Planet Business

Today's other business

THE NUMBERS

$1 billion

Amount that Mark Zuckerberg, the 23-year-old founder of Facebook, turned down in a buyout offer last year from Yahoo! Zuckerberg has just sold a 1.6 per cent stake in Facebook to Microsoft for $240 million, valuing the site at $15 billion.

€51 billion

Sum that Christmas shoppers across western Europe will spend online this Christmas, up almost 60 per cent on last year, according to research firm Forrester.

QUOTE of the WEEK

"I sincerely hope we can close this dark chapter in our relationship and go on in an absolutely close and constructive way."

- EU competition commissioner Neelie Kroes hopes she and Microsoft can be friends now that the company has caved in to the European Commission's 2004 anti-trust ruling, which means it is now open season for open source groups.

GOOD WEEK

Permanent TSB customers

You can now "Pimp Your Card" at the bank. This, for anyone not familiar with MTV vernacular, does not involve anything seedy or illicit, but is a new feature that allows customers to add a picture of family, friends, partners, pets or babies to their laser/ATM cards to create "a once-off piece of wallet fashion".

Superjumbo's first passengers

Not only have the high-fliers who paid as much as $100,380 for their seat on the inaugural commercial journey of the Airbus A380 now claimed their place in aviation history, they also enjoyed plenty of legroom, with 450 passengers on the 850-capacity flight.

BAD WEEK

Rupert Murdoch

The NewsCorp chairman's bid to make sure MySpace retains dominance of the social networking universe was sucker-punched by Microsoft's purchase of a stake in Facebook. The computer giant's weight is sure to help close the gap in users between MySpace (105 million) and Facebook (69 million).

HIPCs

"Vulture funds" are circling Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPCs) and threatening to undermine the debt cancellation deal agreed by the G8 in 2005. The vultures are private creditors who buy defaulted debt owed by the countries at cheap rates and then sue them for a profit.