When U.S. Toyota executive Jim Lentz fields questions today on Digg, there probably won't be many surprises. Photo: Toyota.

If you’re Toyota (TM) right now, the last thing you want is more surprises. That might explain why Jim Lentz, president of the U.S. sales division, will be fielding questions about the automaker’s troubles on social media site Digg today at 2 p.m. PT, 5 p.m. ET; it actually looks to be a pretty low-risk affair.

Normally, “low-risk” and “Digg” don’t go together in the world of corporate PR. On Digg, users get to vote topics into popularity or oblivion– so it can be an image management nightmare.

Want to see what an image management nightmare looks like? Go to Digg and search for the Must Dugg items under “customer service.” You’ll find some gems including, “Best Buy Cancels Your Order As You’re There Shouting Stop” (8,599 diggs) and “Toyota Employees Taped Watching Porn in Customer’s Truck” (3,480 diggs). And yes, both stories are pretty much as bad as they sound. More

Cisco CEO John Chambers says he plans to hire as many as 3,000 workers soon – perhaps half in the U.S. Photo: Cisco.

John Chambers is often in a sunny mood, but on Wednesday he had some obvious reasons: Cisco posted financial results that blew past Wall Street's expectations, signaling that despite the rough economy businesses are spending on technology again.

I caught up with him after the earnings announcement to get some more detail on why the results were so strong, and whether he's really planning to ratchet up Cisco's (CSCO) payroll by a couple thousand more workers over the next few quarters. Below is an edited transcript of our conversation:

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These are strong results. What product areas did the biggest upside surprises come from?

The interesting thing, Jon, is that the upside surprises were in every category. The U.S. went from flat to up 17%, emerging markets went from down negative high 20s to zero, countries like China, India and Brazil all responded very well. China was up in the high teens, Brazil was up about 30, India was up in the low 20s. In terms of service providers, actually they were up 10% after a really tough quarter a couple of quarters ago when they were down 20%. And if you look at commercial, they were down in the low double digits and this quarter they were up about 10%. The enterprise was remarkably well balanced around the world, with growth of about 7%. More

Here's the downside of being a rock star: People expect you to rock. So it is for Cisco (CSCO), the networking powerhouse that managed to cut $1 billion during the steepest part of the downturn and come out swinging.

It looks like the company will outpace analyst expectations for last quarter's revenue and profit when it reports earnings after the bell today. Trouble is, Wall Street already expects Cisco to do well – so to move the needle on its stock, Cisco may have to either deliver a big surprise, give bullish guidance, or both. More

It's easy to imagine why Apple would want to bring comics to the iPad – and thanks to Steve Jobs, it has an inside track to make that happen. Photo illustration: Jon Fortt. Photo: iPad, Apple. Comic book cover, Marvel.

Now that we’ve all seen the iPad and debated its design merits, let’s cut to the chase: This thing will rise or fall on content. If Steve Jobs can get a bunch of cool books and apps on the thing, we’ll want one. If not, we won’t.

Where will His Steveness get some of those books? I say the same place he’s gotten so many movies and TV shows for iTunes in the past: Disney (DIS).

When Jobs needed movies for iTunes, Apple (AAPL) got them from Disney. When he needed TV shows? Disney (which owns ABC) was among the first to sign up. Why all the Disney love? Remember, Steve Jobs was the CEO of Pixar, which had a very lucrative movie distribution deal with Disney. Things only got cozier in 2006, when Disney bought Pixar for $7.4 billion, turning Jobs into the Mouse House’s largest individual shareholder.

But wait, you say. Disney isn’t exactly a major book publisher.

Oh, yes it is. Disney just bought Marvel, remember? More

As Chief Marketing Officer of HP's Personal Systems Group, Satjiv Chahil has helped lead a turnaround in the PC business. Photo: HP.

Satjiv Chahil, the marketing impresario who helped Hewlett-Packard seize the top spot in the global PC market, is retiring.

Chahil, the chief marketing officer of the Personal Systems Group, leaves HP (HPQ) at the top of its game. Since he joined the company four years ago, the company has taken share from rivals such as Dell (DELL) through a combination of operational efficiency and savvy messaging. For example, under Chahil’s watch HP launched an ad campaign called “The Computer Is Personal Again” featuring celebrities such as Serena Williams, Jerry Seinfeld, Vera Wang and Jay-Z.

In an industry where executives have traditionally focused on component costs rather than design and presentation, Chahil, 59, has always been something of a rebel. After stints at IBM and Xerox, he joined Apple (AAPL) in the early 1990s and was a major advocate for putting CD-ROM drives into computers. (It seemed like a wild idea back when floppy disks ruled.) More

How did that happen? Before the iPad announcement, folks got on my case for saying I didn't want a tablet. After the announcement? Well, I still don't want this version of the iPad, but I think this is one of the most impressive pieces of technology we've seen from Apple.

Sarah Lacy of Techcrunch isn't so sure. When I defended the iPad's technology merits, she called me a fanboy. (I love mixing it up with Sarah. I especially enjoyed the part where we imagined Steve Jobs punching me in the face.)

This episode of NBC Bay Area's Press:Here airs Sunday 1/31 at 9 a.m.
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Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad, and some were underwhelmed. OK, maybe iPad 1.0 isn't a must-have – but this is innovative device is just the beginning of something great.

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Jon Fortt of Fortune interviews Kevin Brown, CEO of Coraid, about his startup's approach to storage for the cloud computing era.
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