Business

The gambling tycoon who ran the world’s second largest online poker site from servers in Guernsey has surrendered to the FBI just over a year after the Full Tilt internet address was seized by America’s top white-collar crime prosecutor and the business effectively shut down.

Ray Bitar, chief executive of the Full Tilt group, was arrested on landing at JFK airport. He faces nine charges including bank fraud, money laundering, wire fraud and operating an illegal gambling business — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Analysing one of American corporate history’s greatest mysteries — the lost decade of Microsoft — two-time George Polk Award winner Kurt Eichenwald traces the astonishingly foolish management decisions at the company that could serve as a business-school case study on the pitfalls of success. Relying on dozens of interviews and internal corporate records—including e-mails between executives at the company’s highest ranks — Eichenwald offers an unprecedented view of life inside Microsoft during the reign of its current chief executive, Steve Ballmer. Today, a single Apple product — the iPhone — generates more revenue than all of Microsoft’s wares combined — via Vanity Fair

A Federal Court judge has decided that TPG should pay a whopping $2 million in penalties for failing to specify that the company’s $29.99 Unlimited ADSL2+ deal needed a bundled $30 home phone plan in its ads, but it’s not something the ISP is going to take laying down.

TPG was offering an unlimited ADSL2+ broadband deal, but the offer only applied when a customer took a $30 home phone plan with the ISP. The ACCC turned its nose up at TPG in December 2010, throwing the book at the ISP for the potentially misleading offer. TPG was found to be at fault in November and the Federal Court has now handed down a $2 million fine.

The judge presiding over the case, Justice Murphy, said in the judgement that such a high penalty was needed to discourage similar behaviour by ISPs in future — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Australian consumer electronics upstart Kogan Technologies has deployed a special tax on its popular website which will charge online shoppers an extra 6.8 percent on top of their purchases if they persist in using what the company described as Microsoft’s antique Internet Explorer web browser.

The way we’ve been able to keep our prices so low is by using technology to make our business efficient and streamlined, Kogan wrote on its company blog yesterday. One of the things stopping that is our web team having to spend a lot of time making our new website look normal on IE7. This is an extremely old browser, so from today, anyone buying from the site who uses IE7 will be lumped with a 6.8% surcharge — that’s 0.1% for each month IE7 has been on the market.

It’s not only costing us a huge amount, it’s affecting any business with an online presence, and costing the Internet economy millions, the company claimed. Customers who enter our site using Internet Explorer 7 can avoid the impost by simply downloading an up-to-date browser such as Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Safari, Opera or even a more recent version of Internet Explorer. Kogan wrote that all Internet citizens had a responsibility to make the Internet a better place.

By taking these measures, we are doing our bit, the company added. This will help us increase our efficiency, help keep prices for all smart shoppers down, and hopefully help eradicate the world of the pain in the rear that is IE7! So, what are you waiting for? Time to upgrade your browser! — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Nine out of 10 execs think Big Data — the hoarding of information from server logs to social networking posts — is the fourth most important input to a business. The execs questioned in a survey published yesterday described data sets as the fourth factor of production after land, labour and capital.

The research by the Economist Intelligence Unit and funded by Capgemini examines the role of Big Data in influencing management decisions. Of the 600+ senior execs questioned, 65 per cent of them asserted that more and more management decisions are based on hard analytic information, as opposed to just having a hunch — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Thirty-one.

That’s the number of months it took Palm, Inc to go from the darling of International CES 2009 to a mere shadow of itself, a nearly anonymous division inside the HP machine without a hardware program and without the confidence of its owners. Thirty-one months is just barely longer than a typical American mobile phone contract.

Understanding exactly how Palm could drive itself into irrelevance in such a short period of time will forever be a subject of Valley lore. There are parts of the story that are simply lost, viewpoints and perspectives that have been rendered extinct either through entrenched politicking or an employee base that has long since given up hope and dispersed for greener pastures. What we do know, though, is enough to tell a tale of warring factions, questionable decisions, and strategic churn, interspersed by flashes of brilliance and a core team that fought very hard at times to keep the dream alive.

The following is an account of Palm’s ascent prior to the launch of the Pre, the subsequent decline, and eventual end, assembled through interviews with a number of current and former employees — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Google’s $12.5bn (£7.9bn) purchase of US phone maker Motorola Mobility has been completed days after it received approval from the Chinese government.

Chinese authorities said Google must keep its mobile software, Android, free for other device makers for up to five years.

The acquisition is Google’s biggest to date.

The internet search giant has also named a new management team for the phone handset maker.

Motorola is a leading manufacturer of smartphones and other devices.

Google’s takeover of the business allows it to move into the manufacturing of phones and tablet computers for the first time — via redwolf.newsvine.com