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Activision has acquired 'Candy Crush' maker King Digital Entertainment for $5.9 billion, betting large on the casual mobile gaming market.

The selling price was $18 per share, way below the price King priced at last year went it went public, rough for most investors but still at a price much higher than what shares traded at earlier this week.

Candy Crush has been in decline for most of the last two years but is still played by millions every month.

Combined, the two companies now have over 500 million active monthly users for their games. "Other than YouTube or Facebook there isn't a worldwide network that has a bigger number of audience members," said Bobby Kotick, Activision's chief executive. "A big part of the opportunity is to explore the intellectual property that exists at Activision Blizzard and see if it makes sense in that network."

According to Nest founder and former Apple SVP Tony Fadell, Steve Jobs actively spoke about the potential for building an Apple Car back in 2008.

"We had a couple of walks," Fadell said, in which they asked questions such as, "If we were to build a car, what would we build? What would a dashboard be? And what would this be? What would seats be? How would you fuel it or power it?"

Of course, at that time the company was busy introducing the device that would change the smartphone world - the iPhone, and Jobs decided against building a car at that time. Rumors have remained practically every year since then, however, with plenty of people still expecting an Apple Car in the coming years.

No matter what, Fadell believes we are still in the "early days" for the evolution of the car, and the tech industry will likely be at the forefront of this new revolution although that can be up to 10 years away, he notes.

Following the major takedown of scene release group YIFY, it seems that the large public torrent tracker Demonii will shut down, as well.

The YIFY group, an icon in the movie piracy world, also ran the YTS website and apparently operated Demonii also.

Demonii says it had 44,682,991 peers and over 4.8 million torrents, making it one of the largest public torrent trackers available.

For the time being, the tracker remains up, but expect it to be down within the week.

If you're a fan of the Fallout series, you will be able to try out Nuka-Cola Quantum soon thanks to a new partnership.

Fallout developer Bethesda has teamed up with Jones Soda to release the soda on November 10th at Target stores.

The release coincides with the release of Fallout 4, and Bethesda has been offering fans quite a few collectibles ahead of the game's release.

Major European carrier Vodafone UK announced today that hackers had accessed 1827 customer accounts this week, taking names and mobile telephone numbers.

Additionally, the attackers potentially had access to bank sort codes and the last four digits of bank account numbers, as well.

"This incident was driven by criminals using email addresses and passwords acquired from an unknown source external to Vodafone," said Vodafone in a statement.

Everyone affected has been notified and have told to expect more phishing attempts.

The event marks the second time this week that a British telecom company has been hacked. TalkTalk recently saw information on 1.2 million customers stolen including over 20,000 bank account numbers.

Proving yet again that consumers are willing to try most things if the price is right, HTC lowered the price of their flop, the Re Camera, to $50 and it quickly sold out.

The camera was built to compete against GoPro with supposedly easier ergonomics shaped like a periscope, but sales have been non-existent at its $200 MSRP.

HTC dropped the price to $50 temporarily, possibly to clear inventory, and the ploy worked, as the Re is now sold out but showing the original $199 price tag.

The camera offers a 146-degree wide-angle lens, a 16-megapixel 1/2.3-inch sensor and lets you use your Android or iOS phone as a viewfinder.

Source:
HTC

According to the carrier, the hackers that attacked TalkTalk last week walked away with less information than expected, but there was a still a large amount of data stolen.

Overall, the attackers took email addresses, names and phone numbers for 1.2 million customers, 21,000 bank account numbers, 15,000 customer DOBs and 28,000 partial credit and debit card details. The middle six digits of the cards are missing, so are basically unusable for the attackers.

TalkTalk's chief executive, Dido Harding, noted: "Given the potential size of this attack, we decided to be as open, honest and transparent as we could because we wanted to keep our customers informed and ensure they had the advice and support they need. Today, we can confirm that the scale of the attack was much smaller than we originally suspected, but this does not take away from how seriously we take what has happened and our investigation is still ongoing.

"On behalf of everyone at TalkTalk, I would like to apologise to all our customers. We know that we need to work hard to earn back your trust and everyone here is committed to doing that."

TalkTalk customers have been informed of the data stolen and are likely to see an increase in phishing attempts over the coming weeks and months. So far, two teenagers have been arrested in connection with the hack.

Google's mergers and acquisitions are at its lowest figure since 2009, with the company spending just $250 million so far in the first 9 months of 2015.

By comparison, Google spent nearly $5 billion in the first 9 months last year, and $1.3 billion in the first nine months of 2013.

BI compiled a nice list of Google's previous M&A:

2014 (first nine months): $1.1 billion on non-named acquisitions, plus $2.5 billion on smart appliance maker Nest, $517 million on Dropcam, and $478 million on satellite company Skybox Imaging.
2013 (first nine months): $369 million in non-named M&A, plus $969 million for Waze.
2012 (first nine months): $1.1 billion in non-named M&A, plus $12.4 billion for Motorola Mobility.
2011 (first nine months): $502 million in non-named M&A, plus $676 million for ITA Software, $151 million for Zagat, $114 million for DailyDeals GmbH.
2010 (first nine months): $626 million in non-named M&A, plus $179 million for Slide, $681 million for AdMob, $123 million for On2 Technologies.

