With more investors stepping off the sidelines and edging back into stocks, a key question is -- where's the growth?

Joe Ransom, a senior portfolio manager at Silvant Capital Management, argues there's plenty of growth left in big tech names including Google, Qualcomm, Hewlett-Packard and Oracle.

One piece of advice from Ransom: Don't just rely on sector plays. Do the homework and sift out individual companies with a competitive edge. Case in point, Apple. Despite this week's sell-off after Steve Jobs failed to appear at their developers' conference, Ransom notes Apple remains attractively valued and a darling among consumers, who continually trade up and expand their family of Apple products.

Silvant, which has about $3.8 billion of assets under management, is long all those names in Ransom's funds, including the RidgeWorth Select Large Cap Growth Fund (STTAX), which is up 12.5% year-to-date. 

Stay tuned for part 2 of the interview, where Ransom discusses his other favorites, including energy.  

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At 12:01 a.m. Saturday morning, Facebook will allow user to register user names and domain names (facebook.com/username) to go with them.

One marketer tells me employees at her firm have been instructed to wait up until midnight Friday so they can quickly register user names for all of the firm's clients before squatters can claim them during the land rush.

This approach may not be necessary.

On Digital Media Law, Jonathan Handel explains how a company can protect its trademark before the land rush commences:

At http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=username_rights, there’s a “Preventing the Registration of a Username” form for entering your company name, title, email, trademark, and registration number. (Oddly, there’s no place to enter your own name.) As that last data item suggests, only registered marks are eligible, although I’d recommend that holders of trademark applications in process simply enter the application number instead. Filling in the form will prevent someone else from using your trademark as a user name.

What happens if an infringer registers your trademark before you fill out the form?...

See also:

• The Future of Facebook Usernames Revealed!
• Facebook Misses Anotehr Revenue Opportunity

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From paidContent.org, June 2, 2009: 

Google is beating Microsoft at search, and Apple is pummeling Microsoft on the music front—but with the popularity of the Xbox 360 and Xbox Live, Microsoft has a major edge on all of its challengers when it comes to controlling the living room. And the company made it clear that it’s in this fight for the long haul at E3, with news that Xbox Live would be getting much more digital content soon, including music from Last.fm, connections from Twitter and Facebook, and more streaming movies from Netflix.

Microsoft is already far ahead of Sony in terms of console volume; the same goes for Apple’s AppleTV flop or startups like Boxee, Roku and ZillionTV. (And there isn’t even any premium third-party content available on the Wii yet.) Meanwhile, Microsoft said Xbox 360 owners had watched over 25 million hours worth of movies in the three months after it partnered with Netflix for streaming video—so there’s clearly a hunger for non-game content on the console. John Schappert, Microsoft’s corporate VP of LIVE laid out just how much more of that content people would get...

For more coverage, see paidContent.org:

• Consoles Make Their Mark in the Latest Push to Control the Living Room
• Microsoft Expands Netflix Ties; Will Window Media Center Appeal to the Masses?

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The AllThingsD conference is over, so let the post-op begin!

With the conference fresh in my mind (but my mind not fresh after taking the red-eye) Henry and I discuss some of the key themes and big takeaways from the D7 confab, including:

• Web 2.0 is dead, long live Web 3.0: This was the major theme set out by conference co-hosts Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, who write: "So what's the seminal development that's ushering in the era of Web 3.0? It's the real arrival, after years of false predictions, of the thin client, running clean, simple software, against cloud-based data and services."

Mossberg believes the iPhone and iTouch represent the "tip of the spear," as discussed here, but he does not believe Apple has an insurmountable lead in Web 3.0.

As Henry and I discuss in the accompanying video, if Web 2.0 really is "over" (a debatable proposition, for sure) what's going to happen to all the social networking sites? It's especially relevant considering another big theme was how the Web 2.0 leaders still haven't figured out a revenue model; Twitter served as the Web 2.0 posterchild at D7, although most observers believe they'll figure it out. (Click here for the AllThingsD presentation of Twitter co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone.)

• Microsoft and Yahoo, NOT Sitting in a Tree: With Steve Ballmer unveiling Bing, and Carol Bartz telling Tech Ticker talks are in the ebb vs. flow position, it doesn't look like a search deal is going to happen anytime soon...if ever.

And while Microsoft's new search engine garnered a strong initial response...

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CARLSBAD, CALIF. -- Steve Jobs sounds "energetic, healthy, not gravely ill or someone anxious or [overly] concerned about his health," Steve Wozniak says of his fellow Apple co-founder.

But Wozniak has been "saying the same thing for six months" and took umbrage with yesterday's WSJ.com story on the subject. "They printed [it] like I spoke it as new news," he says. "I'm not sure how I was quoted. It wasn't an interview."

Beyond the sensitive issue of Jobs' health and the thorny issue of journalistic practices, Wozniak also weighs on some more uplifting issues in the accompanying video, taped here at the AllThingsD Conference at the Four Seasons, including his recent stint on "Dancing with the Stars"

"I was meant to be an engineer. I was not meant to be a professional dancer," Wozniak says.

