WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Search and advertising giant Google has closed its deal to buy Fitbit, the companies said on Thursday, even as the Justice Department said it was continuing its probe of the $2.1 billion transaction. The Justice Department, which sued Alphabet Inc’s Google in October for allegedly violating antitrust law in its search and search advertising businesses, said it “has not reached a final decision about whether to pursue an enforcement action” regarding the Fitbit… Source link

Jan 14 (Reuters) – Fitbit Inc has completed its merger with Alphabet Inc’s Google, the companies said on Thursday. The $2.1 billion deal had triggered concerns over Google’s market power and the use of people’s health data in targeted advertising. (Reporting by Munsif Vengattil in Bengaluru; Editing by Arun Koyyur) Source link

Fitbit Inc. FIT, announced Thursday morning that its acquisition by Alphabet Inc.’s [s; GOOGL] GOOG, +0.80% Google has officially closed. Alphabet agreed to pay about $2.1 billion, or $7.35 a share, to acquire Fitbit. The deal was first announced in November 2019 but faced regulatory pushback, particularly in the European Union. European regulators who were looking into the deal eventually gave their blessing last month after… Source link

Google Cloud has partnered with its newly signed customer Nokia to develop infrastructure solutions aimed at telcos that are building 5G networks with compute nodes at the edges of those networks. The goal of the partnership, announced Thursday, is to give telecommunications companies infrastructure they can use to build and deploy cloud-native applications across public and private clouds and edge locations. Tying it all together will… Source link

If Google loses the recent antitrust lawsuits that have been filed against the search engine giant, Google may decrease its ad placement frequency, advertisers may lose access to scalable advertising, while on the other hand, there may be new digital marketing opportunities, better user experiences, and more affordable advertising. What are the antitrust lawsuits about, and what could the outcome of the lawsuits mean for marketers? The State Antitrust Lawsuits The state antitrust… Source link

New weekly unemployment claims spiked far more than expected last week to reach a five-month high, as the coronavirus pandemic and stay-in-place orders weighed heavily on the labor market. The U.S. Department of Labor released its weekly report on new jobless claims Thursday morning at 8:30 a.m. ET. Here were the main results in the report, compared to consensus estimates compiled by Bloomberg: Initial jobless claims, week ended Jan. 9: 965,000 vs. 789,000 expected and a revised 784,000 during… Source link

Telcos have regularly sought out Nokia as a provider of network goodies. In more recent years, they have also looked to Google for its expertise in the cloud and all things related. Now they can buy the entire package in one go after the Finnish equipment maker and the US Internet giant made a joint pitch to operators. The alliance they have struck targets operators building 5G networks with the enterprise customer in mind. Businesses signing up to 5G services will, of course, need a… Source link

A 1952 Mickey Mantle — one of baseball cards’ holy grails — has sold for a whopping $5.2 million, setting a record for the most expensive trading card ever and nearly doubling its value since a 2018 sale. The card is one of nine known in existence in its condition. It sold to Rob Gough, an entrepreneur and actor, who started the DOPE clothing and CBD line and whose credits include the 2018 film “Billionaire Boys Club.” This particular card is graded as Mint 9 by PSA — the go-to… Source link

Press Release Google Cloud, Nokia partner to accelerate cloud-native 5G readiness for communication service providers Google Cloud and Nokia will jointly develop cloud-native 5G core solutions for communication service providers and enterprise customers New partnership will deliver cloud capabilities to the network edge to accelerate enterprise digital transformation 14 January 2021  Espoo, Finland and Sunnyvale, California – Google Cloud and Nokia today announced a global, strategic… Source link

FILE PHOTO: Visitors gather outside the Nokia booth at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, February 26, 2019. REUTERS/Sergio Perez/File Photo (Reuters) – Nokia on Thursday partnered with Alphabet’s Google Cloud unit to build 5G core network infrastructure and allow business customers to offer services such as smart retail and automated manufacturing. Cloud computing units of big technology companies such as Microsoft and Amazon are also tying up with telecoms vendors ahead of… Source link