Recent revelations about alleged insider trading at hedge funds make me wonder if the average investor has a fair shot at investing in stocks. The most recent story pertains to a $15 billion hedge fund that closed back in May.

And last month, the $3.7 billion Galleon hedge fund was shuttered after its founder was arrested with many others. I think it's great the SEC is starting to focus on the problem. I hope the fear of getting caught will stop insider trading by hedge funds altogether.

Facebook looks like its worth close to $10 billion right now, based on actual transactions in the stock. The social networking site has seen its shares surge on an exchange for private companies, suggesting that the company is perceived to be headed in the right direction. Of course, private companies don't have to disclose all their dirty laundry, so assume that the current "market" value is based on only the rosiest of impressions. Some see this as a leading indicator of a Facebook IPO, which is bound to ignite unparalleled excitement.

There's room for a little common sense, though, and investors should take advantage of it. Facebook remains down 33% from its 2007 peak value of $15 billion, and the recent trading activity implies a value slightly below that defined by the latest investment in the company. It probably makes sense to keep the corks in the champagne bottles a little bit longer, but only because the vintage isn't quite right yet.

Large U.S. banks have raised money to improve their capital position this year, in some cases because the government required them to do so. Bank analysts have worried that a wave of write-downs on commercial real estate and credit card debt might require some big financial firms to go back to the funding well. That raises the question of whether institutional investors still have any appetite for putting money into global banks.

Those concerns about bank funding may have been allayed a bit. Mitsubishi UFJ (MTU), the largest bank in Japan and a major investor in Morgan Stanley (MS), is raising $11 billion. The firm has already filed papers with Japan's Ministry of Finance to sell common shares.

At the Microsoft (MSFT) Professional Developers Conference on Tuesday, company CTO Ray Ozzie (pictured) took the stage to chat about his company's latest effort in cloud computing. Called WindowsAzure, this new Microsoft offering will allow companies to write code on a cloud-based operating system that runs in Microsoft data centers. After a year of testing, Azure is slated to go live in January, with paying customers coming aboard in February.

Microsoft is playing catchup in the cloud realm. Amazon (AMZN) and Google (GOOG) have both been running live cloud-computing offerings for over a year and have gained considerable traction with Internet companies and IT organizations seeking to avoid the limitations of physical servers, hardware maintenance and static bandwidth contracts. The big surprise that Ozzie unveiled, however, wasn't technological. It was actually a customer: Automattic, the hot software and blog hosting company that is behind the highly popular WordPress platform.

Earlier this month, Microsoft (MSFT) co-founder Paul Allen was diagnosed with diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, a form of non-Hodgkins lymphoma. According to a memo sent to Allen's staff by his sister Jody, he has begun chemotherapy and is optimistic about his chances of beating the disease.

This is not Allen's first experience with cancer: 26 years ago, he was diagnosed with Hodgkins Lymphoma. At the time, he was chief technical officer for Microsoft, which he founded in 1975 with high school friend Bill Gates. He left the software company to fight the disease, but ultimately decided not to return. While his $11.5 billion fortune, generated by his early investment in Microsoft, pales beside that of Gates, it has still been sufficient to land him the number 17 spot on the Forbes 400 list of wealthiest Americans.

Internet titan Google (GOOG) increased its Web search market-share again in October, while No. 2 Yahoo (YHOO) lost share at a "scary" pace, in the words of one analyst. Bing, Microsoft's (MSFT) new service and the No. 3 player, also registered gains, reported ComScore, an Internet metrics company.

Overall, Google's web search share climbed to 65.4% last month, up from 64.9% in September. Microsoft rose to 9.9% from 9.4%, while Yahoo fell to 18% from 18.8%. October saw the fifth consecutive share increase for Microsoft. But Google's share increased to the highest level ComScore has ever registered for the company. "Tonight's data was positive for Google and Microsoft, and scary for Yahoo," Broadpoint AMTech internet analyst Ben Schachter said in a note to clients.

Much of the fun of observing the friendship between Warren Buffett and Bill Gates is derived from the fact that they are such unlikely comrades. In Gates, you have the 54-year-old quintessential tech geek billionaire. And in Buffett, the revered 79-year-old homespun, value-investor billionaire. What could they possibly have in common?

