The Battle Road Tech Index™ climbed 2.1 percent for the week ended December 18, 2009, closing at 1638. For the week, 15 of the 25 Index components increased in value. Year-to-date, the index is up 64 percent, having started at a value of 1000.

The following companies were notable movers for the week:

Research in Motion (NASDAQ: RIMM, $70.00) rose 9.7 percent this week. On Thursday, December 17, RIMM announced its Q3 earnings results after the stock market closed. The BlackBerry maker reported a 40 percent jump in sales to $3.92 billion, $140 million higher than consensus estimates of $3.78 billion, and earnings of $1.10 a share, six cents better than the consensus estimate of $1.04. RIMM also raised its current quarter guidance, as it expects revenues to be in the range of $4.2 to $4.4 billion and EPS to be in the range of $1.23 to $1.31 per diluted share.

Western Digital (NYSE: WDC, $42.79) gained 9.7 percent this week. The hard-drive industry is expected to face supply rather than demand constraints through the end of 2010. This should quell selling price pressure in the near term, and the industry has the opportunity to benefit from a 2010 hardware refresh as well. Western Digital now has the opportunity to take share in the enterprise segment, which has long been dominated by its top competitor Seagate (NYSE: STX, $17.46). This presents an opportunity for margin expansion as well, since enterprise deals tend to have more favorable terms.

Shares of Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL, $24.34) rose 6.9 percent this week after the company reported better than expected fiscal Q2 earnings. New license sales declined six percent, and overall software revenue climbed five percent, an indication that demand continues to strengthen after bottoming in early 2009. Further, with its primary competitor SAP (NYSE: SAP, $46.34) continuing to report double digit percentage declines in software revenue, it would seem that Oracle is winning market share. With Oracle preparing to release its long awaited Fusion product line in 2010, its product pipeline appears stronger than that of SAP, which has struggled to bring its on-demand Business ByDesign product to market.

Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN, $128.28) fell by 4.2 percent this week, finally giving back some of the gains the shares have amassed over the last few weeks. Widely expected to have an extremely strong fourth quarter, the company faces numerous challenges in the electronic book market, as Sony, Barnes and Noble, and now Google continue to focus their efforts on the future of electronic book, magazine and newspaper distribution.

Shares of Netflix (NASDAQ: NFLX, $53.27) fell by 4.4 percent, amid announcements made by NCR Corp (NYSE: NCR, $10.69) that it would begin to roll out a series of movie rental kiosks, jointly branded by Blockbuster, in an attempt to gain ground in the retail kiosk movie rental business. Along with Coinstar (NASDAQ: CSTR, $26.91), the two companies combined will soon have more than 20,000 kiosks nation wide, ready to rent $1 per night movies, assuming that the movies are returned the next day.