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IBM has released its third quarter results today, with non-GAAP diluted earnings coming in at $3.28 per share, compared with operating diluted earnings of $2.85 per share in the third quarter of 2010, an increase of 15 percent. Analysts were expecting $3.22 per share with revenue of $26 billion. The company posted diluted earnings of $3.19 per share, compared with diluted earnings of $2.82 per share in the third quarter of 2010, an increase of 13 percent.

Big Blue’s third-quarter net income was $3.8 billion compared with $3.6 billion in the same quarter in 2010, an increase of 7 percent. Operating (non-GAAP) net income was $4 billion compared with $3.6 billion in the third quarter of 2010, an increase of 9 percent. Total revenue for the third quarter of 2011 of $26.2 billion increased 8 percent from the third quarter of 2010.

IBM chairman and CEO Samuel J. Palmisano said this in a statement: “In the third quarter, we drove revenue growth, margin expansion and increased earnings as a result of our innovation-based strategy and continued investment in growth initiatives…Growth markets delivered outstanding revenue performance across software, hardware, and services and contributed to the company’s expanded margins. We also achieved strong results in Smarter Planet, business analytics and cloud.”

Some of the growth markets he’s referring to are from the BRIC countries — Brazil, Russia, India and China. Revenues in the BRIC countries increased 17 percent, with total revenues from the company’s growth markets increased 19 percent. Growth markets revenue represents 23 percent of IBM’s total geographic revenue for the third quarter.

Revenues from the Software segment were $5.8 billion, an increase of 13 percent. Hardware revenues totaled $4.5 billion for the quarter, up 4 percent. IBM ended the third-quarter 2011 with $11.3 billion of cash on hand and generated free cash flow of $3.5 billion, up approximately $300 million year over year.

Because of this quarter’s strong earnings, IBM is raising its 2011 full-year operating earnings per share expectations to to at least $12.95 from at least $12.87, and for non-GAAP earnings to at least $13.35, from $13.25 per share.

You can listen and comment on IBM’s third-quarter earnings call, which starts at 4:30 pm ET, below.

A group of Iowa National Guardsmen, fresh from a harrowing two-and-a-half-hour firefight in Afghanistan earlier this year, found itself questioning the effectiveness of some of their new equipment. They had been issued M240B light machine guns for support fire, but they found themselves constantly reloading with new 50-round belts, which necessitated a ammo bearer with a bunch of belts at the ready. “The ammunition sacks that came with it made it too cumbersome and heavy to carry over long, dismounted patrols and especially when climbing mountains. Initially, we came up with using 50-round belts and just reloading constantly, which led to lulls of fire and inefficiency,” said Staff Sgt Vincent Winkoski.

While discussing the shortcomings of their setup (as you might do if your lives depended on it), someone mentioned the movie Predator, in which Jesse Ventura’s character had an ammo box for his minigun strapped to his back. They laughed about it, but Winkowski got to thinking, and with a can-do attitude that becomes of a soldier, decided to put something like it together.

He took some modular gear they had lying around (a carrying frame, all-purpose pouch), combined it with some parts from a remote weapons station, and with a little tinkering and glue, he had himself a working ammo backpack.

They tested it on the range, and it worked. And when their squad was ambushed in a valley by a group of enemy fighters, it proved it was more than just an experiment. Winkowski sent pictures and a description to science advisers in the Army’s research division. They loved it.

Within 48 days, they had redeployed a new, lighter, stronger prototype into the theater. “We were able to put everything together very quickly and were able to prove that with a combat load — that’s 43 pounds with 500 rounds, inclusive of the weight of the kit itself — that still gives the Soldier 17 pounds worth of cargo weight to attach to the frame and still be within the design specifications for the MOLLE medium,” said Dave Roy, who received the design and oversaw the prototyping.

I don’t post this just in the “cool new guns” spirit, though it’s certainly a neat gadget from that perspective. I just thought it was fantastic how the spirit of innovation pops up when you least expect it, and it seems that even within the tightly-regulated world of the Army, a good idea occasionally can take root and be on the ground fast enough to save a few lives. The freedom to create and hack is important and powerful, and providing the tools for people to do it (in this case, forward-thinking modular systems and a willingness to experiment) is an advantage in industry as well as battle.

Thanks to the 1st Battalion, 133rd Infantry Regiment, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 34th Infantry Division, Iowa National Guard for their hard work overseas.

