Business

It looks like mission control: in a Swiss market town, an array of screens in Nestle’s headquarters tracks online sentiment. Executives watch intently as California wakes up, smells the coffee — and says whether it likes it.

This is the nerve centre of the company’s Digital Acceleration Team. By monitoring conversation about its products on social media — right down to realtime recipe tweets across the United States — they aim to win over a sometimes hostile world.

Other companies, such as PepsiCo, Danone and Unilever, have exploited the opportunities to promote themselves online. But Nestle is also concentrating on using social media for damage limitation — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Tiger Airways has been found guilty of spamming its customers by Australia’s communications watchdog.

The Singapore Airlines-backed carrier has been fined $110,000 by the Australian Communications and Media Authority for failing to unsubscribe customers from marketing emails.

The news comes in the same month that restrictions imposed on the airline were lifted more than a year after its entire fleet was grounded over safety concerns — via redwolf.newsvine.com

US auction site eBay has paid only £1.2m in tax in the UK, according to an investigation by the Sunday Times.

The newspaper said that its tax bill in 2010 comes despite eBay’s UK subsidiaries generating sales of £800m.

The auction site — which also owns PayPal — responded that it complies fully with all applicable tax laws.

The report comes after coffee giant Starbucks was also accused of paying just £8.6m in corporation tax in the UK over 14 years.

According to the Sunday Times, eBay had sales of £789m during 2010 in the UK at its four British subsidiaries. Using its worldwide profit margin of 23%, it would have made a profit in the UK of £181m, leading to corporation tax owed of £51m.

Instead, it paid £1.2m, the report said — via redwolf.newsvine.com

New research suggests that companies behind some of America’s best known consumer brands may be far more effective at fighting cybercrime than any efforts to enact more stringent computer security and anti-piracy laws.

Recent legislative proposals in the United States — such as the Stop Online Piracy Act — have sought to combat online trafficking in copyrighted intellectual property and counterfeit goods by granting Internet service providers and authorities broader powers to prosecute offenders, and by imposing stronger criminal penalties for such activity. But recent data collected by academic researchers suggests that brand holders already have the tools to quash much of this activity.

Over the past two years, a team of academic researchers made hundreds of “test buys” at Web sites from 40 different shady businesses peddling knock-off prescription drugs, counterfeit software and fake anti-virus products. The researchers, from George Mason University, the International Computer Science Institute, and the University of California, San Diego, posed as buyers for these products, which tend to be promoted primarily via hacked Web sites, junk email and computer viruses.

The test buys were intended to reveal relationships between the shadowy merchants and the banks that process credit and debit card transactions for these businesses. Following the money trail showed that a majority of the purchases were processed by just 12 banks in a handful of countries, including Azerbaijan, China, Georgia, Latvia, and Mauritius.

The researchers said they submitted the test buy results to a database run by the International Anti-Counterfeiting Coalition, (IACC), a Washington, D.C.-based non-profit organization devoted to combating product counterfeiting and piracy. Several pharmacy and software vendors and IACC members whose trademarks were infringed in those transactions (the researchers said non-disclosure agreements prohibit them from naming the brands) used the data to lodge complaints with Visa (only Visa-branded debit cards were used to make the test buys) — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Flooding in Thailand made getting a hard drive a lot more expensive late last year. It wasn’t a huge deal to most of us, but for a small cloud storage company, it was almost death. Staying alive took creativity. And Costco.

About a year ago, the 3TB internal drives that Blackblaze — which sells unlimited cloud storage for $US5 a month — had been using shot up from about $US130 to $US360. And while the human cost of the floods was enormous, the company also needed to do something to keep itself afloat.

It turned to cheaper external drives. Basically, the answer was to buy the drives, rip them open and stick their guts into the 135TB pods that the company uses — like shucking an oyster. Costco had the best deals, and employees went there to buy 50 or so 3TB external drives at a time. Then things really started to get complicated:

The Two Drive Limit signs started appearing in retail stores in mid-November. At first we didn’t believe them, but we quickly learned otherwise. Sometimes, we talked our way into more, but we heard 2 is the limit a lot. We started doing drive math: 2 drives a day per store, times 3 stores per day, times 5 farmers, times 7 days a week is 210 drives. That would be sufficient, but in reality it didn’t work out that way. Stores were stocking out of drives on a regular basis and we really couldn’t farm everyday, but we kept at it. One Wednesday afternoon, after working all day at Backblaze, Yev circled the San Francisco Bay hitting local Costco and Best Buy stores — 10 stores, 46 drives, 212 miles on his Nissan

— via redwolf.newsvine.com

Google has just acquired VirusTotal, a free security service that analyses suspicious files and URLs, for an undisclosed amount. According to VirusTotal’s announcement, the two companies had been partners for quite some time, and now VirusTotal will continue to operate independently, reaping the benefits of Google’s resources.

Per the agreement, which was spotted by Mikko Hypponen, VirusTotal states that it will maintain its partnerships with outside antivirus companies and security experts. As for Google, this move clearly shows its interests in beefing up its security resources, making this acquisition relevant to nearly all of its services, like Gmail, where files and links are constantly exchanged — via redwolf.newsvine.com

The nation’s largest telco Telstra has claimed in a submission to the competition regulator that it can’t deploy naked DSL broadband services to customers and other ISPs as doing so would require it to undertake significant development of its IT systems, which require a phone line to be connected before broadband can be provided.

A number of Telstra’s major rivals, such as iiNet and TPG, have sold so-called naked DSL services, where ADSL broadband is provided to customers without the requirements of a bundled traditional PSTN telephone line, for half a decade. iiNet, for example, first launched naked DSL to customers in November 2007, and had 131,000 customers using the service in June last year. Many of iiNet’s customers bundle cheap IP telephony services with its naked DSL platform. However, Telstra has consistently declined to provide the service to customers, preferring instead to sell bundled services including monthly traditional PSTN line rental plans, which are typically more expensive than IP telephony options.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission is currently examining the case for stronger regulation of the way in which Telstra provides wholesale ADSL services to retail ISPs such as iiNet, TPG and Optus. In a submission (PDF) to that process released last week (and first reported by iTNews), Telstra argued that the ACCC should not force is to provide new services such as a wholesale version of naked DSL — via redwolf.newsvine.com