The stock market took a plunge again today. While it wasn’t quite as bad as Monday’s free-fall, the Dow fell 348.22 points (3.22 percent), the Nasdaq fell 92.68 points (4.48 percent) and the S&P 500 fell 46.78 points (4.03 percent). Not good.

Some of the major tech stocks, which took massive hits on Monday, only to partially recover on Tuesday, fell one again. Two in particular, Apple and Yahoo hit new lows today, while Google didn’t fare much better.

Apple’s stock now stands at $100.10-per-share. It hit the $100.00 mark today but avoided falling below it. The stock fell over 8 percent.

How bad has Apple’s fall been? Just look at the chart below. It looks like the Mariana Trench. While Apple hovered around the $180-a-share mark for much of August, September was brutal on the company. Now October is turning out to be even worse so far.

Apple’s stock has not been at the $100-a-share level since late April/early May 2007. That was during a time of amazing growth for the stock. By the end of 2007 it had surpassed the $200-a-share level. A correction followed in early 2008, but the stock went back up shortly thereafter. Now, it appears in rough waters after several analyst downgrades.

Another stock that fell in the 8 percent range today was Yahoo. It now stands at $15.58-a-share. The stock has not been this low since mid-2003 — yes, five years ago.

Yahoo’s market cap is now $21.59 billion. That’s significant because it’s almost exactly half of the $44.6 billion offer Microsoft made in the beginning of this year to buy the company, as AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher notes. It sounds like the perfect time for Microsoft (which fell much less than its tech counterparts in trading today) to swoop in for a half-off sale, right?

Wrong, say Microsoft sources close to Swisher. Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer was apparently so put off by the whole ordeal of trying to acquire Yahoo the first time around that he says he isn’t going to make an offer no matter what happens.

But as the saying goes: Never say never.

Everyone has a price, and Yahoo’s is getting cheaper by the day. If Microsoft is really serious about remaining relevant in the Internet game, it’s going to have to make a move for Yahoo sooner or later — no matter how Ballmer personally feels about it.

Some other stocks that took big hits today: Google fell $21.21 (5.15 percent), Sun fell $0.58 (7.74 percent), eBay fells $1.70 (8.15 percent) and Adobe fell 2.90 (7.61 percent).

[top photo: flickr/arainman]

Former Broadcom executive Henry Samueli to plead guilty in backdating case — The Broadcom flameout saga continues, with former chief technology officer Samueli admitting that he previously lied to SEC investigators about whether or not he had illegally back-dated stock options.  Among Broadcom’s two founding Henrys, Samueli was the good cop. That’s why it was surprising that Samueli pleaded guilty to avoid jail time. But the other Henry, former CEO Henry Nicholas, is up for a raft of criminal charges from drug dealing to using prostitutes. [Samueli photo via Forbes.]

Game association trumpets games in the workplace — It’s no surprise that the Entertainment Software Association, the industry cheerleader for companies that publish video and computer games, would produce a positive report about games in the workplace. The ESA-sponsored study, carried out by KRC Research, shows that 75 percent of U.S. organizations that use video game-based training are getting positive results, and looking to expand their usage of games. Meanwhile, more than 75 percent of those without work-focused video games plan to introduce them in the next five years. If we didn’t enjoy any excuse to play games, we’d probably be a little more skeptical. Instead, we think this survey sounds about right.

More than one billion PCs now being used in the world — Research firm Gartner guesses that number and projects it to double by 2014.

Sony has lost $3 billion plus on the PlayStation 3 so far — “Even if the platform is ultimately successful,” an annual Sony company report says, “it may take longer than expected to recoup the investment, resulting in a negative impact on Sony’s profitability.”

LinkedIn may be coming to China — More here.

Review: Psystar’s unauthorized Mac clone is just like a real Mac — Psystar provoked excitement among many bloggers, at least, in April, as it promised to deliver a Macintosh operating system in a machine that it sells for far cheaper than the products that inspired it — in possible violation of Apple’s terms of service. No legal challenge has come from Apple, though. Now, Tom Krazit at CNET has a review of it here, after having used it for a month. He says it’s like using a Mac. [Photo via CNET.]

Five previously-undisclosed features due for Mac’s latest operating system, “Snow Leopard” — According to a scoop published by blog Apple Insider, the new features include a new multi-touch framework, smaller-sized applications, more advanced word processing features, auto activation of fonts, and support for the ZSF file system. Snow Leopard is due next spring. Also, we’ll see how fast Psystar implements it once it’s out.

Old iPhones worth as much as new ones on eBay — Blogger Jason Kottke breaks down observed sale prices on the auction site. And I quote:

- A lot of five never-opened unlocked 16Gb iPhones went for $2,755 ($551 per phone)
- A used unlocked 8Gb iPhone went for $405
- A used unlocked 16Gb iPhone went for $585.

Sun has a massive 256-thread Niagra processor coming in 2009 — The details here.

New York Times: Google News is not growing very fast – This article talks about issues at Google’s automated news aggregator. Although it’s not disclosed in the article, I suppose the New York Times would prefer its readers to use its own automated news aggregator, Blogrunner.

