Planet Business

Image of the week: Who’s driving this car?

Driverless cars are like well-dressed politicians, humble lawyers or columnists who are completely satisfied about everything in life. You can't quite believe they exist until you get up close, and even then you're not so sure. This picture shows members of the media watching "an autonomous self-driving vehicle", aka a driverless car, as it goes on the road in a demonstration in Singapore. The city-state has unveiled its public transport future which contains a vision of passengers commuting in driverless busses along roads and motorways populated by platoons of self-driving trucks following a single driver. It's just a little more ambitious than the Luas cross-city line.

Photograph: Reuters/Edgar Su

In Numbers: Twitter travails

44 Percentage drop in Twitter's share price since April. By the close of trading on Wednesday it was trading at $29.38, not much higher than its $26 IPO price.

336 Number of job cuts announced at Twitter this week. "The world needs a strong Twitter," says chief executive Jack Dorsey. So the social media company has shed about 8 per cent of its workforce in a bid to become more "focused".

8 Number of times Omid Kordestani, previously chief business officer at Google, had tweeted before announcing on Wednesday that he would be joining Twitter as its executive chairman.

The Lexicon: Involuntary churn

Netflix was not feeling so chilled this week. Instead, its third-quarter earnings were proving a bit of a turn-off for investors, with the company getting hot and bothered about involuntary churn. Unlike voluntary churn, where customers take an active decision to abandon a company, involuntary churn is the kind where external factors, beyond both the company and the customers' control, prompt the cancellation of a subscription. Netflix claims involuntary churn arising from the US switch to chip and pin credit cards has hit its subscriber numbers, although analysts also say hotter competition from Amazon and Hulu are encouraging some to exit Netflix for the final time.

Getting to know: Claire and Michelle

Claire and Michelle are a fictional wife and wife who seem to have beaten every other same-sex couple in Ireland to the altar. They rose to prominence on Tuesday as it emerged that the impact of the passing of May’s marriage referendum stretches as far as the Department of Finance’s annual budget day infographics. Claire and Michelle may have tied the knot but are they happy? Claire is self-employed – her area of business not stated – while Michelle works as a sales rep. Together the couple are €1,678 better off as a result of this budget. One of them earns €60,000 and the other €35,000 – it wasn’t quite clear who earned what from the graphic – but then what’s an income differential of €25,000 between made-up spouses?