[via TechZwn; images courtesy of the 133rd]

Google Wallet continues on its slow (but exciting) march toward letting you pay for things simply by tapping your phone against a special, NFC-enabled credit card reader. Today, in a post on Google’s Official Blog, the wallet team announced that it’s rolling out support for SingleTap — a new feature that lets you both pay and redeem coupons at a given retailer, without having to clip (or print out) and paper coupons. Instead, the phone ‘remembers’ the Offers you’ve saved or purchased, and redeems them automatically.

The feature was first demoed back when Wallet was unveiled in May, but when the service launched in beta last month you could only use it for payments, not offers. Of course, Google Wallet is still only available to consumers that have the Sprint Nexus S 4G (not even the T-Mobile or AT&T variants of the Nexus S work). But that will hopefully change soon — I won’t be surprised if we see some announcements around this at the Android event in Hong Kong this week.

Google’s post also notes that the interface for the Google pre-paid credit card — which lets you preload a virtual card with money, in case your credit card isn’t natively supported by Wallet — will now feature more details about each of your transactions.

And finally, Google Wallet has landed some new retailers that will be integrating the service soon, including: Chevron, D’Agostino, Faber News Now, Gristedes Supermarkets and Pinkberry, who join American Eagle, Macy’s, Jamba Juice, and more (you can see a full listing of the partners here).

From the post:

The Offers tab in Google Wallet has been updated to include a new “Featured Offers” section with discounts that are exclusive to Google Wallet. Today, these include 15% off at American Eagle Outfitters, 10% off at The Container Store, 15% off at Macy’s and an all-fruit smoothie for $2 at Jamba Juice. There are many more Google Wallet exclusive discounts to come, and you can save your favorites in Google Wallet so they’ll be automatically applied to your bill when you check out.

Organizing loyalty cards in your wallet is getting easier too. Today, Foot Locker, Guess, OfficeMax and American Eagle Outfitters are providing loyalty cards for Google Wallet so you can rack up reward points automatically as you shop. More of these are on the way.

We’re at the Palace Hotel for the 2011 Web 2.0 Summit where the lineup for the next three days consists of  almost everyone on the entire Internet. In case you didn’t get to be a part of the in-person action, you folks at home can follow along from the Livestream above, starting at 2pm PST.

Today’s speaker highlights include Supyo’s Sean Parker, Salesforce’s Marc Benioff and About.me’s Tony Conrad.

Full schedule below. 

2:00pm Plenary
Room: Grand Ballroom
Opening Welcome John Battelle (Federated Media Publishing Inc.), Tim O’Reilly (O’Reilly Media, Inc.)
2:10pm Plenary
Room: Grand Ballroom
Sean Parker, Co-founder, Supyo Sean Parker (Founders Fund), John Battelle (Federated Media Publishing Inc.)
2:35pm Plenary
Room: Grand Ballroom
John Donahoe, President & CEO, eBay John Donahoe (eBay Inc.), John Battelle (Federated Media Publishing Inc.)
3:05pm Plenary
Room: Grand Ballroom
Marc Benioff, CEO, salesforce.com Marc Benioff (salesforce.com), Tim O’Reilly (O’Reilly Media, Inc.)
3:25pm Plenary
Room: Grand Ballroom
Paul Otellini, CEO, Intel Corporation Paul Otellini (Intel Corporation), John Battelle (Federated Media Publishing Inc.)
3:45pm Plenary
Room: Grand Ballroom
Pivot Tony Conrad (about.me, True Ventures & Sphere)
3:50pm Plenary
Room: Grand Ballroom
Ross Levinsohn, EVP of Americas, Yahoo! Ross Levinsohn (Yahoo!), John Battelle (Federated Media Publishing Inc.)
4:20pm Plenary
Room: Grand Ballroom
High Order Bit Christopher Poole (4chan & Canvas)
4:30pm Plenary
Room: Grand Ballroom
High Order Bit Deb Roy (Bluefin Labs)
4:40pm Plenary
Room: Grand Ballroom
High Order Bit Genevieve Bell (Intel Corporation)
4:50pm Plenary
Room: Grand Ballroom
High Order Bit Brad Rencher (Adobe Systems Incorporated)
5:00pm Plenary
Room: Grand Ballroom
U.S. Senator Ron Wyden, Oregon Ron Wyden (U. S. Senate), John Heilemann (New York Magazine)
5:25pm Plenary
Room: Grand Ballroom
Closing Remarks
7:00pm Dinner
Room: Grand Ballroom
Web 2.0 Summit Dinner with Special Guest: Dick Costolo Dick Costolo (Twitter), John Battelle (Federated Media Publishing Inc.)

