Online retailers have slashed the prices of Palm, Inc.'s (NASDAQ: PALM) newest smart phone, the Pixi, by 75% to $24.99 after a few days in the market. The Pixi is the sister phone to the Pre which is a leading phone device. Amazon is selling the Palm Pre for $79 and while the new handsets by the company have been well reviewed, they have not been smash hits according to analysts.

It is true that handset prices are discounted over time, but the steep fall in the Pixi’s price is jarring as it released just last weekend. The company does not like the way the prices are falling even though it maintains that it does not have much of a say in prices offered by third-party retailers of its products. The company is facing a slew of competitors this holiday season like BlackBerry Tour (NASDAQ: RIMM) and HTC Hero, which makes its position rather tough.

Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) has said its new Chrome OS will be available by end 2010. It is expected that Chrome will run a number of internet application including the company’s own. Chrome is also projected to run first on small laptops called netbooks but will run on many other devices eventually.

Sundar Pichai, a company VP declined to indicate how much the Chrome optimized devices would cost. However, the impact of Chrome to the financial performance of the company would be quite a few years away. The obvious target of the company is Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT) which has its flagship Windows OS and has dominated sales of OS for PCs. But Chrome has far lesser features than Windows and runs on an online medium. This is why Google Inc. is just hoping that Chrome will catch on and eventually replace conventional operating systems.

Poet LLC, the largest producer of corn based ethanol says it can compete with gasoline in two years. The company says that it has reduced the cost of making ethanol from $4.13 to $2.35 a gallon using a better cocktail of enzymes and by cutting capital costs.

It also plans to use a byproduct lignin as fuel and expects to produce cellulosic ethanol in just two years. The company launched a cellulosic-ethanol pilot plant a year ago in Scotland and had gotten round to cutting capital costs by 40%. Farmers are also expected to gain substantially as an acre of corn would produce 480 gallon of corn based ethanol and 55 gallon more from processing cobs, leaves and husks. It is estimated that the nation could produce 5 billion gallons of cellulosic ethanol and perhaps 10 billion gallons later. There are other companies that want to make cellulosic ethanol from wood chips and switch grass.

Wall Street Journal’s Walter Mossberg says that there have not been too many devices to help the blind read or to help people with language related learning abilities. Now Intel Corporation (NASDAQ: INTC) is trying to help with a new product called Intel Reader. This is a book sized device with a processor and a large screen to help with easy viewing while it has a downward facing camera to help text translation into audio or giant text.

The results have been mixed and while it has worked well with books and magazine articles, in other mediums it did a poor job. It also takes practice to use the camera properly. But this may not be a bother for people with disabilities who may find these difficulties to be quite tolerable given the benefits of the system. But the Reader is quite costly, costing as much as $1,500 and is available from a limited number of retailers that stock products for special-needs consumers. This Reader is a computer weighing just 1.4 pounds and has a 5 MP camera. It has the same Atom processor found in netbook computers and can hold 600 pages that you can transfer to and from PC or Mac.

VIVUS, Inc. (NASDAQ: VVUS) has reported encouraging clinical trials of its new erectile dysfunction drug that it is developing. The company has reported that the drug was able to show results in less than half an hour thereby meeting the goals of the Phase 3 trials.

The company conducted tests on 646 patients and found that almost three quarters were ready for sexual intercourse within 30 minutes of taking the new drug Avanafil which is being tested out. This drug helps to inhibit PDE5 enzyme, which causes erectile dysfunction. The same enzyme is also attacked by well known drugs Viagra and Cialis. But the action of Avanafil is designed to be faster than its better known competitors.

The drug also has no serious side effects while some of the most common side effects are that of flushing and headaches, which are present in all erectile dysfunction drugs. VIVUS, Inc. wants to file for regulatory approval late 2010 or early 2011.

BloggingStocks: After-hours traders punished Dell (DELL) stock Thursday, following a weak third quarter earnings report from the technology giant.Going into the afternoon earnings release, analysts had been expecting to see the company show earnings of 28 cents per ... Read more

BloggingStocks: Semiconductor maker Applied Materials (AMAT) reported its fiscal fourth quarter numbers this afternoon following the market close, and the company easily outpaced analyst estimates.Going into this afternoon's earnings report, analysts had been ... Read more

While most everything did well on Thursday, much of the excitement was directed towards smallcaps and Nasdaq stocks. Below is a little study that shows how the market has performed in the past following such buying interest in the Nasdaq while the S&P 500 was in a long-term uptrend.

The NASDAQ Index has approached a defining line, which is likely to form the boundary between calling this market a "Bear Market Rally" and a "New Bull Market."  What is that level, and how close are we now to it?  Let's take a quick look at the NASDAQ Weekly Structure. There are a few key points to watch, as noted above. 61.8% Fibonacci (of Whole Bear Market):  2,251