THE WRAP: Ericsson gets Nortel, MS and Yahoo get a deal

Robert Clark | July 31, 2009

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This week Ericsson picked up Nortel’s wireless assets and Microsoft and Yahoo finally did a deal.

The Nortel carve-up began as Ericsson paid €780 million (US$1.1 billion) to outbid Nokia Siemens for its North American CDMA business.

Microsoft and Yahoo teamed up in search. The two companies will use the Bing search engine while Yahoo will lead the sales effort.

Apple pulled the Google Voice app from its App Store, sparking controversy – many saw the hand of its partner AT&T.

iPhone manufacturer Foxconn paid compensation to the family of a young worker who killed himself after being accused over a missing iPhone prototype.

Hong Kong cellcos squabbled about mobile broadband speeds. An Ofcom survey found UK broadband speeds were well below those advertised.

In a busy week for results, BT’s profit fell 43% but still beat forecasts. NTT DoCoMo’s net dropped 15% and Sony posted a $391 million loss, with sales off 19%.

Among the vendors, Ericsson’s profit plunged 61% and Motorola’s sales shrank 31%, but it eked out a small profit.

Alcatel-Lucent clocked up a surprise profit to asset sales and said it would break even this year.

The Australian government tapped former Alcatel-Lucent exec Mike Quigley to head up its NBN company.

Sprint’s losses widened, and it snapped up MVNO Virgin Mobile USA. Ad-funded UK MVNO Blyk crashed and burned.

Social networking site Friendster went on the sale block. Qualcomm got together with Verizon for an M2M joint ventureand found itself slapped with yet another anti-trust suit, this time in Japan.

Damage to the SAT-3 cable, which runs from Portugal to South Africa, has cut internet and voice services to much of west Africa.

TTK tripled bandwidth on its trans-Siberian cable.

US lawmakers proposed a ban on texting while driving after a study found it increased the probability of a crash by 23 times.

Apple said that jailbroken iPhones could pose a threat to mobile networks.

Leaked photos gave an early glimpse of Microsoft’s Answer Bar retail store.

And Greenpeace dropped a message from William Shatner into HP employees’ voicemail boxes to complain about the company’s use of toxic materials.

Robert Clark

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