Planet Business

Compiled by LAURA SLATTERY

500,000– number of headphones sold by HMV during December, a month when it also sold 20,000 tablets. If only those numbers were the other way around . . .

There may be a market for them in Irish-themed pubs across the world– Minister for Finance Michael Noonan isn't being serious when he suggests a potential buyer for some 7,500 "valueless" e-voting machines.

STATUS UPDATE

Papa-paparazzi:The Daily Mail's picture desk receives between 300 and 400 pictures of Pippa Middleton every day, the paper's picture editor, Paul Silva, told the Leveson inquiry.

Negative campaign:Who is "rich beyond imagination" and "more ruthless than Wall Street", according to a film bankrolled by Newt Gingrich supporters? Why it's Republican presidential frontrunner Mitt Romney.

Patent collector:With a total of 6,180, the winner of the record number of US patents in 2011 was IBM – its 19th year for topping the chart – with Samsung climbing to second place.

THE QUESTION

Do betting firms have a role in  cleaning up sport?

Illegal betting rings are now the biggest threat to the integrity of the London 2012 Olympic Games, having overtaken doping offences, according to Britain’s Olympics minister, Hugh Robertson. The police in Britain have set up an intelligence unit to crack down on attempts to bribe athletes. But can betting firms help authorities detect and eliminate the problem?

Online betting exchange Betfair has agreed a deal to share information with the International Olympic Committee during the games, pledging its “integrity team” will report irregular or suspicious betting patterns. This means the IOC will be able to request the identities of account holders who place suspicious bets.

As its betting licence lies outside Britain, Betfair is not legally obliged to root out suspicious gamblers. However, the world’s biggest betting exchange has signed memorandums of understandings with several sports authorities and has been instrumental in uncovering “irregular” bets leading to illegal syndicates in recent years. Betting firms co-operate partly because they too – not just the sport-watching public – are at risk of being defrauded by suspicious bets. As betting exchanges allow gamblers to play both sides of an outcome – to back it or to bet against it – strange betting patterns are often more transparent to them than they would be to a bookmaker.

For his part, Robertson believes betting authorities in western countries are “well set up” to spot illegal activity, but he has warned that a lack of regulation in Asia means sports fans can’t always believe everything they see.

Pay day

It’s the pay day to end all pay days . . . and yet Apple chief executive Tim Cook is only just warming up. His remuneration package for 2011 could be worth a potential $378 million (€296 million), one of the biggest pay packages on record. The “potential” nature of his compensation haul is because the total includes $376.2 million in shares, half of which will vest in five years and the remainder in 10 years. If Apple’s stock rises even modestly over the next decade, then Steve Jobs’s chosen successor collects yet more again, so he’s likely to stick around at the company to make sure it does. And how does Cook’s compensation compare to other chief executives? According to a recent list compiled by Equilar, the next highest-paid executive is Viacom chief Philippe Dauman, who was awarded $84.5 million in the year to the end of September 2010, while Oracle’s Larry Ellison was awarded $77.6 million in 2011.