Dell announced that it’s reached a settlement with the SEC, resolving an investigation into Dell’s disclosures and alleged omissions from before Fiscal Year 2008, regarding its relationship to Intel, as well as other accounting and financial reporting issues.

Although Microsoft and Yahoo (finally) announced a partnership one week ago, it seems that the deal is far from unbreakable.  Indeed, Yahoo’s shared a few details with the S.E.C., and there are a number of interesting termination provisions attached to the arrangement.

The first can kick in if much more heel-dragging occurs, or more specifically, "if the conditions to commencement have not been satisfied by July 29, 2010."  Which is a nice sign that this won’t still be under discussion come doomsday.

Steve Jobs, who has on separate occasions been reported dead and to have had a heart attack (neither of which were true), said goodbye to Apple back in January. He took a leave of absence from the company due to well-publicized health issues.

Upon his departure, Jobs wrote a letter to the Apple staff. In it, he wrote:

With all the bad economic news flying around including massive Microsoft layoffs, Intel’s first performance concerns in a long time and IBM job cuts, Apple had its best quarter ever as reported in the WSJ.

Deals involving Google and Microsoft may get the government feeling nervous, but so far, Facebook’s growth isn’t causing much anxiety.  The SEC has given the social networking company special permission to keep hiring and handing employees equity without publicly sharing its financial data.

If there is anyone who is representative of all the potential, all the excess and all the celebrity that the Internet economy has offered up to this point, it’s Mark Cuban. His flamboyant style keeps him in the news in one way or another and his mounds of cash from the sale of Broadcast.com to Yahoo! during the first internet gold rush has allowed him to live a life that most can only dream of (if that’s your sort of thing). Well, today that dream life may be looking more like a nightmare as the SEC investigates charges of insider trading by Mr. Cuban.

After being accused of insider trading by the SEC, Mark Cuban’s done the smart thing and stayed fairly quiet so far.  Just the same, one short announcement has given a few clues as to what’s going on in relation to the Mamma.com charges.

Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, Landmark Theaters, and HDNet, has been accused of insider trading.  The SEC claims that, following a private conversation with the Mamma.com’s CEO, Cuban sold his entire stake in the company and thereby avoided at least $750,000 in losses.

Following the July 30 announcement from the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) about new guidance concerning Regulation FD, there has been plenty of online commentary and opinion on what people think it means for business, investors and communicators.

 Yesterday, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) approved new guidance for publicly-listed companies in using traditional websites and social media channels like blogs to meet the SEC’s public disclosure requirements under Regulation FD.

Former AOL Time Warner CFO John Michael Kelly and seven other people were charged by the Securities and Exchange Commission with causing the overstatement of ad revenue by over a billion dollars.

The company’s DoubleClick deal hit an unexpected snag when European Commission members decided to draw out their review to April 2008.

When writing a story that revolves around stock prices, I prefer to wait until the market’s closed – don’t want the story reversing itself as I type, after all.  I’ve found that market updates from Google (and Yahoo and MSN) are a little slow, though, and for this, we can blame the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Google Finance recently gained the ability to share real-time stock quotes from China, and it’s rather proud of this fact.  Also, in the event you’re wondering why we don’t get real-time quotes from within the U.S., Google says it’s all the SEC’s fault.

I’d be surprised to see a single boulder fall; one would expect some other rocks to accompany it.  And now, in a business sense, that expectation has come true; about five weeks after LookSmart’s CEO resigned, the company’s CTO has followed suit.

Google’s not making as many friends as it used to. The latest group to sour a bit on the company are venture capitalists.

Of course, business isn’t really about making friends, but that hasn’t stopped VCs from complaining that Google swallowing up prime acquisitions.

I’m a big believer in giving someone a second chance, but I’m not sure what to make of the news that Google’s chief legal counsel just settled an SEC complaint for is role with a previous company.

David Drummond will pay the Securities and Exchange Commission almost $700,000 to settle their claims against him stemming from his work with a technology training firm.

Providing misleading financial guidance to analysts in 2005, as the SEC contended IBM did, never turned into anything as the two sides settled the dispute.

Three Indian nationals have been charged as part of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s investigation into pump and dump stock schemes the boosted prices for fourteen stocks, including Google and Sun Microsystems.

The Securities and Exchange Commission suspended securities trading of 35 companies yesterday for their spammy ways. Entitled "Operation Spamalot," the SEC is targeting these companies because of artificial inflation of stock prices caused by spam campaigns.