Here’s the latest action:

Sprint and Clearwire to join forces for WiMax venture – The telecom companies, along with Comcast, Time Warner, Google and Intel, are about to announce a $3.2 billion investment in a new wireless Internet company using WiMax technology, according to the Wall Street Journal. The Journal reports that the new company is valued at more than $12 billion and is launching two years ahead of competing offerings from AT&T and Verizon. The combination of that head start and the formidable lineup of backers should make this quite a coup for Sprint, which is the driving force behind the partnership. That’s also a lot of cash for Intel’s WiMax.

Sun previews app platform JavaFX – Sun’s software chief Rich Green gave a demonstration of JavaFX, which should compete with platforms like Adobe AIR for developers of hybrid web-desktop applications, at the JavaOne conference today. Green showed off a JavaFX application that runs Flickr and Twitter feeds in Facebook, then dragged the app onto the desktop. The same application ran on a Java-enabled phone. Rather inauspiciously, CNET reports that the application kept breaking, although the problems were blamed on the venue. The platform is set to launch this fall; I’m hoping more details will emerge about how it’s going to stand out against AIR.

Rocker Neil Young makes collected works available for download — Speaking of Sun, famed musician Neil Young is partnering with the company in an ambitious project to make all of his work available for purchase. Apparently, the content will be delivered on Blu-ray discs that check for and download new content as it becomes available. And apparently, Young says the Playstation 3 is the best device for downloading all that music. This sounds very cool, although I’m not sure that it’ll lead to as many PS3 sales as the new Grand Theft Auto game.

Microsoft’s media player Zune gets TV shows – For all you Zune owners who have been jealously eyeing those with iPods and wondering, “When will I be able to watch Battlestar Galactica on a tiny, portable screen?” the long nightmare is over.

Cisco revenue up 10 percent in Q3 – That’s an increase from $9.8 billion to $8.9 billion, particularly impressive after Sun recently reported a loss during the same period and blamed the weakening economy. Cisco’s profit, on the other hand, fell due to acquisition-related charges, and sales are expected to grow more slowly than previously anticipated.

Stephen Colbert is the Person of the Year (on the Internet) — The political comedian will receive be recognized as part of the 12th Annual Webby Awards next month. Colbert’s mockery of Internet trends has led to everyting from Wikipedia vandalism to possibly the largest Facebook group in history. Which is enough to make him an online pioneer, at least in the eyes of the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences.

Sun is aiming squarely at the start-up market, making several database and server related moves it hopes will lock start-ups into its services early on.

First, Sun is offering support to companies that integrate Sun’s open source database product, MySQL with the popular Amazon web services hosting, called Elastic Compute Cloud (or EC2). That’s big news for developers. They’ve wanted to use the popular MySQL for their database and EC2, but the mix has been dangerous.

That’s because until now, you risked losing data in your database if your instance of EC2 crashed. Now Sun will give you a way to save that data and even a customer service number to call, when you think all is lost and you’re about to jump off the balcony.

Second, Sun is announcing the official launch of its open source operating system, OpenSolaris. In conjunction, it’s announcing that OpenSolaris will now work with the popular Amazon’s web services.

Start-ups looking to build web sites are turning increasingly to Amazon’s web services platform, because it’s so worry free. It’s pays as you go: Amazon increases or decreases your server use, according to how much you need. And until now, Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), as it is called, has only worked with Linux-based operating systems, such as Redhat. Now when a company signs up with EC2, they get a drop-down menu to choose what operating system they want to use, and the OpenSolaris option is no extra charge. Redhat charges $19 a month. Besides Redhat, you can also select other free operating systems, such as Fedora or CentOS. However, Sun boasts its OpenSolaris is the better option because it provides a technology called ZFS, which lets a company more easily scale on a large number of storage devices, and also has a debugging tool called DTrace that the others don’t have.

Finally, in a nod to the growing popularity of social networking, Sun is offering developers a year’s worth of free hosting on its servers through a vendor partner, Joyent (Joyent’s servers are based on OpenSolaris). The program is meant for developers who are creating applications on the OpenSocial platform. The OpenSocial platform is an effort led by Google, to corral multiple social networking companies to agree to common standards so that developers can make a single application that works on all networks. Sun will offer a separate program for Facebook soon, the company said.

Joyent says it has 4,000 applications running on its cloud, generating more than 5 billion page views a month. In the past three weeks, Sun and Joyent have offered the free hosting to applications built for the Hi5 network, which was the first to release a complete set of APIs. Those applications are already generating 100 million page views a month, according to Sun.

[Disclosure: Sun Microsystems is a significant sponsor of VentureBeat’s digital media coverage]

Here’s the latest action:

Google’s search-within-search bugs some publishers — Apparently some folks such as the Washington Post aren’t looking too kindly on latest feature provided Google which lets people search within publications like the Post directly from Google. The feature, started earlier this month, lets you search for a publication on Google, for instance the Post or other sites like Wikipedia, The New York Times, and Wal-Mart, and then gives you a secondary search bar to search within those sites. Here’s the rub: If you search the Washington Post from that bar for say, “jobs,” you’ll see results for the Post’s employment pages, but also ads nearby for competing job sites like CareerBuilder and Monster.com. The NYT has the story.

