Yahoo's Deal To Buy A $200M Stake In Dailymotion From Orange Scuppered By French Government
It looks like lightening has struck on the towers of Dailymotion. Yahoo’s bid to take a $200 million majority stake in the video site — known as the ‘YouTube of France’ — has been killed by the French government, which decided that it didn’t want a U.S. company to take a controlling stake in a French operation, TechCrunch has confirmed with a source close to the situation. Rumors of problems with the deal have been swirling around for weeks now. At first it looked like the issues were because of internal disagreements at Yahoo, according to Business Insider. But a report in the French newspaper Le Monde last week noted that Orange had suspended the deal because of opposition from the French state, which owns 27% of the telecom company. We have confirmed with someone close to the deal that the latter is indeed the case. Our source said that Arnaud Montebourg, the French Minister of Industrial Renewal, effectively told Orange that it could not go through with the deal. “Dailymotion ...
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UK Conservative Party Minister Grant Shapps Is A Master Spammer
BoingBoing just pointed out a nice piece about Grant Shapps, UK Conservative Party Co-Chair and Member of Parliament for Welwyn Hatfield. The Conservative Party has fallen under scrutiny for being too cozy with Google and their practices this year but this seems to offset that considerably. Shapps runs HowToCorp, one of those ubiquitous link farm services that promises to create heady amounts of Google juice for folks who are trying to squat on a topic like, say, "golf."
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