Daryanani cited the bidding war between EMC and NetApp for Data Domain.

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People familiar with the matter say IBM (nyse: IBM - news - people ) was also bidding on the business, as was Electronic Data Systems (nyse: EDS - news - people ).

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Krux estimated that such auctions, known as real-time bidding exchanges, contribute to 40% of online data collection.

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Those customer requests, which are stripped of name, address and other identifying data, are then put up for bidding by some 200 registered lenders.

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The largest social network has recently released some data on how its advertising platform for real-time bidding will deliver for advertisers, helping to rake in some money as it battles Google for display dominance in the web.

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We also expect Facebook to lay greater emphasis on privacy and security of user data, as well as pose stronger competition to Google in terms of bidding for ads.

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The nature of the department's errors, with all the bidders given flawed data, explains why the Department for Transport has said it cannot be certain that the outcome of the bidding process would have been different if the process had been robust, Robert Peston adds.

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