Business, Financial & Legal News - Page 261

I'm sure everyone reading this has used Google at some point and seen that nifty feature which auto-completes your search query for you based on previous queries other people have placed. It's pretty cool, and sometimes outright outrageously funny with some of the suggestions it provides. But how would you like it to auto-complete your name with suggestions that suggest you committed crimes?

Well, that's just the situation that one Japanese man has found himself in. He says that when he searches his name, it does just that: return suggestions and results that suggest he has committed crimes that he claims he hasn't. He claims he lost his job because of it, and wasn't hired for new ones. After all, almost all jobs do a Google search on a prospective employee.

He requested that Google take it down, but they refused. He then turned to the courts to seek an injunction. On March 19th, the Tokyo court approved the injunction requiring Google to suspend its auto-complete results. Google has refused to comply with the order, and refuses to be regulated by Japanese law.

Well, well, isn't this quite the golden nugget of news today, folks! Megaupload co-founder, Kim Dotcom, has admitted that high-profile U.S. government officials held accounts with Megaupload. Not only did people at the Senate, Department of Homeland Security, FBI, and NASA hold Megaupload accounts, but some 15,600 members of the U.S. Military did, too.

The MPAA and RIAA may think that Megaupload is predominantly used for piracy, but there are plenty of government officials and installations using it for legitimate transferring of files, that are simply too big to throw over e-mail. Megaupload's team is working with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) with their MegaRetrieval campaign, where they hope to reunite site users with their data.

This has created the opportunity for Megaupload to discover that a large number of Megaupload accounts are actually held by US government officials, thanks to fresh information provided to TorrentFreak from Kim Dotcom himself. This includes accounts from domains like dhs.gov, doe.gov, fbi.gov, hhs.gov, nasa.gov, senate.gov, treas.gov and uscourts.gov. The number of accounts held with these domains total 1058. From these, 344 users upgraded to Premium access. Between these accounts, they uploaded 15,242 files, a total of 1,851,791MB.

Today has been a day filled with Microsoft news. First the Xbox Lite rumor, and then the "Smoked by Windows Phone" contest. Well, now we're going to tell you how a couple of Bing promoters got fired. The two's employment ended with a bang. At Sundance, they built a three-story party palace filled with celebs and an open bar.

The two had become known for high power marketing campaigns for the search engine Bing. They painted Bing as something colorful and fun, whereas Google could be seen as plain and simple. The experts at AdAge scrounged up some details of why they were fired:

An internal investigation turned up a list of violations, which Ad Age has learned included problems with line items and dates on purchase orders related to the three-story Bing Bar in Park City, Utah -Microsoft's's celeb hangout during the Sundance Film Festival. This year, the space hosted performances from Drake and Jason Mraz, appearances by Paul Simon and Neil Young, catered food and an open bar.

A new challenger has appeared. Apple is no longer the only one doing frivolous lawsuits; now, they are at the receiving end of one! Yes, it's true, one of Apple's stores, with its slick and modern design, "caused" an 83 year old woman to break her nose by walking into the glass--guess they use Windex!

As a result of the collision, Grandmother Evelyn Paswall is suing the company for a cool $1 million. Her lawyer explains:

There were no markings on the glass or they were inadequate. My client is an octogenarian. She sees well, but she did not see any glass.

New iPhone (will that be the new name?) development is of course under way, but a massive part of this is the actual production of the smartphone itself. Foxconn are key partners to Apple, but right now, Foxconn's northern plant in Taiyuan, which is in China's northern Shanxi province, may become both a key hub of the new iPhone, as well as a flashpoint for working condition issues.

The China Times reports that the factory was facing a "huge" shortage of workers, to the tune of 20,000 of them, as it got ready for the new iPhone. It is being reported that they would be in charge of producing as many as 85-percent of total orders, or close to 57 million new iPhones. So, we'd be talking about just under a year of stock for one single model.

The problems with the workers apparently stem from Foxconn allegedly promising to raise pay packets for everyone, but then only delivered their promises to mid- and upper-tier workers, which of course, pissed off some employees, rightfully so, too. The raises supposedly reduce the requirement to work overtime in order to get a decent pay, but the managers have been pushing an all-or-nothing attitude toward overtime. Either you work insane amounts of overtime, or you get offered no overtime at all.

Research in Motion were born in Canada, and have enjoyed Canadian's being loyal to RIM, but this has just begun to stop. In 2011, RIM shipped 2.08 million BlackBerry smartphones, versus the 2.85 million iPhones that Apple sold. Rewind another twelve months into 2010, and we have RIM selling over 500,000 more units than Apple did in Canada.

