Google Buys Motorola Mobility for $12.5 Billion
Google Buys Motorola Mobility for $12.5 Billion
Google announced plans to acquire Motorola Mobility. The price: $12.5 billion – the company’s biggest-ever acquisition by far.
Larry Page (CEO of Google) had this to say:
Motorola’s total commitment to Android in mobile devices is one of many reasons that there is a natural fit between our two companies. Together, we will create amazing user experiences that supercharge the entire Android ecosystem for the benefit of consumers, partners and developers everywhere.
He also brought up the company’s recent, highly-publicised blog post about companies “including Microsoft and Apple” are “banding together in anti-competitive patent attacks on Android.” The Motorola acquisition, he says, will help Google “better protect Android from anti-competitive threats from Microsoft, Apple and other companies.”
Google is getting nearly 25,000 patents from the deal (7,500 of them are pending)…
Facebook & Google Spar Over Google+ Invites
Facebook and Google are engaged in a war of words over claims that Facebook is limiting the spread of Google+ invites on its social network.
The controversy erupted Tuesday after Google spokesperson Randall Safara posted a video on Google+ that appeared to show how Facebook was limiting the spread of Google+ invites. In the video, Safara posts a Google+ invite on his Facebook page, then demonstrates that the post with the invite did not appear in his friends’ News Feeds — even though other posts went through with no problem…
German State Bans Facebook Pages, Like Buttons
The Independent Center for Privacy Protection (ULD) in the northern German state of Schleswig-Holstein has demanded local websites to remove their Facebook Pages and remove any Like buttons on their websites. The companies were told they have until September 1 to comply or will face fines of up to €50,000
The complaint is that these plugins and pages track users for up to 2 years, recording users interactions with web pages, where they go beyond the initial page and what they do on all pages visited.
Facebook stated they were compliant with EU privacy laws…
