Analysts like companies which are easy to predict, so that they can look at the numbers and decide where they are going with ease.

However when Google announces its numbers on Thursday, there are more than a few analysts who do not want to have a stab at it.

For a start they will have to factor in a $12.5 billion acquisition of smartphone maker Motorola which is a little messy.

Even the fact that Chief Executive Larry Page has been sick is making things hard to work out.

But what is really driving the analysts nuts is its expansion into the hardware business, where margins are low and competition is tough.

Last week Google launched the Nexus 7 tablet in partnership with Taiwan's Asustek and released the first Google-designed and manufactured consumer electronics device, dubbed the Nexus Q.

While the hardware appears to be selling well, that is not enough for Wall Street which wants to hear Google's hardware plans.

It is making its hardware push  when its core Web search advertising business is suffering.

Of course they all think that it is due to lower rate mobile phone advertising eating into the numbers because they have been told that by Apple, but it is more likely to be to do with the economic slow down in Europe and the US. Advertising, in any media, always tanks during an economic crisis.

Google has said very little about its plans for Motorola since the deal closed.

Motorola's hardware business includes factories in China, Taiwan and Brazil for building phones and television set-top boxes and does not really fit with Google's high-profit-margin Internet business. It also lost $86 million.

Needham & Co analyst Kerry Rice told Reuters that the mobile phone business is volatile and a company's fortunes can quickly change with one successful or unsuccessful product.

However Google is the king of search and it is running a nice stable and predictable business. Mobile is one where it is not a leader.

Rice said that bits of Google are starting to act a lot more like a semiconductor company which has a lot of fixed costs to absorb.

Analysts, on average, estimate that Google's traditional business generated net revenue of $8.44 billion in the second quarter.

That is up 22 percent year-on-year. But some analysts caution that there is a possibility that figure has been inflated by the inclusion of Motorola revenues.

As a result some analysts are chucking down their pencils and saying that including a month and a half of Motorola results is too tricky and they need to focus on Google's core when it comes to predictions.

Google itself sees the problem and is breaking out its results for its traditional business, Motorola's mobile business and Motorola's set-top box business.

But there are other things which make Google difficult to predict.

Sanford Bernstein & Co analyst Carlos Kirjner has already warned that Google's second-quarter net revenue could be as low as $7.83 billion due to the impact of foreign-exchange rates and a rise in the traffic acquisition costs that Google pays to partner websites.

All up it is making Thursday's announcement too difficult to call and Wall Street does not like that sort of thing. 

Former chipmaker Irwin Jacobs just gave President Barak Obama $2 million to help him get elected.

Jacobs was the former chairman of Qualcomm until March 3, 2009 when he handed the keys to the office drinks cabinet to his son Paul Jacobs.

From the perspective of corporate involvement in politics it is fair to say that Jacobs as a member of the advisory board for the School of Economics and Management at Tsing Hua University in Beijing, favours close economic ties to China.

Another Obama tech donor includes cash from Big Content. Dreamworks Animation Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey Katzenberg donated $2 million.

Katzenberg gave the world Down and Out in Beverly Hills, Three Men and a Baby and Good Morning, Vietnam when he was the CEO of Disney and he can have them back whenever he wants.

Katzenberg has spent more than $2 million in total in campaign donations since the nineties and he normally gives his cash to the Democrats. At the moment the Democrats are still pro-Big Content. But then again so are the Republicans, it is just that the population that isn't.

But now it is looking like reality is starting to bite in China too and both Intel and Microsoft are suffering.

The glorious Wintel alliance is expected to report bad sales growth this week as China's slowing economy shows falling demand for PCs.

Analysts are expecting to hear dark stories from Wintel when they both report their results. No doubt they will both have stonking profits but they will have to report that sales rose five percent or less from a year earlier.

Bloomberg points out growth has been slowing in China, the world's largest PC market since last year which indicates that electronics makers can't count on Asia to counterbalance falling demand in Europe or in the US. This is bad news for Wintel.

It has already hurt AMD which disclosed that revenue fell 11 percent in the second quarter, thanks to weaknesses in China and Europe.

Other doom was clearer after Applied Materials, Intel's largest supplier, cut its annual targets last week, citing delayed orders for its chipmaking equipment because of weaker end-market demand for semiconductors in the same regions.

China had its weakest expansion in three years in the second quarter when its economy improved by 7.6 percent from a year earlier.

Ironically some of this is because the Chinese are dependant on orders US and European tech companies. As US and EU sales slow, so do the orders into the outsourced plants in China.

One of the problems that the Wintel alliance face is that analysts are talking doom and gloom and companies are pulling back on spending as a result. Intel is aware that if it also talks about a technology meltdown it will make matters worse so it is expected to be upbeat when it announces its results.

Microsoft has also been suffering and missing its targets while the Windows group has missed analysts' estimates in four of the six quarters. The Tame Apple press has been claiming that this is due to customers shifting to tablets which don't run the operating system, but it is more likely that it is due to people are hanging on to PCs longer having been put off by a lackluster economic recovery in the US and concerns about the debt crisis in Europe.

It is not helped by the fact that people are putting off buying a PC until after Windows 8 is released.

All up, this is going to be a messy week for technology companies. 

And in its old age the law is wobbling, with the Korea Herald reporting that up until 2000, the FTC filed a complaint against  two percent of the total cases detected.

However, this figure had dropped to 0.95 percent over the past 10 years even though the annual number of cases the agency handled had increased five- to six-fold during the same period.

It also pointed out that of the 3,505 cases the FTC detected in 2010, the agency filed a complaint in only 19 cases. In 1,763 cases, the agency ended up issuing a warning.

