W360 vs Tencent is a dispute between two Chinese IT companies, Tencent and Qihoo, over competition practices that has escalated in November 2010, and hundreds of millions of users were forced to choose sides in the dispute. It is the first anti-monopoly case to be heard by the Supreme People's Court since the Anti Monopoly Law of China was promulgated.
WAdidas AG is a German multinational corporation, founded and headquartered in Herzogenaurach, Germany, that designs and manufactures shoes, clothing and accessories. It is the largest sportswear manufacturer in Europe, and the second largest in the world, after Nike. It is the holding company for the Adidas Group, which consists of the Reebok sportswear company, 8.33% of the German football club Bayern München, and Runtastic, an Austrian fitness technology company. Adidas' revenue for 2018 was listed at €21.915 billion.
WThe AIG bonus payments controversy began in March 2009, when it was publicly disclosed that the American International Group (AIG) insurance corporation was going to pay approximately $218 million in bonus payments to employees of its financial services division.
WAirbnb, Inc. is an American company that operates an online marketplace for lodging, primarily homestays for vacation rentals, and tourism activities. Based in San Francisco, California, the platform is accessible via website and mobile app. Airbnb does not own any of the listed properties; instead, it profits by receiving commission from each booking. The company was founded in 2008 by Brian Chesky, Nathan Blecharczyk and Joe Gebbia. Airbnb is a shortened version of its original name, AirBedandBreakfast.com.
WAmazon.com has drawn criticism from multiple sources, where the ethics of certain business practices and policies have been drawn into question. Amazon has faced numerous allegations of anti-competitive or monopolistic behavior, as well as criticisms of their treatment of workers and consumers. Concerns have frequently been raised regarding the availability or unavailability of products and services on Amazon platforms, as due to its size Amazon.com is considered a monopoly.
WApple Inc. is a multinational American technology company which sells consumer electronics that have been claimed by critics to combine stolen and/or purchased designs that it claims are its own original creations. Criticism of Apple includes allegations of unethical business practices such as anti-competitive behavior, rash litigation, dubious tax tactics, the use of sweatshop labor, misleading warranties and insufficient data security, and concerns about environmental destruction. Additionally, it has been criticized for its alleged collaboration with U.S. surveillance program PRISM.
WBig Boys Gone Bananas!* is a 2011 documentary film, directed by Fredrik Gertten. The film is about how Gertten's film company was sued by Dole for the 2009 documentary film Bananas!*. This lawsuit is a type of case known as a strategic lawsuit against public participation (SLAPP).
WCisco Systems, Inc. is an American multinational technology conglomerate corporation headquartered in San Jose, California. Integral to the growth of Silicon Valley, Cisco develops, manufactures and sells networking hardware, software, telecommunications equipment and other high-technology services and products. Through its numerous acquired subsidiaries, such as OpenDNS, Webex, Jabber and Jasper, Cisco specializes in specific tech markets, such as the Internet of Things (IoT), domain security and energy management. On January 25, 2021, Cisco reincorporated in Delaware.
WCNN, an American basic cable and satellite television channel, has been the subject of several controversies. This article recounts controversies and allegations relating to both the domestic version of CNN, and its sister channels CNN International and CNN-News18.
WA number of different controversies and criticisms have surrounded Comcast for various reasons over its recent history. Customers of the telecommunications company report low levels of customer satisfaction on both service and cost. Comcast has also had several customer service scandals, the most notorious of which featured a representative not allowing a customer to cancel his service. This clip went viral. Comcast has also been widely criticized, most publicly by Netflix, for its position against net neutrality, the principle that all traffic on the internet should be treated equally.
WCriticism of Tesla, Inc., especially under CEO Elon Musk, ranges from potential safety issues to questionable business practices which include alleged fraud, a history of environmental violations, disregard for workers' safety, and Musk's excessive compensation package. Tesla and Musk have also been criticized for their attempts to intimidate and silence whistleblowers, journalists, and other critics who have spoken out against the company.
WDell is an American company that develops, sells, repairs, and supports computers and related products and services, and is owned by its parent company of Dell Technologies. Founded in 1984 by Michael Dell, the company is one of the largest technology corporations in the world, employing more than 165,000 people in the U.S. and around the world.
WDuke Energy Corporation is an American electric power and natural gas holding company headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina.
