum Online download speeds are actually faster than basic Verizon FiOS," but it compares Cablevision's improved December data over a 24-hour period with that of Verizon's from the FCC study last spring.

Verizon said in a statement that Cablevision is comparing its broadband speed to FiOS's slowest tier, at 15 Mpbs download speed, and that Verizon's faster products are superior to Cablevision's. "When given a choice of side by side offers, we are confident the FiOS factor will prevail," it said.

SamKnows didn't respond to an emailed request for comment.

Cable operators point to a PC Magazine study also published last August that surveyed 58,000 people through the website Speedtest.net. It ranked Verizon below Comcast, Cox and Charter—but only because the study combined Verizon FiOS results with those of Verizon's slower DSL technology.

Comcast notes it has tested a 1 gigabyte-per-second broadband service that could top Verizon FiOS. It also says it offers a "PowerBoost" performance similar to many other cable providers that allows for users to experience faster download speeds for the first portion of a file up to a certain size.

FiOS' performance likely reflects its design. Verizon laid fiber-optic cables all the way to the residences of its customers.

[More from WSJ.com: Radical Videogamers Go on Nonkilling Spree]

Cable companies generally wire fiber optic cable to neighborhood nodes, from which coaxial cables run to separate residences and distribute the bandwidth between them.

That means people in neighborhoods effectively share bandwidth, so in evenings, as more people log on, the speed slows.

But the fiber to the home approach is costly to build. Verizon spent more than $20 billion rolling out FiOS, which is available in 14% of the U.S.

Link:
Fastest Internet? It's Complicated