THE WRAP: Web TV war breaks out, Singapore's NBN

This week internet titans prepped for the web TV wars, as India turned the screw on security access.
 
Apple slashed the price of its Apple TV hard-drive and announced 99-cent downloads for TV shows. Rival Amazon also cut its prices, while Google plotted a pay-per-view service by year-end.
 
Sony entered the fray with a new VoD service in Europe and promised a new cloud music service, Music Unlimited.
 
Strong performances at SFR, Maroc Telecom and GVT boosted parent Vivendi’s 1H profits 4% to €1.5 billion, despite losses at the firms other divisions
 
HP outlasted Dell in the battle for storage firm 3Par. Dell withdrew after HP upped its bid to $2.4 billion (€1.8 billion).
 
Intel paid $1.4 billion for Infineon’s wireless chip unit, its second acquisition in as many weeks.
 
After giving RIM 60 days to prove that its technical fix gives them access to encrypted BlackBerry data, Indian authorities turned their attention to Skype and Google.
 
Orange became the first UK operator to launch an HD voice service using the AMR-WB standard.
 
Gartner cut its forecasts for PC and chip sales in the second half on weaker US and European demand.
 
Web use in the BRICI countries - Brazil, Russia, India, China and Indonesia – will double by 2015, said a BCG report, noting that digital consumption patterns in those markets were already very different from the developed economies.
 
Consumers in Austria, Slovenia and Croatia feel lost without a Web connection, a Telekom Austria survey found.
 
Sony Ericsson unveiled its first TD-SCDMA phone in China.
 
Equinix announced a new $63 million Hong Kong data center. 
 
Bouygues Telecom maintained profits during 1H10, as a growing subscriber base boosted sales 4% to €2.7 billion.
 
BT cut back on Indian outsourcing by 15% in a bid to cut costs
 
HP agreed to a $55 million settlement with the US government over an eight-year-old fraud case.
 
And Japanese geeks and their virtual girlfriends flocked to the coastal resort of Atami.