Word-of-mouth is the tried and true way to spread the word about your business, news, or product updates. For businesses, allowing your customers to tell their friends about how awesome your product or service is can be a great way to increase your brand recognition and attract new customers to come in and check out what you’re doing. As Basecamp wrote back in September, the web-based project management system has grown increasingly in popularity because customers have been able to tell their friends and colleagues about it and bring them over to the service.

Curebit, an alum of the Y Combinator winter class of 2011, launched at demo day back in March as a way for online stores to increase revenue through referrals by turning existing customers into marketers. Curebit wants to optimize referral systems for eCommerce platforms, and today they’re launching a new product to help do that more effectively. It’s called the “Social Referral Optimizer” and Curebit Co-founder and CEO Allan Grant tells us that his product is essentially like Google Web Optimizer for referral systems: It solves the hard problem of getting high conversion rates from referral systems.

Curebit supports the type of split referral incentivization that has worked so well for companies like Dropbox. For those unfamiliar, this split referral system is when you recommend Dropbox to a friend, and when they sign up, both you and your friend get some kind of reward, be it 5GB of storage for free or a shiny nickel.

According to Grant, Dropbox worked at optimizing their referral system for months before it began to have any real sort of effect on customer acquisition and conversion, so Curebit wants to take this optimization (i.e. pain in the butt) out of the process for any site — even yours.

What the Curebit team came to understand as they tested different form of referral optimization is that conversion depends a great deal on the details of the offer (the language the offer is presented in, the type of incentive, etc.), so their Social Referral Optimizer allows sites to automatically break an offer into its various permutations and test them across Curebit’s partner sites to see which has the highest conversion rate.

The startup’s optimizer enables sites to vary the amount of the discount, the offer text, the message one uses to share it with friends (whether that be via Facebook or Twitter), the landing page, as well as the graphic design of each page. But really the coolest part is the cross-site optimization: For sites that don’t have enough volume to get those statistically significant results, users are able to take advantage of Curebit’s software, which learns as it tests from other sites across the Web (about 700 of these are already available for testing).

Interestingly, from the data the startup has collected so far, they’ve learned that the conversion rate depends not so much on the amount of the discount that one offers friends for their referrals, but more on the text one uses — how the entire offer is expressed. And so far, the results have been encouraging. With Curebit’s optimizations, users are able to get 30 to 60 percent of of the customers that buy to share exclusive offers with their friends, resulting in a direct, measurable life in sales of up to 15 percent.

The startup is also launching an additional two new features today, including “Facebook Sponsored Stories” integration, which is designed to optimized shared messages, turning them into high-conversion social ads, as well as “Social Influencer Tracking”, in which Curebit identifies customers that have shared an offer (and are super influencers) so that merchants can personally thank them.

For example, when Gina Bianchini, co-founder of Ning, shared one of Curebit’s offers, the DODOcase founders got an email about it right away and were able to reach out to say thanks immediately thereafter. Next time the Ning co-founder buys something that uses a Curebit referral, the DODOcase guys will know right away, even if she doesn’t share. Pretty cool.

For more on Curebit, check out the video below:

IBM has released its third quarter results today, with non-GAAP diluted earnings coming in at $3.28 per share, compared with operating diluted earnings of $2.85 per share in the third quarter of 2010, an increase of 15 percent. Analysts were expecting $3.22 per share with revenue of $26 billion. The company posted diluted earnings of $3.19 per share, compared with diluted earnings of $2.82 per share in the third quarter of 2010, an increase of 13 percent.

Big Blue’s third-quarter net income was $3.8 billion compared with $3.6 billion in the same quarter in 2010, an increase of 7 percent. Operating (non-GAAP) net income was $4 billion compared with $3.6 billion in the third quarter of 2010, an increase of 9 percent. Total revenue for the third quarter of 2011 of $26.2 billion increased 8 percent from the third quarter of 2010.

IBM chairman and CEO Samuel J. Palmisano said this in a statement: “In the third quarter, we drove revenue growth, margin expansion and increased earnings as a result of our innovation-based strategy and continued investment in growth initiatives…Growth markets delivered outstanding revenue performance across software, hardware, and services and contributed to the company’s expanded margins. We also achieved strong results in Smarter Planet, business analytics and cloud.”

