KKPNY Royal KPN NV (PK)

   (FROM THE WALL STREET JOURNAL 12/9/15) 

French Telecoms Are

Searching For Deals

French telecommunication companies are reviving efforts to reduce the number of mobile-phone businesses at home and expand abroad as they try to restart a wave of deal-making across Europe.

Orange SA is weighing multiple acquisition targets in France and in Europe, to build scale so the former French monopoly doesn't itself become a target in the future, according to people familiar with the matter, who added that the exploration is still preliminary and no deal is imminent.

The potential options Orange's advisers have proposed include Dutch company Royal KPN NV and Belgium's Proximus Group, according to a person familiar with the deliberations. Orange also is considering deal options with the telecom unit of French industrial firm Bouygues SA or Telecom Italia SpA, the person added.

Iliad SA, the low-cost upstart that kicked off a price war in France when it became the country's fourth mobile operator in 2012 and slashed prices, is also looking to buy assets outside France, people familiar with the matter said.

-- Nick Kostov and Sam Schechner

Twitter Tweaks

Timeline Tweets

Twitter confirmed Tuesday it is testing a new timeline format where tweets are sorted by relevance instead of in reverse chronological order.

Screenshots of the experiment showing tweets out of order rippled through Twitter's service and naturally caused a small uproar among longtime users. The possible move toward an algorithmic-driven news feed has been hinted at by Twitter for more than a year, but early adopters consider the chronologically ordered timeline sacred to the core Twitter experience.

"This is an experiment," a company spokeswoman said. "We're continuing to explore ways to surface the best content for people using Twitter."

The test is likely part of co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey's promise for big, bold changes to Twitter to help get it out of its growth slump.

-- Yoree Koh

Pinterest Moves To

Bolster Image Search

Pinterest Inc. on Tuesday said it has acquired two startups that could help improve the company's ability to show users images, or "pins," they might like.

The visual bookmarking company has bought The Hunt, a community-powered shopping service, and Pext, an app that matches images to user-made memes. A Pinterest spokesman declined to disclose the terms of the deals, which mark the company's eighth and ninth acquisitions.

The Hunt specifically may help Pinterest in its quest to capture a stake in the e-commerce market and support a hefty valuation of $11 billion. The Hunt is a destination for shoppers to help others find products they spotted in photos on social media sites such as Instagram, Tumblr and even Pinterest. Users post a photo of a product they like, and others then post a link where the item or something similar can be purchased.

The Hunt's co-founder and CEO, Tim Weingarten, and some of the service's product team will join Pinterest. Mr. Weingarten will be a product manager on the commerce team while the rest of his team will be assigned to the engineering and data science teams.

-- Yoree Koh

FTC Appoints Online

Privacy Advocate

The Federal Trade Commission has appointed a leading Internet privacy and security expert as its new chief technologist, amid a growing concern for consumer protections with the emergence of the so-called Internet of Things, the agency said.

Lorrie Cranor, director of the Carnegie Mellon CyLab Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory, and a member of the board of directors of the online privacy advocacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation, will join the agency in January 2016.

She replaces Ashkan Soltani, who has held the job since October 2014.

Mr. Soltani last year shared a Pulitzer Prize for public service for his role in helping a team from The Washington Post and the Guardian newspapers cover the leak of government surveillance program data by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, in 2013. His future plans weren't disclosed.

Ms. Cranor declined to comment before starting the new position.

-- Angus Loten

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

December 09, 2015 02:47 ET (07:47 GMT)

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