HEXUS.sharewatch: Google punished for profit miss

It's tough at the top, it would seem. Google announced its quarterly earnings late last week and while it managed 27 percent revenue growth, they fell just thought of analyst expectations in terms of earnings per share.

Investors were clearly hoping for a lot better and punished Google's share price with a fall of over eight percent.

Most scrutiny was pointed at Google's increased overheads, and while its senior management argued much of this was due to investment, analysts were concerned about the spiralling cost of recruiting and retaining talent.

 The big gainer of the week from our list of US-listed tech companies was graphics outfit NVIDIA. It's shares have taken a battering since the launch of the Apple iPad 2 and its A5 chip, which made people more pessimistic about sales of Android tablets, which predominantly use NVIDIA's Tegra 2 chip.

But observers now thing NVIDIA's stock may be on the cheap side and see plenty of growth potential as a bunch of mobile devices running Tegra 2 hit the market later on this year.