Twitter to pay Kordestani annual base salary of $50,000

(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.

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Exclusive: Silicon Valley IPO market boom winding down

Last 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

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Apple’s newest courtroom foe is a patent-savvy university

This 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.

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Apparel maker Patagonia stops buying Ovis 21 wool after PETA video

The footage published on Thursday by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) showed the cruel treatment at farms which supplied the Ventura, California-based company with merino wool used in its base layers and insulation. Patagonia’s Chief Executive Officer Rose Marcario said in a statement the company was shocked by the video, and they were dismayed to witness such “horrifying” mistreatment.

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Liberty Interactive to buy online retailer Zulily in $2.4 billion deal

Liberty Interactive Corp , which owns home shopping network QVC, said it would acquire Zulily Inc in a deal valued at $2.4 billion to tap into the online retailer's younger clientele and its strong mobile presence. Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd owns a stake of about 9 percent in the company. Billionaire John Malone-backed Liberty will combine the five-year old Zulily with its QVC business, which is about 30 years old and seen by analysts as a maturing business in the United States

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Twitter signs multi-year deal with NFL

(Reuters) – The National Football League said it signed a multi-year partnership with microblogging site Twitter Inc to deliver video and other content to NFL fans on a daily basis. Content, including in-game highlights from pre-season through Super Bowl 50, will be distributed across Twitter from the start of the 2015 season, the NFL said in a press release. (http://bit.ly/1TkkSLl) The partnership expands on the NFL's existing partnership with Twitter since 2013, and Twitter users will now have access to more official NFL content than in the past

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Think the world’s getting worse? Think again, says economist

By Joseph D’Urso LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Turn on the news or listen to doom-mongers in politics and the media, and you could be forgiven for thinking the world is a more violent and unequal place than ever, but according to economist Max Roser, we’ve never had it so good in many ways. Roser, based at the University of Oxford, spends his time digging through data on human living standards across countries and decades, and makes jazzy graphs and slides for his website OurWorldInData.org and his 30,000 Twitter followers

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State actor suspected in cyber intrusion on U.S. military email

The unclassified email network at the U.S. military’s Joint Staff has been offline since late July after what investigators now believe was a sophisticated cyber attack likely linked to a foreign state, U.S. officials said on Thursday.

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