(Business 2.0) – [HIT] Bet the crackers aren't Ritz: Extras like the gourmet brown-bag lunches that Ritz-Carlton hotels give to their pampered air travelers helped put the upscale chain over the top in J.D. Power & Associates's North American Hotel Guest Satisfaction Index. This year the Ritz ranked higher than the perennial winner, the Four Seasons.

[HIT] The empire strikes back: With TiVo getting a lot of attention for adding home networking features, cable companies are fighting back with their own digital recorders. The beneficiary: veteran set-top box manufacturer Scientific Atlanta, which shipped 158,000 of its Explorer 8000 DVRs to providers like Time Warner and Cox Communications over the summer. Investors have noticed: Scientific Atlanta is now trading at about $31 a share, up 150 percent in a year.

[HIT] The empire also has good lawyers: Comcast, the nation's largest cable operator with 30 percent of the market, is throwing its weight around with content providers. It recently sued Liberty Media in order to shave $200 million off its annual bill for Liberty's Starz Encore movie channels. Comcast will now pay Starz on a per-subscriber basis rather than a flat monthly fee.

[MISS] Analyze this: For the past four years, the performance of Wall Street analysts' 600 most highly recommended stocks has lagged far behind that of the 600 stocks they most frequently panned, according to a new study from Zacks Investment Research. Mitch Zacks, the firm's director of research, notes that by the time Wall Street is recommending a stock, it is already priced for perfection. Zacks says if analysts love it, don't buy it.

[HIT] No longer sitting by the phone: At last, Bill Gates is getting his calls returned by the wireless industry. Microsoft announced that Motorola's MPx200 phone, due out by the holidays, will use its Smartphone operating system. For all its woes, Motorola is a step up for Bill & Co.'s wireless ambitions: Past partners include the unfamiliar Sendo and HTC.

[MISS] Oh, well, in that case...it still didn't work: After trying for a year and a half to sell its Citi Cash Card to students, Citibank cut up the cards. Nearly two years behind the competing Visa Buxx card and carrying a hefty $25 annual fee, the rarely advertised prepaid MasterCard turns out to have been "a tool for consumer education," a spokesperson explains. Now that's priceless.

[MISS] Salesfarce: The Dalai Lama endorses peace and compassion. His Holiness doesn't endorse Salesforce.com, a fact the company was forced to acknowledge after it produced a poster promoting one of its events that featured an image of the exiled Tibetan leader. CEO Marc Benioff quickly apologized, yanked the posters, canceled the event, and squared everything with a $100,000 donation. Says the head of the Himalayan Foundation, "I think Benioff learned that you can be edgy without being offensive."