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The most powerful investment bank on the planet boasts a respected team of technology analysts. But Goldman Sachs Group (NYSE: GS) seemed to miss the boat on grabbing a good Twitter handle. The company tweets under @GS_News (and it has plenty of useful tweets).

A logical handle would have been @GS, same as its ticker symbol, but some dude name Gary grabbed the @GS twitter handle. He's got less than 10 followers right now. What might be a possible business opportunity for Gary, is a Fail Whale for the Goldman Sachs brain trust.

This post was written by Minyanville contributor Sean Udall. Sean holds position in RIMM, VMW, SUPX.

• Goldman Sachs upgraded Research in Motion (NASDAQ:RIMM)saying to buy in front of EPS. I couldn't agree more and in fact was going to say that today. Be that as it may, I doubled my RIMM long into yesterday's weakness and plan to hold into/through EPS report. My quick take is that RIMM could have one of the better reports relative to all the negative analyst actions and commentary in tech and the overall market.
  
  
• One of my themes for this upcoming EPS season is to look for stocks that have had the most negative analyst commentary coming into the quarter, as no one these days is looking at things like Price/Sales, Price/Book or Price to normalized earnings.
  
  

This post was written by Minyanville contributor Sean Udall.

Through my career I've generally stayed apolitical with regard to investment and trading decisions, but there have been times when some higher percentage trades have presented themselves due to political circumstances. Examples include: the tech push in Clinton's second term, the defense sector after Bush's 2000 victory, as well as the oil patch. Based on that, here are some overriding thoughts, in no particular order.

The market has moved to the phase where many if not most participants want and expect a pullback. Since the market confounds the greatest number of players most of the time, is a big pullback a lower probability event now? Moreover, does the selling panic of much of October turn into a buying panic in the coming weeks and months? I'm letting the charts lead me here but aware that this bullish case could possibly trump terrible economic conditions.

I still think the alt energy patch (solar, wind, battery tech, clean coal) will produce some of the best winners, but a lot of easy money has been made in just days. Quality and fundamentals will likely count much more now than over the past few months. Also, extended runs may become vulnerable quickly if policy decisions do not show quick tangible follow-through. Companies with the best balance sheets and funding sources will benefit the most and have the least downside on sharp technical pullbacks.

It's been almost a year since Sony Corporation (NYSE: SNE) launched the music downloading platform Platinum Music Pass in direct competition with Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL)'s iTunes Store, the largest and most successful downloading store. In the months since the program was announced and first released, it has not been reviewed very favorably. Nevertheless, this user found it very exciting and an inventive way to combat declining music sales based on CD profits and the strong grip store's like iTunes have on the market.

When it was released, critics and industry "pros" derided the credit card-like download albums as a step backward (you could easily download an album from iTunes without the cards), overpriced (the set price of the cards is $12.99), and a complete misstep in a market and economy obsessed with environment-friendly products (the cards are only available from physical retailers). Nevertheless, and these problems aside, the cards do offer those music listeners who are shopping for groceries or out buying other goods the chance to buy a downloadable album without the hassle of the CD.

Critics overlooked the mass appeal and sale capability of the cards in grocery stores and other stores since the target groups are not listeners who go out to simply buy an album, etc. Additionally, the platform only offers music from Sony's artists, which limits its catalog capabilities, but it does offer the highest quality MP3 tracks at 320 kbps MP3. By comparison iTunes's music files are generally 128 kbps in the regular store and 256 kbps in the iTunes Plus store.

Editor's Note: This post comes courtesy of Sean Udall, a wise player in the tech field. For more, visit www.minyanville.com.

Interesting article on Apple's (NASDAQ: AAPL) iPhone "potential" teardown. Implications are that the 3G iPhone will carry higher margins than previous model. We will see shortly and I still expect Broadcom (NASDAQ: BRCM) to benefit from the actual teardown.

Speaking of Broadcom, the company got the all clear on a patent infringement deal with SiRF Technology Holdings (NASDAQ: SIRF) and I like the emerging technical setup on BRCM.

Elsewhere, Adobe (NASDAQ: ADBE) reports today and has been a solid tech name this year, really many years for that matter. I don't expect any big surprises.

Electronic Arts (NASDAQ: ERTS) is at the William Blair growth conference. Gaming sales were reported strong again last week. This is probably a cheap solid grower but I prefer the growing online gaming model, I've discussed on the Buzz in the past.

SunPower (NASDAQ: SPWR) was upgraded this morning and presenting at an Alternative Energy conference on Wednesday. I was going to trade this again but the analyst action is spiking the stock today.

Evergreen Solar's (NASDAQ: ESLR) shareholder and analyst meetings is scheduled this week and I'm thinking this could fuel bullish action.

Regarding Comverge (NASDAQ: COMV) and EnerNOC (NASDAQ: ENOC), I overheard some bullish comments on these stocks on CNBC this morning. I've discussed COMV on the buzz previously and ENOC is their sister company. Both companies offer technology solutions for managing the power grid more efficiently and I think both stocks are cheap emerging growth stocks.

