"Well managed, dominant firms use downturns to become more powerful -- and that's definitely what Telefonica (NYSE: TEF) is up to," says Roger Conrad in The Utility Forecaster.

"Incorporated in 1924 as a unit of US-based ITT, the Spain-based company now serves 47 million customers in its home country, 150 million in 14 Latin American nations and 45 million elsewhere in Europe.

"Thus far in the recession, diversity and dominance of fast-growing markets has kept Telefonica growing. Overall global customer rolls increased by 15.2% through the third quarter 2008.

Minyanville contributor Sean Udall dares to share the kind of keen insight and actionable information you won't find in any prospectus. For more original thought, visit www.minyanville.com.

Goldman Sachs removed Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) from its conviction buy list. I've jested in the past that this list tends to have little conviction itself. At any rate, I'm still in a holding pattern on AAPL as it moves closer to levels that I really find attractive -- $125 and lower.

Though the stock made a nice turn off lows, AAPL appears to be assessing whether the Dell (NASDAQ: DELL) news will have a material spillover effect. Some of DELL's weakness is due to AAPL so we will have to see how much macro driven issues affect AAPL's peak season growth. Piper noted that AAPL is in need of a Mac refresh -- this is true and is in the works.

Meanwhile, T-Mobile (NYSE: DT) has announced it will start selling Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) Android-based phones. Time will tell if this hits the iPhone's growth, but I don't suspect it will.

This week BT PLC (formerly British Telecommunications PLC) (NYSE: BT) got lots of favorable coverage for relenting on its plan to remove thousands of iconic red phone boxes. BT announced in June it wanted to replace about one-third of its remaining 12,000 red phone boxes. The company has slowly been dispatching the boxes for years, prompting small local protests all along and a big outcry this summer.

BT proposed a new deal: for £1 a town could keep the box, but with no working phone. A working phone would cost £500 ($900) a year. According to The Telecom, BT says £500 ($900) pounds is only half the annual cost of operating a red phone box. Really, $1,800 a year to maintain a pay phone? This July, residents in Cornwall were told their phone, which had been broken since June, wouldn't be fixed till late August. In protest, they strung up a bunch of tin cans on strings inside the booth.

As Brian White discussed in his earnings preview, analysts had been expecting to see another disastrous quarter for Motorola Inc. (NYSE: MOT) and this morning's earnings figures confirmed those expectations. The cell phone maker reported that its fourth-quarter profit plunged 84%, hurt by weak wireless phones sales and a deep loss in its handset division.

Net profit sank to $100 million, or 4 cents per share, down from $623 million, or 25 cents, a year earlier. Net profit from continuing operations was 5 cents. Included in the company's numbers were charges of 9 cents related to asset write-downs, layoffs and a legal settlement.

Excluding one-time items, Motorola would have earned 14 cents, a penny above analysts' expectations.

Motorola also posted a decline in its quarterly sales which slipped to $9.65 billion from $11.79 billion a year earlier. Analysts forecast a revenue of $9.6 billion for the quarter, according to Thomson Financial.

Google, Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) likes to make the most complex thing you'll ever do into the most simplest task. Much of the planet knows how easy it is to use Google's market-leading search engine, but the talent and technology to make that possible would be mind-boggling to many of us.

If you've used a cellphone in the last year, you're probably aware of how complex that category has become. In standard fashion, cellphone makers and wireless carriers both are cramming more features into wireless phones these days as a way to recruit more customers. Long gone are the old differentiators like coverage area and minute packages, and in are MP3 players, streaming video and amazingly complex user interfaces for even the most basic of cellphones. Google wants to change that, and apparently it won't bother with yet another handset that would just get lost in the fray.

No, Google's simplistic approach, as it always has been, may be in the software that powers these devices instead of making the hardware itself. Right now, Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) makes the Windows Mobile operating system for advanced wireless phones, but it's laden with overkill for most of us. Yes, we all want email and multimedia applications on our phones, but we can do without the complexity current solutions have to offer. If Google were to license or give away its mobile operating system technology to manufacturers and have a say in the design itself beyond the software -- and support the effort using in-phone advertising of some sort -- the world of cellphones could change for the better. If we thought the Apple, Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) iPhone was "revolutionary,'" then maybe the 'gPhone' could be one step beyond that.

