LONDON, May 22 (Reuters) – A project to allow companies to set up a website with almost any address has relaunched after a software glitch exposed sensitive details of applications last month, forcing it to shut down.

In the most ambitious expansion of the Internet so far, the body that oversees domain names has now given organisations until May 30 to apply for their own Web address endings – for example .london, .eco or .canon – provided they have a legitimate claim to the domain name and can pay a hefty fee.

The new suffixes should allow companies or communities more control over their online presence and send visitors more directly to part of their sites.

But the process was dogged by controversy even before the embarrassing software bug: many brand owners have felt forced to take part in the expensive project or risk rivals bagging domains that could be mistaken for their own.

It has also raised questions of corporate governance at Icann, the non-profit body that manages the Internet’s naming system, since some current and former directors of the body stand to make money out of the explosion of new names.

Chief Executive Rod Beckstrom said Icann now hoped to be ready to publish details of who had applied for what before the U.S. organisation’s next major meeting in Prague, which will be his last before he hands over to a new CEO.

“I think the team has done a very professional job of dealing with the situation,” he told Reuters by telephone. “Now we’re able to move on to the next phase.”

LONDON (Reuters) – Japanese electronics group Panasonic (6752.T: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) plans to open a European factory this year to make home appliances, a market it is targeting as sales of televisions stagnate, in a rare vote of confidence for manufacturing in the crisis-hit euro zone.

Panasonic is looking to minimize the effect of a strong yen on its exports by bringing manufacturing closer to its customers, and also hopes to capitalize on any incentives that struggling euro zone governments may offer.

Industrial production in the euro zone fell 0.3 percent month on month in March, as an escalating debt crisis, rising unemployment and high inflation dissuaded consumers from spending and companies from investing.

“We are studying European production,” Panasonic’s European Chief Executive Laurent Abadie told Reuters in an interview. “We have different interesting opportunities at the moment. Probably I will be able to give you more information in a few weeks.”

“This year, yes, this is our target.”

Abadie declined to say which locations were under consideration, but said it would be a European Union country.

Chinese automaker Great Wall Motor (2333.HK: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz)(601633.SS: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) opened its first European factory in Bulgaria in February, as part of its strategy to lift sales in the region.

May 22 (Reuters) – Apple has maintained its place as the world’s most valuable brand over the past year, leading a group of technology-related companies that dominate the top 10, according to a study published on Tuesday.

The iPhone and iPad maker has boosted its brand value by 19 percent in the past year to $183 billion, or 37 percent of its market capitalisation, according to the annual BrandZ study by leading brands and market-research agency Millward Brown.

Facebook, with a market value of $82 billion after its initial public offering last week, was the fastest climber in the top 100, seeing its brand value rise by 74 percent to $33.2 billion to put it in 19th place.

Seven of the top 10 were technology-related firms, although McDonald’s and Coca-Cola kept their respective number four and number six rankings.

Marlboro moved up a notch to seventh place despite anti-smoking campaigns in much of the world.

Nick Cooper, managing director of Millward Brown Optimor which produced the study, said the strength of technology brands was a measure of the central and transformative role it plays in contemporary life.

“It’s all pervading,” Cooper told Reuters, “and there’s a lot of excitement and new news. This is where it’s all happening. That tends to increase not only the demand and financial performance but also the role of brand.”

LONDON, May 21 (Reuters) – WPP has become the first foreign advertising group to invest in Myanmar since Western sanctions were lifted, betting on a flood of demand from multinational companies wanting to market their goods and services.

New York-based Ogilvy & Mather, part of the global WPP group, said on Monday it had agreed to buy a stake in Myanmar’s leading ad agency Today Advertising, staking out an early position in one of Asia’s last frontier markets.

The United States suspended sanctions on Friday in response to political reforms in Myanmar, a poor southeastern Asian state sandwiched between China and India that had been ruled by its armed forces for 50 years.

Europe had suspended sanctions a month earlier. After years of detention and house arrest, opposition leader and Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi took her seat in parliament on May 2, ushering in a new political era.

Ogilvy & Mather was also the first international ad agency to set up in Vietnam when U.S. sanctions were lifted there in 1994. Vietnam is now one of WPP’s fastest-growing markets.