Some of the growth markets he’s referring to are from the BRIC countries — Brazil, Russia, India and China. Revenues in the BRIC countries increased 17 percent, with total revenues from the company’s growth markets increased 19 percent. Growth markets revenue represents 23 percent of IBM’s total geographic revenue for the third quarter.

Revenues from the Software segment were $5.8 billion, an increase of 13 percent. Hardware revenues totaled $4.5 billion for the quarter, up 4 percent. IBM ended the third-quarter 2011 with $11.3 billion of cash on hand and generated free cash flow of $3.5 billion, up approximately $300 million year over year.

Because of this quarter’s strong earnings, IBM is raising its 2011 full-year operating earnings per share expectations to to at least $12.95 from at least $12.87, and for non-GAAP earnings to at least $13.35, from $13.25 per share.

You can listen and comment on IBM’s third-quarter earnings call, which starts at 4:30 pm ET, below.

Google Wallet continues on its slow (but exciting) march toward letting you pay for things simply by tapping your phone against a special, NFC-enabled credit card reader. Today, in a post on Google’s Official Blog, the wallet team announced that it’s rolling out support for SingleTap — a new feature that lets you both pay and redeem coupons at a given retailer, without having to clip (or print out) and paper coupons. Instead, the phone ‘remembers’ the Offers you’ve saved or purchased, and redeems them automatically.

The feature was first demoed back when Wallet was unveiled in May, but when the service launched in beta last month you could only use it for payments, not offers. Of course, Google Wallet is still only available to consumers that have the Sprint Nexus S 4G (not even the T-Mobile or AT&T variants of the Nexus S work). But that will hopefully change soon — I won’t be surprised if we see some announcements around this at the Android event in Hong Kong this week.

Google’s post also notes that the interface for the Google pre-paid credit card — which lets you preload a virtual card with money, in case your credit card isn’t natively supported by Wallet — will now feature more details about each of your transactions.

And finally, Google Wallet has landed some new retailers that will be integrating the service soon, including: Chevron, D’Agostino, Faber News Now, Gristedes Supermarkets and Pinkberry, who join American Eagle, Macy’s, Jamba Juice, and more (you can see a full listing of the partners here).

From the post:

The Offers tab in Google Wallet has been updated to include a new “Featured Offers” section with discounts that are exclusive to Google Wallet. Today, these include 15% off at American Eagle Outfitters, 10% off at The Container Store, 15% off at Macy’s and an all-fruit smoothie for $2 at Jamba Juice. There are many more Google Wallet exclusive discounts to come, and you can save your favorites in Google Wallet so they’ll be automatically applied to your bill when you check out.

Organizing loyalty cards in your wallet is getting easier too. Today, Foot Locker, Guess, OfficeMax and American Eagle Outfitters are providing loyalty cards for Google Wallet so you can rack up reward points automatically as you shop. More of these are on the way.

Word-of-mouth is the tried and true way to spread the word about your business, news, or product updates. For businesses, allowing your customers to tell their friends about how awesome your product or service is can be a great way to increase your brand recognition and attract new customers to come in and check out what you’re doing. As Basecamp wrote back in September, the web-based project management system has grown increasingly in popularity because customers have been able to tell their friends and colleagues about it and bring them over to the service.

Curebit, an alum of the Y Combinator winter class of 2011, launched at demo day back in March as a way for online stores to increase revenue through referrals by turning existing customers into marketers. Curebit wants to optimize referral systems for eCommerce platforms, and today they’re launching a new product to help do that more effectively. It’s called the “Social Referral Optimizer” and Curebit Co-founder and CEO Allan Grant tells us that his product is essentially like Google Web Optimizer for referral systems: It solves the hard problem of getting high conversion rates from referral systems.

Curebit supports the type of split referral incentivization that has worked so well for companies like Dropbox. For those unfamiliar, this split referral system is when you recommend Dropbox to a friend, and when they sign up, both you and your friend get some kind of reward, be it 5GB of storage for free or a shiny nickel.

According to Grant, Dropbox worked at optimizing their referral system for months before it began to have any real sort of effect on customer acquisition and conversion, so Curebit wants to take this optimization (i.e. pain in the butt) out of the process for any site — even yours.