Wall Street was less than enamored with Comcast's (NASDAQ:CMCSA) earnings. Basic cable subscribers dropped slightly, by 95,000. But, selling basic cable is not the main event at the firm.

Comcast's shares dropped about 5% this morning, but the company said net profit rose to $588 million, or $0.19 a share, in the second quarter, up from $460 million, or $0.15 a share, in the same quarter a year ago. Revenue rose 31% to $7.712 billion with strong increases in digital television and phone subscribers.

According to MarketWatch: "Digital-cable customers grew by 823,000 to 14 million, as video-on-demand, digital-video recorder technology and high-definition programming helped fuel the increase."

That digital cable number and new sign-ups for VoIP services are the future of the company. Comcast added 671,000 digital-telephone subscribers during the second quarter, driving revenue 98% higher to $420 million. Comcast ended the three months with more than 3 million phone customers.

That is hard news for Verizon (NYSE: VZ) and AT&T (NYSE: T) who are trying to hold on to their landline customers and build video-to-the-home platforms using fiber. Comcast may be the largest cable company, but its peers are also signing VoIP customers at a rapid pace and adding broadband and digital TV subscribers.

Comcast's shares may be down today, but the telephone company shares will be the ones to watch over the next year or two.

Douglas A. McIntyre is a partner at 24/7 Wall St.

Shares of Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) sank in late-day trading Tuesday after AT&T (NYSE: T) said the early surge of iPhone buying wasn't as big as projected. AT&T reported that 146,000 iPhone owners activated its service in the first 36 hours of the phone's debut. While that would be a huge success for any other consumer-electronic product, it was considered a flop by some. Besides, the much-touted iPhone isn't "any other consumer-electronic product." A number of analysts expected AT&T to report activating as many as 500,000-700,000 iPhones for the quarter. "It was a disappointment," a Piper Jaffray analyst told USA Today.

The news sent shares of Apple down nearly $9, to $134 yesterday, while AT&T dropped $0.35 to $39.68. Both companies are up notably today.

Richard Linder, AT&T's Chief Financial Officer told the New York Times that demand for the iPhone at AT&T stores had outstripped supply in two days and that the launch "couldn't have gone better." Richard Doherty, an analyst at Envisoneering Group, considered the iPhone sales a success. He told USA Today that "no consumer electronic product at that price point has ever sold 146,000 units in two days."

Steve Jobs knows his audience. And the audience at the MacWorld 2007 conference keynote (speaker, as always, the mock-turtlenecked Steve Jobs, but in brown -- a jab at the Zune perhaps?) had been camping out 'since nine the night before.

So it was to no small applause when he took the stage around 9 a.m. here on the West Coast. And everyone was on the edges of his and her seat waiting for the Big News.

Naturally, in our opinion here, the Big News is the iPhone. We've been wondering about it for months, giving it optimistic release dates (hey, still could happen, right?) and wondering whether Apple Computer, Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) could even call it that, given that the trademark to the name is owned by Linksys. And, basically, loving it from afar. Well, it's true, and it is called the iPhone, and Engadget reports Jobs saying that it will be a "leapfrog product," it will include an iPod (duh), a widescreen with touch controls, and it will be a "breakthrough internet communications device," whatever that is.

Also big news from Steve was that the Apple TV will be shipped in February; lots of details over at Engadget, photos of the interface and lots of details on how it will work. There is also ridiculous eye candy coming up every minute on the iPhone. I can't wait to do a montage!

MySpace has just closed a deal with Cingular that will allow Cingular users who subscribe to the MySpace service to receive brief text messages when new comments and/or friend requests are posted to their MySpace site.

MySpace is also a key component of Helio's new cell-phone launch.  My Space is already enjoying the company of Google and Yahoo! as one of the top three most-visited sites on the Internet.

Google and Yahoo! have both launched their own respective mobile services, Google mobile and Yahoo! mobile. But the mobile landscape is still very much undefined and will prove to be an interesting platform for the Internet majors to compete over.