Planet Business

Compiled by LAURA SLATTERY

Image of the week: Dog at a banking committee

Ideally this picture would have a speech bubble coming out of this service dog, who doesn’t seem too impressed with the entertainment factor of JP Morgan Chase chief executive Jamie Dimon’s testimony to a US Senate banking committee in Washington on Wednesday, which was on the subject of “what went wrong at JP Morgan Chase”.

Dimon – that’s the back of his silvery head on the right – told the committee that the bank will probably seek to claw back pay from executives responsible for some $2 billion in trading losses. Dimon blamed overconfidence in “trusted managers” for the losses.

The dog says: “Once you’ve heard one banker talk about risk management, you’ve heard them all . . . ”

In numbers:

The Web's Big bang

1,930 - Number of applications made to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) for new top-level domains suffixes ahead of the Internet’s “big bang”.

231 - Number of domains for which at least two applications were made, suggesting there will be competition for commercially lucrative suffixes such as .app, .baby, .money and, er, .pizza.

116 - Number of applications for domains in non-Latin scripts such as Chinese or Korean, meaning people won’t have to switch keyboard modes to type in domain names.

$185,000 - The fee for making an application, allowing the process to be dominated by the likes of Google, Amazon and big bank and car companies, and suggesting the person who applied to own the domain .wtf actually has some kind of business plan.

The lexicon: Yammerites

A Yammerite is, quite simply, someone who uses Yammer. And Yammer is a social network for businesses thats apparently caught the chequebook-wielding eyes of Microsoft. According to Bloomberg, Microsoft may pay more than $1 billion for the network, which would help it build on the suite of products it offers corporate customers and enable it to compete with Salesforce.comand Oracle, both of which that have bought social media related companies in recent months. If it goes ahead and buys Yammer Inc, Microsoft will inherit a networking tool thats essentially a cross between Facebook and a corporate intranet.

Getting to know: Ian Livingston

The most pertinent fact right now about Ian Livingston, chief executive of BT, is that he’s a football fan. The telecoms group has become “the new ESPN” – in other words, the latest challenger to BSkyB’s arsenal of Premiership rights: BT has picked up the rights to show 38 Premier League matches per season from 2013-2014 onwards. Livingston recently declared he would forgo a pay rise for 2012 – if the Premiership deal pays off, such gestures may no longer be necessary. But the Scotsman doesn’t support any of the teams his company will show on its imminent new sports channel, however, being both a lifelong fan and non-executive director of Celtic FC.