Business

Oracle is stopping a marketing campaign attacking IBM in wake of a national advertising board‘s recomendation that the company made false claims when comparing its Exadata technology to competing IBM products. It’s the second time in four months the National Advertising Division (NAD)  has taken action against Oracle for making false claims when comparing its Exadata products to IBM’s technology. The NAD is an advertising industry group that falls under the umbrella of the Better Business Bureau. The NAD recommended that Oracle stop making  comparative claims about its Exadata database technology, following  a challenge made by IBM. The NAD said the Oracle “messaging” could not be substantiated. In question is an ad that appeared as a full-page advertisement in the Wall Street Journal that included the following: •    “Exadata 20x Faster … Replaces IBM Again” •    “Giant European Retailer Moves Databases from IBM Power to Exadata … Runs 20 Times Faster” Oracle argued it was using one...

Anthony Ha is a writer at TechCrunch, where he covers media, advertising, and startups. Previously, he was a staff technology writer at Adweek, worked as a senior editor at the tech blog VentureBeat, and was also a reporter at the Hollister Free Lance, where he won awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association for breaking news coverage and writing.... ? Learn More It looks like Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake may have to find a new name for her new product Pinwheel. A New York court has granted a preliminary injunction against Fake’s startup 2bkco, as requested by a similarly named startup Pinweel. The injunction was posted on Scribd by lawyer and blogger Venkat Balasubramani, and I’ve embedded it below. Fake sent me an email confirming its accuracy, though she declined to say what the company’s response will be, because “we can’t comment on pending legal matters.” The Pinweel team sent a similarly terse statement, saying, “We can confirm that the federal court has iss...

According to the U.S. Justice Department’s latest filing in its suit against Apple and a number of major publishers over alleged price fixing in the eBook market, the DOJ won’t make any major changes to its proposed settlement after receiving and analyzing 868 public comments about the suit. The settlement is currently under review in a federal court in New York and today’s document outlines some of the public comments the DOJ received after the settlement was announced. Earlier this year, three of the publishers named in the suit (Hachette, HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster) quickly agreed with the Justice Department’s proposed terms and settled. Apple, Macmillan and Penguin Group decided to fight the charges, however. According to the Justice Department, Apple’s entry in to the eBook market led to a sudden and steep increase in the retail prices of eBooks, “affecting millions of consumers.” The government argues that “the seismic shift in e-book prices was not the result of ma...