Analyst Upgrades

• General Electric (GE) and Barclays (BCS) to buy from neutral at UBS.
• Warnaco (WRC) to outperform from market perform and Melco Crown (MPEL) to market perform from underperform at Wells Fargo.
• Parker-Hannifin (PH) and Emerson Electric (EMR) to buy from neutral at Goldman.
• AMD (AMD) to buy from neutral at Nomura.
• Novellus (NVLS) and Sherwin-Williams (SHW) to equal weight from underweight at Morgan Stanley.
• OpenTable (OPEN) to outperform from market perform at Morgan Keegan.
• Skilled Healthcare (SKH) to buy from hold at Jefferies.
• Lear (LEA) to overweight from equal weight at Barclays.
• Adobe (ADBE) to buy from neutral at BofA/Merrill.

As the name implies, Local.com (NASDAQ: LOCM) is a provider of local online advertising services -- primarily for small business. And based on its Q1 results, the company continues to get traction. Revenues came to $11.1 million, up 16% over the past year. There was a net loss of $2.9 million or 20 cents, but the company was able to post positive cash flow.

In the quarter, search traffic reached 60 million monthly unique visitors (from both network sites and Local.com). This represented an 18% increase over Q4 and 32% spike over the past year. True, revenue per thousand visitors was down 11% to $246, but this is to be expected in the slow economic environment.

Actually, Local.com is using its cash to pick up customer bases. For example, last month the company acquired 14,200 local business customers for $3.1 million. There was also a purchase of 11,800 web hosting customers in February (for $1.2 million).