What the Curebit team came to understand as they tested different form of referral optimization is that conversion depends a great deal on the details of the offer (the language the offer is presented in, the type of incentive, etc.), so their Social Referral Optimizer allows sites to automatically break an offer into its various permutations and test them across Curebit’s partner sites to see which has the highest conversion rate.

The startup’s optimizer enables sites to vary the amount of the discount, the offer text, the message one uses to share it with friends (whether that be via Facebook or Twitter), the landing page, as well as the graphic design of each page. But really the coolest part is the cross-site optimization: For sites that don’t have enough volume to get those statistically significant results, users are able to take advantage of Curebit’s software, which learns as it tests from other sites across the Web (about 700 of these are already available for testing).

Interestingly, from the data the startup has collected so far, they’ve learned that the conversion rate depends not so much on the amount of the discount that one offers friends for their referrals, but more on the text one uses — how the entire offer is expressed. And so far, the results have been encouraging. With Curebit’s optimizations, users are able to get 30 to 60 percent of of the customers that buy to share exclusive offers with their friends, resulting in a direct, measurable life in sales of up to 15 percent.

The startup is also launching an additional two new features today, including “Facebook Sponsored Stories” integration, which is designed to optimized shared messages, turning them into high-conversion social ads, as well as “Social Influencer Tracking”, in which Curebit identifies customers that have shared an offer (and are super influencers) so that merchants can personally thank them.

For example, when Gina Bianchini, co-founder of Ning, shared one of Curebit’s offers, the DODOcase founders got an email about it right away and were able to reach out to say thanks immediately thereafter. Next time the Ning co-founder buys something that uses a Curebit referral, the DODOcase guys will know right away, even if she doesn’t share. Pretty cool.

For more on Curebit, check out the video below:

Over the weekend, Nokia launched a suite of casual games developed at Nokia Research Center which are meant to demonstrate how NFC can enable new forms of mobile gaming. The three new games include Nokia World Flags, Nokia Shakespeare Shuffle and Nokia Nursery Rhyme Shuffle. All can be played now on any Nokia Symbian NFC-enabled phone including the Nokia C7 Astound, C7-00, 600, 603, 700 and 701.

Nokia calls the games “tangible” mobile games because of the way they interact with physical objects in the real world using NFC tags. The games don’t have to read or write to the tags in order to work – they only need to detect the tags’ presence. That means they will work with blank NFC tags or even “contactless” credit cards, transit cards or ID cards, the company explains.

Frankly, the user interfaces for the games are only so-so, but to be fair, these are more akin to demo apps than “real” games meant to attract thousands of users. Instead, it’s the idea behind these games that’s meant to be the focus of this news.

For example, one game involves NFC-tagged playing cards which are used to play a digitized version of a child’s simple matching game. Traditionally, you would play this game by flipping over cards to find the matched pairs. With the NFC game, however, you tap the card with your phone. While I’m not sure if a game like this is screaming out for NFC, the concept of combining playing cards with NFC in new ways has some appeal. Imagine playing a NFC-enabled version of one of those “Magic: The Gathering” type games where with a tap you could actually see the battles between wizards animated on your phone’s screen, while the mobile app also kept score for you. That might be cool (well, for nerds, wink wink).

The two other Nokia games now available involve tapping cards to mix up either nursery rhymes or Shakespeare quotes. They look pretty boring.

In a video, Nokia shows off a fourth concept (not available) where you tap different parts of a stuffed animal with an NFC phone to launch different games. That could provide toy makers a new avenue for upselling that was previously limited to ads that appear on their toys’ boxes and in their instruction manuals. Still, as much as I personally love technology, the idea that my child’s teddy would simply serve as an avenue to toddler’s first gaming addiction kind of makes me sad. Whatever happened to actually playing with your toys? (Maybe I’m just getting old.)

Nokia, it should be noted, is not the first to have ideas about NFC-enabled gaming. One high-profile example comes from Rovio, which, launched an NFC-enabled version of Angry Birds called Angry Birds Magic earlier this year. That game also works on Symbian.

Widespread NFC adoption is several years out, and is still waiting on Apple’s participation. That means opportunities for NFC-enabled gaming are few and far between today.

Nokia is often early to the smartphone space with innovative concepts, but it’s not until Apple executives upon them do they really reach the mainstream. Something tells me that NFC mobile gaming will be just another example of this ongoing trend.