If we go back a bit further to 2008, RIM sold 500-percent more BlackBerry phones than Apple did iPhones. But, we all know that the iPhone has grown in popularity immensely, and Canadian's just don't want to continue being blindly loyal. Bloomberg notes that Canada-based sales make up roughly 7-percent of RIM's total revenue.

RIM has enjoyed local support in Canada, which would hurt them considerably seeing Apple overtake them on their home ground. Alfred DuPut from research firm Interbrand says that this is due to RIM not investing enough in promoting their devices once the iPhone shipped. If you ask me, it's because Apple have a totally contained system, with hipsters wanting them, grandmas wanting them, great marketing, they just 'work', and are simple enough that a 5-year-old could use it.

Earlier today, we reported the FaceBook issued a statement regarding employers and the like who asked for FaceBook log in credentials. Well now, a senator in the USA is reportedly drafting a bill to make this illegal. The DOJ has already said they believe breaking FaceBook's ToS, which ban giving your password to someone, is a federal offence, but have sated they will not be prosecuting it.

The senator described the requests as an "unreasonable invasion of privacy for people seeking work," adding that the bill would be ready "in the very near future." The practice is akin to them asking to open your postal mail to see if there is anything interesting in there. With everyone up in arms about the practice, it's no wonder someone thought it to be a good idea to write a law regarding it.

France's President, Mr. Sarkozy, said in a statement, "From now on, any person who habitually consults websites that advocate terrorism or that call for hate and violence will be punished. France will not tolerate ideological indoctrination on its soil." If politicians aren't blaming games for violent behavior, they turn to the internet. It's common political rhetoric, but does this announcement even make any sense?

What caused this? Mohamed Merah, a 23-year-old, killed seven French people - three soldiers, three Jewish children and a rabbi. He claimed Al Qaeda inspired him to do so. Luckily, there is a good distance to travel from this statement issued in the heat of the moment to it being implemented in a law. Sticking to this particular case, is there any evidence that Merah visited any of these "extremist websites?"

Besides, as most people know, these videos can be found pretty much anywhere, including sites like YouTube. Also, how would this law be implemented? This is starting to sound like an assault on France's internet freedom. Besides, how do you tell apart a PhD student from a radical? The simple answer: you can't. Let's just hope today's announcement is just more political rhetoric in an election year.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer (say that ten times fast), who is kind of equal to the US Secretary of the Treasury announced that the government would make tex credits available to UK-based video game developers in the next budget. Andrew Eades, CEO of UK developer Relentless Software, said in a statement released by The Independent Game Developers Association (TIGA):

UK developers have been competing on an uneven global playfield. Today's decision by the government to back TIGA's tax break campaign will help ensure that we can remain competitive in the global market.

We were nearly here before, back in 2010, when the current UK government cancelled plans for gaming industry tax breaks when they came into power in 2010. Critics have said that the cancellations of these tax breaks were pretty catastrophic for the UK gaming industry, where they caused studio closures, impeded the nation's ability to compete internationally, and have caused a brain drain of talent seeking better jobs in countries like Canada.

OK. I admit it: since I purchased the new iPad, I've been obsessed about 'Draw Something', the Pictionary-like drawing game which is just insanely addictive. Most of the people around me, family and friends, have been playing it too, which makes it great. Today I wake up to the news that the maker of Draw Something, OMGPOP, has been acquired by social gaming powerhouse Zynga.

What price did Zynga draw on Draw Something's cheque? A very cool $210 million. TechCrunch has heard they were offered $180 million upfront, plus a $30 million earnout. OMGPOP chief executive, Dan Porter, now becomes a general manager and vice president of Zynga New York, with OMGPOP's employees joining Zynga. OMGPOP had not hit great success with titles up until Draw Something, when they bought the game to iOS and Android just over a month ago, they saw the title explode: racking up 35 million downloads, and 1 billion drawings.

It has also been reported that OMGPOP could have been worth more... a lot more. Simon Khalaf, the chief executive of mobile analytics company Flurry, said to TechCrunch's Kim-Mai Cutler, as well a Business Insider's Henry Blodget that OMGPOP effectively left $800 million on the tablet by selling to Zynga. The reason behind this is that Draw Something could've branched out into different areas, the same way that Rovio took the Angry Birds franchise and made it flourish.