Position in BRCM, ESLR, COMV.

The recently reported three day e-mail blackout experienced by the consumer internet customers of Hughes Communications Inc. (NASDAQ: HUGH) has ended. Although the system has not swung over to its new enhanced version, it appears that Hughes technical staff has opted to reawaken the previous e-mail application to restore that service to its customers. Personal comment from the company regarding this situation was unavailable as of this writing.

What little preview I received of the attempted e-mail upgrade by HughesNet was enticing. It looked streamlined, intuitive and was definitely appealing to the eye. When the company completes its adjustments and makes the hoped for upgrade available, I'll provide my full assessment of the new service for our readers.

A simple 24 hour email outage for a system upgrade has turned into a 3 day technical nightmare for Hughes Communications Inc. (NASDAQ: HUGH). Initially, the company informed customers that email service would be suspended for a 24 hour period, from 6pm Saturday, April 26 through 6pm Sunday, April 27. As of this writing, HughesNet email service is still down.

I guess one can live without email for a few more days, even though some might have important data to transmit via email. It's data which could affect one's career advancement. I guess in my case I could hand it off to my ground based mail carrier. However, because I have become quite accustomed to lackluster performance from Hughes Communications, I'm glad I'm not invested in it.

[Note from the author: Hughes email service fully restored in original format as of 04-30-08]

This is my shortest post ever but I had to share with our readers a marvelous little bit of musical humor. Click on this to see the best Tech-stock bubble video on YouTube, performed by the Richter Scales (to the tune of Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire") -- very clever. Hope you enjoy it. I am sure it will make the rounds for a long time to come.

Sheldon Liber is the CEO of a small private investment company and the principal for design and research at an architecture & planning firm. He writes the columns Chasing Value and Serious Money. Disclosure: I do not own shares of GOOG, but I do get silly once in a while.

It's been a good week for Wi-Fi startup Meraki. First of all, the company raised a cool $20 million in venture capital. Investors included Sequoia Capital, DAG Venture and Northgate Capital.

What's more, Meraki says it will offer free high-speed wireless Net access throughout San Francisco. No doubt, the announcement is getting a lot of buzz.

But what does this really mean? I had a chance to interview Craig Settles, the author of Good Fight for Municipal Wireless. According to him:

"It is vitally important that people realize Meraki is NOT making this service available for free elsewhere. People have to pay for the hardware and individuals have to step up to provide DSL or some other high-speed landline access for some of these repeaters. Meraki is doing what EarthLink -- along with Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) -- should have done, that is, use the big, high-profile city as a marquee account, but sell the service to everyone else. Don't get sucked into the 'free' hype.

Although AOL has chosen to withdraw continuing development of the Netscape Navigator browser, you'll be able to continue using it indefinitely. Honestly though, who would want to?

Netscape doesn't have much in the way of loyalists in the realm of content suppliers, and web users seem not to care much what browser they use as long as the utility is fast, accurate and simple. I myself switched from Netscape to Firefox during the last year because Navigator was giving me image handling problems and Mozilla Firefox proved to be easier, faster and less burdensome.

Since 1994, Netscape has been a leading-edge web utility. However in recent years, competition from Mozilla Firefox has relentlessly scooped away market share from Netscape and a strong and victorious competitive battle has been waged in the interest of Internet Explorer by Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT). Although Netscape proved to be a strong web utility, in the last few years it lacked any significant improvements in user friendliness. I think that situation is in part due to Microsoft's reluctance to make the Windows operating system play nice with Netscape Navigator. We may take pause to wonder if Time Warner Inc. (NYSE: TWX) ever properly applied pressure on Microsoft over the situation ... probably not.

In the big picture, no one is going to miss Netscape Navigator. Yes, some few loyalists might whine for a while and some people with fully loaded hard drives might find their machines maxed out by the downloading of a new browser and the system changes associated with that, but in the end it's all good if it makes the browsing experience faster and easier for the end user. Besides, it might force the sale of some new computers, yes?

Perhaps AOL should just spin off Netscape, take a bit of cash for it and write the rest off. That might be easiest in the long run. When given the fact that AOL will apparently be relegating Netscape to second-tier status, do you really think it'll ever get better?

Stick a fork in it gang, it's done.

As the holiday season approaches, we thought you might appreciate some gift suggestions with a twist, appropriate for those on your list who aren't satisfied with the same old, same old.

I admit to an abiding fascination with automata, mechanical devices, usually hand-cranked, that perform often-elaborate movements (think cuckoo clocks on steroids). If you have someone like me on your holiday gift list, and an unlimited budget, check out the offerings of Cabaret Mechanical Theatre.

Among my favorites:

• Anubis operating a jackhammer
• Wankel's Self-turning Sausages
• Honeymoon Bed (yes, it bounces)
• The Queen's Royal Wave
• Miniature jousting knights that fit in your palm
• Guillotine fun
• Spaghetti eater sitting in bathtub

Lest you think these are toys, note the prices: $500 to $2,000. The Cabaret Mechanical Theatre also tours a collection of much more elaborate automata.