WDunkin' Donuts LLC, also known as Dunkin', is an American multinational coffee and doughnut company, as well as a quick service restaurant. It was founded by William Rosenberg in Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1950. The chain was acquired by Baskin-Robbins's holding company Allied Lyons in 1990; its acquisition of the Mister Donut chain and the conversion of that chain to Dunkin' Donuts facilitated the brand's growth in North America that year. Dunkin' and Baskin-Robbins eventually became subsidiaries of Dunkin' Brands, headquartered in Canton, Massachusetts, in 2004, until being purchased by Inspire Brands on December 15, 2020. The chain began rebranding as a "beverage-led company", and was renamed Dunkin', in January 2019; while stores in the U.S. began using the new name, the rebranding will eventually be rolled out to all of its international stores.
WElsevier is a Netherlands-based publishing company specializing in scientific, technical, and medical content. It is a part of the RELX Group, known until 2015 as Reed Elsevier. Its products include journals such as The Lancet and Cell, the ScienceDirect collection of electronic journals, the Trends and Current Opinion series of journals, the online citation database Scopus, the SciVal tool for measuring research performance, the ClinicalKey search engine for clinicians, and the ClinicalPath evidence-based cancer care service. Elsevier's products and services also include digital tools for data management, instruction, research analytics and assessment.
WFox News is an American basic cable and satellite television channel owned by Fox Corporation. During its time on the air, it has been the subject of many controversies and allegations.
WGeneral Electric Company (GE) is an American multinational conglomerate incorporated in New York State and headquartered in Boston. Until 2021, the company operated through aviation, power, renewable energy, digital industry, weapons manufacturing, locomotives, and venture capital and finance, but has since divested from several areas, now primarily consisting of the first four segments.
W"HumancentiPad", stylized as "HUMANCENTiPAD", is the first episode of the fifteenth season of the American animated television series South Park, and the 210th episode of the series overall. It originally aired on Comedy Central in the United States on April 27, 2011. In the episode, Kyle is kidnapped after agreeing to an iTunes user agreement, and forced to become part of a "revolutionary new product" that is about to be launched by Apple. Meanwhile, Cartman, who has not acquired an Apple iPad, pesters his mother on the issue, drawing her ire.
WInstagram is an American photo and video sharing social networking service founded by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger. In April 2012, Facebook Inc. acquired the service for approximately US$1 billion in cash and stock. The app allows users to upload media that can be edited with filters and organized by hashtags and geographical tagging. Posts can be shared publicly or with pre-approved followers. Users can browse other users' content by tags and locations and view trending content. Users can like photos and follow other users to add their content to a personal feed.
WLenovo Group Limited, often shortened to Lenovo, is a Chinese -American multinational technology company specializing in designing, manufacturing, and marketing consumer electronics, personal computers, software, business solutions, and related services. Products manufactured by the company includes desktop computers, laptops, tablet computers, smartphones, workstations, servers, supercomputers, electronic storage devices, IT management software, and smart televisions. Its best-known brands include IBM's ThinkPad business line of laptop computers, the IdeaPad, Yoga, and Legion consumer lines of laptop computers, and the IdeaCentre and ThinkCentre lines of desktop computers. As of January 2021, Lenovo is the world's largest personal computer vendor by unit sales.
WLogorama is a 2009 French adult animated short film co-written and directed by François Alaux, Hervé de Crécy and Ludovic Houplain (H5), and produced by Autour de Minuit. Set in a stylized version of Los Angeles, the short portrays events told entirely through the extensive use of more than 2,000 contemporary and historical logos and mascots. The film won both the Prix Kodak at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival and the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film at the 82nd Academy Awards in 2010.
WMcDonald's Video Game is a Flash game published and developed by the Italy-based group Molleindustria in 2006. It is described as an "anti-advergame", meaning a satire of various companies and its business practices. It has also been classified as a newsgame or an editorial game by Ian Bogost.
WMcDonald's is an American fast food company, founded in 1940 as a restaurant operated by Richard and Maurice McDonald, in San Bernardino, California, United States. They rechristened their business as a hamburger stand, and later turned the company into a franchise, with the Golden Arches logo being introduced in 1953 at a location in Phoenix, Arizona. In 1955, Ray Kroc, a businessman, joined the company as a franchise agent and proceeded to purchase the chain from the McDonald brothers. McDonald's had its previous headquarters in Oak Brook, Illinois, but moved its global headquarters to Chicago in June 2018.
