Bayoubuzz

LONDON (Reuters) – Vodafone (VOD.L) posted third quarter results slightly below forecasts on Thursday as increasingly tough trading in Spain and Italy overshadowed solid performances in emerging markets and northern Europe for the world's largest mobile operator.

Vodafone said group organic service revenue, which comes from the provision of ongoing services to customers, was up 0.9 percent, compared with an analyst forecast of 1.1 percent.

European organic service revenue was also worse than expected, down 1.7 percent as the huge financial constraints on consumers in Italy, Spain and Greece pulled down otherwise solid performances in the two big northern markets of Britain and Germany.

Analysts had been expecting Europe to be down by 1.4 percent. Spain and Italy were both particularly weak, down 8.8 percent and 4.9 percent respectively.

Balancing that out, growth within the other faster-growing division of Africa, Middle East and Asia Pacific, known as AMAP,

HONG KONG – Lenovo Group Ltd., the world's second biggest personal computer maker, said Thursday that quarterly profit grew by more than half but warned hard drive costs would remain high amid a global shortage.

The company said it's confident of closing in on the top spot in PC sales as it reported strong sales growth across all major markets even as it focuses more attention on the burgeoning smartphone and mobile Internet market.

Net income rose to $153 million, or 1.46 cents per share, in the October-December period, which is the company's third fiscal quarter. That's up 54 percent from the same period the year before.

Sales jumped 44 percent to a record $8.4 billion as its share of the global personal computer market hit a high of 14 percent.

Lenovo posted 30 percent sales growth in China, which accounts for about two-fifths of total sales. Sales

NEW YORK (Reuters) – A new crop of companies entering the U.S. public markets, including such high-profile offerings as Facebook, are turning the clock back on the way U.S. corporations are run.

Facebook, Groupon Inc, LinkedIn Corp, Zynga Inc and others have put in place governance provisions that go against a long-term swing towards more shareholder-friendly rules.

One stark example of this reversal is in the number of companies that have classified or staggered boards, where only a handful of directors come up for election each year rather than all of them, making it hard for an activist investor or unwanted suitor to take control of the board through a proxy context.

Another is the creation of dual-class stock structures, which allow founders and early investors to gain greater voting control than their economic interest would otherwise suggest.

In the past 10 years, many of the biggest publicly

With over 500,000 apps available through Apple’s App Store, it can be daunting for developers to get their apps noticed — let alone downloaded. Enter a recent thread on app developer site Touch Arcade , in which a poster who was recently shopping around for ways to get his app more exposure was contacted by a “marketing” company that promised it could break apps into the top 25 rankings in exchange for a lump sum payment — in this case $5,000. The company in question went on to present a list of client apps that are currently sitting pretty on the list of 20 most popular free iPhone apps (8 out of 20 to be exact). That’s rarified air even for big-name developers. According to the poster, the company achieves its ends by utilizing outsourced bot farms to automatically download client apps (something the company freely admitted), thus moving them quickly up the rankings, at