"Stock prices continue to behave bearishly," caution David Nassar and Larry McMillan, options experts and editors of the industry-leading The MarketWatch Options Trader.

Here, they offer a bearish market overview along with a bullish look at beverage stocks -- along with an options play on PepsiCo (NYSE: PEP).

The advisors explain, "Rallies can't gain footholds, while declines are deeper and more long-lasting than seem possible. As a result, there is an oversold condition in this market -- one which can spur sharp, but short-lived rallies at any time -- but a true intermediate-term buy signal is not at hand, for none of our indicators have turned bullish.

"The Standard & Poor's 500 turned bearish when the index fell through what had been support at 1490. That was the last piece of the bearish puzzle. The market has been under extreme pressure ever since. Any rallies towards 1490 can be sold, as that level now represents resistance.

"Meanwhile, where is support? It was at 1430-1440, but that level gave way and it seems likely now that the averages will test 1410 (the August closing lows) and perhaps 1370 -- which is multiple support from both August and March.

"Should that give way, then a true bear market would be underway. Support levels are somewhat meaningless in a nasty decline like this anyway; it is more important to monitor oversold conditions.

Only with Israeli ingenuity can you take a technology that was once reserved only for video games and make it functional in the real world. The news that Israel has launched the anti-hijacking pilot ID system developed by Elbit Systems(NASDAQ:ESLT) is good not just for the company, but for air travel as well.

Starting next year, Israel will require pilots who fly to its airports to use the Security Code System (SCS), a local invention designed to ensure planes that have been commandeered for al Qaeda-style attacks are spotted in time. Israel plans a trial run for the system, using a credit card-sized keypad, next month, in cooperation with five airlines from the United States, Europe and Africa. About 10,000 of the units will ultimately be issued, with Israel bearing the cost. Pilots who fail the authentication test when they approach Israeli airspace will be denied entry. Should a plane go ahead, ignoring further warnings, Israel will consider it hostile and scramble fighter planes for an interception. In the worst case, that could mean an aircraft is shot down.

Several experts familiar with Israeli methodology say the system -- also known as "Code Positive" -- is based on the assumption that a hijacking will take place in one of two ways. Hijackers could either kill the pilots and take control -- as is believed to have been the case in the September 11 attacks on the United States. Or they could force pilots to issue a compliant response to the system in the hope of buying enough time to reach Israel and crash the planes into a target on the ground. In the first case, the hijackers would fail the security check as they entered Israeli airspace, giving military authorities about 15 minutes to launch a response. In the second, Dani Shenar, chief of security for Israel's Transportation Ministry said, pilots would be expected to relay a "May Day" alert.

Let's all hope that this system is never put to use, but in the event of a hijacking, this Israel system could save hundreds of lives.

Aaron Katsman is the lead Portfolio Manager and Managing Director of America Israel Investment Associates, LLC. and Senior Editor of IsraelNewsletter.com. Author holds a position in ESLT as of 11/21/07.

M2E Power has reportedly received a total of $8 million in funding from a group of venture capital outlets including: OVP Venture Partners, Highway 12 Ventures, @Ventures, the CMGI Inc. (NASDAQ: CMGID) clean technology venture unit, and various angel investors. The first round capital funding, it is said, is to be put to work developing "no battery" power sources in mobile devices for military applications with the long-term focus being on civilian applications such as for iPods, cell phones and cameras.

Business Wire reports that M2E, in partnership with General Dynamics Corp. (NYSE: GD), has filed six patents on technology exploiting the Faraday Principle, which involves creating electricity by passing magnets through coils. The reader may wish to note that his principle of electromagnetic induction was proven viable in 1831. Rob Day, principal at @Ventures stated, "They've reached the stage where they've proven this really does work. Prototypes are in actual D-cell or A-cell batteries." You may read about some of the details at AOL Money and Finance.

On September 7, Tom Barlow reported that Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) would be manufacturing an e-book reader, reportedly tagged the Kindle (perhaps to "rekindle" interest in this technology that hasn't quite caught on?). It competes with the Sony (NYSE: SNE) reader in that it presents the e-book text in a new, crisp format, without reliance on backlighting that can be unfriendly to a bookworm's eyes.

On Monday, AMZN evidently plans to introduce the Kindle, and those in e-book publishing hope the device's launch will lift interest in the format. Arthur Klebanoff, co-founder and CEO of e-book publisher Rosetta Books LLC told The Wall Street Journal that e-book sales in the U.S. likely range between $15 million and $25 million. "By any scenario it's very small," he noted, "but Amazon's entrance is very significant ... this is about trying to change consumer habits."

According to an article on CNET, the device is expected to be priced in the $400 to $500 range and will have the ability to wirelessly connect to an e-book store on Amazon.com. Perfect for when you're on vacation and run out of reading material.

Amazon already sells digital downloads through its music and movies store; the company hopes that introducing its own e-reader could spur interest in downloadable books. In effect, the new product represents an effort from Amazon to return to its roots; books, after all, were the first thing AMZN ever sold.