Business news in brief

Car companies back hydrogen stations

TOKYO -- Toyota, Nissan and Honda are working together to get more fuel cell vehicles on roads in what they call Japan's big push toward "a hydrogen society."

Fuel cell vehicles emit no pollution. They run on the power created when hydrogen stored as fuel combines with oxygen in the air to make water.

Hydrogen fueling stations are needed to make the technology a viable option. Only 23 have opened in Japan so far, with hundreds more being planned.

The automakers pledged up to $90,000 per hydrogen station per year, to build and maintain them.

Officials from Toyota Motor Corp., Nissan Motor Co. and Honda Motor Co. appeared together in a news conference in Tokyo last week.

The stations already get government subsidies, but they are expensive and are operating in the red. The automakers' financing is designed to alleviate that, and proliferation of the technology is expected to lower costs.

Hitoshi Kawaguchi, an executive from Nissan, said automakers can compete in products, including fuel cell cars, but they have to cooperate in infrastructure, such as hydrogen fueling stations.

The total value of support the automakers plan for the stations is estimated at about $40 million or $50 million, they said.

Google unit sorry for Nazi camps in game

BERLIN -- A Google subsidiary has apologized for making Nazi concentration camps part of a mobile role-playing game.

Niantic Labs says players of "Ingress" can propose historic location and monuments for inclusion in the game, in which two factions use smartphones to battle for control of these sites. The German weekly Die Zeit reported some of the sites, known as "portals," were located within concentration camps such as Dachau and Sachsenhausen.

Gabriele Hammermann, director of the memorial site at Dachau, told the dpa news agency that Google's actions were a humiliation for victims and relatives of the Nazi camps.

Niantic Labs' founder John Hanke said in a news release that the company has begun removing the offending sites from the game. He said "we apologize that this has happened."

Microsoft urges companies to use Skype

Microsoft Corp.'s Skype wants companies to rip out their landlines and place calls over the Web instead.

Skype will roll out new products that will let companies replace their phone networks and broadcast meetings to thousands of people at once. The new features are part of Microsoft's Office 365 cloud products and will be available later this year, said Zig Serafin, vice president of Skype for Business.

Microsoft, which is revamping its entire business around cloud-computing and mobile software, is seeking to boost revenue from online products by selling more Web-based Office programs. The Redmond, Wash.-based company has said it wants to reach annualized revenue of $20 billion in its corporate-cloud business in the fiscal year that ends in June 2018.

"We can be the landline service provider for you, or you can use the existing telecom provider," Serafin said.

Microsoft will offer Skype for Business as a Web-based cloud service in the U.S. that companies can use to replace landline services. Customers who don't want to replace their phones can still access these features through their phone carrier if they choose to do so, thanks to agreements that Microsoft has signed with telecom partners, Serafin said.

Pricing for the new Skype services will be announced when they become available later this year.

-- Bloomberg News

Austrian court rejects Facebook suit

VIENNA -- A court in Austria has rejected a class-action lawsuit against Facebook alleging invasion of privacy, saying it lacks jurisdiction in the case.

The suit was brought by Austrian law student Max Schrems on behalf of 25,000 Facebook users who claimed the social network is illegally tracking their data, including by providing them to U.S. intelligence agencies.

Vienna regional court spokesman Beatrix Engelmann said the court concluded Schrems didn't have the automatic right to bring the case in his home country because he was acting more as an organization because of the website he ran than a consumer.

It didn't say where he might have the right to bring the case, and didn't rule on the substance of the complaint.

Schrems says he plans to appeal the decision.

Johannesburg weighs Uber regulations

South Africa's most populous city is considering regulations for car-booking service Uber Technologies Inc. in the country's richest province, addressing the concerns of the taxi industry.

The city of Johannesburg is consulting with the government of Gauteng province on how to introduce new rules, which could include compliance with laws designed to increase the involvement of black people in the economy, Christine Walters, the city's mayoral committee member for transport, said by phone recently.

"We will request that the province makes the regulations and the guidelines," she said. "The city would like a South African flavor of black economic empowerment with Uber."

Founded in 2009, San Francisco-based Uber connects drivers with passengers via mobile applications on smartphones in more than 300 cities. The company, which doesn't own the vehicles or employ the drivers, has taken business from existing taxi companies and was the subject of violent protests from competitors in Paris last week. Two senior Uber managers were held by French police following the incidents.

The City of Johannesburg is meeting with representatives of the local taxi industry to hear their concerns about Uber, which include who has the right to use certain routes, Walters said. The city will also work on the digitization of the public- transport industry to better compete with the U.S. company, which started operating in Johannesburg in 2013 and is now available in four South African cities.

-- Bloomberg News

SundayMonday Business on 07/06/2015

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