Obviously a quarter of a million dollars or so is nothing to Apple, which has about $120 billion in the bank. But this episode does signify the end of this strange saga wherein Apple — for a while — refused to budge on selling AppleCare, its premium warranty service, to customers in Italy without telling them that Italian law requires two years of standard warranty coverage for all consumer products for free. Italian regulators were unusually aggressive in the law’s enforcement, fining Apple nearly a million euros already over the issue.

The additional fine is being levied for Apple’s non-compliance with the law between March and November 2012.

Even after being slapped with the first fine a year ago, Apple continued to sell AppleCare in its stores in Italy and on its website. Then the European Union said it would start to look into Apple’s practice selling AppleCare in other countries in Europe that have similar consumer protection laws as Italy. In November, Apple finally complied with the Italian agency’s demands and stopped selling AppleCare warranties in Apple Stores in the country.

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Back in February 2010, the executives – legal chief David Drummond, privacy counsel Peter Fleischer and George Reyes, who was already Google’s ex-CFO at that point – were given suspended six-month sentences over alleged privacy offences. On Friday, an appeals court quashed the verdict.

“We’re very happy that the verdict has been reversed and our colleagues ‘ names have been cleared,” a Google spokesperson said afterwards. “Of course, while we are delighted with the appeal, our thoughts continue to be with the family who have been through the ordeal.”

The ordeal in question happened in 2006, when schoolchildren in Turin uploaded to Google Video a video of one of their classmates, an autistic boy, being bullied. The video went up in September of that year, but Google only received a complaint two months later, at which point it took the video down.

The person who uploaded the video was sentenced to 10 months’ community service, but the Italian courts also pressed on with cases against four Google executives, who had nothing to do with the video other than being Google executives (the fourth, who escaped conviction, was marketing executive Arvind Desikan).

The thrust of the case was that the video stayed up for two months despite other users having complained in the video’s comments thread – not, it should be noted, the same thing as a formal complaint.

To the dismay of Drummond, Fleischer and Reyes – as well as anyone who worries about user-generated content platform liability – the court went on to convict them for breaking Italian privacy law, despite the fact that the video was taken down shortly after the complaint was received. The executives were however exonerated on defamation charges.

Google said at the time that it would appeal, and this clearly worked, albeit slowly.

It is probably worth pointing out that that, at the time of the convictions, Google was engaged in a low-level war with billionaire media baron and Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, who was busy making life hard for the U.S. web company in various ways.

Just in the few months before the convictions, Berlusconi’s Mediaset broadcaster had won a copyright infringement suit against YouTube, and his government had made it illegal for websites to show videos without a license.

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AppleCare is a paid warranty policy that the company sells to customers to cover their gadgets after the free warranty period expires. Apple had come under fire from the Italian government’s consumer watchdog agency in late 2011 for not making it clear to Italian customers that they are entitled under European law to a two-year free warranty policy, and for continuing to sell AppleCare as an extended warranty that kicked in after just one year.

The company is still selling AppleCare on its website in Italy, but now phrases it as a way to “add to the two years of vendor warranty required by Italian law to protect consumers.”

Apple seemed to get away with ignoring the threats for almost a year, even as Italy got more aggressive in its enforcement policy. The company has been fined almost a million euros.

This probably isn’t the end of the warranty saga, however. The European Union’s Justice Commission has also been asking member countries if Apple is violating the two-year free warranty law in their countries as well.

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Salerno-based 4W Marketplace, which powers the Premium Publisher Network, is taking the money from VC house Principia SGR.

In an announcement, the firm says:

“The investment will be directed towards the strengthening of the technological department for research and development in the computational advertising area and the development of new cutting-edge internet advertising models.”

That work will be carried out together with 4W Marketplace’s local university.

The Premium Publisher Network was formed by newspaper groups RCS and L’Espresso three years ago and now numbers dozens of members including broadcaster Rai and paper La Gazzetta della Sport and La Repubblica.

4W Marketplace is the network’s exclusive ad provider, having been started by the Digital Magics incubator, and currently offers contextual, mobile and social ads.

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But, although the service sees no problem heading to emerging young markets, high costs will keep it out of Germany for the foreseeable future.

“We’re about to launch in France, Spain and Italy,” international VP Nic Jones told Informa Telecom & Media’s Industry Outlook 2013 conference on Tuesday.

“The one missing country is Germany. Germany is very, very hard to gain digital rights to be able to build a digital business.”

License rates required of digital services by royalty collectors are still relatively high in the country.

“They (rightsholders) genuinely believe they are protecting the music industry,” Jones said. “They need to embrace the future without being so scared of it.”

Jointly owned by Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group and Abu Dhabi Media Company, Vevo has so far launched in six countries, including Brazil. Whilst that choice might raise some eyebrows, the territory is growing up fast.

