Consumers
©Getty From the immediate postwar era, when shortages, rationing and black-market dealings defined the consciousness in much of Europe, to the freshly minted middle classes proliferating across Asia, Latin America…
Copyright and intellectual property
©Getty Recent “patent wars” between mobile-phone makers Apple, Samsung, HTC and others over smartphone technology have highlighted the importance of businesses being able to protect their intellectual property rights. Copyright…
Safeway accepts $5.7bn offer for Canada stores
Safeway is to sell its 200-plus Canadian stores to local rival Sobeys for $5.7bn in cash, accepting an unsolicited offer that the mid-market US grocer said was too good to…
MPs demand Google tax revamp
©Bloomberg MPs have demanded urgent changes to Google’s “highly contrived” tax arrangements in a hard-hitting report that said the internet giant’s tax avoidance had damaged its reputation and that of…
Eight charged with fraud conspiracy
Eight people including two Ukrainian nationals were charged on Wednesday with conspiracy to commit fraud, identity theft and money laundering, in connection with a hacking scheme that allegedly targeted more…
Generic drug groups fined $2.15bn
Generic drug makers Teva and Sun Pharma will pay $2.15bn to Pfizer and Takeda to settle a long-running patent dispute in the US over Protonoix, a stomach acid treatment. The…
Morgan Stanley chief in profitability pledge
Morgan Stanley chief executive James Gorman is promising to increase profitability at the bank’s wealth management business, two years after backing down on a pledge to achieve profit margins of…
Digital hunter-gatherers
©Dreamstime While the multibillion-dollar data broker industry profits from the trade of thousands of details about individuals, those bits of information are often sold for a fraction of a penny…
Struggling to corral a disparate network
A web visitor looking up the forecast for Chicago on a free weather site would find out about the temperature and any likelihood of rain. At the same time nearly…
Companies scramble for consumer data
©Dreamstime Corporate competition to accumulate information about consumers is intensifying even as concerns about government surveillance grow, pushing down the market price for intimate personal details to fractions of a…
What is your personal data worth? Not much
How much are a person’s data worth? Not much. While the multibillion-dollar data broker industry profits on the trade of thousands of details about individuals, those bits of information often…
Consumers seek to draw the veil back over their lives
At a recent talk in London, Google’s Eric Schmidt gave some advice to those worried about the increasingly online and digital nature of our lives. “There is an off button.…
Big data has to show it’s not Big Brother
©Ingram Pinn Sales of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four have risen since Edward Snowden revealed how the National Security Agency of the US gains access to telephone records and data from…
Banks prepare credit lines for edge on Box IPO
Banks are tripping over themselves to lend money to Box, the cloud computing start-up, in a race to get a slot on one of the next big Silicon Valley flotations.…
India’s Apollo in $2.5bn deal for Cooper Tire
©Bloomberg Apollo Tyres is to pay $2.5bn for one of the largest US tyre makers, in the biggest Indian acquisition of a US company to date. The all-cash purchase of…