(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.
Read moreLast 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
Read moreThis 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.
Read moreSpeaking to analysts after its second-quarter report late on Thursday, Google Chief Business Officer Omid Kordestani pointed to Brooklyn-based Etsy as a good example of web companies winning more business due to Google's recent move to index information and pages within third-party apps. “Developers like Etsy are already seeing a boost in traffic as a result of deep linking,” Kordestani said. The jump in Etsy's shares pressured short sellers who recently increased bets against the company, which has grown from selling just wooden goods to include other crafts, vintage goods and recently, mass manufactured products
Read more