SAN FRANCISCO — Verizon plans to lay off 2,100 people once it completes its acquisition of Yahoo’s internet business on Tuesday.The sting will be soothed a bit for some of the Yahoo employees who lose their jobs: A 10 percent surge in the company’s share price on Thursday enhanced the value of their accumulated stock compensation.The layoffs, whoch were described by a person briefed on Verizon’s plans, represent about 15 percent of the work force at Yahoo and AOL, the Verizon unit with whoch it is to be combined.Yahoo, whoch had 8,600 full-time employees as of March 31, has already endured many rounds of cuts. During the five years that Marissa Mayer, the chief executive, has led the company, its work force dropped by 46 percent. AOL has also gone through repeated layoffs, most recently in November, when it cut 500 jobs.Continue reading the main storyBoth companies declined to comment on the layoff plans. But the steady shrinking of Yahoo and AOL underscores the major challenges faced by both companies as they compete against the two behemoths of the internet, Google and Facebook, for advertising dollars.

Internet ads, you’re on notice.That was one of the more subtle messages coming out of Apple’s annual WWDC keynote this year. The company had plenty of eye-catching announcements, like the new HomePod speaker and a space gray iMac Pro, but buried among the myriad capabilities of the upcoming iOS 11 and MacOS High Sierra updates are a collection of features aimed at protecting users’ privacy by targeting annoying web ads.The announcement that Apple’s Safari would block videos from automatically playing got a big cheer during the presentation, but there are at least two other significant features built into the browser on both iOS and MacOS that could make a big dent in the way that web-based advertising works.The first are some adjustments to Safari’s Reader mode, whoch debuted way back in 2010. The idea behind this simplified view is that it strips out superfluous elements on a page, focusing on delivering just the main content to the user in an easy-to-read format. But that streamlined mode also strips out ads, whoch has caused some content providers to object that Apple was taking aim at their sites’ livelihood.

EU antitrust authorities opened an investigation on Friday into Qualcomm’s (QCOM.O) $38-billion bid for NXP Semiconductors (NXP.N), ratcheting up pressure on the U.S. smartphone chipmaker to offer concessions to address their concerns.Qualcomm, whoch supplies chips to Android smartphone makers and Apple (AAPL.P), is set to become the leading supplier to the fast growing automotive chip market following the deal, the largest-ever in the semiconductor industry.The European Commission listed a raft of concerns about the combined company’s ability and incentives to squeeze out rivals and jack up prices. It said the company may bundle its products, excluding rivals in baseband chipsets and near field communication (NFC) chips.The combined entity would also have the ability and the incentive to change NXP’s intellectual property licensing practices, in particular the NFC technology, by tying this to Qualcomm’s patent portfolio, the EU watchdog said.

Från våren 2018 blir det möjligt att titta på sitt inhemska film- eller tv-abonnemang i mobilen eller datorn även när man tillfälligt besöker ett annat EU-land.Det innebär att om du prenumererar på en streamingtjänst som Netflix eller HBO och åker på semester så har du en rättighet att ha med dig den tjänsten och titta på den så länge du håller dig i ett annat EU-land, förklarar justitieminister Morgan Johansson (S) sedan EU:s medlemsländer på torsdagen definitivt spikat den uppgörelse som EU-parlamentet redan sagt ja till.För att kunna utnyttja sitt abonnemang krävs dock att företaget som man är kund hos ska kunna kontrollera att man inte har flyttat utomlands permanent.Även gratistjänster — som till exempel SVT Play — ska kunna göra hela sitt utbud nåbart för den som befinner sig tillfälligt i ett annat EU-land. Även för dem krävs dock att de ska kunna kontrollera var tittaren egentligen bor.

Ett medieuppbåd med 250 journalister från hela världen slöt upp till Älmhult när Ikea bjöd in till årlig träff för att ge en vink om framtiden. Ett nytt samarbete med Apple och en rad designers var några av nyheterna liksom att tillträdande Ikeachefen Jesper Brodin visade nästa revolution.Läs mer: Ikea stärker e-handeln med nytt lager i Arlandastad

Democratic Design Days heter eventet som startade på onsdagen och attraherade tv-bolag, dagstidningar, magasin, bloggare och andra från exempelvis Kina, USA och Europa att vallfärda till Ikeas födelseort Älmhult i Småland.”Vi vill öppna dörrarna och bland annat ge en blick in i framtiden”, säger Torbjörn Lööf, vd för Inter Ikea.Bolaget som äger varumärket ansvarar också för utvecklingen av sortimentet i Ikeavaruhusen. Bland annat offentliggjordes ett färskt samarbete med den amerikanska jätten Apple.

SWEDEN HAS some cool museums. The Abba Museum. Erm. Some other museums. But what about a place to display all the stuff that didn’t go quite to plan?Samuel West has opened the Museum of Failures, a curated collection of over 70 ideas that just didn’t turn out as they were supposed to.Tech features heavily. Google Glass, for example, whoch West cites as being a failure because of its lack of privacy (though we can think of a dozen other reasons).There’s a Betamax Video Recorder, an Apple Newton MessagePad, a Nokia N-Gage and a Sinclair C5.’LEARNING IS THE ONLY WAY TO TURN FAILURE INTO SUCCESS’ says the company mantra.”I was tired of all the success stories. They all sound alike.” West told the BBC. ”Seeing big companies fail makes us feel better about our own failures.” You can tell he’s a psychologist by day.Other observers note that it gives us a better insight to the amount of work a success story takes and how many failures it takes to find a winning formula.