Growing a company through acquisitions can feel a bit liking eating Chinese food. Two hours after you’ve had a meal you’re hungry again.

Larry Ellison must be starting to feel that way. When he bought PeopleSoft, he promised it would put Oracle on course for earnings per share growth of at least 20 per cent a year. He’s more than met that promise (that is, if you care to overlook the little matter of amortisation - more on that below.)

The trouble with strategies like this is, they only work if you keep buying. Prices have been going up and suitable big targets are getting scarcer - which explains why this has now become a preoccupation on Wall Street, to judge by the questions Ellison faced at his company’s annual financial analyst meeting on Wednesday.

Ellison’s message to the doubters: "We have found some very attractive targets, and we think we can do it for a while longer." Compared to the horizontal software plays he has bought so far, the next spate of deals might involve more "vertical" companies that specialise in specific industry sectors. "We can buy a typical vertical company that’s running at 5 per cent [operating margins] and run it at 30 or 40 per cent," Ellison boasted.

The trouble is, the bigger Oracle gets, the hungrier it becomes. According to Charles Di Bona at Sanford C Bernstein, Oracle will have to spend $52-58bn on acquisitions over the next five years to keep its earnings per share machine ticking over at the desired rate. So either the deals have to get bigger - in which case the risk of overpaying and the complexity of integration go up - or Oracle has to spread its net wide and trawl for large numbers of smaller transactions.

There’s no question that Ellison’s consolidation play has been a huge success. The outcome of his current circling of the beleagured BEA Systems should give some idea of how long he can keep it up.

Footnote: What is the right measure of earnings for a serial acquirer like this, anyway? Oracle likes to boast about its pro-forma earnings per share. But as the deals have flowed, the amortisation of intangibles has picked up: 12 per cent of operating profits in the 2006 fiscal year, rising to 15 per cent in 2007.

Look at it another way. Back in 2004, Oracle’s earnings per share looked roughly the same on both a GAAP and non-GAAP basis. In the three years since, the pro-forma number has jumped by 98 per cent: the GAAP number is only up 62 per cent. Like too much Chinese food, all those deals start to show on the waistline in the end.

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An interesting first from CA. The software maker has just handed over all the R&D and future product development for part of its security portfolio to Indian company HCL. CA keeps control of the brand and handles all the sales and marketing.

It’s one thing for a bank or an industrial concern to outsource its software development, but something else entirely for a software company. CA already has 1,200 developers of its own in India, but this takes things a big step further.

CA executive George Kafkarkou denies that ceding all the development work for his company’s "threat management" products (think anti-virus, firewalls, etc) is a form of outsourcing. HCL and CA will share revenues from this business in the future, he says, so it should be seen as a closer business partnership.

Yet CA still calls the shots. Aside from control of the customer relationships and brand, Mr Kafkarkou says it will still own all the intellectual property created in future by HCL developers - though some details have yet to be completely ironed out, such as how exactly the "partners" arrive at future product roadmaps.

Threat management accounts for just under 5 per cent of CA’s $4bn in annual revenues. But as the first deal of its kind, this could point to a more fundamental shift ahead. If CA has decided it should stick to what it is good at, and that means marketing rather than building its own products, the next logical step is surely to go the whole way and become a "software-lite" software company.

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Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving in the US, falls
this year on its earliest possible date - November 23.

The big day of store sales when retailers are supposed to go
into the black for the year also signals the unofficial start of the holiday
shopping season.

The latest online retail figures from the comScore research
firm suggest the industry will need all those extra days of shopping – Black
Friday can fall as late as the 29^th – to avoid a disappointing
Christmas.

It reports retail e-commerce sales in October grew 19 per
cent on last year to $9.96bn. That compares to year-to-date sales growth of 21
per cent up to the end of September.

Gian Fulgoni, comScore chairman, said October’s figures
often gave a glimpse of what to expect during the holiday season:

“That online sales growth rates diminished slightly in
October is not entirely unexpected, as many consumers are feeling the pinch of
ballooning mortgages and gas prices, coupled with a decline in housing values.
Even the rapidly growing online commerce sector appears to not be immune from
these economic realities,” he said.

Apparel and accessories growing by only 5 per cent in
October could be down to unseasonably warm weather, he added, and a recovery in
this sector could change the picture for Christmas sales online.

There were also encouraging figures for some
categories of retailers. Furniture, appliances and equipment grew 105 per cent
on a year ago, while sales of the Nintendo Wii, Sony’s PlayStation 3 price cuts
and the success of the game Halo saw the video game sector soar 264 per cent
compared to October 2006.

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By Michael Steen, FT Netherlands Correspondent

You’re sitting in a traffic jam, late for a meeting, watching the estimated time of arrival on your satnav’s display creep later and later as it takes account of the fact that, right now, you’re not going anywhere. Do you cancel, try another route, or wait it out?

TomTom, the Dutch maker of navigation devices, is claiming to put an end to this kind of dilemma with a new service it launched today in the Netherlands, dubbed High Definition Traffic. It tracks the paths of about 4 million Vodafone mobile phone users to expand the amount of traffic information available.

Traffic information on satnav devices is not exactly new, but they tend to depend on patchy data compiled by sparse roadside cameras and traffic detectors.

Vodafone can track the whereabouts of each phone to within 500 metres and monitor its movement, says Luciën Groenhuijzen, managing director for TomTom Mobility Solutions. He is quick to point out that the data is not linked to the phone users.

The tracking element allows TomTom to strip out pedestrians and people travelling on trains that run alongside motorways. Each user is tracked for one hour before being re-assigned with a new random number.

"We introduced that [the one hour limit] so that we can’t follow someone, even if we don’t know who they are, for a whole day," Mr Groenhuijzen says.