“It’s not often that a market of this size opens up, with this history and infrastructure and capability, so it’s very, very exciting,” WPP Chief Executive Martin Sorrell told Reuters.

Myanmar has a population of about 60 million, who live on an average income of about $4 a day – far less than that in rural communities. It has an average age of 27 and is rich in resources but has little provision for business or banking.

LONDON (Reuters) – Walkie-talkie maker Sepura (SEPU.L: Quote, Profile, Research) is targeting cash-rich mining, oil and utility companies with its acquisition of Austria’s 3T, as growth prospects in the public sector slow, its chief executive told Reuters on Wednesday.

Industrial companies are increasingly embracing the two-way Tetra radios long used by police, fire and ambulance services, as their rugged qualities make them suitable for tough environments such as mines or oil and gas fields.

Most major European countries have fully equipped Tetra networks for their emergency services, meaning opportunities for further sales are limited, especially as governments across the continent are slashing public spending.

“As many of the regions across the world have digitised their public safety offerings, the market itself is going to run out of big countries who need to upgrade their networks,” Sepura Chief Executive Gordon Watling said in a telephone interview.

“There aren’t many Germanys left,” said Watling, adding the acquisition of infrastructure provider 3T should expand Sepura’s addressable market by up to 50 percent.

Germany is the world’s biggest market for radios that use the Tetra standard, which has only just been approved in the United States and Canada. China and India are upgrading their networks city by city, rather than a nationwide rollout.

Britain’s Sepura is a market leader in Tetra radios, with about 40 percent of the global market, neck and neck with Motorola Solutions Inc (MSI.N: Quote, Profile, Research) and ahead of EADS’s (EAD.PA: Quote, Profile, Research) (EAD.DE: Quote, Profile, Research) Cassidian.

LONDON, May 15 (Reuters) – Rebekah Brooks rose from secretary to chief executive of Rupert Murdoch’s British newspaper group, but the woman who once partied with prime ministers now faces criminal charges and possible prison time.

Entering a London police station on Tuesday to be told she was charged with hiding evidence from police investigating phone-hacking by some of her reporters, Brooks was beset by cameramen and photographers eager to capture every detail of her dramatic fall from grace.

Instantly recognisable with her long mane of red curls, Brooks, 43, has rarely been out of the news since the phone-hacking scandal exploded last summer, forcing Murdoch to hastily shut down the News of the World newspaper she used to edit.

An intensely private woman who splashed intimate details of other people’s lives on the front pages of her newspapers, Brooks was forced out into the full glare of the world’s media last Friday for a day of televised grilling.

Testifying at the Leveson Inquiry into press ethics, which was set up as a result of the News of the World saga, Brooks displayed both the charm and the steel that beguiled the great and the good of British media and politics for so long.

Out of the many powerful people Brooks befriended during her stellar career, Murdoch was the one who made the biggest impact on her life. Her close friendship with the News Corp tycoon gave her entree in the most exclusive circles and he repaid her loyalty and friendship with one huge promotion after another.

After rising in just 11 years from secretary to editor of the News of the World in 2000, aged 31, Brooks became the first woman editor of the Sun in 2003. In 2009, Murdoch made her CEO of News International, his British newspaper group.

LONDON (Reuters) – British online payday loans provider Wonga.com launched a credit service for small businesses on Monday, aiming to fill a gap in the market left by banks who have been hamstrung by tight lending conditions imposed since the credit crunch.

Wonga, which has made 4 million short-term loans to consumers since its launch in 2007, will offer small businesses loans of 3,000 to 10,000 pounds ($4,800 to $16,200) for periods of between one and 52 weeks.

Interest rates will be fixed at between 0.3 and 2 percent per week, depending on how risky the loan is judged to be.

Wonga uses automated risk-processing technology to give near-instant answers to online applicants, and turns down about two-thirds of applications.

It now aims to export its more popular features, including the simple application screen featuring sliders that can be dragged to the desired amount to be borrowed and repayment period, to the business world.

“We wanted it to have all the characteristics that people positively associate with Wonga in terms of transparency, simplicity, ease of use, speed … and we wanted to bring that to small business,” said Chief Executive Errol Damelin.