WNestlé S.A. is a Swiss multinational food and drink processing conglomerate corporation headquartered in Vevey, Vaud, Switzerland. It is the largest food company in the world, measured by revenue and other metrics, since 2014. It ranked No. 64 on the Fortune Global 500 in 2017 and No. 33 in the 2016 edition of the Forbes Global 2000 list of largest public companies.
WNorthrop Grumman Corporation is an American multinational aerospace and defense technology company. With 90,000 employees and an annual revenue in excess of $30 billion, it is one of the world's largest weapons manufacturers and military technology providers. The firm ranks No. 96 on the 2020 Fortune 500 list of America's largest corporations.
WNovartis International AG is a Swiss multinational pharmaceutical corporation based in Basel, Switzerland. It is one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world.
WPayPal Holdings, Inc. is an American multinational financial technology company operating an online payments system in the majority of countries that support online money transfers, and serves as an electronic alternative to traditional paper methods such as checks and money orders. The company operates as a payment processor for online vendors, auction sites and many other commercial users, for which it charges a fee.
WReddit is an American social news aggregation, web content rating, and discussion website. Registered members submit content to the site such as links, text posts, images, and videos, which are then voted up or down by other members. Posts are organized by subject into user-created boards called "communities" or "subreddits", which cover a variety of topics such as news, politics, religion, science, movies, video games, music, books, sports, fitness, cooking, pets, and image-sharing. Submissions with more upvotes appear towards the top of their subreddit and, if they receive enough upvotes, ultimately on the site's front page. Although there are strict rules prohibiting harassment, it still occurs, and Reddit administrators moderate the communities and close or restrict them on occasion. Moderation is also conducted by community-specific moderators, who are not considered Reddit employees.
WRoyal Dutch Shell plc, in future Shell plc, is an Anglo-Dutch multinational oil and gas company headquartered in The Hague in the Netherlands and incorporated in the United Kingdom as a public limited company. It is one of the oil and gas "supermajors", and, measured by 2020 revenues, the 19th-largest company in the world. It is the largest based in Europe and is the largest company overall which is not based in either China or the United States. In the 2020 Forbes Global 2000, Shell was ranked as the 21st-largest public company in the world. Shell was first in the 2013 Fortune Global 500 list of the world's largest companies; in that year its revenues were equivalent to 84% of the Dutch national $556 billion GDP. Since then, Shell has dropped to the fifth largest company on the Global 500, but is still the largest non-state-owned energy corporation in the world and the second-largest non-Chinese corporation in the world, falling short only to Walmart.
WStarbucks, an American coffee company and coffeehouse chain, has been the subject of multiple controversies.
WTarget Corporation is an American retail corporation. The eighth-largest retailer in the United States, it is a component of the S&P 500 Index. Target established itself as the discount division of the Dayton's Company of Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1962; it began expanding the store nationwide in the 1980s, and introduced new store formats under the Target brand in the 1990s. The company has found success as a cheap-chic player in the industry. The parent company was renamed the Target Corporation in 2000, and divested itself of its last department-store chains in 2004. It suffered from a massive and highly publicized security breach of customer credit card data and the failure of its short-lived Target Canada subsidiary in the early 2010s, but experienced revitalized success with its expansion in urban markets within the United States.
WTata Group is an Indian multinational conglomerate headquartered in Mumbai, India. Founded in 1868 by Jamshedji Tata, the group gained international recognition after purchasing several global companies. It is one of the biggest and oldest industrial groups in India. Each Tata company operates independently under the guidance and supervision of its own board of directors and shareholders.
WCriticism has been directed at Tesco from various groups, including national organisations, trade bodies, individuals, consumer groups and watchdogs, particularly since the early 2000s.
