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Amazon.com Inc must face a trademark lawsuit brought by a watchmaker which says the online retailer's search results can cause confusion for potential customers, a federal appeals court ruled. The 2-1 opinion from the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco on Monday reversed a lower court ruling, and said high-end watchmaker Multi Time Machine Inc. is entitled to a trial on its trademark allegations. An Amazon representative could not immediately be reached for comment.

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(Reuters) – Apple Inc has removed several civil war games featuring Confederate flags from its App Store, some game developers said. South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley on Monday called on lawmakers to take down the Confederate battle flag at the state capitol grounds. Retailers such as Wal Mart Stores Inc and Sears Holdings Corp have stopped selling the flag.

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(Reuters) – The attorneys general of New York and Connecticut are investigating Apple Inc's negotiations with music companies to look for signs of potential antitrust violations. The attorneys general want to know whether music labels colluded or were pressured into favoring Apple's paid music subscription service, which was released on Monday. Apple launched Apple Music on Monday, a $9.99-a-month streaming music service that will likely alter the dynamics of how consumers listen to music as the music industry grapples with declines in downloaded songs and tries to figure out new ways to get people to pay for music.

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SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Apple Inc and electric battery maker A123 Systems are close to settling a legal dispute over claims that the smartphone and computer maker, which is also looking into building an electric vehicle, poached A123 employees to build a large-scale battery unit. A123, which makes batteries that are used in electric cars, sued Apple in February in Massachusetts federal court, claiming that around June 2014 Apple began aggressively poaching A123 engineers tasked with leading some of the company's most critical projects. Apple denied the claims. The Waltham, Mass. …

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SurveyMonkey CEO and husband of Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, Dave Goldberg, died unexpectedly on Friday night, his brother wrote in a Facebook post on Saturday. “It’s with incredible shock and sadness that I’m letting our friends and family know that my amazing brother, Dave Goldberg, beloved husband of Sheryl Sandberg, father of two wonderful children, and son of Paula Goldberg, passed away suddenly last night,” Robert Goldberg wrote.

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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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(Reuters) – Walt Disney Co CEO Bob Iger learned that Steve Jobs' cancer had returned less than an hour before Disney announced it was buying Jobs' Pixar studio in 2006, and Iger kept the Apple co-founder's condition a secret for three years, according to Bloomberg, citing a new biography of Jobs. Iger told the authors of “Becoming Steve Jobs” he thought about the implications of keeping such a secret at a time when regulators were calling for more disclosure and holding executives more accountable to their fiduciary duties, Bloomberg reported. The $7 billion deal to buy Pixar made Jobs Disney's largest shareholder and put him on the entertainment company's board.

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By Alexei Oreskovic SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – About 40 percent of adult Apple iPhone owners in the United States are interested in buying the company's new Apple Watch, according to a new Reuters/Ipsos poll. The high-tech smartwatch, which will range in price from $350 to $17,000 for an 18-karat gold model, is Apple Inc’s first major new product in five years and consumer demand for the device is being closely watched by competitors and investors. Owners of the iPhone are a particularly important market for Apple as it launches the new watch, which goes on sale April 24. Because the watch needs an iPhone to work fully, analysts say the most likely pool of initial buyers will already have an Apple smartphone in their pockets.

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By Alexei Oreskovic SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Apple Inc's new smartwatch may be a tough sell, with 69 percent of Americans indicating they are not interested in buying the gadget, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll. The poll was taken after Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook rolled out the product on Monday, and only about half of respondents said they had heard news of the timepiece in the last few days. Also, in an encouraging sign for Apple, roughly 13 percent of survey respondents who did not own an iPhone said that they would consider buying one in order to buy an Apple Watch, which needs an iPhone to work fully. Apple overcame skepticism about the iPad and iPod when they first debuted, but the survey suggests that the world's largest technology company has work to do to make the watch ubiquitous.

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By Malathi Nayak NEW YORK (Reuters) – Software developers say it will not be easy to come up with a “killer app” for Apple Inc's Watch – few have seen the product and the software is still in test mode. While app makers are passionate about developing for the Apple Watch, some are skeptical about the prospects of coming up with a big idea for the little computer on a wrist that hits stores on April 24, said Markiyan Matsekh, product manager at software engineering firm Eleks. A killer app that grabs consumers' attention will be key to the success of the Apple Watch and could spawn new companies, as the iPhone did. Apple has blocked some features, such as the gyroscope and accelerometer, on the development kit, and the watch simulator cannot test all functions, developers said.