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Apple and four other major book publishers are being sued by the US Department of Justice over the pricing of ebooks.The USA accuses Apple and Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Simon and Schuster and Penguin of colluding over the prices of ebooks they sell.

This lawsuit is over the firms’ move to the agency model where publishers rather than sellers set prices.

Hachette, HarperCollins and Simon and Schuster have already settled.

The case will proceed against Apple, Macmillan and Penguin “for conspiring to end ebook retailers’ freedom to compete on price”, the Justice Department said.

“As a result of this alleged conspiracy, we believe that consumers paid millions of dollars more for some of the most popular titles,” Attorney General Eric Holder said.

“To effectuate their conspiracy, the publisher defendants teamed up with defendant Apple, which shared the same goal of restraining retail price competition in the sale of ebooks,” according to papers filed in New York’s Southern District court.

“Apple facilitated the publisher defendants’ collective effort to end retail price competition by coordinating their transition to an agency model across all retailers.”

In addition, the European Commission has also been probing e-book price fixing.

Apple, Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan and Simon and Schuster have now made proposals to settle that probe.

“The European Commission has received proposals of possible commitments from Apple and four international publishers,” said the EU’s competition commissioner Joaquin Almunia.

Electronic books are sold according to a different formula from that governing the sales of physical books.

For most physical books publishers set a wholesale price, often about half the cover price, and then let a retailer decide how much they actually want to charge for the title.

This model was initially adopted for ebooks but has since been changed for what is known as an agency model.

Under this scheme, publishers set the price of a book and the agent selling it gets a 30% cut. The agency model was adopted by publishers largely at the prompting of the late Steve Jobs.

The shift to agency pricing was also seen as a protective measure to head off attempts by Amazon to corner the market in ebooks. It had been aggressively cutting prices to win customers over to its Kindle ebook reader.

Samsung Electronics has said it’s profit for the first three months of the year to almost double as its smartphone sales continue to grow.The company said it expects an operating profit £3.2 billion (5.8tn won) for the period.

The success of Samsung’s Galaxy range has seen it become the world’s biggest selling smartphone maker.

Analysts said the firm had benefited from keeping its margins healthy, despite growing competition.

With memory chip prices rising, chips will play a big part in second quarter profits. Expectations for operating profit will reach somewhere between 6.5tn to 7.5tn won.

While Samsung’s phone unit has prospered, other divisions, including memory chip manufacturing, have been going through a tough time.

Prices for memory chips have been falling globally, not least due to oversupply.

Analysts said that natural disasters last year in Japan and Thailand had resulted in a fall in production of various electronics products, which use these chips, resulting in high inventory levels putting pressure on prices.

At the same time, slowing demand from key markets such as the US and Europe hurt chipmakers.

However, analysts said that as the global economy recovers and supply chains in the region get back on track, chip prices were likely to recover, boosting Samsung’s profits further.

While the company is expected to grow further, analysts warned that Samsung will have to overcome potential hurdles on the way.

To begin with, it will have to fend off competition from its biggest rival Apple, they said.

The fear is that increased competition may force Samsung to lower its prices in a bid to attract customers, a move which, if implemented, would impact on its profit.

At the same time, Samsung is also involved in a legal battle with Apple over patents involving technology it uses in its smartphones and tablet PCs.

A big rise in online betting via mobile phones has helped Paddy Power to increase it’s profits with a 16% rise annual rise.The bookmaker, which makes most of its profits in the UK, said pre-tax profits for the year to 31 December 2011 rose to £100.9 million (121.2m euros).

Paddy Power expanded its High Street network, opening 41 outlets in the UK last year to bring its total to 165.

Online revenue increased by 26%, driven by a 225% rise in turnover from betting on mobile phones to £304.7 million.

The company said that 49% of its online sports betting customers used their mobile phone to place bets.

Online betting accounts for 79% of Paddy Power’s profits and the company said it had increased the number of UK online customers by 50% to 710,043.

“Our class leading mobile product, married to the strength of our brand and strong value offering has driven acquisition and retention, leading to 1.1 million active customers online,” said chief executive Patrick Kennedy.

Although the company now has 165 shops in the UK it plans to open another 35 to 40 each year.

