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The Reg's review of 2014: Naked JLaw selfies, Uber and monkey madness

Put it on a stick and 'cheesie'

Twitter, buy buttons, BT

Driver background checks and conforming to city public-transport rules became the firm’s sore point.

Salt Lake City politicos voted to let Uber to operate but only if it followed the same rules as other transport firms including getting background checks, and vehicle inspections but Portland, San Francisco and LA took Uber to court, a court in Berlin upheld a ban on Uber, a US Senator wrote to Uber’s CEO demanding answers about a “troubling disregard for customers” privacy and their data protection - the Senator wrote to Lyft, too - and in Singapore the city transport authority planned its own taxi-finding app.

Rutger Hauer

Your Uber driver is here

As 2014 closed, Uber stood at a crossroads: the negativity is unlikely to thwart Uber’s popularity, rather - if GroupOn taught us anything - it’s this: that Uber will be forced to grow up. An embarrassing internal memo indicated where the firm had been, stressing “superpumpdness” as one of the qualities sought in staff.

Reports also emerged how the ride-sharing firm had actively lobbied politicians and pressuring bureaucrats to relax or kill legislation on that would have affected driver background checks or stopped it operating.

With the investment going south, Uber’s backers stumped up another $1.2bn - cash that CEO Travis Kalanick said would go on Uber’s “internal growth and change".

He said Uber would learn from others who’ve gone through “similar challenges". Kalanick promised a smarter and more humble company would be the result.

Twitter and Facebook - buy! Buy! Buy!

2014 saw different fates unfold for social-network darlings Twitter and Facebook. The latter raked in billons in of dollars in ads-flingers’ cash while the former shocked Wall St with falling revenue and warning of future misses – all that as the anniversary of its 2013 IPO approached. Why so different? Facebook marked its 10th anniversary this year with 1.32bn users, yet it seemed to have cracked the mobile market and in so doing put behind it recent years’ fears that the service had peaked.

For the smaller Twitter, revenue was up along with new user numbers – but not enough. Also timeline views – a measurement of “engagement” and thus people’s stickneyness for cash-happy advertisers – was falling. All told this contributed to Twitter’s continued losses and by October investors were dumping the stock they’d clamored for 12 months before and by November even Twitter’s top management was cashing out, selling $50m in personal holdings.

Twitter has been trying to change: notice the upsurge of ads and sponsored links and suggestions over who to follow and alerts about who was Tweeting what?

Silicon Valley investor and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel offered his theory for Twitter’s problems: Management smoking pot.

To people like Thiel, Twitter’s potential is the millions of users whose free-loading status entitles them to being exposed to the full glare of advertisers. Same goes for Facebook. Interestingly, both firms arrived at the same point in 2014 to try and find new ways to synthesise more money from their free assets: a buy button.

Twitter and Facebook began testing the addition of a button on admen’s Tweets and Facebook posts, letting you carry out one-click purchase without the inconvenience of leaving that Tweet or Facebook post. Their interest came as the payments market itself got stirred up with the entry of Apple with its Apple Pay product, a contactless payment system for iPhone, iPad or Apple Watch.

iPad purchasers line at the San Francisco Chestnut Street store

Huzzah! No more queuing in lines in real life, thanks to a Facebook and Twitter buy button

But the bounds of what’s possible and what’s permitted were tested by Facebook who it emerged had conducted an experiment on 700,000 users over a period of one week in 2012 without their knowledge or consent. Facebook, along with two US universities, had manipulated users’ news feeds to control the emotional experiences and gauge how their posting behavior changed as a result. Facebook countered by painting it as a data-privacy issue, saying no unnecessary data had been collected – but users were still furious. The experiment left British and Irish data watchdogs investigating the US giant … yet the guinea pigs continued to use their free Facebook.

O2? EE? BT buys back into mobile

13 years after BT spun out its mobile phone venture O2, BT wanted back into the game. The telco hosted a reverse auction to buy back O2 or take EE. Eventually, BT brushed off O2 to enter exclusive talks to take EE. EE is Britain's largest mobile network with 24.5 million customers and brings a ready-made 4G network infrastructure to the table, but that comes at a price: EE is a bigger firm and will be harder to integrate into BT than O2, while it's also more expensive; the deal is priced £12.5bn.

BT was a mobile pioneer: it launched O2 in 1985 as a joint venture with Securicor. The new network was then called Cellnet, back when mobile phones were bricks owned only by YUPPIEs. BT bought out Securicor and rebranded BT Cellnet but then spun out the firm against a backdrop of collapsing profits, with Spanish carrier Telefonica buying O2 for £17.7bn in 2006.

O2 went on to leapfrog BT to become the UK’s biggest carrier – 21 million mobile users versus 19.4 million on landlines for BT. It was a source of pain and regret for BT but what’s changed and why would BT now want to go back? The answer, apart from profits: O2’s subscriber base, as BT tries to expand out of its core business of phone and into content, hence all those Premier League football deals in recent years.

Mobile means growth in content delivery. For all the pros of EE, it's O2 that's been growing fastest, though: O2's number of mobile subscribers grew in 2014 by one million while Vodafone, Orange, T-Mobile and 3 collectively added just 400,000. Getting dibs on Apple’s iPhone had helped O2.

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