Jones said Vevo aims to launch in countries where people are most passionate about live music: “Actually, there is a market to monetize premium videos in Brazil – and Mexico, too.”

Such expansion will see mobile become Vevo’s primary distribution device.

“UK growth is far greater than on mobile than anything else,” Jones said. “Asia s a bit down the track for us. But we don’t see Vevo as a desktop proposition

“We are talking with various potential partners in India, where Indians many will only ever see the internet as a mobile proposition.

“Eastern Europe is going to be a high priority for us next year- places like Russia are incredibly important.”

But, as mobile becomes the majority, free content operators are posed with a challenge – advertising models are playing catch-up.

“Monetising mobile is much more hard,” Vevo VP Jones told Informa Telecoms & Media’s conference.

“The formats aren’t clear yet. The idea from agencies that mobile should be treated separately is a mistake. There is a view that mobile should be sold at a lower CPM. Most advertisers buying VOD are thinking about the laptop or the PC.

“There is a very big job to educate the advertisers and agencies. Not to educate the users – they are naturally emanating toward mobile.”

The challenge of emerging markets being mobile-first is one recognised by others like Facebook, which conceded in its IPO filing that it is increasingly well used in developing countries on handsets, where its business model is virginal.

But what Jones was also speaking to was a growing grumble I am hearing, from content services, that – even in the west – mobile advertising effectiveness just isn’t yet cutting it.

Jones speculated that Vevo may float on the market “one day”. And he said, in future, it would innovate around presenting live music gigs. He cited an example of a Led Zepplin concert which attracted two million applications for 20,000 tickets as proving there is a ready audience of people to pay for online gig streams.

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Arianna’s Italian launch leans on La Repubblica publisher Gruppo Espresso, and takes as its editor Lucia Annunziata, a TV host who previously worked at both La Repubblica and the Corriere della Sera.

This was not the approach taken in the UK, where AOL appears to want Huffington Post to work harder, according to the impression given by last week’s Times article.

“We still need to see more agenda-setting and more breaking news,” AOL Huffington Post media group international SVP Jimmy Maymann told The Times.

“Just like Arianna knows everybody on Capitol Hill, we need somebody who knows everyone in Westminster and can bring in stories.

“In the UK, we didn’t go out and hire a local ‘Arianna’ — we went with a promising new talent instead as editor-in-chief.”

AOL says Huffington Post’s UK audience has trebled since the UK site was introduced a year ago, to 4.1 million unique visitors in August, according to comScore.

But the full figures paidContent obtained from comScore show almost half of Huffington Post’s UK audience is still going to the US site…

For its first foray outside North America in mid-2011, Huffington Post did not strike a newspaper partnership deal — as it has done in France and Spain — instead handing editorship to the existing AOL UK content network editor Carla Buzasi.

Prior to AOL, Buzasi had edited or deputy-edited the websites for female lifestyle titles Glamour.com, Marie Claire, and came to AOL to help introduce the MyDaily women’s lifestyle site.

Buzasi now makes regular media appearances, for instance, on ITV’s Daybreak morning TV show sofa. But, whilst Arianna Huffington herself is a famous political commentator, Huffington Post UK’s profile in the corridors of power has been far less so.

Joining launch political editor Chris Wimpress this May, New Statesman politics editor Mehdi Hasan – a regular on politics talk shows like BBC One’s Sunday Politics – joined as HuffPo’s political director.

The site’s masthead places politics below education, sport, tech and trends.

“Our UK and Canadian editions have really been guinea pigs,” Maymann told The Times. “They have told us, shown us, that if we want to have local relevance, we needed a model that was a little bit different.”

Had HuffPo sought the option at the time, it is quite likely that UK newspapers would have rebuffed the suggestion of partnering with it – all of the candidates already have strong commentary brands of their own. UK newspapers have always executed a strong line in robust news commentary of the sort many believe their US peers have not — a gap which Huffington has exploited.

HuffPo UK’s unique monthly visitors count in the UK is eight times smaller than Telegraph.co.uk’s unique monthly browser count, for example. That is admirable in a crowded market, but the conditions may not be equivalent to make HuffPo as big a success elsewhere as it has been at home.

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It’s stuffed with factoids that may well induce depression. For example, not only were most of Europe’s biggest companies were built out of the industrial revolution but in fact continental Europe has produced just one of the world’s top 500 companies over the last 30 years (California alone, by comparison, has produced 26).

Europe produces plenty of corner shops, hairdressers and so on. What it doesn’t produce enough of is innovative companies that grow quickly and end up big. In 2003, analysing Europe’s entrepreneurial gap, the European Commission cited a study which showed that during the 1990s, 19% of mid-sized firms in America were classified as fast-growers, compared with an average of just 4% in six European Union countries.

