Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg tied the knot over the weekend, marrying his sweetheart of more than 9 years, and hopefully his marriage doesn't sputter the way Facebook's initial public offering (IPO) has. On just its second day of trading, the world's largest social playground saw its shares dip below its IPO price of $38 on Monday, a bad sign for those who thought pouring a ton of money into Facebook at the outset would lead to easy riches.

Dell on Tuesday reported financial results for its second fiscal quarter of 2012 and described its performance as "strong" based on $15.7 billion in revenue. That's up 1 percent from last year, and 4 percent sequentially. Meanwhile, Dell's operating income for the first half of 2012 jumped 50 percent, and GAAP earnings per share rose a healthy 71 percent to 48 cents. So why did Dell's stock drop so sharply in after hours trading?

Wall Street IT professionals are gearing up to increase spending on transformational initiatives in 2010 and 2011, with most of the additional budget in IT investments for analytics going towards risk, compliance, and trading, IBM said.

"Coming out of the largest financial crisis in modern day history, there has never been a more important time for firms to capitalize on technology investments to make sense of the data and gain a more sophisticated understanding of risks," said Shanker Ramamurthy, general manager, IBM Financial Services Sector. "The road to recovery is built on infusing intelligence across operations, streamlining costs and getting back to basics so that firms once again focus on innovation and growth.

The survey pinged nearly 250 business and IT Wall Street dudes, and almost half of them said they expect 20-30 percent of their technology budgets to go towards the above mentioned areas. And of all the regulatory activities, 55 percent identified systemic risk as the largest driver of IT investments.

More here.

Whether you're a fan of Apple's recently unveiled iPad or not (and judging by the reader comments, many of your are not), you were probably expecting the tablet to cost much more -- maybe even twice as much -- than the entry-level unit's $499 price tag. As it turns out, Apple stands to make $208 on every $499 iPad sold, giving the company headroom to drop the price if the market (and competition) dictates.

That's according to a bill of materials (BOM) analysis by Brian Marshall of BroadPoint AmTech. According to Marshall, individual parts inside Apple's 16GB Wi-Fi-only iPad adds up to $270.50, which includes a $10 line item attributed to manufacturing. Factor in another $20 for warranty service, and the bottom line comes to $290.50, leaving $208.50, or a nearly 43 percent profit margin.

"If [Marshall] is right, this shows that there's room going forward for Apple to reduce the price of the iPad," said Ezra Gottheil, an analyst with Technology Business Research. "I think the $499 price point is very aggressive, but if they dropped [the price] it would really put the iPad in the netbook range. At a lower price, consumers will have to decide waht they want for a portable work and play device, a netbook or get an iPad."

The profit margin's even wider on the 16GB iPad with Wi-Fi and 3G, which Marshall estimates runs the company $306.50 to produce but will sell for $629. The end result is a 52 percent profit, a number videogame console makers can only dream of.