Modu, a secretive company with a module that can be inserted into various wireless devices, raises $100 million — The Israeli company is expected to close the round within the “next few weeks,” according to the Globes, which also says the company is valued at a significant $150 million before the investment. The company has raised $20 million to date from Genesis Partners, Gemini Israel Funds, SanDisk and founder Dov Moran. The company is  making modular hardware products built around its tiny cell phone module; there’s a video here (or just see below).

Sun gets $44M contract from Pentagon’s DARPA to replace chip wires with laser beams –The wiring between processors on a chip is one of the biggest bottlenecks to increased efficiency in semiconductors. Sun has beat out Intel, IBM, MIT and HP on a government contract to figure out how to use silicon photonics, or light beams, to make chips faster and more efficient.

Will Fed make taxpayers pay more for Bear Stearns? — Shareholders of Bear Stearns, a third of which comprise Bear Stearns’ own employees, were so upset by the deal to bailout Bear Stearns at the low price of $2 per share that they’ve revolted and are pushing for a higher price of $10 per share. This is the bank that got caught up in the worst excesses of the subprime bubble, was apparently literally gambling while the ship sank and refused to participate in bailing out other companies (Long-Term Capital Management) in the past. So why would the Fed would and JPMorgan want to make taxpayers pay the higher price to bail these guys out?

Search arbitrage company Geosign disintegrates after receiving record $160M investment last year – The Canadian company’s saga shows the danger of trying to use an arbitrage strategy with Google’s ads. It was buying Google keywords and sending people to landing pages with Yahoo ads on them. When Google found out about the trick, it changed its terms and shut off Geosign’s ability to conduct its arbitrage. The company’s business model disintegrated. American Capital, the lead investor in the company last year, is looking pretty foolish. Why make an investment in a company that isn’t producing anything of sustainable value? We reported on the company here last year when it raised the money.

The X Prize Foundation offers $10 million to team that produces vehicles that can get 100 miles per gallon or more — Details here. The winning cars must carry four or more passengers and have climate control, an audio system and 10 cubic feet of cargo space. Qualifiers also must have four or more wheels, reach 100 mph, and reach 60 mph in 12 seconds, and have a range of 200 miles.

Battery companies LionCells and Seeo raise cash — Seeo, of Berkeley, Calif., has raised nearly $1 million in capital from Khosla Ventures, to make safe, high-density batteries. This comes after the company (which doesn’t have a web site) took in $1 million last year, according to a California regulatory document cited by VentureWire. Last month, another company, Menlo Park’s Lion Cells, whih makes high-power lithium ion batteries, raised approximately $12 million, according to the SEC. Battery Ventures and Nth Power participated in the second round, according to the filing.

GotVoice, the speech-to-text company, now wants to raise money too — Perhaps jolted by the announcement last week that competitor SpinVox raised $100 million in a carrier land-grab for its own speech-to-text technology, GotVoice is now saying it too wants to raise financing. To give it more time, the Kirkland, Wash. company has raised a $1.78 million a “bridge round” of funding to supplement the $3 million in raised in 2006 from Ignition and other individual investors, according to VentureWire.

Silicon Valley venture firm Morgenthaler Ventures raising funds — The venture capital firm is trying to raise another fund, totaling about $400 million, but VentureWire reports that its firm’s 2001 fund is below median in its performance and suggests investors are on the fence on the firm, founded in the 1960s.

Sun Microsystems has acquired Innotek, a Stuttgart, Germany provider of open source desktop virtualization software called VirtualBox, for an undisclosed amount.

VirtualBox is part of a hot group of companies allowing for much more efficient use of computers within large companies. VirtualBox enables desktop or laptop PCs running pretty much any operating system — Windows, Linux, Mac or Solaris — to run multiple, different operating systems side-by-side, switching between them with just a click of the mouse.

This allows software developers to more easily build multi-tier or cross-platform applications, and saves a company from having to buy multiple machines.

VirtualBox is also open source, and the move keeps Sun in the leadership pack as a major provider of open source software. It just acquired open source database company MySQL for $1 billion.

With more than four million downloads since January 2007, Innotek’s VirtualBox also has offices in Dresden, Berlin and the Russian Federation.

Innotek has been developing PC virtualization technology since 2001.

Yakov Sadchikov, who is following the European and Russian scenes closely, notes the acquisition comes soon after SWSoft, a competing virtualization software company from Russia was renamed Parallels.

Also, he cites Randall Kennedy of InfoWorld calling the Sun-Innotek deal a smart buy: “… even more important is Sun’s recognition of Innotek’s commitment to developers. VirtualBox has long been the preferred solution for open-source programmers seeking to ‘roll their own’ virtualization platforms.”

Innotek was privately funded.