TomTom blends the data collected from Vodafone with existing sources and sends updates to one of its new, €399 units every three minutes. (TomTom includes a year’s traffic information in the price after which it will charge €9.95 a month.)

So does it work? A test of the gadget at the height of Monday morning rush hour in the congested Randstad area around Amsterdam seemed to suggest it does.

Driving from the coast towards Amsterdam, the navigation device shows an accident has closed a lane on the motorway and a parallel main road is also clogged up. The gadget sends our car under the motorway, along a canal and through a village that looks onto fields near Schiphol airport. One feels a little smug.

What happens if everyone buys the gadget? Don’t you lose your edge? Mr Groenhuijzen claims not. The system is so fast at updating, he says, that the TomToms stuck to people’s windscreens would not send them all haring down a B-road into the same village to create a new traffic jam.

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The mobile gaming industry has hit a bump on its road to
growth.

Revenues for publishers declined by 9 per cent in the second
quarter, compared to the first, when revenues were up 11 per cent on the fourth
quarter, according to the iSuppli research firm.

Its report says the pace of growth is slowing and one of the
main problems for the industry is the small number of subscribers for mobile
games. It suggests the demographic could be widened if games could take
advantage of phones and be more networked and multiplayer.

A week ago, shares in Glu Mobile fell 33 per cent after it
predicted a fourth-quarter loss of 6 to 7 cents a share, compared to Wall
Street expectations of a loss of 2 cents.

It blamed slowing business in Europe where carriers were
ordering fewer games as they changed the way they managed their businesses.

Analysts said the industry was suffering from growing pains.
ISuppli suggests carriers are turning to the mobile video market instead, which
it says holds the most upside potential of premium content categories.

Greg Ballard, Glu’s chief executive, visited us recently. He
admitted the US was trailing Japan and Korea, where companies such as Namco and
Sega were moving forward with multiplayer games on more sophisticated phones.

Glu was also still very dependent on carriers – 95 per cent
of its games were delivered through 160 carriers. He expects downloads to shift
more to the Web over the next three to five years, as well as to sideloading at
retail through memory cards that handsets can now increasingly accommodate.

Glu sees itself as the most independent of the big three
mobile game players in the West – Gameloft is backed by the video game
publisher Ubisoft and Electronic Arts has bought Jamdat.

David Gosen, the head of mobile publisher I-play and another
recent visitor, said Glu’s flotation on the Nasdaq in March has helped the
profile of the industry. He believes more user-friendly handsets,
all-you-can-eat data plans and big brands entering the sector will unlock the
market in a big way over the next 12 to 18 months.

ISuppli’s forecasts back him up – it expects mobile gaming
revenues to nearly triple by 2011, growing to $6.6bn, for a compound annual
growth rate of 23 per cent.

That makes this year’s second-quarter slump seem like only a
pause in a game, before the industry leaps to the next level.

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Nokia is engaged in close combat with the internet’s leading
companies as their incursions increase into its domain of the cellphone.

It gave a frosty reception on Monday to Google’s Android
mobile phone software platform, which will rival the Nokia-backed Symbian
operating system.

Then
there was a strong riposte on Wednesday with the announcement that its internet
portal Ovi will be included by Vodafone on its high-end handsets.

The
deal with the world’s biggest mobile operator by revenue is a tangible win for
the company compared to the vague promise of the Open Handset Alliance to
Google.

Following
on from a similar deal with Telefonica last month, it shows operators are
willing to give a place to the handset maker’s internet services alongside
their own content and services.

Smaller
battles are also being won and lost.

Google
acquired a company from under Nokia’s nose last month when it bought Jaiku, an
Helsinki-based rival to the Twitter mobile microblogging service.

Jaiku
was founded by ex-Nokia employees and the leading handset maker had adopted its
technology, so it would have made a natural acquisition for a company looking
for Web 2.0 smarts.

It
already has Mosh, of course – a three-month-old service developed in-house that
allows its members to upload and share content such as photos, videos,
ringtones and games.

Mosh,
short for mobilise and share, is proof that Nokia can think outside the box, or
handset. It was thought up a year ago by Americans and Finns locked up in a
hotel outside Helsinki for a month. “We were told to come up with something
game-changing,” says George Linardos, Director of Experience, Forum Nokia.

So
far, it has attracted more than 6m downloads of applications and content since
its launch on August 9 and works on all Web-enabled devices.

The service will launch Seek next month, allowing users to
request customised content such as a specific video or detailed map of an area
for their phone.

With Mosh, Nokia beat another internet company, at least to
the name. Legal letters were exchanged when Yahoo’s new social network Mash was
under development with the title Mosh.

Nokia pointed out it got there first, and a mishmash
over Mosh was avoided.

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That’s the word from Kanwar Chadha, founder of GPS chip designer SiRF, and the prospect is exciting.

Adding place data as well as time data to pictures would make it much easier for folks to reconstruct long ago vacations from the pictures they took. It would also improve Interent image search many times over.

Stephen Shankland, who writes about photography for Cnet, muses on the possibilities, the concerns and the technical feasibility in this post on his blog Underexposed.

Buying advice…

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Hoax? Almost surely.

But too funny not to mention.

The device even can be upgraded with the ubiquitous iPod dock. Frankly, I think a Zune dock would have been a better choice. Welcome to the social, indeed:

The TwoDaLoo is billed as the world’s first toilet two people can use … at the exact same time. It brings couples closer together and conserves our water supply all with one flush. The TwoDaLoo features two side-by-side toilet seats with a modest privacy wall in between. An upgraded version includes a seven inch LCD television and iPod docking station.

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