By Eric Auchard DUBLIN (Reuters) – Slack, the group messaging platform valued at nearly $3 billion, plans to accelerate its growth by spending some of its $250 million cash pile on mass-market advertising, founder and CEO Stewart Butterfield said. “We are switching from trying to keep up with growth to trying to generate growth,” Butterfield said in an interview at Web Summit, Europe’s biggest conference for start-ups
Read moreBy Toby Sterling AMSTERDAM (Reuters) – After its rapid ride to dominance in online travel in Europe over the past decade, Booking.com is seeking to expand in China and the U.S., its CEO said in an interview. Darren Huston, who heads both Booking.com and its U.S. parent company Priceline Group, said Booking.com is targeting a 20 percent increase in bookings going through its website in the third quarter and still has years of growth ahead.
Read moreBy Dan Levine and Joseph Menn SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Eight months after disclosing a major data breach, ride service Uber [UBER.UL] is focusing its legal efforts on learning more about an internet address that it has persuaded a court could lead to identifying the hacker. In February, Uber revealed that as many as 50,000 of its drivers' names and license numbers had been improperly downloaded, and the company filed a lawsuit in San Francisco federal court in an attempt to unmask the perpetrator. Uber's court papers claim that an unidentified person using a Comcast IP address had access to a security key used in the breach.
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By James Davey LONDON (Reuters) – The British arm of German discount supermarket Aldi will launch an online operation next year, marking its first foray into e-commerce in Europe and giving the UK's major grocers yet another headache to contend with in a brutally competitive market. Privately owned Aldi [ALDIEI.UL], which posted a 4 percent dip in 2014 operating profit on Monday, showing even discounters can't engage in a price war and emerge unscathed, said it will begin selling wine by the case online in the first quarter of next year.
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By Thomas Escritt AMSTERDAM (Reuters) – A Dutch website said on Sunday it had garnered enough signatures to force the Netherlands to hold a non-binding referendum on the EU’s association agreement with Ukraine, in a move meant to signal popular dissatisfaction with Dutch European policy. “YOU did it, out of love for democracy in the Netherlands and Europe, and to send a signal to The Hague and Brussels,” the website told its readers in a post on Sunday evening. Any referendum is likely to be held during the Dutch presidency of the European Union, which starts in January.
Read moreBy Julia Fioretti BRUSSELS (Reuters) – The European Commission on Thursday launched an inquiry into the behavior of online companies such as Google, Facebook and Amazon to try to gauge whether there is a need to regulate the web. It is not clear whether the inquiry will lead to any regulation of the Internet in the European Union, but it provides more evidence that mainly U.S
Read moreBy Julia Fioretti , Brussels (Reuters) – – The European Commission will launch a study in September of the ride-hailing app Uber in an effort to settle legal disputes that have pitched the U.S.
Read moreBy Nate Raymond NEW YORK (Reuters) – A Florida man accused of running an unlicensed bitcoin exchange and who is among five defendants linked to last summer's massive data breach at JPMorgan Chase & Co is in talks to resolve his criminal case, according to court papers filed Friday. In a court filing in federal court in Manhattan, a prosecutor said Yuri Lebedev, one of two men charged with operating the bitcoin exchange service, was in discussions “regarding a possible disposition of this case.” The filing used language that is usually indicative of plea talks, though cases in some instances can be resolved with deferred prosecution agreements or with charges being dropped. Eun Young Choi, a prosecutor under Manhattan U.S
Read moreFRANKFURT/BERLIN (Reuters) – German newspaper revenues stabilized in 2014 after years of decline as publishers compensated for falling advertising sales by persuading more readers to pay for news online. Total revenues fell 0.6 percent to 7.76 billion euros ($8.57 billion) in Europe’s biggest newspaper market, the Federation of German Newspaper Publishers (BDZV) said, compared with a 4.4 percent decline in 2013.
Read moreBy Julia Fioretti BRUSSELS (Reuters) – New European Union data protection rules expected to be agreed on Monday will allow citizens to sue companies that own data as well as those that process it on their behalf, for example cloud computing providers. The new system is opposed by companies such as Germany’s SAP SE, International Business Machines Corp, Cisco Systems Inc and Amazon.com Inc who say it will kill off Europe’s cloud computing industry, as well as introduce uncertainty in business to business relations.
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