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By Julia Fioretti BRUSSELS (Reuters) – Facebook said on Monday it would appeal a court ruling ordering it to stop tracking the online activities of non-Facebook users in Belgium who visit Facebook pages, or face a 250,000 euro ($269,000) daily fine. Belgium's data protection regulator took the U.S. company to court in June, accusing it of trampling on EU privacy law by tracking people without a Facebook account without their consent. At stake is the so-called 'datr' cookie, which Facebook places on people's browsers when they visit a Facebook.com site or click a Facebook 'Like' button on other websites, allowing it to track the online activities of that browser.

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Google parent Alphabet Inc , Microsoft Corp and Amazon.com Inc made headway in the latest quarter in the areas that will be their main engines of growth for years to come, driving up shares across the tech sector on Friday. For Alphabet, search traffic on mobiles surpassed desktop traffic worldwide for the first time, while Amazon was able to boost margins, an area of concern, as its cloud business boomed. Microsoft's growing emphasis on cloud computing under Chief Executive Satya Nadella also put the company on track successfully transition away from its slowing business that relies on sales of personal computers.

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By Yasmeen Abutaleb SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Facebook Inc is testing a personal digital assistant called “M” within its Messenger service that can answer questions with live human help and perform tasks such as buying gifts online and booking restaurants. M is “powered by artificial intelligence that's trained and supervised by people,” David Marcus, vice president of Messaging products, wrote on his Facebook page on Wednesday. Rival services like Apple Inc's Siri, Google Inc's Google Now and Microsoft Corp's Cortana rely entirely on technology to answer questions.

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Google Inc's overhaul of its operating structure is an acknowledgement of the lack of transparency surrounding its disparate businesses and projects, analysts said, but it remains to be seen how much more the company will actually disclose. Analysts and investors have long sought more granular detail on Google's capital spending and cash flow, as well as the financial performance of YouTube and Android. Google said on Monday it would split into two reporting companies under a new holding company called Alphabet.

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(Reuters) – Canadian smartphone maker BlackBerry Ltd is cutting jobs across the world, the company said on Friday, as it consolidates its software, hardware and applications business. BlackBerry, which reported a 16.8 percent fall in quarterly revenue in March, had about 6,225 full-time employees as of Feb. 2015, according to its website. The company is reallocating resources to capitalize on growth opportunities and achieve profitability across all its business segments, a company spokeswoman said in an e-mailed statement.

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Facebook has warned of heavy investments in 2015 as it steps up efforts to expand a collection of products that include messaging service WhatsApp, photo-sharing service Instagram and virtual reality headset maker Oculus Rift. As a result, Facebook's operating expenses rose 83 percent in the first quarter as R&D costs jumped 133 percent and marketing and sales spending nearly doubled. “The question is, can they keep costs under control and what will be the new revenue streams around video, Instagram and virtual reality around Oculus?” he said. Facebook's net income attributable to stockholders fell to $509 million, or 18 cents per share, in the three months ended March 31, from $639 million, or 25 cents per share, a year earlier.

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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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Search engine Google has agreed to better inform users about how it handles their personal information after an investigation by Britain's data protection regulator found its privacy policy was too vague. The Information Commissioner's Office said in a statement that it required Google to sign a “formal undertaking” that it would make the changes by June 30 and take further steps in the next two years. The ICO investigation stems from a privacy policy implemented by Google in March 2012 that consolidated some 70 existing privacy policies into one and pooled data collected on individual users across its services, including YouTube, Gmail and its social network Google+.

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By Jennifer Ablan and Liana B. Baker NEW YORK (Reuters) – Samsung Electronics recently offered to buy BlackBerry Ltd for as much as $7.5 billion, seeking its valuable patents as it battles Apple in the corporate market, according to a person familiar with the matter and documents seen by Reuters. South Korea's Samsung proposed an initial price range of $13.35 to $15.49 per share, representing a premium of 38 percent to 60 percent over BlackBerry's current trading price, the source said on Wednesday. …