China's Dongfeng Motors and the French government will each invest about 800m euros (£660m) in return for 14% stakes.

Another 1.4bn euros will be raised from existing investors in Peugeot.

The deal is still subject to a shareholder vote but will provide much-needed cash to keep Peugeot afloat after government guarantees expire.

Should the deal be approved, the Peugeot family's 25.4% stake will be diluted to 14%, matching that of the French government and the Chinese carmaker.

Europe's second-largest carmaker also announced its latest financial results on Wednesday, warning that it may face losses until 2016.

Peugeot said its net loss narrowed to 2.32bn euros last year, compared to a 5bn-euro loss in 2012.

Sales also fell by 2.4% from a year earlier to 54.1bn euros, due to tepid demand for new cars in Europe.

Chinese capital

There have been months of talks over the fate of the French carmaker, and reports say the deal is likely to be formally signed in March.

In a statement to the Hong Kong stock exchange, Dongfeng said the deal is meant to "expand and deepen their current cooperation" with Peugeot.

It also said the venture would "strengthen overseas cooperation to achieve the objective of selling 1.5 million vehicles under the Dongfeng, Peugeot SA and Citroën brands per year starting from 2020".

Peugeot already has a joint venture with Dongfeng, which is one of China's newer car brands and is known for its heavy trucks and "Fengshen" line of vehicles.

However, the new arrangement is expected to bring an increase in production and a new research and development centre.

Dongfeng is also expected to promote the Peugeot brand in the fast-growing car markets in South East Asia.

The deal also makes Dongfeng the latest Chinese carmaker to buy into a Western competitor.

Last year, Zhejiang Geely Holding bought London black cab-maker Manganese Bronze Holdings for £11.4m after the company went into administration. Geely also bought Sweden's Volvo brand in 2010.

French history

Peugeot was founded 200 years ago and is one of France's oldest industrial dynasties.

The company began in 1810 as a maker of tools and coffee mills, which are still marketed under its name.

However, it has faced financial difficulties and shrinking market share over the last few years.

Peugeot signed an investment deal with General Motors in 2012, but the US carmaker offloaded its stake in the loss-making company in December.

Last year, it also faced criticism for closing its Aulnay-sous-Bois plant in the Paris suburbs in an attempt to cut costs.

There's a glimmer of hope. According to fourth-quarter figures reported by IDC, Windows Phone market share rose nearly 47% year over year, the best result of any leading contender, though that share remains mired in the low single digits. Most of the increase can be attributed to Nokia, which Microsoft is in the final stages of acquiring.

What happens to the Nokia brand under Microsoft's new leadership needs to play out. But the Finnish phone giant keeps delivering fine phones that deserve recognition.

Next in line is the Nokia Lumia Icon that I've been testing, also known as the Lumia 929. This latest flagship — a Windows Phone exclusive to Verizon Wireless — isn't the thinnest or lightest (at 5.86 ounces) phone around, but it belongs in the high-rent district. The aluminum ring rimming this polycarbonate rectangular slab helps give the phone a premium feel. It comes in black (like my test unit) or white. It arrives Thursday for $199 with a two-year agreement.

You can't help but be impressed with the sharp 5-inch, Gorilla Glass-protected Full HD OLED display, which can be made out in direct sunlight. You can turn on a setting that bolsters the screen's touch sensitivity, meaning you can interact with it wearing gloves, an act of mercy, given the deluge of snow here in the Northeast.

Icon measures up, specs-wise. Inside is a snappy Qualcomm quad-core processor, 2 gigabytes of RAM and 32 GB of sealed storage — with an additional 7 GB of online storage provided gratis via Microsoft's SkyDrive (soon to be called OneDrive).

THE CAMERA CROWN

Most notably, Icon borrows camera features from its Nokia sibling the Lumia 1020, which set the bar high for smartphone photography.

The new phone doesn't match the 41-megapixel sizzle of the 1020 — Icon is at 20 megapixels — but it does have Carl Zeiss optics and takes outstanding pictures and videos. After you snap a picture, Nokia condenses the image to a size that's easier to share, while also retaining a higher-resolution image. Incidentally, the 5-inch Icon display is larger than the 4.5-inch display on the 1020.

In the recent past, Nokia justifiably bragged about the photographic muscle built into its phones. This go-round, there seems to be a heavier emphasis on video. The device is meant to appeal to the kind of consumer who captures quick videos and posts them to a popular social-media outlet such as Vine.

The Commerce Department said on Wednesday groundbreaking tumbled 16.0 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 880,000 units, the lowest level since September. The percentage drop was the largest since February 2011.