Oh yeah, billions. Together, the two are worth a combined $100 billion, an announcer pointed out during an event in New York Thursday organized to let future business leaders -- MBA students at Columbia University -- ask questions of the fabled capitalists.

Bing is, apparently, still alive and kicking. On Nov. 11, Microsoft (MSFT) announced a deal with Wolfram|Alpha, the search engine created by Mathematica founder and math genius Stephen Wolfram. Microsoft will be Wolfram|Alpha's first partner and will incorporate results from the search engine, which aims to provide actual answers to questions asked in natural language.

This follows on the heels of Microsoft inking deals to pull in real-time update data from Twitter and Facebook. But perhaps best for Microsoft was Bing's very strong traffic growth numbers for October.

In the technology world, every day seems like Google day. Or Apple day. Or Microsoft day. Or Facebook day. Or Twitter day. So where the heck is Yahoo (YHOO), the erstwhile search titan that has suffered humiliating trials and tribulations over the last two years?

Answer: It's plotting and planning to regain its lost luster, according to still-relatively-new CEO Carol Bartz. During a luncheon hosted by the American Chamber of Commerce on Tuesday in Singapore, Bartz sounded bullish notes about Yahoo, as well as the broader economy.

As expected, the E.U. raised objections to the Oracle (ORCL) buyout of Sun (JAVA) at about the same time that the Department of Justice approved the deal. The E.U.'s objection is based on the large market share that the two tech companies would have in the MySQL software business.

European authorities have been deviling American companies for years. In 2001 they killed the GE (GE) deal to purchase Honeywell (HON), which would have been the crowning achievement of Jack Welch's tenure at the world's largest conglomerate. The E.U. has troubled Microsoft (MSFT) and Intel (INTC) over antitrust concerns, and now it has brought up similar issues with Oracle's plans.

The $750 million acquisition of mobile advertising network AdMob by search giant Google (GOOG) signals a new stage of the battle for the soul of the mobile Internet between Google and its arch-rival Apple (AAPL). The acquisition gives Google the strongest player in the fast-growing market for putting advertisements on smartphones. And it's the latest brawny move by Google in an unspoken war that has broken into pitched battle in the past two weeks.

Microsoft's (MSFT) new Windows 7 operating system has launched with a sales boom. In its first weekend, sales were 234 percent higher than what predecessor Windows Vista racked up, according to retail sales measurement company NPD Group. That's a very strong sign for Microsoft, considering that the holiday sales cycle hasn't kicked in yet and there were no major external catalysts, such as back-to-school sales, to stimulate purchases.

Far more important than consumer sales, however, is whether large and midsize companies decide to buy Windows 7 for their fleets of laptops and desktops. Chances of that happening are very high, although the bulk of those purchases probably won't occur for another 12 months at least. Corporate IT managers always prefer to test-drive software for extended periods and normally wait for Microsoft to release fixes to new software, which usually takes around six months.

Cisco Systems Inc. (CSCO) posted a stronger-than-expected profit for its fiscal first quarter and said business was recovering as customers are buying more network equipment again. Its revenue outlook for the current quarter also exceeded Wall Street expectations. Shares rose over 3.5 percent in premarket trade.

Toyota Motor Corp. (TM) posted a surprise profit last quarter -- its first after three losing quarters -- and trimmed its projected red ink for the year. Toyota said results were due to government measures around the world designed to boost sales of environmentally friendly cars and other vehicles. Shares were 2 percent higher ahead of the bell.

Google (GOOG) CEO Eric Schmidt spoke at MIT this afternoon. He had some interesting things to say about the company's place in the world -- and how Google can continue to follow its golden rule, "Don't be evil."

Schmidt came to MIT to honor the memory of one of my MIT professors, Dr. Michael Hammer, who, as I wrote earlier, tragically passed away about 14 months ago. Hammer was most famous for co-authoring Reengineering the Corporation, along with my former boss, James A. Champy. But Hammer received tenure as a computer science professor at MIT before he became a management guru.

The 500 largest non-financial companies in the U.S. hold $994 billion in cash and short-term investments, up about 8 percent from last year, according to an exclusive study conducted by The Wall Street Journal. Some of the largest tech companies like Google (GOOG) and Apple (AAPL) have tens of billions on their balance sheets.

There is nothing new about corporations holding high cash balances during a recession, since companies want to maintain a buffer against falling sales and earnings losses. But it raises the question of what will happen to the cash as the economy recovers.