[…]

If Europe were more entrepreneurial, says everyone from the commission down, it would not have been such a poor producer of big businesses. And it would have produced more successful new technology firms. Entrepreneurship doesn’t have to be channelled through the tubes of the internet, but over the past few decades a great deal of it has been. That an economy so copiously provided with the technically educated as Germany’s has not produced a single globally important business-to-consumer internet company suggests a big problem with entrepreneurship.

So why exactly are things so dismal?

The article identifies a set of familiar problems: Europe suffers from a lack of risk-taking; its entrepreneurs have an inability to access larger funding rounds; there are more restrictive labor laws.

But it also identifies a few bright spots, such as the fact that governments are actually starting to take a more active — and actually helpful — role in promoting startups.

Go, read!

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The e-commerce firm says Kobo Touch has become the top-selling product on Rakuten’s large online mall after going on pre-order sale July 2 ahead of its July 19 service launch.

At the same time, Kobo has announced a partnership with Italian retailer Mondadori Group to bring its device to Italy in its ongoing globalisation effort.

The Japanese and Italian experiences certainly show Kobo has a knack of brokering good local carriage partnerships. Mondadori online media stores carry over nine million products.

In the UK, Kobo grabbed a deal with high street newsagent WH Smith last year to sell its e-readers on prominent display stands. But, asked for sales this week by paidContent, Kobo and WH Smith declined to give numbers.

In countries like France and Italy, e-books are still relatively sparsely adopted; it is still a market waiting to take off. Kobo CEO Mike Serbinis puts the Italian e-book market at €10 million last year.

Kobo is also available in the Netherlands, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Austria, Germany and France.

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Italy’s Competition and Market Guarantor Authority (AGCM) is threatening to fine Apple 300,000 euros (about $377,500) for giving one year of warranty service to customers for free, but charging for additional coverage through its AppleCare product. Italy requires all companies offer two years of product coverage for free.

According to Reuters:

The AGCM said in its monthly bulletin that Apple was continuing to adopt unfair commercial practices in Italy and noted this could eventually lead to the closure of its Italian operations for up to 30 days.

The U.S. group has 30 days to respond.

The AGCM alleges that information provided by Apple about an extra guarantee scheme encourages customers to buy the service without clearly explaining that the company is obliged to offer a two-year free warranty, the source said.

In December Apple was ordered to pay 400,000 euros for not explaining the two-year warranty guarantee to Italian consumers and an additional 500,000 euros for offering AppleCare without a complete explanation of consumers’ rights. It appealed the fines but lost, and is now facing more fines. It’s not clear how big Apple’s operations are in the country in total, but it does have 10 retail stores.

Apple has scored some important legal wins here at home recently — but its luck hasn’t been as consistent on the international stage.

The 4G iPad false advertising case in Australia, a $60 million iPad trademark payout in China, and Italy’s aggressiveness on enforcing warranty rules shows that even the richest and most influential tech company in the world isn’t immune to local laws and red tape. Luckily for Apple, it has enough cash in the bank to shrug off a few million-dollar fines here and there.

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One day after Philipp Humm’s surprise resignation from T-Mobile, Vodafone announced he has joined its ranks. Humm won’t just be supervising one of Vodafone’s numerous European subsidiaries – he will take charge of eight of them: Germany; the UK; the Netherlands, Turkey, Ireland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Romania.

That explains Humm’s sudden departure. T-Mobile USA’s parent company Deutsche Telekom is one of Vodafone’s biggest competitors. In fact, by running Vodafone Germany Humm will be going head-to-head with T-Mobile Germany, the DT subsidiary he once led.

Vodafone announced the appointment as part of a larger European reorganization. Vodafone is splitting the continent into two operating regions. Italy CEO Paolo Bertoluzzo will run the second region which encompasses southern Europe and includes Vodafone’s carriers in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Albania, and Malta.

The move is definitely a step up for Humm. While T-Mobile USA is a huge operator by European standards, it’s the smallest of the U.S. Big 4 by far. In several of the countries Humm will be supervising, Vodafone’s carriers are the No. 1 and No. 2 players. He no longer has to assume the role of the scrappy challenger.

Humm won’t assume his new Vodafone mantle until Oct. 1, which is the day after his contract with Deutsche Telekom officially ends. It’s now pretty clear Humm isn’t being punished for his role in the AT&T-Mo debacle. Quite the opposite, he’s being rewarded with an even more important job (albeit by a different company).

That leaves T-Mobile in a bit of turmoil. It needs to scramble to find a permanent CEO while in the process of overhauling its network, launching LTE and executing its new “challenger strategy.” As I wrote yesterday though, the last thing a new T-Mobile CEO should do is try to ‘shake up’ the company, as new chiefs are wont to do. Humm and team had put together a compelling plan to take on T-Mobile’s larger rivals, and whomever winds up running T-Mo should give it a chance to work

Image courtesy of Flickr user LGEPR

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