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WSJ: Google Hit With Antitrust Lawsuit In Europe

April 15, 2015February 16, 2016 Staff Writer

“European Union regulators formally accused Google Inc. of violating the bloc’s antitrust laws by abusing its dominance of online search, escalating a long-running case that had stalled for years despite three separate attempts at a settlement. Wednesday’s move is the first time that any regulator has filed formal antitrust charges against the California search giant, putting the EU in the vanguard of a global debate over the regulation of giant Internet platforms.” Adapted from WSJ

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Why investors should be concerned about cybersecurity breaches

April 8, 2015February 16, 2016 Staff Writer

Major security breaches continue to hit headlines, as businesses are forced to shift from focusing on the imminent nature of threats to calculating their potential financial impact. Companies are investing billions of dollars in cybersecurity, but the average return on spending for security technology is only 14%. Every year the cost of a data breach continues to rise. In spite of this, investors and shareholders don’t react strongly to news of a breach. Target’s stock fell 11% after it revealed it was the victim of one of the largest breaches ever to…

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Cybercriminals Are Misappropriating Businesses’ Web Addresses

March 12, 2015February 16, 2016 Staff Writer

As a Result, Customers Can’t Find the Real Companies on the Web Cybercriminals targeting businesses are stealing more than customer passwords and credit-card numbers these days. Some are misappropriating the very Web addresses—or domain names—of the businesses themselves. When Pablo Palatnik of Miami glanced at a Google analytics report showing Web traffic on his office TV monitor one day last month, he was alarmed to discover that traffic to his business website, Shadesdaddy.com, had plunged 80% from its usual level of as many as 10,000 visitors a day. At first,…

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Google’s Domain Name Land Grab: Consumer Convenience Or Coercive Control Point?

March 6, 2015February 16, 2016

Internet naming decisions are the sort of Internet plumbing inside baseball that only interests policy wonks and marketing mavens. That is until an 800 pound gorilla like Google GOOGL +0.54% decides to pay $25 million for a single generic top-level domain name (gTLD). Buying “.app” for almost four-times the previous record for a gTLD not only raised eyebrows, but questions about the strategy behind Google’s expansive and expensive domain name land grab. Although the most costly, .app is merely one of over 100 gTLDs, Google had already spent nearly $20…

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Xiaomi: China’s big Apple rival isn’t worth getting excited about (yet)

February 13, 2015February 16, 2016 Staff Writer

Xiaomi, the third-largest smartphone maker in the world, is coming stateside, but not in the way pundits expected. The company announced at a conference Thursday that its e-commerce website, Mi.com, could start selling products to U.S. customers in five months. Surprisingly, smartphones will not be among them — at least, at first. Instead, Hugo Barra, Xiaomi’s Global VP, suggested the company might start with items such as a recently-launched pair of headphones and its popular external battery pack, the latter of which sold 15 million units in 2014. The company has…

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Businesses neglect Internet security to protect reputation

January 8, 2015February 17, 2016

VietNamNet Bridge – Most Vietnamese companies are negligent when it comes to protecting their information on the Internet, VNCERT director Vu Quoc Khanh told Kinh Te & Do Thi (Economic and Urban Affairs) newspaper. Why do businesses attacked by hackers often hesitate to publicise information about the attacks? Recent attacks, especially the incident involving VC Corp’s websites, show that any organisation or business can be a potential target for hackers. However, most businesses prefer not to say anything about such attacks to protect their reputation. They only start asking for…

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Our biggest search competitor is Amazon says Google Boss Eric Schmidt

October 14, 2014June 2, 2016 Staff Writer

BERLIN: Google boss Eric Schmidt said on Monday his company’s biggest competition as a search engine came from e-commerce giant Amazon, not from its traditional rivals. In remarks prepared for delivery in Berlin, Schmidt hit back at accusations that Google as the world’s biggest search engine enjoyed unchallenged market dominance, saying that the sector was targeting the company on several fronts. “Many people think our main competition is Bing or Yahoo. But, really, our biggest search competitor is Amazon,” he said. “People don’t think of Amazon as search, but if…

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Twitter sues US government over Transparency Report restrictions

October 8, 2014February 17, 2016 Staff Writer

Twitter has been publishing what bits of info it’s allowed to concerning national security requests for some time now, but the social media feed wants the ability to publish the whole thing. Today, the outfit filed a lawsuit aiming to get approval to post its entire transparency report. In a blog post, VP of Legal Ben Lee says that the company is asking a California District Court “to declare these restrictions on our ability to speak about government surveillance as unconstitutional under the First Amendment.” As is stands, Twitter and…

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Forbes lists 10 Emerging Women Entrepreneurs To Watch In Africa

September 30, 2014February 25, 2016

In June this year, She Leads Africa, a Nigerian-based social enterprise that aims to foster business growth in Africa by providing female startup entrepreneurs with the knowledge, networks, and financing to build and scale strong businesses, launched a business pitch competition. The purpose of the competition was to select ten exceptional young female entrepreneurs doing business in Africa to participate in an Entrepreneur showcase, whereby the entrepreneurs would pitch their businesses to a panel of esteemed business leaders and investors, including Nigerian multi-millionaire telecoms tycoon Hakeem Belo-Osagie, Standard Chartered Nigeria…

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Reddit Is Raising Big Funding of $500 Million

September 8, 2014February 18, 2016 Staff Writer

Reddit, the social news site with a big Web footprint, is raising a big funding round — with help from some of the people who helped launch the site nine years ago, including co-founder Alexis Ohanian and other people associated closely with startup incubator Y Combinator. Sources said the almost-anything-goes site has reached a preliminary agreement to sell less than 10 percent of the company for more than $50 million. That could give the company a valuation of upwards of $500 million. Given investors’ new-found appetite for content companies — see:…

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