“It’s a bummer.”

That’s how Quincy Smith, president of CBS Interactive, described the departure of Last.fm’s three founders, Martin Stiksel, Felix Miller and Richard Jones.

CBS paid $280m in 2007 for Last.fm, an online music service and community now used by over 37m people a month. It remains one of the UK’s biggest buyouts in the web 2.0 era and Last.fm is still a fixture of London’s Silicon Roundabout.

Yet Mr Smith was magnanimous as three darlings of the web scene left CBS Interactive, which as a whole generated revenues of over $600m last year.

Continue reading "Last.fm loses its founders"

For the FT’s New Technology Policy Forum, University of Chicago professor Richard Epstein considers the European Commission’s recent fining of Intel for anticompetitive behaviour:

On May 13, 2009, the European Commission fined Intel just over €1bn for its supposed abuse of its dominant market position in violation of Article 82 of the EC Treaty. That decision marks yet another effort by commissioner Neelie Kroes to ratchet up the enforcement of EC competition policy, all in the name of preventing consumer harm. Yet the devil lies in this one detail. The aggrieved “consumer” of Intel is its long-time junior rival, AMD, which filed three separate complaints against Intel between 2000 and 2006.

Continue reading “The European Commission strikes again”

From the FT’s Comment page, Irwin Stelzer, director of economic policy studies at the Hudson Institute, says the US is finally catching up to the EU and getting tough on high-tech anti-competitive behaviour:

For once, America is running at top speed to catch up with the European Union. In levying a record fine against Intel, the world’s largest chipmaker, the EU competition authorities have let it be known that a dominant company’s efforts to crush rivals by threatening customers or rigging a price schedule will not be tolerated.

Continue reading “US regulators run to catch up with EU”

Google’s European Zeitgeist event this year has been nicknamed “the Royal one” as it was attended not only by the usual business heavyweights like Vivendi’s Jean-Bernard Lévy and Richard Branson but by Prince Charles of the UK, Crown Prince Haakon of Norway and Prince Philip of Spain.

The presence of royalty is not as strange as it might initially seem. Much of Zeitgeist revolves around discussions on how to save the planet, and this is a project that many otherwise under-employed European royals have embraced.

Perhaps these aristocrats also see a kindred spirit in Google, the king of the internet. Oh if only it weren’t for those tedious elected governments, those dull regulations, how much easier it would be to make the world work better. Continue reading "Googling democracy"

Despite the €1bn fine handed to Intel by the European Commission, it wasn’t all bad news for US tech companies in Europe on Wednesday. Ebay won a lawsuit in the French courts over sales of fake L’Oréal perfume on its auction site. A court specialised in trademark law ruled that Ebay was merely a host site for the sales of counterfeit goods and not a party to their sale. It also said Ebay, which has a $10m a year budget for fighting online crime, was doing all it could to combat fakes. Continue reading "Ebay wins French L’Oréal fakes lawsuit"

Intel has come out fighting, after being slapped with a record €1.06bn fine by the EU for anti-competitive practices. Paul Otellini, chief executive, responded almost instantly with a statement that Intel planned to appeal.

“Intel takes strong exception to this decision,” he said. So the Brussels lawyers and the computer industry can now look forward to a protracted battle before there is any sort of finality to this.

The fine is certainly enormous, dwarfing even the sums Microsoft has had to pay. However, it’s not clear how much this ruling will really change. Continue reading "Long haul still ahead on Intel case"

Many predicted that mobile advertising would suffer in the downturn, as marketers looked to allocate shrinking budgets to more proven media.

But that hasn’t prevented the UK market from almost doubling in size last year, according to a report by PricewaterhouseCoopers for the Internet Advertising Bureau.

PwC’s Eva Berg-Winters said that growth of 99.2 per cent was greater than she had expected. “We have now passed the tipping point where things start moving in the mobile internet,” she said, adding that mobile was taking off faster than internet advertising did at a similar stage of its development in the late 1990s. Continue reading "Mobile advertising: the law of small numbers"

For a little while it looked like things were looking up for Phorm, the internet advertising technology company. There had been a year of controversy about the company’s technology which monitors internet users web surfing behaviour at the ISP level - a technique known as “deep packet inspection”, which has raised accusations of spying with some privacy activists.

But at the beginning of the year, things went quiet.  There were a few positive statements about targeted advertising from UK officials like Stephen Carter, and the company launched a trial with KT, the Korean broadband provider.

Now, suddenly, the controversy is raging again. Continue reading "Phorm controversy sparks up again"