The FT’s editorial page takes issue with the EU Commission’s involvement in the Oracle / Sun deal:
The mere possibility that a $7.4bn technology merger in California might be blocked by regulators nearly half the world away over a fly-speck of a business shows how odd the dispute over Oracle’s proposed acquisition of Sun Microsystems has [...]
Yelp has bowed to pressure from disgruntled small business owners and is making changes to its popular reviews platform.
In the wake of three class action lawsuits that accused Yelp of extortion, chief executive Jeremy Stoppelman today announced a series of changes to the site and the formation of a new small business advisory council.
The most [...]
Local reviews site Yelp is facing some unflattering reviews of its own service.
In a class action lawsuit filed in Los Angeles federal court, the red-hot startup is accused of unfair competition and what amounts to extorting small businesses.
The plaintiff in the suit, an animal hospital in Los Angeles, alleges that after negative reviews about its [...]
Social games are oft criticised for being little more than drivel. It’s a fair charge. After all, there’s not much intellectual value in games like Sorority Life and Mob Wars.
Nonetheless, they have become among the most popular activities for users of social networks. Zynga, the largest maker of social games, says it has 50m daily [...]
Earlier this year we asked if Facebook was “monopolising the social networking market“.
An upstart social network aggregator, Power.com, had sued Facebook in California court, and it looked like the law might force Facebook to open up its walled-garden. Power was alleging that Facebook restricts users and stifles competition, and was in violation of California’s unfair [...]
In July we reported on how East Africa ended its isolation as the world’s last region not connected to the global broadband network. Until that point, the region relied on “satellite internet links that are slow, unreliable and often prohibitively expensive, problems that have inhibited business activity, public sector efficiency and the spread of [...]
Twitter and LinkedIn will start letting users sync their accounts starting Tuesday, allowing posts from LinkedIn to appear in Twitter streams, and vice versa. It’s a move aimed at the growing base of business users who take advantage of social networking sites.
LinkedIn, with more than 50m members, is the largest professional network on the web. [...]
Zynga, the largest social gaming company, has raised an additional $15m in funding, in yet another sign that this nascent industry has quickly become big business in the Valley.
The San Francisco company, which operates games on Facebook, MySpace, and Apple devices, has attracted nearly 200m monthly users to its games.
And it’s figured out how to [...]
Over the weekend we revealed that News Corp and Microsoft were in talks to “de-index” News Corp’s content from Google, in favour of Microsoft’s Bing search engine.
By today it was clear that this is part of a broader move by Microsoft to boost Bing by getting publishers to cut their sites off from Google.
It sounds [...]
Ebay is betting big on mobile shopping. Last month we revealed what a hit the Ebay iPhone app already had proved — ringing up $400m in sales.
“More than 4.6m people have downloaded the Ebay app,” we wrote, “using it to buy not just books and clothes, but also a Lamborghini, a $150,000 boat, and a [...]
Amazon and Apple must be feeling pretty good about the holidays so far.
Buoyed by Black Friday, Amazon said that November has been the best sales month ever for its Kindle. Amazon still won’t release sales figures, and e-readers could soon be outdated devices, but for now, the Kindle remains the market leader in one of [...]
Just as Amazon’s Kindle is going all gangbusters at the start of the holiday season, the launch of perhaps its most-formidable rival is getting off to a rocky start.
The Nook, an e-reader from bookseller giant Barnes & Noble, was hailed as an improvement on the Kindle when it was unveiled in October. It supports the [...]
