This Week... Spanair ceases trading, Sir Stelios goes against the EasyJet board and Twitter introduces censorship.
on 1st February 2012Welcome back to another instalment of our weekly updates. Many of you would have attended the Travel Weekly Globe Awards event last Wednesday, a truly glamorous evening with some great companies winning. Of course the Costa Concordia disaster is still heaviliy in the news with new predictions that the ship won’t be recovered for another 10 months. In other news, Spanish airline, Spanair, has collapsed this week as well as Twitter making a controversial move to censorship. For all this and more read on.
CWT Digital News:
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Travel News:
Sir Stelios and Easy Jet at loggerheads again- 30th Jan- A new row has sparked between the founder and the board of EasyJet, this time involving bonuses. Sir Stelios has gone against the board who are planning to release a pay deal in which the 10 executives could be rewarded up to £8 million over the next 3 years. Sir Stelios has even written to the Prime Minister, David Cameron, for support against this, stating that the EasyJet board are softening performance targets so that the payout is more likely . A vote will take place next month and it is believed that several of the directors will quit if the vote is won in Sir Stelios’s favour.
Spanair collapse and budget airlines open up flights- 30th Jan- Spanish carrier, Spanair, collapsed this weekend leaving around 22,000 passengers stranded. The carrier mainly focused on domestic flights around Spain. As a result both Ryanair and EasyJet have extended their flight services as well as offer special rates on flights for travel up to the 12th Feb. The collapse of the Spanish carrier was believed to be down to lack of funding. This is the 1st company to go into admin this year after what was a turbulent 2011 for travel companies.
Technology News:
Twitter causes criticism with censored tweets- 27th Jan- Twitter caused controversy last week when they announced that tweets will be censored according to each country. A technology has been developed which will block tweets per country depending on that certain country’s laws. This change in direction for the social network contradicts Twitter’s former policy of ‘the tweets must flow’, when during the London riots Twitter refused to shut down rioters accounts as it went against their policy. The new policy has come under heavy criticism from users of the site who believe that this new policy goes against what Twitter stands for. Twitter has tried to reassure its users with a blog post stating that its ‘core values as a company is to defend and respect each user’s voice. We try to keep content up wherever and whenever we can, and we will be transparent with users when we can’t’.
Entertainment industry hit out at Google and Bing- 26th Jan- Last week Google and Bing were confronted by the entertainment industry over the amount of illegal download music sites that were showing in search results. The campaigners released a 90 page document which demonstrated illegal sites being ranked highly in search results. It was claimed that in a search for chart singles 16 out of the 20 results were for illegal sites. The industry is now putting pressure on the search engines to carry out measures against this such as prioritising sites which obtain certification as a licensed site and to stop indexing sites which are ‘substantially infringing websites’. In reaction to the document, Google have insisted that they are currently working on reducing piracy and plan to ‘continue to work in close partnership with rights holders to help them combat piracy and protect their property’. After failing to get SOPA off the ground, the music and entertainment industry are clearly trying to prevent piracy via other measures now.
We hope you found this weeks update useful and of course if you want to keep up with all the news during the week you can follow us on Twitter and like us on Facebook. Have a good week!
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