Good morning tech

Industry Notes

Google’s results promise to lift veil on value. Google’s second-quarter earnings are expected today. “Questions about the company’s growth rate, intense regulatory scrutiny in Europe and the U.S., difficulties in China and the impact of the mobile Web have combined to unnerve investors,” the WSJ reports. 

PC shipments up. Shipments of personal computers rose 22.4 percent worldwide in the second quarter “as businesses replaced aging computers and consumers continued to show interest in inexpensive laptops,” AP reports, citing data from market research group IDC. HP is still the top computer manufacturer in the world, followed by Dell, which reclaimed the second spot from Acer. “Consumers still sought out low-end laptops and netbooks — computers that are even less expensive, but also less powerful. However […] consumer PC buying seems to be slowing in the U.S. as big business spending picks up.”

WHO, WHERE

Sens. KAY BAILEY HUTCHISON (R-Texas) and BILL NELSON
(D-Fla.) are holding a press conference at 11:45 a.m. at the Capitol to
announce a “major breakthrough” on NASA’s re-authorization bill. The
compromise championed by Nelson would cancel the Constellation manned
space flight program as President Obama has said he plans to do, but
would use parts made from Constellation contracts to build a new rocket.

Commerce Secretary GARY LOCKE is in Atlanta at the Georgia Institute
of Technology for the last of four innovation forums, starting at 10 a.m.

CTIA’s DANE SNOWDEN will be at the Senate Commerce hearing on online safety for children today. (2 p.m., 253 Russell Senate Office Building).

TWEETED

“Attention AT&T customers: @ATT is threatening to drop AMC, so you won’t see season 4 of Mad Men. Fight back here”

—@MadMen, a Twitter account by fans of the show, weighing in on a fees battle between AT&T and Rainbow Media, the parent company of AMC. 

OPINION

“The potential impact of Google’s algorithm on the Internet economy is such that it is worth exploring ways to ensure that the editorial policy guiding Google’s tweaks is solely intended to improve the quality of the results and not to help Google’s other businesses.”

—The New York Times editorial board adds some legitimacy to the idea of “search neutrality,” which Google representatives have often dismissed as bad policy and a concoction of competitors.

SCHEDULED

10:30 a.m. … FCC open meeting

2 p.m. … Senate Commerce Committee hearing on “protecting youths in an online world” (253, Russell Senate Office Building)

5:30 p.m. … New America Foundation forum on decoding digital activism

WATERCOOLER

SIGNAL — Apple will hold an iPhone 4 press conference on Friday. No
further details are known, except that the company will address the
device’s signal reception issues that were recently highlighted by
Consumer Reports as the reason it refused to recommend the phone.