(Reuters) – Twitter Inc said it would pay new Executive Chairman Omid Kordestani an annual base salary of $50,000 and a one-time grant of options to buy 800,000 shares of the microblogging website operator. Kordestani's appointment was a move by Twitter to allay concerns about Dorsey's dual role as head of mobile payments company Square Inc.
Read moreLast year, many tech IPOs enjoyed soaring valuations in their Wall Street debut, raining cash on the companies and their investors and boosting concerns about another Silicon Valley bubble. Now, the party is winding down, according to data analyzed by Reuters: Five of the 12 U.S.-based tech companies that went public this year, or 42 percent, priced their shares at a valuation below or nearly the same as their private market value, compared to 24 percent of the 29 that went public in 2014. “People are no longer out of their minds with valuations and expectations,” said Adam Marcus, managing partner at OpenView Venture Partners in Boston
Read moreThis week, however, a federal jury returned a verdict against Apple in a lawsuit brought by a different kind of adversary: a public university. The University of Wisconsin-Madison's licensing arm, the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, convinced a jury that Apple had infringed its patent for improving chip efficiency when the company incorporated the technology into some of its phones and tablets. Research institutions and universities have not traditionally been major players in patent litigation, and even now schools still launch relatively few patent suits compared to private companies – about 40 to 50 cases per year, according to preliminary research by University of Alberta professor Tania Bubela.
Read moreDanish zoo staff dissected a nine-month-old lion cub in front of an audience of enthralled young children on Thursday, as a social media storm about the gruesome display raged outside. It’s cool that it was so similar to a human,” said 11-year-old Sofie Beyer, visiting the zoo in Odense, Denmark’s third largest town.
Read moreBy Deborah Todd SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Yahoo's next step in password security is to eliminate them altogether.
Read more(Reuters) – Twitter Inc said in a blog it would provide its advertisers with custom data-driven reports to help them gauge the impact of their ad campaigns on their profits. The effectiveness of an ad campaign will be measured by dividing an advertiser's target audience into two groups – one that sees the ads and another that doesn't – and comparing conversions across the two test groups. Twitter's ad revenue per monthly average user has been declining and to stem this it has launched new advertising products, notably its app install ads
Read moreTen more people have been detained in connection with messages they wrote on Twitter about the suicide bombings which killed 99 people in Ankara, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said on Thursday, bringing the number held to 12. Davutoglu told Reuters on Wednesday some of the suspects in Saturday's attack, the worst of its kind in Turkey, had spent months in Syria and could be linked to Islamic State or to Kurdish militants.
Read moreThailand's military government has scrapped a plan to create a single Internet gateway, a deputy prime minister said on Thursday, putting paid to a system aimed at allowing authorities to monitor content. The plan to consolidate Thailand's 10 Internet gateways into one central government-controlled point had been one of the government's least popular ideas since it came to power following a bloodless coup last year. Deputy Prime Minister Somkid Jatusripitak, a former finance minister, said the plan had been halted
Read more(Reuters) – A U.S.
Read moreVideo-streaming service provider Netflix Inc reported third-quarter U.S. subscriber additions below its own forecast, blaming an ongoing transition to chip-based cards for the miss. Shares of Netflix, known for its original shows such as “House of Cards” and “Orange is the New Black”, plunged about 15 percent after the bell, before clawing back to trade down 2.4 percent
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