Starts for December were revised up to a 1.05 million-unit pace from the previously reported 999,000-unit rate.

Economists polled by Reuters had expected starts to fall to a 950,000-unit rate in January

Starts in the Midwest tumbled a record 67.7 percent, suggesting unseasonably cold weather could have disrupted activity. But at the same time groundbreaking in the Northeast surged to the highest since August 2008.

Frigid temperatures have been blamed for the sharp slowdown in hiring in December and January. They also chilled manufacturing output last month and have been cited for the unexpected drop in retail sales in January.

But not all of the weakness in data can be attributed to the cold weather, amid evidence the economy was already losing momentum towards the end of the fourth quarter.

Groundbreaking for single-family homes, the largest segment of the market, fell 15.9 percent to a 573,000-unit pace in January. That was the lowest level since August 2012. Starts for the volatile multi-family homes segment dropped 16.3 percent to a 307,000-unit rate.

Permits to build homes fell 5.4 percent in January, the largest drop in since June, to a 937,000-unit pace. Permits for single-family homes slipped 1.3 percent. Multifamily sector permits declined 12.1 percent.

Microsoft first announced the re-branding in January, after British Sky Broadcasting took issue with the "SkyDrive" name and won an initial case in a British court last year.

Like other cloud storage services, OneDrive gives you a place to store all of your files — photos, videos and, documents. Microsoft's pitch is that it aims to make managing it all very easy and portable across all your devices regardless of platform.

Among other things, today's announcement brings automatic camera backup for Android devices. And new video sharing functionality automatically sizes a video depending on where you want to share it or play it.

Existing SkyDrive users need not take any action to transfer files. They will be available once you log in to onedrive.com.

Microsoft offers users 7GB of free storage and another 3GB for free when you use the camera backup feature. You can earn more storage by referring friends.

As part of the kickoff, the company is running a promotion to give the first 100,000 people who access their OneDrive account after the launch an additional 100 GB of free storage for a year. You can monitor start time for the promotion on Twitter via @OneDrive.

The service is built into the latest version of Windows, Windows Phone, Office and Xbox and is also available on iOS and Android mobile devices and Mac computers.

Backing up precious photos, videos and documents online is a hotly competitive area in consumer tech: Google tackles it with its Drive service (for documents and more) and Google+ (photos) and Apple of course has iCloud. Not to mention powerhouse startups like Dropbox and Box.

But for many consumers the process remains cumbersome, especially if you happen to own devices on different operating systems — an Android phone and an iPad, say, in addition to a Windows PC.

There remains a "huge amount of folks who don't know what cloud storage is," says Microsoft executive Chris Jones. As a result, documents remain "trapped" on a PC, or photos "just sit there" on your phone.

Wall Street analysts and others have pointed to mobile as a crucial part of Microsoft's strategy under new CEO Satya Nadella. In a note just Tuesday, Gartner research analyst Merv Adrian wrote that concentrating on mobile tech, as well as leveraging lessons learned from gaming, "can help Microsoft appeal to the next generation."

After Blackberry customers complained on social media, chief executive John Chen called the promotion "inappropriate and ill-conceived"

T-Mobile apologised for any confusion and said it was happy to be a "Blackberry partner".

Blackberry has lost market share to Apple's iPhone and other smartphones.

T-Mobile sent emails last week advertising a free upgrade to an iPhone 5s and calling it "a great offer for Blackberry customers".

Offered a choice

The promotion annoyed some users, who took to Twitter to complain to T-Mobile.

"As a T-Mobile customer I felt like you don't want to support Blackberry at all. So I'm thinking about switching," wrote one customer in a tweet to T-Mobile's US chief executive John Legere.

Another called the advert "juvenile" and said "trying to get Blackberry owners to switch to iPhones won't work. My company needs efficiency".

Mr Legere responded and said he was hearing Blackberry users "loud and clear", pointing out that they would not have to give up their phones, but were just being offered a choice.

In a blog on Blackberry's website, Mr Chen said the company had not been told about T-Mobile's plans in advance and it understood its customers' anger.

"I can assure you that we are outraged too. What puzzles me more is that T-Mobile did not speak with us before or after they launched this clearly inappropriate and ill-conceived marketing promotion," he wrote.

He also had a message for T-Mobile: "I would like to remind you that our long-standing partnership was once productive and profitable for both Blackberry and T-Mobile. I hope we can find a way forward that allows us to serve our shared customers once again."