Tablet computers are being put in the basket of goods used to calculate the UK’s rate of inflation.Items dropped from the basket include the cost of developing colour film.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) updates the basket each year so the contents accurately reflect current trends in spending.

The basket contains 700 items, with 180,000 individual prices collected each month.

“Tablets have been added as they represent a significant and growing market,” the ONS said.

“However, charges for developing and printing colour film are being removed as the popularity of digital cameras means fewer and fewer people are using analogue cameras,” the ONS added.

The basket of goods is not changed just because spending on individual items has fallen or risen. Changes are made to broaden or widen the coverage of a particular group of items.

So pineapples are in this year, to give more varied coverage of volatile price movements for fruit and vegetables.

Other categories have been changed simply to make them more representative.

Hot oat cereals are in to broaden the category of bread and cereals; continental soft cheese has been added to the milk, cheese and eggs category; and cans of stout have been added to widen the range of beers in the basket.

In addition, the costs of vehicle excise duty, TV licences and trade union and professional subscriptions, which are used to work out the RPI, will now also be used to calculate the CPI, in line with European statistical standards.

Apple has unveiled a new iPad with a high definition screen.It said the resolution of the display was 2,048 by 1,536 pixels. The tablet is also powered by a new A5X chip with improved graphics performance.

Apple dominates the market but should face a fresh challenge later this year when tablets running the full Windows 8 system are expected to go on sale.

The new iPad – which is simply called by that name – also features a 5-megapixel camera sensor. It will be able to run on 4G LTE networks where the service is available and can act as a wi-fi hotspot for other devices if carriers allow the function.

It is 9.4mm deep, slightly thicker than the 8.8mm profile of the iPad 2. The basic 16GB model with only wi-fi will cost £399 and the top of the range 64GB model with wi-fi and 4G will cost £659.

It is due to go on sale on 16 March in the UK, US, Canada, Germany, France, Switzerland, Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia and Japan.

The previous model will stay on sale at a reduced price, starting at £329. Mr Schiller said that would make it more affordable for schools to buy the machine.

The firm also announced an upgraded TV box which can now handle 1080p video

Apple new CEO Tim Cook has been  given a pay package worth £240 million ($378 million) in 2011, most of which came in shares payable in the coming years.Apple’s board granted Mr Cook 1 million restricted stock units, worth $376m, to signal its confidence in him when he took over from Steve Jobs in August.

His salary and performance bonus, about £540,000 ($900,000) each, made up the rest, a company filing showed.

Mr Jobs, who died in October, owned 5.5 million Apple shares.

He famously received a salary of only $1 a year.

Mr Cook will receive half of the shares in 2016 and half in 2021.

Analysts expect the Apple chief to have been the highest paid chief executive in the US in 2011.

The best paid boss in 2010 was Viacom head Philippe Dauman, with an £54.5 million ($84.5 million) haul based on a new contract that granted him shares and stock options.

Apple reported record breaking profits for the three months to 31 December 2011 of £8.36 billion ($13.06 billion)- more than doubling  up 118% from the same period in 2010.The company also sold 37 million iPhones- more than twice as many as they sold in the last quarter of 2010.

“Apple’s momentum is incredibly strong, and we have some amazing new products in the pipeline,” said chief executive Tim Cook.

The firm is expected to release its iPad 3 in March this year.

“We are very happy to have generated over $17.5bn in cash flow from operations during the December quarter,” said Peter Oppenheimer, Apple’s CFO.

“Looking ahead to the second fiscal quarter of 2012, we expect revenue of about £20.96 billion and we expect diluted earnings per share of about £5.48 ($8.50).”

Apple saw strong sales for both its iPads and its Mac range of computers, rising 111% and 26% respectively compared to the same period in 2010.

Google was the most visited website with US users in 2011 but Facebook was not far behind according to market researchers.Nielsen suggests more than 153 million visitors clicked onto Google branded pages each month, as Facebook attracted close to 138 million visitors.

Yahoo came third with about 130 million visitors each month.

But analysts warned Yahoo’s tally might be at risk if young people continued to turn away from web-based email.

The study is based on data collected between January and October and included visits from home and work computers. It involved a sample from a global panel of 200,000 people.