But he called it "the most fun thing" he'd done in a long time and talked about the joy and satisfaction of challenging yourself and getting out of your comfort zone.

It's that kind of uplifting spirit that makes Wozniak one of the most beloved and revered figures in Silicon Valley, and beyond. That and his contributions to the personal computer revolution. Speaking of which...

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Shares of Hewlett-Packard slipped Wednesday after CEO Mark Hurd didn't express the same kind of optimism as other tech executives have on recent conference calls.

"I'm not ready to call it better," Hurd said on H-P's conference call Tuesday evening, in sharp contrast to the themes of stabilization and even improvement coming lately from Cisco, Intel, Corning, AMD and others.

Beyond the rhetoric, H-P maintained its EPS guidance but said its expects revenues to decline 4% to 5% in the current fiscal year vs. its prior forecast for a drop of 2% to 5%. H-P announced plans for an additional 6000 layoffs.

Further job cuts may enable H-P to reach its earnings targets but the company may be running up against the limits of cost-cutting...

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Now that Apple's quarter is out of the way, all eyes turn to June, when Steve Jobs is supposed to return and Apple is likely to release several new products.

Will Steve be back?

Based on Apple's careful comments on yesterday's earnings call, the answer seems to be "yes."

Analyst Dan Frommer from The Business Insider thinks Apple will also make a couple of important product announcements in June:

• New iPhone software, which will have a bunch of exciting new features and retroactively improve existing iPhones
• New iPhone hardware (aka, a new iPhone)

Dan thinks that later in the year Apple might also release a product he's calling the "iPhone Touch HD," which would serve as Apple's entry into the netbook market.

With the burgeoning success of the iPhone, iPod, and Mac, Apple is beginning to do what Microsoft has been trying for a decade to do: Create a common software platform that transcends devices. This is one of the most important trends for Apple's long-term growth prospects.

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Apple delivered another strong quarter, blowing away the ludicrously conservative "guidance" it issued three months ago and justifying the stock's huge run of the last few months.

The company's outlook for Q2 is again "comically conservative," in the words of Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster, so the bar seems to be set low enough for Q2.

But now Apple needs to fix its Mac problem.

The number of Macs Apple sold in the quarter declined for the first time since 2003, says Dan Frommer, analyst at The Business Insider.  This is in part because of the economy and in part because Apple had a huge quarter last year with the launch of the MacBook Air.  But it's also because the company does not yet have a product to compete in the fastest-growing segment of the PC market: Netbooks.

Dan Frommer thinks this will soon change.  He thinks the company will eventually launch something he calls the "iPod Touch HD," which will be a sort of Kindle-on-steroids that fits between the low-end Mac and the high-end iPod.

Can the stock keep climbing in the meantime?  Possibly.  It's still not expensive: After adjusting for cash, the stock is trading at about 10-times trailing 12-months cash flow, which is a reasonable multiple for a company this strong (not screamingly cheap, but reasonable).  The broader market seems poised for a correction, which would take Apple down with it, but the company itself seems in great health.

See also from The Business Insider: Analyst Calls Apple Guidance "Comically Conservative"

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So much for our write up of Skype's founders buying itself out of eBay's clutches. eBay announced yesterday that they'd be taking Skype public in 2010 instead. In a statement, eBay's chief executive John Donahoe said what analysts and reporters have been saying since the deal was announced, "It's clear that Skype has limited synergies with eBay and PayPal." Henry Blodget, for one, was excited enough to put an exclamation point in his headline. He notes that this could just be a negotiating ploy to get would be buyers to pony up now. Can Skype's founders come to the table with a sweeter offer? As a user, I'd rather see them take the product back then spin it into an IPO.

A small victory for the many opponents of Time Warner's plan to "meter broadband"-- in other words, make people pay more for the more Internet they use. The plan has received nothing but hate for the last two weeks...

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For once, the biggest story in the Valley isn’t about sexy Web upstarts. It’s about big-old-boring IBM and seen-better-days Sun. It turns out they aren’t merging after all. In a deja-vu turn of events for anyone who watched the Microsoft-Yahoo drama last year, it seems Sun’s board was split about the deal. You know, the only one the company could allegedly scare up during the period it was shopping itself.

There’s speculation that Scott McNealy, the firebrand founder of Sun who opposed the deal, may be retaking the CEO slot as a result. Having watched Jerry Yang, Michael Dell and other returning founders flounder, I can’t imagine that mollifies upset Sun shareholders. eWeek put things well when it wrote that Sun better have “a solid backup plan.”

The most successful Internet companies are frequently the ones who destroy traditional business models and sky-high fees charged by middlemen. Consider the music industry with iTunes and file sharing; media with blogs and enterprise software with open source and software-as-a-service. Revolution Money, founded and funded by former AOL scions Ted Leonsis and Steve Case, has been trying to do the same to the world of credit card payments and processing, but it’s had mixed results. Today, the company announced another $42 million in funding to keep on trying...

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