PODCAST: BlackBerry profits nosedive, Angry Birds loses companies $1.5 billion
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Here are today’s top headlines from the Marketplace Morning Report and from around the web.
The Canadian company that makes BlackBerry smartphones says phone and tablet sales last quarter were far short of expectations.
The car company Saab is still in financial straits. Saab’s creditors are asking a Swedish court today to let the car maker declare bankruptcy. It’s last attempt to go bankrupt was denied. Saab owes millions of dollars to suppliers and employees.
News out of a European finance ministers meeting in Poland this morning that a decision on whether to let Greece have its next round of bailout funding won’t come until October.
The so-called rogue trader who allegedly caused $2 billion worth of losses at the Swiss bank UBS has been charged with fraud.
You know those surveys that tell us how much work time we lose to Facebook? Or the NCAA Basketball tournament? Well there’s a new one that says American companies lose $1.5 billion in productivity because employees are playing the game Angry Birds for 200 million minutes a day. I’d like to see a survey about how much money these surveys are costing our economy in lost productivity.
Supermarkets in Argentina are getting some vending machines that will sell you Lay’s potato chips. But the machines don’t take coins, they take potatoes. You buy the spud at the store, drop it in the slot, watch a video of the chip making process, and voila! Out comes a warm bag of Lay’s potato chips. Sure, Lay’s wants you to know those chips are made from real potatoes. But the bag of chips you just bought, yeah — not made from that potato. The bag of chips was in there the whole time.
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