The low amount of fines has also caught the eye of critics, which pointed out that although the FTC usually imposed fines equivalent to around one to two percent of related profits, in other developed countries the rate increased to 15 to 20 percent of profits.

Politicians and civic groups now demand that tougher measures, including criminal charges, be adopted to prevent unfair trade among conglomerates together with abolishing the exclusive right of the FTC.

Compared to other countries, they say, unfair business activities like price fixing are more likely to happen in Korea, where the gap between large and smaller firms is deepening due to the powerful market dominance of major conglomerates.

Rep. Kim Jae-won of the ruling Saenuri Party said: “At a time when ‘economic democratisation’ is emerging as a new agenda, it is inappropriate to maintain the system.”

However, the FTC fought back claiming that antitrust cases should be handled differently from other criminal charges.

It said that that this was because the consequences needed to be considered carefully and added, before pointing out that in many countries, criminal charges were taken as "supplementary measures together with administrative punishment."

It claimed that of 34 OECD member states, Korea was one of 13 countries that imposed criminal charges, while others such as Australia, the Netherlands, Sweden, Spain and Finland had no regulation for criminal charges.

The FTC said that of the 13 countries that imposed criminal charges, seven countries had no record of punishment over the past 10 years.

The exception fell in the US where the Justice Department oversaw antitrust cases together with fair trade authorities, it added.

A federal jury in San Francisco found the BlackBerry maker Research in Motion (RIM) liable for $147.2 million in damages for infringing on patents held by Mformation Technologies.

Amar Thakur, a lawyer for Mformation, was quoted by AP  as saying that the verdict of doom came after a three week trial and a week of deliberations by a jury of eight people.

Mformation sued RIM in October 2008, claiming that the Canadian company infringed on its 1999 invention for remotely managing wireless devices.

Mformation's software allowed companies to remotely access employee mobile phones to do software upgrades, change passwords or to wipe data from phones.

RIM will have to pay $8 for each of the 18.4 million Blackberry devices that were connected to the Blackberry Enterprise Server, from the day the lawsuit was filed until the time of the trial. After getting his calculator, the pleader figured that added up to $147.2 million.

Thakur told AP that the software was fundamental to the success of RIM.

He must be hoping that RIM pays up quickly and the cheque clears. The outfit is fast running out of money.

The BlackBerry US market share has dropped from 41 percent in 2007 to below four percent in the first three months of this year. For the quarter that ended on June 2, it lost $518 million and its revenue fell 43 percent to $2.8 billion. Any spare cash has gone towards cutting more than 5,000 jobs. 

In the UK a number of HPC facilities aimed at business use have also been unveiled recently.

Intel lawyers went to Mexico to take on two companies who happened to have the world Intel in their business names and their domains.

Both of the domains are registered to different people in Sonora, Mexico and are not chip companies.

Domainnamewire reports IntelCompras.com had 120,000 visitors on average per month and sales in excess of 24 million pesos during 2011.  

The owner said he chose the name Intel because it is shorthand for intelligence, so the name means "Intelligent Buy".

Intelsitio.com is owned by a company that provides web services and the owner said more or less the same thing. The name means "intelligent site".

Had Chipzilla won, it would have closed two established businesses internet businesses. Its briefs were trying to use the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) to do it.

Those rules were designed for clear cut cases of abusive cybersquatting.

Intel did not try to take the companies down in an unfair competition or trademark claims. The UDRP ruled that the case was not cybersquatting and it told Intel to sling its hook. 

Page has been absent from the Internet company's biggest public events for weeks, and is recovering from an unspecified ailment that caused him to lose his voice.

Schmidt did most of his talking for him, but apparently this was restricted to asking for a "gottle of gear" at board meetings, so they sent Larry home to get better.

Page did not show up at the annual shareholders' meeting and there were some questions about his health.

Page is back at work and has been taking meetings at Google headquarters in Mountain View. Schmidt is still not saying what ailed the co-founder.

He said that Page was still recovering. "He is talking, but talking softly." There was no mention of him carrying a large stick.

The concern of shareholders and the press mirrors similar concerns that Apple investors had when Steve Jobs took time off sick. At the time there was the feeling that people should have known how sick Jobs really was.

Page is still expected to skip the company's post earnings conference call next week. 

Melinda Gates, who is a Catholic, has said that the Gates Foundation will dedicate the rest of their lives improving access to contraception across the globe.

Gates told the Sydney Morning Herald that unless the Church pulled its finger out on contraception, women in African and Asia would be "voting with their feet", as women in the West had done, and would ignore the church ban on artificial birth control.

She said that she had been inundated with messages of support from Catholic women, including nuns who wanted the Church to be more sensible about contraception. There were women out there who had been coming on to websites and saying 'I'm a Catholic, but I believe in contraception'.

She said that in the West, while Bishops banged on about contraception, ordinary Catholics just did the opposite. In Africa however it was a big trickier.

In the US, 82 per cent of Catholics say contraception is morally acceptable. So let the women in Africa decide.

Melinda said that she did have some problems speaking out in defiance of the church hierarchy.

As a Catholic she believed in the religion and its "amazing moral teachings". But she also had to think about keeping women alive.

When it comes to not letting women or babies die, that's more important than arguing about what method of contraception is right, she thinks.

Mr and Mrs Gates are pouring $560 million into improving access to birth control over the next eight years.

She said it was time to push contraception back to the top of the development agenda.

She said that when the Gates Foundation started, it had focused on family planning. However it changed direction to vaccines after realising that women would not choose to have fewer children until they were sure their offspring would survive beyond childhood.