Japan’s third largest carrier, Softbank, is to acquire fourth placed carrier eAccess in a share swap deal valued at just under ¥200 billion ($2.6 billion), Reuters is reporting (original story at the Nikkei business daily).

The deal is aimed at acquiring customers and bulking out Softbank’s spectrum frequency holdings to support LTE services, according to the reports.

Softbank, whose charismatic CEO Masayoshi Son is the man with the 300-year business plan, will gain enough customers to put it within touching distance of Japan’s second placed carrier, KDDI. Reuters reports that Softbank and eAccess together had 34.3 million users, as of the end of August — to KDDI’s 35.9 million. First placed carrier, NTTDoCoMo has more than 60 million mobile customers.

Back in August NTTDoCoMo announced that subscribers to its LTE service Xi had passed the five million mark.  The service — Japan’s first LTE offering — was launched at the end of 2010.

Today’s Facebook IPO is a momentous, historical occasion. It’s set to be the biggest tech IPO ever, and the third largest IPO in U.S. history, second only to Visa and General Motors. The company that was once just a glimmer in the eye of a Harvard student named Mark Zuckerberg raised over $16 billion yesterday as shares were gobbled up by hungry investors, and that $38 share price point is expected to increase as the stock starts trading around 11am today.

Do you know how much money that is?

That’s more than nine Google IPOs, the cost of buying Napster 132 times in 2008, and enough to buy Mark Zuckerberg plenty of executive hoodies — 266,266 to be exact.

And how did I calculate this madness, you ask? I didn’t. A new website just popped up titled “Facebook made more money than”, and it looks a helluva lot like a Facebook page (fittingly). The site is sourcing facts from the web to provide a little added perspective on just how much $16 billion is worth.

Check it out here.

Here’s one more for the road, just to nail down the nearly unimaginable sum in your mind:

The $16 billion netted by Facebook before the stocks begin trading is more than the value of 66 sets of Winklevoss twins.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Intelligent Apps, the Hamburg, Germany-based startup behind popular taxi ordering smartphone application myTaxi, has raised 10 million euros in growth funding from car2go, a subsidiary of Daimler, Germany’s third largest carmaker. XING and Hackfwd founder Lars Hinrichs also participated in the financing round, as did previous backers T-Venture (Deutsche Telekom) and KfW Bankengruppe.

According to Bloomberg Businessweek, Daimler took a 15 percent stake in the mobile apps developer.

Intelligent Apps claims myTaxi has a market share of no less than 80 percent in Europe, and is still growing fast. The app has been downloaded 800,000 times to date, and 7,000 taxi drivers have registered for the service so far.

Read more at TechCrunch Europe.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

We’ve shown you the summer cell phone lineup from KDDI (Japan’s No. 2 carrier) yesterday. Today, Japan’s third largest carrier, SoftBank Mobile, showed its own summer lineup during a special press conference, and all of their 13 new models have one thing in common: they all come with Twitter pre-installed.

The buyers of these cell phones will be able to access Twitter either via a pre-installed app or through a pre-installed widget on the homescreen. The background is that SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son himself is a huge Twitter fan (he has almost 300,000 followers) and believes Japan is set to become Twitter country. And in fact, by some measures it’s already No. 2.

Photo gallery of all the 13 new Twitter-powered cell phones over at MobileCrunch.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch