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Hewlett-Packard said Monday it has submitted a bid to acquire data-storage company 3PAR for $1.6 billion, a 33.3% premium to the offer proposed by HP rival Dell last week.

HP offered to buy all of the outstanding common stock of 3PAR for $24 a share in cash, calling it "substantially superior" to the $18 per share offered by Dell, which is valued at $1.15 billion. Shares of 3PAR (PAR) closed at $18.04 Friday, and were up nearly 40% to $25.23 in early morning trading Monday.

In addition to upstaging Dell’s offer, HP’s bid is also higher than an earlier bid it had submitted for the company.

During a conference call with investors, HP’s executive vice president Dave Donatelli said HP had been in conversations with 3PAR about doing a deal prior to Dell’s agreement to buy the company last week, but would not comment on the original bid’s value. In its letter to 3PAR’s chief executive, HP said it is proposing "to increase our offer."

Shares of HP (HPQ, Fortune 500) were down about 1% Monday morning, while Dell’s (DELL, Fortune 500) stock was up nearly 1% quick guaranteed personal loans.

Dell spokesman David Frink said the company would not comment on HP’s offer. But the fact that 3PAR shares quickly rose above HP’s offering price of $24 a share could be a sign that investors believe Dell will sweeten its bid.

3PAR did not have a comment on HP’s offer early Monday.

The bidding war emerges as both tech giants face leadership challenges.

Earlier this month, HP said CEO Mark Hurd would be stepping down following sexual harassment claims against him and the company. HP’s chief financial officer Cathie Lesjak is serving as interim CEO but the company has made no mention yet about its CEO succession plans.

Meanwhile, a sizeable number of Dell investors showed their disdain for CEO and company founder Michael Dell by withholding their support for him at the company’s recent shareholder meeting. That meeting took place just weeks after the computer maker settled a fraud case with the SEC. 

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In the future, you better go green if you want a federal contract.

The General Services Administration has recommended that federal agencies begin collecting greenhouse gas emissions data from their suppliers. This would be on a voluntary basis, at least at first. Eventually, however, agencies could give purchasing preferences to companies with low greenhouse gas emissions.

GSA’s report was in response to an executive order issued in 2009 by President Barack Obama, which directed agencies to make reductions of greenhouse gas emissions a priority. Besides making cuts in their own emissions, agencies also can encourage their suppliers to reduce their emissions.

Suppliers that do so “can gain a competitive advantage not only with their federal customers, but also with their commercial customers and the public, who are increasingly seeker ‘greener’ companies when making procurement decisions,” GSA’s report concluded instant payday loan.

The report acknowledged that small businesses may not have the resources to have their greenhouse gas emissions verified by third parties. The government can ease this burden by phasing in any greenhouse gas emissions reporting program and allowing small firms to use streamlined reporting tools, the report stated.

Meanwhile, Obama asked federal agencies to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions from indirect sources such as employee travel and commuting by 13 percent by 2020. This builds on an earlier directive for agencies to reduce their emissions from direct sources.

See www.whitehouse.gov.

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The board of directors of Computer Services Inc. has approved a 15.8 percent increase to its quarterly cash dividend.

The dividend was raised to 11 cents per share from 9.5 cents per share. The dividend is payable Sept. 24 to shareholders of record Sept. 1.

It is the 22nd annual increase of the quarterly dividend, according to a news release issued by Computer Services Inc. The company announced last week it recorded a record first-quarter net income and revenue.

It had net income of $5 fast payday loans.3 million, or 36 cents per share, on revenue of $39.7 million, in the fiscal first quarter, ended May 30.

Paducah, Ky.-based Computer Services (Pink Sheets: CSVI) provides core banking services such as payment processing, Internet, card services, risk assessment, fraud prevention, network management and regulatory compliance to financial institutions and corporations.

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Banner Corp. said it issued more than 85 million shares of stock at $2 per share in a recent stock offering and raised about $162 million, after discounts and commissions were deducted.

Last week, Walla Walla-based Banner (NASDAQ: BANR), parent of Banner Bank and Islanders Bank, said it “intends to use a significant portion of the net proceeds from the offering to strengthen Banner Bank’s regulatory capital ratios and to support managed growth . The company expects to use the remaining net proceeds for general working capital purposes.”

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It’s spring, the eternal season of rejuvenation.

And that has some hoping, at last, for a rebirth of the housing market.

It has been a rough two years, with buyers and sellers battered by a wave of foreclosures, tight credit and uncertain job prospects. Government support — in the form of tax credits and federal backing for mortgages — has helped keep sales moving. But now those supports are ending, making this spring a key test of whether the housing market can walk on its own again.

