Business

Yahoo has said that it is laying off about 2,000 employees as it struggles to regain its web crown.

The firm said those at risk would be told of their job elimination or phased transition as part of its restructuring, which will save the company $375m every year.

Today’s actions are an important next step toward a bold, new Yahoo! — smaller, nimbler, more profitable and better equipped to innovate as fast as our customers and our industry require, CEO Scott Thompson said in a canned statement — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Google is responsible for misleading and deceptive ads that use the name of a company to direct traffic to a competitor’s site, an Australian court ruled on Tuesday.The Federal Court of Australia ruled in an appeal that Google is responsible for misleading and deceptive advertising targeted to appear near search results for a competitor’s name. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) brought the case to court over four instances of misleading ads. In an earlier ruling a primary judge had ruled in favour of Google.In the four cases, searches for a company’s name brought up sponsored links containing that name — but the links led to the websites of competitors that had paid for the ads — via redwolf.newsvine.com

The Australian Communications and Media Authority has given a formal warning to Melbourne-based company, Ezystays Pty Ltd, following an investigation that found it breached the Spam Act by sending marketing emails without consent of the recipients.

Ezystays is an Australian company that provides travel related products and services. The ACMA received complaints alleging Ezystays had sent marketing messages by email without the recipient’s consent. Ezystays claimed it was able to send the emails because the recipients’ email addresses appeared on a purchased marketing list. The investigation concluded that the fact an email address appeared on a marketing list did not mean that Ezystays had consent from the recipients to send them marketing messages — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Global Payments, the credit and debit card processor that disclosed a breach of its systems late Friday, said in a statement Sunday that the incident involved at least 1.5 million accounts. The news comes hours ahead of a planned conference call with investors, and after Visa said it had pulled its seal of approval for the company.

In a press release issued 9.30pm ET Sunday, Atlanta based Global Payments Inc. said it believes the affected portion of its processing system is confined to North America and less than 1,500,000 card numbers may have been exported…Based on the forensic analysis to date, network monitoring and additional security measures, the company believes that this incident is contained.

It remains unclear whether there are additional accounts beyond these 1.5 million that were exposed by the breach; the company’s statement seems to be focusing on the number of cards it can confirm that thieves offloaded from its systems — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Twitter has bought the microblogging service Posterous and will be running it as an adjunct to its main client — for the time being, at least.

This team has built an innovative product that makes sharing across the web and mobile devices simple — a goal we share, said Twitter in a statement. Posterous engineers, product managers and others will join our teams working on several key initiatives that will make Twitter even better — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Expanding its software-aided medical transcription services, Nuance Communications will purchase medical transcription service provider Transcend Services for US$300 million, the two companies announced Wednesday.

Nuance will fold Transcend’s service into its own significant medical transcription and health care natural language processing (NLP) services. In particular, Nuance is interested in Transcend’s strong presence in the small- to mid-size hospital market, which accounts for about 90 percent of all hospitals in the US.

Medical transcription already accounts for approximately 30 percent of Nuance’s annual revenue, said Carina Edwards, Nuance vice president of healthcare solutions marketing. The purchase of the Atlanta-based Transcend will boost Nuance annual revenue by about $140 million to $150 million per year, the company estimates. The company’s health care practice accounted for $527 million in revenue for its fiscal 2011 — via redwolf.newsvine.com

A social media experiment has backfired for Coles, exposing the supermarket to a flood of negative comments on Twitter

The supermarket is the latest company to have a social media marketing exercise go terribly wrong, following blunders from Qantas and Coca-Cola.

The official Coles account last night urged followers to complete the sentence in my house it’s a crime not to buy…

But the PR exercise quickly fizzled as Twitter users inundated the supermarket’s account with negative comments — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Yesterday I received an email from Stratfor CEO and founder George Friedman. Deplorable, unfortunate and illegal, he thundered

Having had our property stolen, we will not be victimised twice by submitting to questions about them.

The release of these emails is, however, a direct attack on Stratfor. This is another attempt to silence and intimidate the company, and one we reject. As you can see, emails sent to many people about my resignation were clearly forged.

It’s the most exciting correspondence I’ve ever received from Stratfor.

Unfortunately after all this time as a low-level subscriber, Stratfor has never given me the inside running on a story. Not even once.

Nor, during my years travelling for Foreign Correspondent, have I ever seen evidence that Stratfor’s big corporate clients, who pay many thousands of dollars for their subscriptions, received insights they couldn’t have gleaned if they were avid readers of Britain’s Economist, the august US journal Foreign Affairs, or the excellent Australian foreign policy blog, The Interpreter.

Stratfor’s real talent lies in marketing to corporate America — via redwolf.newsvine.com

The European Union’s regulatory body has unconditionally approved Google’s acquisition of Motorola Mobility in a deal that could be worth about $12.5 billion.

The European Commission also said today it would monitor Google’s and its rivals’ use of patents to make sure that the deal complies with EU antitrust rules — via redwolf.newsvine.com