Only Entertainment

Facebook bobbed above a $100bn market capitalisation for the first time on Monday, almost exactly one year since its record low.

Last week, Facebook's stock rose to $38 – its IPO value – for the first time, and on Monday it closed at $41.34, bringing the company's value by market capitalisation to $100.6bn.

Coincidentally, Monday also saw the end of a protracted court case in which Facebook will pay a $20m settlement to users who objected to their information being used as part of advertiser promotions.

Five plaintiffs who brought the case in 2011 over Facebook's "sponsored stories", which use "likes" to promote brands to other users, apparently in conflict with a Californian law which prevents advertisers using endorsements without explicit permission.

The group protested that users could not contra or opt out of the ads and were not paid for the scheme, which earned Facebook around $234m between January 2011 and August 2012, according to court documents.

Plaintiffs also complained that the scheme did not afford sufficient protections to younger users. The judge initially rejected Facebook's proposed $20m settlement, but under a revised deal Facebook will reimburse 614,000 users who responded to a notification of the class action.

It is the latest event in a series of controversies surrounding Facebook's use of consumer data for commercial ends, coming at the same time as Facebook's milestone market value.

Facebook's chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg anticipated the surge, selling $91m worth of shares in early August, a regulatory document showed.

Facebook's transition into a publicly traded company has been extremely bumpy. It began with a much-hyped IPO, which saw little enthusiasm from chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, who attended only one prior meeting with investors.

During the flotation, the Nasdaq exchange froze three times within an hour, unable to handle the scale of interest from potential investors and from staff selling their stock; in May 2013, Nasdaq was fined $10m, the biggest ever fine of its kind, for the glitches.

Meanwhile, the investment bank Morgan Stanley, which was underwriting the IPO, bought back millions of shares to artificially inflate the price on day one.

Maruti Suzuki has launched a sportier avatar of the WagonR called the WagonR Stingray at a starting price of Rs 4,09,999 (ex-showroom, Delhi)

Sony has put its cards on the table. The PlayStation 4 release date is 15 November in North America and 29 November in Europe.

At a packed press conference earlier this week in Cologne, where the monstrous Gamescom event is being held, the company laid out its final pre-release vision for the machine. And it's all about games. Sure, there's a roster of video services (with LoveFilm and BBC iPlayer heading up the UK offering), but whether we're talking discs or digital distribution, triple-A publishers or one-person teams, it is and always has been about games.

On the opening day of Gamescom, I'm sitting with Andrew House, the president of Sony Computer Entertainment. At the conference the night before, in front of a global online audience, he had berated Microsoft for the mixed, confused positioning of its Xbox One console launch. At first it was going to be a digital-focused machine, with discs relegated to a secondary position; there would be no traditional pre-owned game sales, there would be a requirement for near-constant internet connection. But in a historic mea culpa the then-president of interactive entertainment, Don Mattrick, backtracked on the harshest of the DRM measures. Sony wasn't going to let this go.

"While others have shifted their message and changed their story," said House during the press event, "we were consistent in maintaining a message that is fair and in tune with consumer desires."

Yahoo! attracted more website visitors in the United States than Google during July, pushing the company to the top of the online league for the first time in two years.

Nearly 197 million individuals visited a Yahoo! website last month, according to rankings from comScore, versus 192 million for Google. The last time Yahoo! outperformed Google was in May 2011.

The improvement suggests that changes under chief executive Marissa Mayer, who was recruited from Google, are beginning to resonate with the online audience. Mayer has revamped the Yahoo! home page, as well as email and weather services.

The Yahoo! audience total does not include traffic to its newly acquired blogging platform Tumblr, which came in as the 28th most popular site with 38 million visitors.

"No online media outlet would have come close to predicting this, and if they had, you would have said they were insane," said Ed Barton, director of digital media at Strategy Analytics. "This will probably have a positive impact on the share price and if Yahoo! keeps this up, it has a chance of becoming relevant again."

However, comScore's data only paints a partial picture, because it does not include mobile phone usage, which now accounts for a significant amount of Google traffic

Microsoft has stepped into a new and uncertain era with the announcement that CEO Steve Ballmer will retire within 12 months, triggering a search for a successor to take over the software behemoth.

The announcement on Friday surprised analysts and investors and sent shares surging, reflecting belief that the company will benefit from new leadership as it tries to innovate and chase the market for smartphones and tablets.

"There is never a perfect time for this type of transition, but now is the right time," Ballmer said in a statement.

Held annually in Cologne, Gamescom is more than mere trade fair for the global games industry. Doubling as a public convention, it attracts more than 280,000 fans eager to go hands-on with hardware and software yet to hit the streets. This year's conference has proven to be one of the most important in recent years, with both Microsoft and Sony revealing more information on their impending new consoles, the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4.

I remember the first time I saw the Compact Oxford English Dictionary.

It came in a slipcase with a little drawer for its magnifying lens. We sold it at the academic bookstore in Toronto where I worked, and we kept a copy in the window. Whenever someone came in and plunked down over a hundred dollars for it, I always struck up a conversation about what a marvellous thing it was.

I'd seen the OED before then, of course. We had the 11-volume set in the English classroom in my high-school. I loved pulling down a copy and getting lost in it, browsing it for hours at stretch sometimes. I knew that there would come a day when I'd own this for myself.

Then came my adulthood, when I found myself moving, first cross-continent, then overseas and back – twice! – and I never felt rooted enough to invest in quite that much physical product. I toyed with buying various CD ROM editions, but never got to it, at first because it wouldn't run on the OS I was using, then because I'd switched to subnotebooks without CD drives.

The wings of the experimental aircraft arch more than 63 metres, the same span as an Airbus A340, but they look frail, supported on the airstrip by wheeled struts. They are covered in a patina of 11,268 photovoltaic cells, which look dark blue in the grey predawn. The four 10-horsepower propellers they power now start to spin silently. Bertrand Piccard, a 55-year-old explorer and psychiatrist, dons his helmet and oxygen mask and completes his final checks. The Solar Impulse quietly taxies forwards. The plane is travelling impossibly slowly – 30km an hour – when it gently noses up and leaves the ground. With air beneath them, the rangy wings seem to gain strength; the fuselage that on the ground seemed flimsy becomes elegant, like a crane vaunting in flight. It seems not to fly, though, so much as float. Piccard spends the day wheeling the solar-powered plane around the Matterhorn and lands 12 hours later, after sunset. But the Solar Impulse is a plane that would fly for ever.