1. GOOGLE CLOSE TO BUYING WAZE FOR $1.3 BILLION
Israeli publication Globes reported Monday that Google is in talks to buy Israeli map company Waze for $1.3 billion, making it Google's fourth largest acquisition to date. Waze, which Facebook was recently thinking of buying for $1 billion, has about 45 million users across 190 countries, many in developing regions like Southeast Asia and South America. The app collects GPS stats from users' smartphones while allowing them to update information about police presence, gas prices and more, providing users with up-to-the-minute traffic driving information. The deal is expected to be announced as early as this week. [New York Times]
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2. PUZZLE & DRAGONS SUCCESS SHOOTS JAPANESE GAMING COMPANY INTO SPOTLIGHT
The stock price of Tokyo's GungHo Online Entertainment has grown 45-fold in the last 12 months, as its new mobile game Puzzle & Dragons has gone viral. The outlandish growth has shot GungHo, owned 58.5 percent by SoftBank, to a valuation higher than that of Nintendo, the 14-year-old maker of Mario Bros., Pokemon and Legend of Zelda, proving once again the volatile nature of the smartphone gaming business. "It made me feel lousy. I felt embarrassed," GungHo's CEO Kazuki Morishita said of the comparison to Nintendo. "We haven't even reached the level of the ground Nintendo is standing on, in terms of the ability to create." [Wall Street Journal]
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3. YOGURT BRAND CHOBANI GREW AS FAST AS GOOGLE AND FACEBOOK
Just five years after opening, Chobani Greek yogurt reached $1 billion in annual revenue last year. "This kind of growth is unheard of, particularly for a startup, in the packaged-goods business — and rare in the tech world," says Fortune. Hamdi Ulukaya, founder and 100 percent owner of the company, won Ernst & Young's World Entrepreneur of the Year Saturday. Greek yogurt is a $2 billion a year industry. [Fortune]
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4. STOCKS BARELY FLUCTUATE AFTER S&P UPDATE
After downgrading the U.S. government's credit rating in 2011, sending the stock market into a tailspin, the Standard & Poor's Ratings Services upgraded its outlook from Negative to Stable today, saying the economy has finally started to improve. This time, though, Wall Street seems uninterested: The S&P 500 added 0.1 percent to 1,645.30, after sliding 0.3 percent earlier. The Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 9.79 points, or 0.1 percent, to 15,257.91. [Bloomberg]
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5. CHARITY EARNS $1 MILLION FOR 'LUNCH WITH WARREN BUFFETT'
This weekend, an anonymous bidder paid $1 million to the charity GLIDE to have lunch with Warren Buffett and friends at Smith & Wollensky in New York City. Though substantial, the bid was much lower than last year's $3.46 million bid, and the previous year's bid of $2.63 million. GLIDE's mission is to "alleviate suffering and break the cycles of poverty and marginalization." [Chicago Tribune]