WTSLAQ is a loose, international collective of largely anonymous short-sellers, skeptics, and researchers who openly criticize Tesla, Inc. and its CEO, Elon Musk. The group primarily organizes on Twitter, often using the $TSLAQ cashtag, and Reddit to coordinate efforts and share news, opinions, and analysis about the company and its stock. Edward Niedermeyer, in his book Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors (2019), establishes the catalyst for the formation of TSLAQ in July 2018 to be the doxxing by a Twitter user of Lawrence Fossi, a Seeking Alpha writer and Tesla short seller who uses the pseudonym Montana Skeptic. TSLAQ highlights what they claim to be a variety of dangerous, deceptive, unlawful and fraudulent business practices by Tesla. On occasion, TSLAQ has exchanged hostilities with Tesla fans over social media. An online group, TSLAQ's activities at times include taking aerial photography and visiting parking lots used by Tesla for storage.
WTwitter is an American microblogging and social networking service on which users post and interact with messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and retweet tweets, but unregistered users can only read those that are publicly available. Users interact with Twitter through browser or mobile frontend software, or programmatically via its APIs. Prior to April 2020, services were accessible via SMS. The service is provided by Twitter, Inc., a corporation based in San Francisco, California, and has more than 25 offices around the world. Tweets were originally restricted to 140 characters, but the limit was doubled to 280 for non-CJK languages in November 2017. Audio and video tweets remain limited to 140 seconds for most accounts.
WUber Technologies, Inc., commonly known as Uber, is an American mobility as a service provider based in San Francisco, with operations in over 900 metropolitan areas worldwide. Its services include ride-hailing, food delivery, package delivery, couriers, freight transportation, electric bicycle and motorized scooter rental via a partnership with Lime, and ferry transport in partnership with local operators. Uber does not own any vehicles; instead, it receives a 25% commission from each booking. Fares are quoted to the customer in advance but vary using a dynamic pricing model based on the local supply and demand at the time of the booking.
WUntied.com was a website critical of United Airlines that logs complaints from passengers. The name untied.com transposes two of the letters of the name "United" and also suggests disorder. Kevin Simpson of the Denver Post said in 2000 that "The Untied.com phenomenon mirrors the online trend in consumer activism that has caught on with the disgruntled flying public this summer travel season." In 1998 Laura Bly of the Los Angeles Times said that Untied.com was "One of the most visible efforts to chastise a travel company in cyberspace". In 1998 Jeremy Cooperstock, the website founder, said that Untied.com was "a Web site that offers frustrated former United Airlines passengers a chance to speak out."
WUrban Outfitters, Inc. (URBN) is a multinational lifestyle retail corporation headquartered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It operates in the United States, Sweden, United Kingdom, Spain, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Belgium, Canada, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland and the United Arab Emirates. The Urban Outfitters brand targets young adults with a merchandise mix of women's and men's fashion apparel, footwear, beauty and wellness products, accessories, activewear and gear, and housewares, as well as music, primarily vinyl records and cassettes. Much of the merchandise is designed and produced by the company's wholesale division on multiple private labels.
WVisa Inc. is an American multinational financial services corporation headquartered in Foster City, California, United States. It facilitates electronic funds transfers throughout the world, most commonly through Visa-branded credit cards, debit cards and prepaid cards. Visa is one of the world's most valuable companies.
WThe American multinational retail chain Walmart has been criticized by many groups and individuals, such as labor unions and small-town advocates, for its policies and business practices, and their effects. Criticisms include charges of racial and gender discrimination, foreign product sourcing, anti-competitive practices, treatment of product suppliers, environmental practices, the use of public subsidies, and its surveillance of its employees. The company has denied any wrongdoing and said that low prices are the result of efficiency.
WXiaomi Corporation, registered in Asia as Xiaomi Inc., is a Chinese designer and manufacturer of consumer electronics and related software, home appliances, and household items. Behind Samsung, it is the second largest manufacturer of smartphones, all of which run the MIUI operating system, a fork of Android. In 2020, the company sold 146.3 million smartphones and, as of August 2021, its MIUI operating system had over 450 million monthly active users. It also is a major manufacturer of appliances including televisions, flashlights, unmanned aerial vehicles, and air purifiers using its Internet of Things and Xiaomi Smart Home product ecosystems. The name "Xiaomi" literally means millet and rice, and is based on the Buddhist concept of starting from the bottom before aiming for the top.
WZynga Inc. is an American social game developer running social video game services and founded in April 2007 with headquarters in San Francisco, California, United States. The company primarily focuses on mobile and social networking platforms. Zynga states its mission as "connecting the world through games."