T-Mobile confirmed that Blackberry devices were still available for people to buy and that other users of Blackberry devices could switch to the network if they wanted.

Blackberry was once a dominant player in the smartphone market but has lost ground to Apple, Samsung and other rivals.

It launched a new model, the Z10, in 2013 which it hoped would help revive its fortunes but disappointing sales and poor financial results led to a company shake-up.

Mr Chen was appointed interim chief executive in November and the company announced that 4,500 jobs, or 40% of its workforce would be cut.

On starting his role, Mr Chen said he would refocus the company to rely less on handsets and more on the company's services business.

Renaissance, owned by British private equity firm Permira, provides cloud-based education software, including reading and assessment tools that the company says are used by nearly 20 million students and teachers.

Google Capital was formed in 2013 to invest in technology start-ups. Its investments include SurveyMonkey, an online survey company, and Lending Club, a service that matches people seeking loans with people willing to make them.

The Renaissance investment is Google's first in education.

New York Times said on Wednesday Google's investment was $40 million. (r.reuters.com/bag96v)

Not so in the latest edition of the Global Talk Finance program. Representatives from the banking sector talk enthusiastically about how they've reformed their risky business practices and raised billions to fight against poverty and climate change. They herald the introduction of a "Robin Hood" tax, where speculators pay around a 0.1% tax on their financial transactions, as a "triumph."

Ok, so it may not strictly be real life. The news anchor is played by "Walking Dead" star Andrew Lincoln, he quizzes characters played by some of Europe's biggest stars -- Bill Nighy, Clemence Poesy, Javier Camara and Heike Makatsch who says the tax was "a profoundly important moment -- it's been good for business and it's brought billions for jobs in Europe."

Yet fiction is not so far away from reality. Eleven European countries, including France, Germany, Italy and Spain are signed up to a Financial Transaction Tax which could raise up to 30 billion pounds annually and be implemented as early as next year. It is the best chance we have of ensuring those responsible for the crisis pay their fair share to put things right.

Unfortunately the UK is refusing to join in, even attempting to block the proposal with a groundless legal challenge in the European Courts of Justice. As Bill Nighy's character demonstrates masterfully as he squirms out of questions over how the money could help stop cuts to public services, it means the UK will also lose out on the benefits.

Bill Nighy has been involved with the "Robin Hood" tax campaign since its inception in 2010. He came with us to see first-hand the impact of the financial crisis only a few miles away from its epicenter in the City of London.

A food bank in the London borough of Putney, where emergency food parcels are given out to those in the most dire need, had seen numbers increase 50% in a year. There are now over 350 Trussell Trust food banks across the UK, at one point opening at the rate of one a week, as people struggle to make ends meet in a perfect storm of public service cuts and decreasing standards of living.

The move, which the company hopes will generate more interest in the site, comes two weeks after LinkedIn disclosed that page views slipped for the second consecutive quarter.

The professional networking site said on Wednesday it will algorithmically distribute career-related articles written by any users on its "Influencer program," a blogging platform previously available only to businesspeople who were invited to contribute, including well-known names like former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg and billionaire Richard Branson.

By opening the program to everybody, LinkedIn hopes its users will generate a steady stream of shareable content, providing a white-collar twist on how Facebook supplies its users a continuous stream of pictures or links from their friends.

LinkedIn disclosed during its quarterly earnings call on February 6 that, following several quarters of explosive growth, page views had in fact slipped for the second consecutive period, suggesting waning user interest in revisiting the site.

Ryan Roslansky, the company head of content, argued that the "Influencers" program has been successful in boosting LinkedIn's traffic and user engagement, with each post generating 80 comments and 250 likes.

"It's starting to bring a lot of people back to the site more frequently," said Roslansky. "We want to get much more content in front of them and much more niche content about their interests."

With Influencers now broadened to many more writers, LinkedIn will use algorithms to identify articles that gain traction with readers and distribute those more broadly, Roslansky said.

In recent years LinkedIn has moved away from its roots as a dormant resume library for headhunters and job-seekers, instead positioning itself as a social hub that aggregates news, links, and status updates from members.

The company has viewed the transition toward a more lively, Facebook-esque offering as a way to pull in more users on a regular basis and more advertising revenue. LinkedIn inserts ads into users' timelines, an advertising model that has been successfully deployed by social media peers Facebook and Twitter Inc.

In April, LinkedIn acquired Pulse, a news reader app, for roughly $90 million to uncover relevant news articles as part of a daily digest to users when they log in to the site.

