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LinkedIn’s fourth quarter results flew past Wall Street estimates as companies paid LinkedIn

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[LNKD  Loading...      ()   ] more for recruiting services, sending the stock higher after-hours. (Track LinkedIn after hours action here.)

The company’s earnings came in at 12 cents a share, up from 5 cents a year ago and nearly double the 7 cents expected. Revenue also more than doubled from the year ago quarter, coming in at $167.7 million.  » Read More

Rupert Murdoch may still be struggling with News Corp.’s newspaper division as the hacking scandal racks up quite a bill, but his movie and TV studio and cable divisions are making gains.

Mark Lennihan / AP News Corp.'s headquarters in New York.

The media giant reported better than expected quarterly results Wednesday, and announced that it’s taking a $87 million charge “related to the costs of the ongoing investigations initiated upon the closure of "The News of the World."

Murdoch was not on the call, nor was his son James—COO Chase Carey has been taking an increasingly public role at the company while the family, and James in particular, takes a step out of the spotlight while it tries to put the hacking scandal behind it.

(Just Wednesday, News Corp. settled another 15 lawsuits by phone hacking victims — it’s now settled 54 out of 60 cases, paying $7.9 million).

 » Read More

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I sat down with Disney

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[DIS  Loading...      ()   ] CEO Bob Iger immediately following the company’s earnings beat—the company reported 80 cents of earnings per share, compared to the 72 cents Wall Street projected.

Increased guest spending and attendance at the parks, and higher advertising rates and affiliate revenue at the media networks drove the earnings upside.

The revenue fell short of analyst expectations (Disney doesn’t provide guidance) – at $10.779 billion, compared to the $11.18 billion wall street was looking for.  » Read More

Flikr/cdharrison Cinderella's Castle

Disney

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[DIS  Loading...      ()   ] reports earnings after the bell, and the company’s up against some tough comparisons to last year.

In fact, this quarter is expected to show the smallest percentage increases of any quarter in fiscal 2012.

Wall Street’s looking for earnings per share of 72 cents, a five percent increase over the year-ago quarter, on four percent higher revenue of $11.2 billion.  » Read More

Coinstar earnings blew past expectations, sending the stock soaring after-hours. The company reported earnings per share of $1 on $520 million in revenue. Wall Street had expected just 65 cents a share on $498 million in revenue.

Source: Coinstar.com

The big driver was the company’s

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[CSTR  Loading...      ()   ] biggest division, DVD Rental service Redbox, which showed 39.5 percent revenue growth. Perhaps more important, the company’s guidance for the current quarter was better than expected. The company is continuing to double down on entertainment — it is buying the assets of NCR’s

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[NCR  Loading...      ()   ] entertainment business.

These better-than-expected results come on the heels of Coinstar announcing its partnering with Verizon

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[VZ  Loading...      ()   ] to launch an online content service to go head to head with Netflix

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[NFLX  Loading...      ()   ].

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Super Bowl ads may be entertaining—but do they work?

Forget about which ad drew the biggest laughs—which ones inspire consumers to get out and spend some money?

CNBC partnered with a company called “Collective Intellect” for a Super Sunday Ad tracker which measures social media engagement by culling through 11 million daily posts from Twitter, Facebook, blogs and more across the web.

And it does something unique—it measures “purchase intent” what consumers say about wanting to buy an advertised product.  » Read More

Bloomberg | Getty Images The real battle this weekend will be for your eyeballs - either on your TV or your smartphone.

While the Patriots and the Giants battle it out, the two screens that battle for consumers attention—your smartphone and TV—are teaming up.

About 60% of mobile users plan to use, or look at their phones during the Super Bowl, according to Harris Interactive.

Add in the people who will watch the game with a tablet or laptop, and it’s a multi-platform advertising bonanza.  » Read More

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The Patriots and Giants don't face off for another few days, but the Super Bowl already has some big winners — advertisers.

This year's ad rates are at a record high: $3.5 million per thirty second spot, on average.

But not only could the big game draw record viewers, but marketers are also cashing in online, where they start generating attention for their ads weeks before the big game. By now, about half of Super Bowl ads are already online, as brands look to turn their 30-second ad buy into weeks-long marketing event.  » Read More

I just got back from a quick tour of Facebook’s new HQ. While the we wait for the company to file its S-1 with the SEC, it’s business as usual at the company's new Menlo Park campus.

CNBC Facebook “Just Kickin’ It” lounge

But when the company does file, we can expect CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg to gather employees to discuss the big news.

About 2,000 of Facebook's roughly 3,000 employees are based here as they started moving over from Facebook's old digs in Palo Alto, in December.

Employees started to arrive at 7 and will continue to trickle in until 11 (engineers come and leave later). The outside of the HQ is totally corporate as it used to be owned by Sun Microsystems

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[JAVA  Loading...      ()   ] . But the inside is funky and casual, a lot more like the company's old offices on in Palo Alto.

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The timing of AllThingsD’s “D: Dive into Media” conference couldn’t be better—the conference gathers media and tech executives on the eve of the expected Facebook IPO.

And it’s appropriate that the CEO of arguably the second most powerful private company in Silicon Valley, Twitter’s Dick Costolo, kicked off the event.

Costolo tried to dodge all IPO-related questions, but he couldn’t avoid the looming topic of Facebook’s pending offering.

After complimenting Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, Costolo stressed that his company has no plans to go public, and would prefer not to have the distraction of dealing with an IPO—implying that Facebook feels the same way. Costolo said he repeatedly tells his employees to focus on Twitter’s goals, and not on a specific “market window.”  » Read More