creative

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French media group Vivendi has entered exclusive talks to buy 80 percent of video-sharing website Dailymotion from telecom operator Orange for 217 million euros ($236 million), the companies said in a joint statement on Tuesday. Orange would keep the remaining 20 percent of the company as part of the deal, which corresponds to an enterprise value for Dailymotion of 265 million euros, the companies said. “Orange and Vivendi will now enter into a period of exclusive negotiations in order to finalize the terms of this operation,” the companies said. “For Orange … this operation meets the group's ambition to bring Dailymotion together with a strategic content-focused partner that is capable of giving it the means to accelerate its growth and to turn it into one of the world's largest content distribution platforms.” Orange said it will use the proceeds of this transaction to finance and reinforce its efforts in its digital business.

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By Sarah McBride and Dan Levine SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Silicon Valley powerhouse venture capital firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield and Byers was cleared on Friday of claims it short-circuited the career of a former partner because she is a woman, in a gender discrimination trial that shook the tech world. A California jury also rejected a claim that Kleiner, the firm that backed Google Inc and Amazon.com Inc, had retaliated against its former partner, Ellen Pao, by firing her after she sued in 2012. Despite days of courtroom drama about affairs, books of erotic poetry and office flirting, juror Steve Sammut, who mostly voted for Kleiner, said the decision came down to Pao's effectiveness at her job. The verdict dashed Pao's hopes for personal vindication, but the trial revealed embarrassing disclosures about how Pao and other women were treated at Kleiner and Silicon Valley's corporate culture and its lack of diversity.

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By Matthew Miller and Gerry Shih BEIJING (Reuters) – IBM Corp will share technology with Chinese firms and will actively help build China's industry, CEO Virginia Rometty said in Beijing as she set out a strategy for one of the foreign firms hardest hit by China's shifting technology policies. IBM must help China build its IT industry rather than viewing the country solely as a sales destination or manufacturing base, Rometty said at the China Development Forum, an annual Chinese government-sponsored conference bringing together business executives and China's ruling elite.

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China's Defense Ministry on Friday denied that it had anything to do with a cyber attack on Register.com, a unit of Web.com, following a report in the Financial Times that the FBI was looking into the Chinese military's involvement. “The relevant criticism that China's military participated in Internet hacking is to play the same old tune, and is totally baseless,” the ministry said in a fax to Reuters in response to a question about the story. It is not clear what the Chinese military would be looking for or what it would gain from Register.com's data. China and the United States regularly accuse each other of hacking attacks.

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Nokia, the world's third-largest mobile equipment maker, has seen nothing in its business that would lead it to change its financial outlook, its chief executive said on Sunday. It is kind of business as usual,” Nokia CEO Rajeev Suri said in response to a reporter's question during a press conference ahead of the Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona. In late January, the company said that for its mainstay Nokia Networks’ business, it expected net sales and operating margins in the first quarter to decline compared to the fourth quarter of 2014, typically a seasonally stronger quarter.

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A year and a half ago, Apple Inc had applied for just eight patents related to auto batteries. Recently, it has hired a bevy of engineers, just one of whom had already filed for 17 in his former career, according to a Thomson Reuters analysis. The recent spate of hires and patent filings reviewed by Reuters shows that Apple is fast building its industrial lithium-ion battery capabilities, adding to evidence the iPhone maker may be developing a car. Quiet, clean electric cars are viewed in Silicon Valley and elsewhere as a promising technology for the future, but high costs and “range anxiety”, the concern that batteries will run out of power and cannot be recharged quickly, remain obstacles.

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Japan Display Inc is considering building a plant to supply smartphone screens for Apple Inc and is negotiating with the U.S. company for investment in the project, a person familiar with the situation said on Friday. The Japanese screen maker aims to be the primary supplier of high-tech screens for Apple's wildly popular iPhones, the person told Reuters. Global iPhone sales, notably in China, have surged to make Apple the most profitable company in history. Japan Display wants Apple to shoulder much of the expected 200 billion yen ($1.7 billion) investment in the plant, which aims to be in operation next year, the source said on condition of anonymity as the talks remain confidential.

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By Deepa Seetharaman and Edwin Chan SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Electric-car battery maker A123 Systems has sued Apple Inc for poaching top engineers to build a large-scale battery division, according to a court filing that offered further evidence that the iPhone maker may be developing a car. Apple has been poaching engineers with deep expertise in car systems, including from Tesla Inc, and talking with industry experts and automakers with the ultimate aim of learning how to make its own electric car, an auto industry source said last week. Around June 2014, Apple began aggressively poaching A123 engineers tasked with leading some of the company's most critical projects, the lawsuit said. The engineers jumped ship to pursue similar programs at Apple, in violation of their employment agreements, A123 said in a filing earlier this month in Massachusetts federal court.

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By Jeff Mason RANCHO MIRAGE, Calif. (Reuters) – It may not have been a hacking, but a computer outage at the hotel where U.S. President Barack Obama resided this week could not have come at a more inconvenient time. The president flew to San Francisco on Thursday to preach the benefits of better corporate cybersecurity practices. The entire two days he was in town, the computer system at his upscale hotel, The Fairmont, was down. “There's certainly no evidence to say anything was hacked or compromised,” said Thomas Klein, the hotel's general manager, noting the irony of Obama's attendance at a cybersecurity summit during the same period.

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By Christina Farr SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Apple Inc's healthcare technology is spreading quickly among major U.S. hospitals, showing early promise as a way for doctors to monitor patients remotely and lower costs. Fourteen of 23 top hospitals contacted by Reuters said they have rolled out a pilot program of Apple's HealthKit service – which acts as a repository for patient-generated health information like blood pressure, weight or heart rate – or are in talks to do so. Apple rivals Google Inc and Samsung Electronics , which have released similar services, are only just starting to reach out to hospitals and other medical partners. Such systems hold the promise of allowing doctors to watch for early signs of trouble and intervene before a medical problem becomes acute.