"The next 60 days, they should tell us where we’re going," said Letty Demay, president of the St. Louis Association of Realtors. "Hopefully we’re going to see a good year."

Despite the long, grim slide, there are reasons for optimism: Chief among them is the fact that, for people with cash and confidence in their jobs, it is a good time to buy a house.

Between low prices, rock-bottom interest rates and the tax breaks for first-time homebuyers, housing is as affordable as it has been in years. Prices in St. Louis are back at 2004 levels, according to the Federal Housing Finance Agency, and data tracked by Wells Fargo say the number of St. Louisans who can afford to buy is near 18-year highs.

That is driving a surge of interest this spring. Area real estate agents are busier than they have been in quite some time, Demay said. Phones are ringing. Houses are getting shown.

"I think overall we’ve got a stronger market than we’ve had in the last 18 months," she said.

And while that strength hasn’t yet shown up in sales numbers, which are not yet available for March, it is beginning to show in homes under contract. In the first week of April, the number of pending sales in St. Louis County — homes that are in contract but not yet closed upon — was nearly back to 2008 levels, after plunging 42 percent last year, according to data from Kelsey Cottrell Realty.

The market is strongest at lower price points, where the $8,000 tax credit has more impact and financing is easier to come by. The share of listings under $300,000 that are in contract is actually higher than it was two years ago, said the firm’s co-owner Kevin Cottrell. He said his agents were seeing something they hadn’t in quite some time: homes selling not in weeks, but in days.

"If they’re priced right, they won’t even make it to the weekend," he said.

But some of that strength comes from supports that are soon to be pulled out.

Homes must be in contract by April 30 to qualify for the $8,000 tax credit; and unlike last fall, when it was first set to expire, there is little momentum in Congress for another extension.

Meanwhile, interest rates are widely expected to rise after the Federal Reserve stopped buying mortgage-backed securities at the end of March.

So far, rate increases haven’t happened — Freddie Mac’s average 30-year fixed rate mortgage climbed from 5.08 percent to 5.21 before falling back to 5.07 a week later — but many experts think they will creep up over the next few months if the economy improves. Some predict six percent by year’s end.

That’s still low by historic standards, but over 30 years every 1 percentage point increase adds roughly 10 percent to the cost of the loan.

That, as much as anything, may push more people to buy this spring, Cottrell said, even if they don’t hit the tax credit’s timeline.

"What does your total cost of ownership look like if rates go above 6 percent?" he asked. "It’s really not about the $8,000 credit, it’s about what you’re going to spend to own the thing."

But the recovery is still tentative, and nobody is expecting the market to roar back, especially in the area that most interests sellers: price.

Prices have bounced back a bit in the past six months but are still well off their mid-decade peaks. Median prices in St. Louis have dropped 6.5 percent over the past three years, said David Stiff, chief economist for Fiserv, a financial data firm. He said he expected a roughly 1 percent decline in both 2010 and 2011. It’ll be 2014 before prices fully rebound here, he said.

"Unemployment is still quite high, and that will remain a drag on housing demand," Stiff said. "We’re expecting prices to bottom out at the end of the year. And then I think it’ll be a pretty slow recovery."

Still, he said, the housing market is on the way to recovery. There may be some stops and starts. Sales may drop again after April 30. But a recovery is coming.

"We’re far closer than we have been," Stiff said.

Just how close, we will find out soon.

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From avid to involved to casual, two out of three New York residents consider themselves sports fans and the favorite team in the Empire state is the defending World Series champion Yankees.

A poll released Monday by the Siena College Research Institute finds that a total of 68 percent of residents statewide — 16 percent are “avid” fans, 27 percent are “involved” fans, 25 percent are “casual” fans — while 32 percent are “non-fans.”

At the same time, the cost of attending a sporting event is keeping more and more fans away from stadiums and arenas. Over 50 percent of New Yorkers attend at least one professional sports event each year, but despite 63 percent saying they “love to go,” 88 percent say costs have gotten out of control and 77 percent now prefer watching the game on TV to attending in person.

New York City-area teams are among the highest-priced tickets in all sports while the top major professional sports teams in the Upstate region — Buffalo’s Bills and Sabres — rank among the lowest, respectively, in the National Football League and National Hockey League.

