Every day, the Fortune staff spends hours poring over tech stories, posts, and reviews from all over the Web to keep tabs on the companies that matter. We’ve assembled the day’s most newsworthy bits below.
“Google doesn’t understand the commercial business. … They’ve been in the enterprise e-mail and collaboration space for four years and they have less than 1% of the enterprise e-mail market after four years.” — Tom Rizzo, director of Microsoft Online Services. (Computerworld)
- Groupon’s board is holding a conference call today to discuss whether to take Google’s reported $5.3 billion buyout offer. (TechCrunch)
- Motorola Mobile will become an independent company come January 4, 2011, run by CEO Sanjay Jha. Cell phones and related items will be produced by Moto Mobile while the set-top box and cable infrastructure businesses will be handled by Motorola Solutions. (Phone Arena)
- Sorry Nook. These days, the e-reader wars really boils down to the Kindle and the iPad. Among surveyed e-reader owners, 47% own a Kindle and 32% own an iPad. However that gap appears to be closing quickly — last August, Kindle ownership was at 62%, while iPad had a marginal 16%. (Fortune)
- After technical and legal delays, Google is reportedly in the final stages of launching its retail e-books platform. Unlike Apple, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble’s current services, Google’s offering should allow users to buy books directly from Google or several online retailers — including independent bookstores — add them to an online library tied to a Google account, and access those books via web browser on computers, smart phones and tablets. (Wall Street Journal)
- The European Commission launched an investigation to figure out whether Google is abusing its online search dominance by preventing ad partners from placing some competing ads on their web sites. (Fortune)
- Facebook’s director of engineering, Aditya Agarwal, is leaving the social network after five-and-a-half years. Among the numerous FB projects he worked on during his tenture, Agarwal contributed to Facebook’s newsfeed, search, ads user commerce and services infrastructure. (Network Effect)
- JP Morgan is giving its investment bankers iPads as part of a new company pilot program running through May 2011. (Information Week)
- Juniper Research predicts that revenues from in-game purchases will overtake the traditional pay-per-download model as the primary source of monetising mobile games by 2013. (Market Wire)
- Twitter introduced a new section called “Most Shared,” tracking activity on social networks including Twitter. (Read Write Web)
- On the heels of news that Microsoft sold some 2.5 million Kinnect sensors since its launch less than a month ago, Sony says it’s shipped 4.1 million of its Playstation Move motion controllers day one. No Move sell-through figures, though. (Erictric)
