world-market

Dow jumps 936 points in biggest point gain ever

10/13/2008:
Last week was one of the worst week in the history of US financial markets with the Dow, SP and Nasdaq lossing a lot of ground, but today, the markets seems to have turned a corner with biggest point gain ever for the Dow. The Dow surged 936 points (11%), SP added 11.7%, Nasdaq added 11.8%. Has investors looked for bargins or bet that the worst of the credit crisis is over. We will have to wait to see if this is the start of a Bull market or just a one day shot up.

Anheuser Busch Being Bought By InBev NV

07/14/2008:
Anheuser Busch, U.S. brewer, has agreed to be bought by Belgium based InBev for a higher price of $52 billion after a month long standoff between the two. This will create the world’s largest beer maker. InBev maker of Stella Artois and Beck’s, will pay $70 per share for maker of Budweiser.

Mars To Buy Wrigley

04/28/2008:
Mars, the makes of the world famous M\&M’s, announed on Monday that a deal to acquire the chewing gum company Wrigley Jr. Company for about $23 billion. The deal is being partly financed Berkshire Hathaway which has a famous financier, Warren Buffett . Mr. Buffett was also an early investor in Coca Cola.

Delta and Northwest Merger

04/15/2008:
Today marked a big day for the airline industry where much anticipated merger between Delta Air Lines Inc. and Northwest Airlines Corp. was finalized. The deal is around $17.7 billion and would create the world’s largest airline. The new airline will have some $35 billion in revenue and more then 75,000 employees, with access to more than 390 destinations in 67 countries. Delta will have their executive offices in Atlanta, Minneapolis and New York, with international executive offices in Amsterdam, Paris and Tokyo.

Apple To Rent Movies, Shows Thin Notebook

01/15/2008:
Today at the annual Macworld Expo, Apple Inc’s Chief Executive Steve Jobs introduced a Ultralight MacBook called MacBook Air. The MacBook Air is 0.76 inch thick at its widest point and comes with 1.6 or 1.8GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2GB of RAM, and an 80GB hard drive and just one USB port with prices to start at $1,799. He also announced that iTunes will allow users to download movies from all major studios for a charge of $3.99 for new releases and $2.99 for old titles. Once downloaded the movies can be watched on iPod/iPhone and your PC, the movies are valid for 30 days to start watching once downloaded and 24 hours after that to finish.

BSNL plans initial public offering (IPO)

01/14/2008:
BSNL, Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd, is a state owned telecom company in India. BSNL is pronding thoughts of an IPO at around 10% stake in the company which is valued at around $10 billion (Rs 40,000 crore) for later this year. The company is currently valued at $100 billion (Rs 400,000 crore).

Motorola Acquiring Soundbuzz

01/11/2008:
Motorola will acquire Soundbuzz, Singapore based pan Asian music provider, which will add Motorola’s MotoMusic service to India, South East Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. The MotoMusic service is currently being provided in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Soundbuzz provides consumer ability to downloads music to mobile device using the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) digital rights management (DRM) technology. Currently Soundbuzz has extensive music libraries and through licenses from Sony BMG, EMI, Warner Music International, and Universal Music Group and many others independent record labels within Asia, USA, and Europe.

Microsoft offers Fast Buyout Offers

01/08/2008:
Microsoft has offered to buy Fast Search and Transfer (Fast), a Norwegian enterprise search company, for $1.2 billion. This will place Microsoft in a good position of enterprise as it try to become one stop shop for the enterprise with its wide range of products.

Wikia Launched

01/07/2008:
Today, marks the enterance of a new way of searching. Jimmy Wales, cofounder of online encyclopedia Wikipedia, and his team have launched Wikia to give the online community a new way to search for information. Will this new search engine hurt the established search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN and the others? Only time will tell. It will take sometime for Wikia to reach the online community and enchance Wikia. The concept behind Wikia is similar to encyclopedia Wikipedia and hence will allow the online community to help better the search engine experince and put the results best suited for a given query in front of the searcher.
Wikia has been backed by the funding from Amazon.com, venture capital firm Bessemer Venture Partners, Netscape Communications cofounder Marc Andreesen, LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, and Lotus Development founder and Electronic Frontier Foundation cofounder Mitch Kapor.

Ask.com Enables Privacy Control

12/12/2007:
Ask.com announced the availibility of AskEraser, a privacy control that erases information about users’ search queries within a few hours. With AskEraser enabled for a given users, all Ask.com cookies including IP address, user ID and session ID cookies and complete text of search queries are erased across the Ask.com search areas but cannot delete it from from the servers of third-party companies. But the side effect of AskEraser being enabled is that some of the Ask.com personalization options will not function.