BNET Daily Dispatch: Housing, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and Price-Fixing
By
Andrew Hines
March 27th, 2007 @ 9:52 am
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Categories: General
Tags: Andrew Hines
- It's official: The U.S. is experiencing the worst housing slump in a decade. The number of homes sold last month fell 3.9 percent from the year before, and prices slid 0.2 percent. America's third-largest home builder, Lennar Corp., reported a 73 percent decline in profits. The drop in housing has combined with rising fuel costs to bring down consumer and investor confidence. Analysts expect the housing market to be a drag on the economy for the remainder of the year, despite a strong job market.
- Yahoo! plans to announce today a new mobile ad network that would represent a major strategic move, before any clear leader has emerged in the quickly growing mobile market. Steve Boom, Yahoo’s senior vice president for broadband and mobile, said the company is working "extremely fast to get the building blocks in place." The ad network would take advantage of Yahoo!'s mobile search application, oneSearch.
- Microsoft is once again facing investigation by regulators in the European Union. This time, the European Committee for Interoperability Systems seeks to determine whether the software titan failed to share information required to allow competitors to share documents with its Microsoft Office suite of applications. The investigation comes in response to long-standing complaints from IBM, Sun Microsystems, and seven other companies competing to rein in Microsoft's 98 percent share of the office applications market.
- Judges in the Supreme Court are struggling to decide whether pricing agreements between retailers and wholesalers are always illegal, as has been the rule. Specifically, the justices heard arguments in favor of allowing wholesaler/manufacturers to set a minimum retail price. A decision to overturn the rule would represent a major shift in the long-standing interpretation of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.