Asked about their favorite team, the Yankees came out of top at 28 percent and another 10 percent described the Yanks as their second favorite. The Yankees received three times the support of their closest rival, the Mets for the single top spot and almost double the overall support when looking at each respondent’s first and second favorite team. Overall, the Yankees are named by 38 percent, the Mets by 20 percent and the New York Giants by 20 percent. Further down the list are the Bills and New York Jets at 8 percent, the Sabres at 4 percent. Also, the Boston Red Sox were at 4 percent, followed by Syracuse University and the Pittsburgh Steelers at 2 percent, and the New York Knicks and Rangers at 1 percent.

The SRI Sports Poll showed that New Yorkers are engaged in athletics as 68 percent of regularly watch or listen to sports, talk about the games with friends or read about sports in newspapers or on the Internet.

“When it comes to sports fanship, actions speak louder than words. When asked whether or not they see themselves as a sports fan, 61 percent say 'yes' and 39 percent say 'no,'" said Dr. Don Levy, SRI’s director. "But, we looked at whether or not New Yorkers watch sports or sports news on television or listened on the radio, surfed the net for sports news, read about sports or talked to friends and family about sports. We found that nearly seven out of every 10 residents walks the walk of a sports fan and for 16 percent of all New Yorkers being a sports fan is a major part of what they do each and every day.”

The SRI New York Sports Poll was conducted March 22-26, 29 by random telephone calls to 876 New York adults.

The survey can be found here.

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A federal grand jury returned indictments against two Roseville residents, charging them with conspiracy to commit copyright infringement.

The indictment alleges that Nicholas Summerlin and Angelica Parson, both 22, sold illegal copies of Adobe Creative Suite Master Collection 3, Microsoft Office 2007, and Rosetta Stone language software. The software had a combined retail value of $561,430.

Both received a cease-and-desist letter from Rosetta Stone, but they allegedly kept selling their pirated software in 330 transactions in 2008 and 2009.

The Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Unit of the Sacramento U.S. Attorney’s office is prosecuting the pair, said a release from Benjamin Wagner, U.S. Attorney in the California Eastern District, based in Sacramento.

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China overtook the United States in renewable energy investments for the first time ever in 2009, attracting nearly twice as many dollars and becoming the world’s largest market for clean energy projects.

Renewable energy investments in China - mostly wind farms - totaled $34.6 billion in 2009, according to report released Thursday by the Pew Charitable Trusts and Bloomberg New Energy Finance. In the United States, $18.6 billion was spent.

The report’s authors stressed it was the stable, long-term policies put forth by the Chinese government and easier access to credit that attracted the money, and said the numbers do not bode well for America.

"The United States’ competitive position is at risk in the emerging clean energy economy," Phyllis Cuttino, director of the Pew Environment Group’s Global Warming Campaign, said in a statement.

The report noted that over 700,000 clean energy jobs have been created in the Untied States since 1998, and with so much money being invested in the alternative energy market, this was likely just the beginning.

But with the U.S. losing its dominance in renewable energy, future jobs could be on the line.

Cuttino urged U.S. lawmakers to put a price on carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas emitted from burning fossil fuels. A price on carbon would make fossil fuels more expensive and renewables more competitive. She also said the country needs to mandate that utilities buy a certain percent of their power from renewable sources, and create stable, long-term subsidies for renewable energy.

China uses huge amounts of coal to generate electricity and has famously resisted putting a price on carbon dioxide. But the country does have an aggressive mandate that its utilities use more renewable energy.

There are several bills in Congress that would do what Cuttino is seeking but they face considerable resistance from lawmakers and the general public. Opponents either fear the measures would be too costly to the economy, don’t believe renewable energy is ready for prime time, or don’t think global warming is a major problem.

The investment tallies for China and the United States include all private investments in renewable energy projects, as well as money renewable energy firms raised in stock market offerings, venture capital and private equity deals bad credit pay day loans. They do not include government grants or corporate R&D, which in the United States totaled another $7 billion. How much China spent on government support and corporate R&D was not immediately available.

Globally

Worldwide the report said $162 billion was spent on renewable energy, down just 6.6% from the year before. That compares to a 19% drop in investment in the oil and gas industry, according to the report.

In 2010, Bloomberg New Energy Finance is expecting a 25% increase in renewable energy investments to $200 billion.

Asia, with economies that were less severely hit by the recession and easier access to money, saw a 37% increase in investments in 2009. In Europe and America’s harder hit economies and tighter capital markets, investments dropped 16% and 33% respectively.

In relation to the size of its economy, Spain saw the largest investment, 0.71% of its gross domestic product went into clean energy. Spain was followed by the United Kingdom, China and Brazil. The United States ranked 11th.

Most of the money spent on renewable energy is in the form of power projects, wind farms, solar arrays or other things that actually produce electricity. Only a small part is spent on R&D or capitalizing start-up companies.

