Category: Business

Business Legal

Intel forced to pay record $1.4 billion fine for unfair sales tactics

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As reported on Engadget. BY STEVE DENT The European Union’s second-highest court has upheld a $1.4 billion fine levied against Intel for anti-competitive practices against chip foe AMD. In the original decision, way back in 2009, the European Commission found that Intel harmed its rival and consumers by giving unlawful rebates to retailers and PC makers like HP, Dell and Lenovo. Intel thenappealed, saying the commission “ignore(d) the reality of a highly competitive microprocessor marketplace.” But the Luxembourg General…

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Automotive Business Culture

Big money, fast cars, and a Nyan Cat: this is the Gumball 3000

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As reported on The Verge. By Chris Ziegler A notorious road rally drops by NYC on the way to Ibiza “Rev it!” screams a man in the crowd. He gets his wish: a McLaren MP4-12C, covered from nose to tail in fluorescent livery, blips its throttle to the delight of a few hundred people gathered in New York City’s historic South Street Seaport. I came here to get a glimpse of the Gumball 3000, an annual…

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Business Culture

Comcast Is Turning The US Into Its Own Private Hotspot

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As reported on TechCrunch. by John Biggs On paper it looks like a win-win: in the past few days, Comcast is quietly turning on public hotspots in its customers’ routers, essentially turning private homes into public hotspots. Comcast customers get free Wi-Fi wherever there is a Comcast box and the company gets to build out a private network to compete with telecoms. Win-win. Fifty thousand users with Arris Touchstone Telephony Wireless Gateway Modems – essentially basic modems that cable…

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Business Entertainment

Amazon stops taking DVD pre-orders in price row with Warner

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As reported on Engadget. BY MATT BRIAN Amazon’s quest for better deals and cheaper prices has seen it squeeze publishers, but it isn’t limiting itself to just books. The New York Times reports that the retailer is refusing to list DVD pre-orders for upcoming launch of many Warner Home Video movies. We’re not talking small releases either: The Lego Movie, 300: Rise of an Empire and Winter’s Tale are just three titles launching in the coming days that Amazon lists but isn’t allowing customers to…

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Business Entertainment

LA Times: Steve Ballmer agrees to buy the LA Clippers for $2 billion

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As reported on Engadget. BY RICHARD LAWLER So what’s Steve Ballmer up to now that Satya Nadella is running things at Microsoft? According to the LA Times, he’s just made a tentative agreement to buy the Clippers for about $2 billion. After NBA commish Adam Silver (pictured above, with Ballmer at a Clippers game on May 11th) announced the league will force current owner Donald Sterling to sell the team after racist remarks he made leaked out, a number of potential…

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Business Culture Tablet Trends

2014 Tablet Growth Revised Down To 12% On Longer Ownership Cycle, Phablet Popularity

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As reported on TechCrunch. by Ingrid Lunden The growth of tablets has been held up as one of the big, disruptive forces in personal computing, with the more portable, touchscreen devices eating into sales of laptops and other, larger PCs. But a report out today from IDC puts a little dampener on that line of thinking: the analysts there say that they are revising down their forecasts for 2014 tablet shipments (and subsequent sales), as people hold on…

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Business Culture HealthCare

This pill could stop 90 percent of HIV cases in the US

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As reported on The Verge. By Arielle Duhaime-Ross But only if it reaches the right people Michael Lucas has been taking Truvada, the HIV prevention pill, for about a year now. And the 42-year-old adult film director and gay porn performer readily admits that the decision wasn’t all that hard to make — especially when compared with the alternative. “It just seemed healthier to run the risk of experiencing side effects than to worry about HIV,”…

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Business

AT&T To Acquire DirecTV For Nearly $50B

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As reported on TechCrunch. by Greg Kumparak As has been rumored for the past few weeks, AT&T has just officially announced their plans to acquire DirecTV. The terms of the deal came together at roughly $95 per share, which comes to a grand total of $48.5 billion dollars. If you add in the nearly $19B worth of debt that DirecTV is towing behind it, though, this deal sets AT&T back to a tune closer to $67 billion. It…

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Business Culture Internet

Comcast Wants To Put Data Caps On All Customers Within 5 Years

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As reported on TechCrunch. by Greg Kumparak About.com CEO Darline Jean Joins Ad Tech Company PulsePoint If you’re a Comcast customer living in one of the many states where they’ve imposed no real limits on bandwidth usage for the last few years… enjoy it while it lasts. During an investor call today (link via Ars), Comcast executive VP David Cohen said that he predicts bandwidth caps (or, as ISPs prefer to put it, “usage-based billing”) to be rolled out…

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Business History Tech

AI algorithm takes seat on investment company’s board

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As reported on Engadget. BY STEVE DENT The coming robot apocalypse will need robot executives to rule over it, but it looks like they’re going to have to start with more mundane business first. A Hong Kong venture capital firm has just “appointed” an artificial intelligence tool called VITAL to its board of directors to help find promising investments. It’ll scan things like financing, IP and clinical trials from prospective companies, share that info with the board and even cast…

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