When will American’s learn to stop worrying and love robots? That question must be echoing inside consumer robotics company iRobot (IRBT).

The Burlington, Mass., company went public nearly two years ago and its share price has spent much of last year below the $24 offering price. Revenue from consumer products –60% of iRobot’s revenue last year – fell 1% in the first half of 2007 from a year ago.

Some of that decline was tied to waning appeal of iRobot’s flagship consumer product, the Roomba vacuum. But iRobot had some new products up its sleeve, and it announced them last week: a robot to clean out rain gutters, and a mobile robot that can send images of kids, pets or the infirm to remote PCs. The response? iRobot’s stock was down as much as 3.2% Friday, hardly a standing ovation.

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The floodgates are back open for tech IPOs. Since August – a seasonally sluggish month compounded this year with market turmoil – VMWare (VMW), MercadoLibre (MELI) and athenahealth (ATHN) went out with ecstatic receptions. The pipeline could start getting crowded.

There have been notable fizzles as well: HireRight (HIRE) and Orbitz (OWW) are below their offering prices. So this seems as good a time as any to trot out the old lectures about doing homework and reading prospectuses.

Okay, I’ll spare the lecturing, and instead offer five tricks I’ve found that can speed up the evaluation of IPO candidates and shorten the slog through hundreds of pages of legalese. These have worked for me, but are far from definitive. If you have others please share them below. Continue »

In a post-market-bell bomb, E-Trade (ETFC) lowered its 2007 profit guidance by 31%. Even worse was why: It’s backing out of wholesale mortgages. This is, on the face of it, scary stuff. Few predicted E-Trade would be broad sided by the mortgage mess. So, the story in the financial press is that that this bodes ill for other financial companies.

I see it differently. My first thought was that E-Trade is cleaning house ahead of a rumored merger with TD Ameritrade (AMTD), just as Ameritrade on Friday came clean – after months of complaints – about the hacker who made off with millions of its customers’ contact information. I’d argue that these two companies are gussying themselves up for a wedding.

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Steve Jobs is sorry. He wants to give you $100 back for what you paid when you bought your iPhone too early. Provided, of course, you spend that $100 in one of his stores.

I disagree with Om on this. I get this feeling that this is exactly what Steve Jobs had planned all along? The chances are high that that extra $100 you would have saved, had the iPhone been appropriately priced to begin with, would have been spent outside an Apple (AAPL) store. Now it’s staying in Apple’s coffers. And Steve Jobs looks like a caring, responsive CEO who didn’t mean to hurt anyone’s feelings.

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Of all the lightning rods that have been sticking out of the uber-phenomenon known as Google (GOOG), CFO George Reyes was one of the most inconspicuous. Now Google says Reyes is out, but he will stick around long enough to find a successor.

CFO transitions are tricky things, and they’re even trickier for big stars like Google. Investors like to go to sleep at night knowing who is running the financial side of things, so normally a company will have a seasoned candidate lined up to make the transition as smooth as possible. Jittery investors may send the stock lower, which in turn makes employees compensated by stock options that much more antsy.

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When is a good thing too much of a good thing? It’s surely a question somewhere in the back of the minds of investors in VMWare (VMW). Since the stock went public two weeks ago — at $29 a share, 21% above its initial price of $24 a share — it has rocketed 150% to close Monday at $72 a share.

It’s now worth three times as much as underwriters first thought it was worth.

Did the lead underwriters mess up and leave tens of billions of dollars on the table? I don’t think so. If one were cynical, one would say Citicorp, JP Morgan and Lehman stand to gain more by priming the IPO pipeline with a superstar offering. The market for tech IPO’s now has a very appealing poster child.

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Stocks may be rebounding but the credit crunch isn’t finished. The mortgage market is hungover from a subprime binge. Senseless lending in odd investments like ninja loans have hurt banks. Hedge funds betting on complex, risky derivatives are closing up shop. And it’s only likely to get worse.

The fallout is hurting almost everyone, but not the technology sector – the very sector that, you must recall, has for most of this decade been remembered for its reckless, devil-may-care investments. The credit markets and the financial services companies that seemed to thrive during the lean years that followed the dot-com collapse are now the ones in trouble. But tech is doing just fine. The Nasdaq Financial Services Index is down 7% this year, while the Nasdaq Computer Index is up 9%.

But in today’s markets, no sector is an island. So how is the turmoil in other parts of the financial market likely to affect technology stocks?

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