Wonga’s business has boomed during the downturn as cash-strapped consumers who found it hard to obtain short-term credit elsewhere turned to it for loans of up to 1,000 pounds to tide them over for up to a month.

LONDON (Reuters) – Members of Britain’s ruling Conservative party repeatedly tried to soften language directed at Rupert Murdoch and his son James in a parliamentary report, before they ultimately decided to vote against it in its entirety.

The Culture, Media and Sport committee found after its five-year investigation that Rupert Murdoch was unfit to run a major global company and was responsible for a culture of illegal phone-hacking that has shaken his media empire.

The report was passed 6-4 by the committee, with all four votes against cast by members of Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservative party. Five opposition Labour members supported the report, backed by the lone Liberal Democrat, whose party is part of Cameron’s coalition government.

The largely failed effort to deflect some blame from the Murdochs could hurt Cameron, who is already under fire over accusations that he has done too much to protect Murdoch’s business interests. That a Liberal Democrat ally sided with the opposition is also damaging to Cameron’s coalition.

The lack of unanimity, and the strong wording of the report, were both unusual. Select committees include a balance of government and opposition members and usually try to seek consensus to show that their conclusions are non-partisan.

Despite repeatedly failing to soften the report in places, the Conservatives said they might have approved it had it not been for an amendment by Labour’s outspoken Murdoch critic Tom Watson that described Murdoch as “not a fit person to exercise the stewardship of a major international company”.

Conservative committee member Louise Mensch said: “I would nonetheless have voted for the report and explained where I disagreed … had that line about Rupert Murdoch’s unfitness to run an international company been left out.”

LONDON (Reuters) – Rupert Murdoch is unfit to run a major international company and should take responsibility for a culture of illegal phone hacking that has shaken News Corp, a powerful parliamentary committee said on Tuesday.

Pulling few punches, MPs focused on the failings of the 81-year-old News Corp chief executive, his son James and a company which they said had showed “wilful blindness” about the scale of phone-hacking that first emerged at Murdoch’s News of the World newspaper.

The cross-party committee, which approved the report by a majority of six to four, scolded News Corp for misleading the British parliament and trying to cover up illegal phone hacking. It said that there had been huge failures in corporate governance which raised questions about the competence of Rupert’s son, James.

“News International and its parent News Corporation exhibited wilful blindness, for which the companies’ directors -including Rupert Murdoch and James Murdoch – should ultimately take responsibility,” it said.

“Their instinct throughout, until it was too late, was to cover up rather than seek out wrongdoing and discipline the perpetrators,” the MPs said in an 85 page report.

“Even if there were a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ culture at News International, the whole affair demonstrates huge failings of corporate governance at the company and its parent, News Corporation.”

The report may force James Murdoch, once heir apparent to the media empire, to sever his last ties with Britain’s biggest satellite TV firm BSkyB, which News Corp had sought to take over before the scandal.

LONDON (Reuters) – Rupert Murdoch is unfit to run a major international company and should take responsibility for a culture of illegal phone hacking that has shaken News Corp, a powerful British parliamentary committee said on Tuesday.

Pulling few punches, lawmakers focused on the failings of the 81-year-old News Corp chief executive, his son James and a company which they said had showed “willful blindness” about the scale of phone-hacking that first emerged at Murdoch’s News of the World newspaper.

The cross-party committee, which approved the report by a majority of six to four, scolded News Corp for misleading the British parliament and trying to cover up illegal phone hacking. It said that there had been huge failures in corporate governance which raised questions about the competence of Rupert’s son, James.

“News International and its parent News Corporation exhibited willful blindness, for which the companies’ directors -including Rupert Murdoch and James Murdoch – should ultimately take responsibility,” it said.

“Their instinct throughout, until it was too late, was to cover up rather than seek out wrongdoing and discipline the perpetrators,” the lawmakers said in an 85 page report.

“Even if there were a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ culture at News International, the whole affair demonstrates huge failings of corporate governance at the company and its parent, News Corporation.”

The report may force James Murdoch, once heir apparent to the media empire, to sever his last ties with Britain’s biggest satellite TV firm BSkyB, which News Corp had sought to take over before the scandal.