Amazon has announced today that if you order Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 and use the company's Prime Now same delivery service you can get the game delivered to your door at midnight on launch day.

The only caveat is that you have to live in one of 20 major metros - Atlanta, Austin, Baltimore, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Indianapolis, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Manhattan, Miami, Minneapolis, Orange County, Phoenix, Portland, Sacramento, San Antonio, San Francisco, San Jose, and Seattle.

Additionally, if you order snacks, Amazon will deliver those, as well.

"Why wait in lines on release night when we'll bring Call of Duty: Black Ops III right to your door? We're making it easy for hardcore gamers to download the app, reserve a coveted delivery window for midnight delivery and sit back while the game comes right to their doors. Our Prime customers will be on their way to ranking up before they know it, and all without having to leave the comfort of their house," said Stephenie Landry, Amazon's worldwide director of Prime Now. "We love offering exclusive opportunities for our Prime members and the gaming community, and now they can get the most anticipated game of the year, Call of Duty: Black Ops III, moments after it is released."

Amazon has updated their Prime Music service this week, adding some highly requested features.

The company will now allow desktop and mobile users to download songs for offline playback, and mobile users can now download the songs to your phone's SD card (if you have one) allowing you to save precious internal storage.

Additionally, the service is now supported via Android Wear, the popular smartwatch operating system. The support allows for browsing via your watch and playback control.

Finally, Amazon also added a "New to Prime" tab to find the latest releases and a "Popular" tab to see the top songs and albums in the U.S. at that time.

The RIAA has asked the courts to issue a default judgement against the new Grooveshark music service, demanding $17 million in piracy damages and 'willful counterfeiting' damages.

The original Grooveshark settled its lawsuit with the RIAA earlier this year, but the new Grooveshark was started a few days later using the name. The RIAA sued almost immediately, and Namecheap and CloudFlare both eventually shut down the domain and their servers.

Grooveshark stayed around for a while, moving from domain to domain but is now shuttered for good.

"Defendants' Counterfeit Service prominently featured counterfeit replicas of the Grooveshark Marks as well as identical graphical elements taken from the original Grooveshark website," the RIAA said in their motion. "Plaintiffs have provided conclusive evidence that infringing copies of MP3 files that correspond to each of the Works-in-Suit have been streamed, reproduced, and distributed via the Counterfeit Service to computers located in New York."

The RIAA has asked for full damages for 89 infringing tracks, $400,000 for cyberquatting and $4 million for willful counterfeiting of the Grooveshark trademark, which is owned by the record labels. While the courts will absolutely side with the RIAA, there is very little chance the labels ever see a dime since the alleged operator is located somewhere in Europe.

A month after releasing their first Android app (to help consumers migrate to iOS), Apple has launched a second app for the operating system.

Apple's Beats Pill+ app is a companion to Apple's Beats Bill+ portable Bluetooth speaker, letting users queue up tracks and other basic DJ features.

The app, comically, has terrible ratings from users that are mostly just mad at Apple putting anything in the Google Play Store but nothing compares to Apple's Move to iOS app that has over 30,000 1-star reviews.

If you are interested, you can check out Beat Pills+ here.

According to the latest figures from Pew Research, 68 percent of American adults have smartphones now, and 45 percent have tablets.

The figures are significant since in 2011 the smartphone figure was 35 percent and the tablet figure was almost non-existent.

Breaking down the smartphone number further, we have 86 percent ownership for the 18-29 age group, and 83 percent for those in the age 30-49 range.

With the increase in tablet and smartphone ownership has come a decline in desktop and laptop ownership. 78 percent of adults under 30 own a desktop or laptop, down from 88 percent in 2010. In total, 73% of U.S. adults own a desktop or laptop computer, down from 80 percent in 2012.

In total, mobile phone ownership is almost fully saturated, with 92 percent of American adults owning a mobile phone of some kind.

Amazon has removed all listings for the Google Chromecast and the Apple TV, taking down direct competitors to its own Amazon set-tops and streaming sticks.

Besides selling it directly, Amazon has also removed third-party reseller listings and even new and used devices sold by Amazon users through the marketplace.

Taking it one step further, if you search for the items you will instead get a recommendation for the Amazon Fire TV or the Amazon Fire TV stick.

As part of their decision to stop selling the items, Amazon says "It's important that the streaming media players we sell interact well with Prime Video in order to avoid customer confusion." This, of course, doesn't make too much sense since Chromecast's SDK is open and Amazon could have added support pretty easily.

Amazon has announced that it is exiting the daily deals business, effective December 18th.

On that date, Amazon will stop selling the deals completely, including through the Amazon Local app, but any deals purchased before the shutdown will still be usable and supported.

Overall, the entire daily deal space is struggling. Market leader Groupon, once valued at $16 billion, now has a market value of just $2.4 billion and laid off 1100 employees just two months ago. LivingSocial also just laid off 20 percent of its workforce.

Amazon closed Amazon Destinations earlier this month, a service that let Amazon users find deals on hotels within range of their current location. It seems pretty clear that both Destinations and Local were not seeing the revenue Amazon had expected.

For their part, Amazon only left consumers with a vague message: "We've learned a great deal from the daily deals business and will look for ways to apply these lessons in the future as we continue to innovate on behalf of our customers and merchants."