Roslansky said LinkedIn's new pitch to users is: "Give us 15 minutes each morning and we'll make you a better professional each day."

Most recently, the premium point-and-shoot throne has passed to Sony. For more than a year, Sony's Cyber-shot RX100 and then the RX100 II have been the cameras to beat. Other challengers have risen, too — the high-end compact field has grown more competitive than ever as camera manufacturers look for ways to get you to put down that smartphone.

Enter the PowerShot G1 X Mark II (MSRP $799.99), the challenger Canon hopes will win back its kingdom. As an update to the earlier, failed G1 X, it's impressive: a better lens, speedier operation, a smaller body, and improved autofocus.

The new lens on the G1 X II is by far its greatest improvement. The sequel sports a 24-120mm f/2–3.9 lens which has a longer zoom and wider aperture than the previous model. The extra reach on both ends will be helpful, but it's the speedy aperture that really excites us. Combined with the camera's unusually large 12.8 megapixel sensor, it makes for truly DSLR-like image quality, complete with nicely blurred backgrounds and fine high-ISO results.

While the G1 X II is much smaller than its predecessor, the bigger, better lens and bigger, better sensor also result in a bigger, bulkier camera than the RX100 II. The most appealing thing about the RX100 is how much imaging power it packs into such a small chassis, and Canon simply can't compete. Even many mirrorless cameras with collapsible lenses are as small or smaller.

Autofocus has been significantly beefed up, and offers 31 AF points, compared with nine on the original G1 X. In our time with the camera on the CP+ show floor in Yokohama, we definitely noticed a big improvement in AF responsiveness. The camera locked on to subjects easily, and touch focusing also works extremely well.

The range of motion found in the back screen is also quite impressive. It hinges straight back and then up 180 degrees (for selfies) or down 45 degrees (for shots over crowds). We've seen similar screens on other compacts, but Canon's is among the sturdiest we've encountered. The Mark II's display is also a capacitive touch panel.

The kiosks, to be installed in Seattle, and Austin, Texas, are similar to ATMs but have scanners to read government-issued identification such as a driver's license or a passport to confirm users' identities.

The ATMs will allow people to swap bitcoin for cash, or deposit cash to buy more bitcoin by transferring funds to or from a virtual wallet on their smartphones.

Bitcoin was launched in 2008 and is traded within a global network of computers. It is not backed by a single company or government and has no assets behind it, but its release is tightly controlled, mimicking a central banking system's control over the minting of money.

Robocoin, based in Las Vegas, installed its first bitcoin ATM in Vancouver last fall and will also start operating one in Calgary, Alberta, later this month. Robocoin also is planning to install ATMs in Asia and Europe.

A bitcoin is currently worth about $636, but its value has fluctuated widely as the currency's visibility has increased. Last September, a bitcoin was worth around $150. By late December the value was near the $1,000 mark.

Users can buy products and services online on sites including Overstock.com or in a handful of stores.

The currency's reputation took a hit last week when two of its best known exchanges suspended withdrawals. One of them, Slovenia-based Bitstamp, said Friday it planned to allow redemptions to resume.

Game company King.com filed its F1 form with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday for an initial public offering. The company plans to trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol "KING." The company did not disclose the stock's IPO price. Banks JP Morgan, Credit Suisse Securities and BofA Merrill Lynch will lead the offering.

According to its IPO filing, King boasted an average of 128 million daily active users last month who played their games more than 1.2 billion times a day. The smash hit Candy Crush Saga, which first launched on Facebook before surging in popularity on mobile devices, makes up a significant portion of those numbers. The game has 93 million daily active users who played 1 billion times a day.

However, that one game has proven to be highly lucrative for King. According to financial information shared in their IPO filing, the company pulled in $568 million in profit off of $1.9 billion in revenue last year. In 2012, the year Candy Crush Saga was introduced, King generated $164 million in revenue and $7.8 million in profits.

"We believe we have a repeatable and scalable game development process that is unparalleled in our industry," said King in its filing.

The IPO filing is the latest in a string of high-profile public tech offerings. Last November, social network Twitter began trading on the New York Stock Exchange at $26 a share. Its stock has jumped above $57 as of pre-market trading Tuesday.

Sony had said that it hoped to sell 5 million units by the end of March after releasing the Playstation 4 on November 29 in the United States, Western Europe and Latin America and rolling it out across other Asian countries since then.

The console will go on sale in Japan on February 22, the last country currently scheduled to handle the device.

Microsoft Corp said in January that it had sold more than 3 million of its Xbox One console by the end of December after it was also released in late November.