Yet when it comes to innovation, the United States is still the world’s leader. The country attracted 60% of all venture capital money spent on renewable energy worldwide. Venture capital generally goes to start-up firms that hold the most promise for future technologies.

"We’re very good at creating companies," John Woolard, chief executive at solar power firm BrightSource Energy, said on a conference call discussing the report. "We’re not doing a very good job creating markets."  

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For those who expect a brutal jobs market and a nervous consumer to threaten the economic recovery this year, a rally in the retail sector is a surprising bright spot.

Even with the market’s most recent run up, the Dow Jones industrial average has gained a modest 3% year to date, while the S&P 500 is up just 4% and the Nasdaq composite has risen a mere 4.6%.

Meanwhile, the retail sector has been staging a stealth rally, with the S&P Retail (RLX) index jumping more than 8% from the start of the year and the Morgan Stanley retail index surging more than 14%. Individual stocks have been even more buoyant, with many of the best performers in the S&P 500, the S&P MidCap 400 and S&P SmallCap 600 coming from the retail sector.

"I think it has to be seen as a good sign," said Bernard McGinn, chief executive of McGinn Investment Management.

He said the stock gains suggest that retailers have become more efficient since the recession. And that has translated into improving sales and profits. On top of that, consumers are starting to loosen their purse strings.

"They’re not spending anywhere near the levels of three years ago, but they are spending more than we thought they would," he said.

A perception that the sector is stabilizing and that the economic recovery will pick up later in the year has brought in some big buyers. But many investors remain wary of the buoyancy in the retail sector amid bets that the current pickup in spending can’t last, particularly with unemployment continuing to rise.

"The gains in consumer discretionary and the retail sector mean people are banking on a powerful recovery that we don’t think is going to happen," said Ben Halliburton, chief investment officer at Tradition Capital Management.

He said he’d rather be in the consumer staples sector because those stocks have a global presence and aren’t tied to the U.S. consumer. Some of the year-to-date winners in that sector include Tyson Foods (TSN, Fortune 500) (+42%), Dr Pepper Snapple Group (DPS, Fortune 500) (+24%) and PepsiCo (PEP, Fortune 500) (+9%).

The fact that many individual investors are unwilling to jump into the retail sector with both feet could also be seen as a positive indicator, from a contrarian viewpoint no fax cash advances.

"Retailers are up a lot, but the overall sentiment is negative and a lot of people are still betting against the stocks," said Ryan Detrick, senior technical strategist at Schaeffer’s Investment Research.

"When you have something helping to lead the market higher yet people are throwing their hands up, that can be a good thing," he explained. "That skepticism can keep driving the stocks higher."

Sales drive stock growth

Still, improving store sales have been translating into share growth for many of the nation’s largest publicly-traded retailers.

December and January same-store sales rose by a larger than expected pace, significant as the two months include the critical holiday period. Easter sales are also expected to have risen 2%. Same-store sales is a retail industry metric that measures stores that have been open a year or more.

Considering the level of insecurity about the economy, the willingness of Americans to spend even moderately more than a year ago is a step in the right direction.

Clothing retailers have spiked 17% year-to-date, led by Ross Stores (ROST, Fortune 500) (up 25.4%) and Abercrombie & Fitch (ANF) (up 24.6%). General merchandisers are up 12%, including Family Dollar Stores (FDO, Fortune 500) (up 27.3%) and Big Lots (BIG, Fortune 500) (up 24.2%). Big department chains are up 11%, including Macy’s (M, Fortune 500) (up 28.6%) and Sears Holdings (SHLD, Fortune 500) (up 24.7%).

Discounters have been outperforming their luxury brethren, unsurprising in a post-recession economy. But the sector as a whole has also been holding up well, despite middling consumer sentiment and an unemployment rate that stood at 9.7% last month.

Aside from traditional retail, consumer discretionary, the category that also includes restaurants, hotels and casinos, is up 8% from the start of the year. That makes it the second-best performing sector this year, narrowly trailing industrials, which include Dow stocks Boeing (BA, Fortune 500) (+29%) and General Electric (GE, Fortune 500) (up 15%). 

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Former U.S. Interior Secretary Stewart Udall died Saturday. He was 90.

Udall served under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson during the 1960s. He previously served as a congressman from Arizona.

Stewart Udall was the brother of the late Morris Udall and the father of U.S. Sen. Tom Udall, D-N.M. He is viewed as one of the early leaders in the modern U no teletrack payday loan.S. environmental and conservation movements.

He died of natural causes in New Mexico, according to statements by his family.

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