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SoftBank Corp CEO Masayoshi Son said on Friday he was confident his company's acquisition of Sprint Nextel Corp will be completed in early July after rival bidder Dish Network Corp failed to make a counter move this week. SoftBank, a Japanese mobile network operator, is heading into the home stretch as it tries to push through Japan's biggest ever acquisition, while aggressive dealmaker Dish has loomed as a potential spoiler with rival offers for Sprint and its Clearwire Corp subsidiary.   Son, SoftBank's billionaire founder, said Dish's failure to raise its offer for Sprint before a deadline early this week brought the Japanese company closer to sealing the $21.6 billion deal, but warned that its U.S. rival could make a surprise move before a Sprint shareholders' meeting on June 25. "We don't know what could happen before the meeting but we took a big step forward after Dish missed the deadline to make a new proposal," Son told an annual sharehol

Tesla Motors Inc on Thursday unveiled a system to swap battery packs in its electric cars in about 90 seconds, a service Chief Executive Elon Musk said will help overcome fears about their driving range. The automaker will roll out the battery-swapping stations later this year, beginning along the heavily-traveled route between Los Angeles and San Francisco and then in the Washington-to-Boston corridor.   "There are some people, they take a lot of convincing," Musk said at an event at Tesla's Los Angeles design studio. "Hopefully this is what convinces people finally that electric cars are the future." Electric cars have been slow to catch on with consumers because of their high price, limited driving range and lack of a charging infrastructure. Tesla has been working to address some of those issues with fast-charging stations and now with the battery-swapping technology. A battery pack swap will cost between $60 and $80, about the same as filling up a 15-

Wimbledon, the world's oldest tennis championship, is embracing new technology with an iPad app to appeal to a younger audience. The app allows users to navigate around the grounds via a photographic map, zooming in on specific courts to get updates on the state of play. They can also get alerts telling them how their favorite players are faring. The All England Club (AELTC), which stages the tournament on the grass courts of suburban London, is in the position of knowing that demand for tickets far outstrips supply. But with so many people unable to get tickets, the tournament's online presence has brought it closer to fans around the world, AELTC Commercial Director Mick Desmond said.   "If you can't come to Wimbledon, we want to try to make it the next best experience," he told Reuters. "We try to position Wimbledon as tennis in an English garden but at the same time we want to be at the cutting edge of innovation," he added, speaking before t

Chinese cellphone chip designer Spreadtrum Communications Inc said it received a $1.38 billion buyout proposal from a unit of government-owned Tsinghua Holdings Co Ltd. _0"> The offer of $28.50 per American depository share represents a premium of 28 percent to Spreadtrum's Thursday closing price on the Nasdaq . Spreadtrum said its board is evaluating the proposal. The company develops chips for smartphones, feature phones and other consumer electronics products, supporting 2G, 3G and 4G wireless communications standards.   Spreadtrum, which gets most of its sales from China and Korea, counts HTC Corp and Samsung Electronics among its customers. Lower-priced smartphones are popular in Asia and are expected to drive growth in the mobile handsets market as the United States reaches saturation. China has more than 1 billion mobile phone subscribers, with many switching from low-end feature phones to smartphones in the past few years as prices become more affordable wi

France's Socialist government aims to introduce a law preventing online retailer Amazon from offering both discounts and free delivery for books in France , the culture minister said, arguing this amounts to unfair competition. _0"> Aurelie Filippetti said the government was looking for the right time to introduce a ban on the practice, which book sellers say threatens their business model by allowing Amazon to undercut their prices.   "I'm in favor of ending the possibility of offering both free delivery and a five percent discount," she told BFM news television on Friday. "We need a law, so we're going to find a legislative window to introduce one." Amazon in France declined to comment. Filippetti's remark underscored tensions between the French government and U.S. online firms such as Amazon and Google, which have been criticized for paying too little to the creators of cultural or news content. France, like other European countries

China's ZTE Corp, the world's fifth largest smartphone maker, is aggressively moving into the higher end of the market for mobile gadgets with more 4G shipments. The Shenzhen-based company has been trying to move away from selling lower end mobile phones, a strategy that has served it well in boosting its global market share, but at the expense of pressuring margins and profitability.   It plans to further raise its global profile by sponsoring a U.S. National Basketball Association (NBA) team later this year, executives said. "We're working towards a goal of 4G LTE (Long Term Evolution) gadgets making up 40-50 percent of our total consumer devices shipments by 2015. The percentage is quite small now -- about 4 percent," Lv Qianhao, ZTE's head of handset strategy, told reporters in China's southern city of Guangzhou, where 4G LTE trials are being conducted. ZTE is banking on products such as its Grand Memo phablet -- a cross between a phone and a tab

Dell Inc's billionaire founder Michael Dell said he would oppose any leveraged recapitalization of the company and called on stakeholders to vote in favor of his buyout offer, ahead of a shareholder meeting next month. _0"> Dell argued his case in a presentation filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday, saying that keeping any part of the company public while it transformed itself would hurt Dell's stock price.   That in turn would threaten customer perception and make it more difficult to keep employees, he said. If his buyout proposal fails to sway shareholders, he reiterated that he will remain with the company but said he "will also oppose the kind of imprudent leveraged recapitalization that has been suggested by certain other parties." Activist shareholder Carl Icahn, who says Dell's offer undervalues the company, on Tuesday promised shareholders that the company would buy back up to $16 billion of stock if they joined h