The 10 biggest European tech stories this week

This week, Tech.eu tracked 14 technology M&A transactions and 57 funding deals (totaling €260 million, about $287 million) in Europe, Turkey, and Israel.

Here’s an overview of the 10 biggest European tech news items from this week:

1) The EU announced on Thursday a new round of antitrust charges against Google — the third set since early 2015 — claiming that some of the company’s advertising products had restricted consumer choice.

2) Microsoft has won a court appeal to prevent it having to hand email data located on Irish servers over to US authorities.

3) Microsoft also confirmed last Monday that it will close its Finnish mobile phone unit and cut up to 1,350 jobs in the Nordic country.

4) German chipmaker Infineon Technologies has agreed to buy Wolfspeed Power and RF for $850 million from U.S. company Cree, as it bets on new energy-efficient chips it expects will dominate the market in the next decade.

5) Uber had a rough week in Europe – drivers in Denmark were fined, and the company has been forced to pull out of Hungary after the introduction of tough new laws by prime minister Viktor Orban.

6) Some of the leading fintech companies in Europe have joined forces to launch the European Fintech Alliance (EFA) in Berlin.

7) Cloud9 IDE, an Amsterdam/San Francisco-based startup that offers a cloud-based integrated development environment (IDE) in which developers can quickly start building applications and collaborate with others, has been acquired by Amazon Web Services.

8) Germany has launched a support program for automated and connected driving, making available up to €80 million for research projects until 2020. In related news, Germany’s electric car discount scheme has greatly spurred new BMW i3 sales.

9) Opera Software on Friday said it will communicate by early Monday whether all the conditions of a $1.24 billion takeover bid by a Chinese consortium have been met.

10) Investment firm Marlin Equity Partners has closed €325 million for its first dedicated fund in Europe.

Bonus link: Tim Berners-Lee, the man who invented the World Wide Web, has pleaded with EU regulators to sew up loopholes in the bloc’s new net neutrality rules, rules that aim to maintain a level playing field on the internet.

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This post was first published on Tech.eu.