Website                                  Unique visitors per month
1. Google                                        153,441,000
2. Facebook                                     137,644,000
3. Yahoo                                         130,121,000
4. MSN/WindowsLive/Bing                 115,890,000
5. YouTube                                     106,692,000
6. Microsoft                                      83,691,000
7. AOL Media Network                        74,633,000
8. Wikipedia                                      62,097,000
9. Apple                                           61,608,000
10. Ask Search Network                     60,552,000

Source: Nielsen

Although Google trumped Facebook as the most popular web brand, the search giant’s Google+ network came far behind Mark Zuckerberg’s site in Nielsen’s ranking of the most popular social networks and blogs.

Google+ came eighth in the list with 8.02m unique monthly visitors.

That also put it behind Google’s weblog publishing tool Blogger, as well as Twitter, Wordspace, Myspace, Linkedin and Tumblr.

Google’s YouTube was identified as the most popular destination for online videos, attracting more than three times the number of monthly visitors as the music video service Vevo.

While Yahoo maintained its position as one of the top three web brands, an earlier study cast doubt over its ability to retain the position over coming years as it’s email system faces a declining market share.

Independent estimates suggest more than 6.8 million Android or Apple iOS smartphones were activated on Christmas Day – more than double last year’s number.More than 3.7m Android devices were activated over the Christmas weekend, Google has revealed.

Industry experts believe the rise is partly because entry level smartphones have become cheaper.

The statistics, from Flurry Analytics, suggested 242 million apps were also downloaded on the same day.

The peak time for downloading new apps on Christmas Day was between 7pm and 10pm, the company said.

It gathered its data via its analytics tool which monitored downloads and usage of 140,000 apps in both Google’s Android Market and Apple’s App Store.

Flurry Analytics did not break down numbers for the individual operating systems.

It said the figures showed an increase in activations of 353% when compared to the daily average between 1 and 20 December. App downloads were up 125% over the same period.

The Android operating system can be found on a wide range of models produced by many different manufacturers, whereas Apple’s iOS is only found on iPhone, iPad and certain models of its iPod music player.

Demand for the iPhone has reached such a level that China based manufacturer Foxconn is looking to double production to 400,000 units per day, China Daily reported.

Jonathan Ive, Apple’s head of design, has been awarded a knighthood in the New Year Honours list.Mr Ive, who can now call himself Sir Jonathan has been made a Knight Commander of the British Empire (KBE).

Raised in Chingford, Mr Ive began working for Apple in 1992 and since then has been the brains behind many of its products.

He described the honour as “absolutely thrilling” and said he was “both humbled and sincerely grateful”.

Mr Ive added: “I am keenly aware that I benefit from a wonderful tradition in the UK of designing and making. I discovered at an early age that all I’ve ever wanted to do is design.”

Mr Ive has been lauded for the tight fit between form and function seen in Apple gadgets such as the iPod and iPhone.

Born in February 1967, Mr Ive inherited a love of making things from his father, a silversmith, and reportedly spent much of his youth taking things apart to see how they worked.

From the age of 14, he said, he knew he was interested in drawing and making “stuff” and this led him to Northumbria Polytechnic – now Northumbria University – where he studied industrial design.

On graduation he started work as a commercial designer and then, with three friends, founded a design agency called Tangerine.

One of the clients for the agency was Apple which was so impressed with the work he did on a prototype notebook that it offered him a full time job.

Mr Ive was apparently frustrated during his early years at Apple as the company was then suffering a decline. Everything changed, however, in 1995 when Steve Jobs returned to the company he helped found.

Mr Jobs described Mr Ive as his “spiritual partner” in the recent biography of the Apple co-founder written by Walter Isaacson. However, it also said that Mr Ive was “hurt” by Mr Jobs taking credit for innovations that came from the design team.

Mr Ive’s eye for design combined effectively with Mr Jobs’ legendary attention to detail and the products that have emerged from the company since the late 1990s have turned Apple into the biggest and most influential technology company on the planet.

The knighthood is the second time Mr Ive has been recognised in the honour’s list. In 2005 he was made a Commander of the British Empire (CBE).