The European Union on Friday moved to close a loophole that has allowed multinational companies to reduce their tax bills by exploiting differences in national tax rules, ending months of negotiations and potentially boosting EU states’ tax revenues.

Corporate tax avoidance has become a hot issue in industrialised nations. Campaigners have drawn support from public anger at companies avoiding taxes at a time of austerity.

“The aim is to close a loophole that currently allows corporate groups to exploit mismatches between national tax rules so as to avoid paying taxes on some types of profits distributed within the group,” finance ministers said in a statement.

The change in the so-called parent-subsidiary directive addresses “hybrid loan arrangements”, a combination of equity and debt often used as a tax-planning tool.

Some member states classify profits from such tools as a tax-deductible debt; others do not. That has prompted some multinational companies to open subsidiaries in other member states so they pay little or no tax.

“Using an (EU) directive that was based on common sense – avoid double-taxation – a few cunning devils had managed to pay no tax at all,” French Finance Minister Michel Sapin said, welcoming the move. “That will mean a bit more money in state coffers, which as you know we’re quite keen on.”

All EU tax law requires unanimity among member states, and getting all states on board has been an uphill struggle. Europe has been torn between the demands of small countries fiercely resisting change to low-tax regimes that attract foreign investment, and others wary of driving away big employers.

Earlier this month, the European Commission increased pressure on Ireland, the Netherlands and Luxembourg over their corporate tax practices, saying it would investigate deals they cut with Apple(AAPL.O), Starbucks (SBUX.O) and Fiat(FIA.MI).

Member states will have until the end of 2015 to turn the change into national law.

German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said the EU should go even further and tackle what he said was the growing abuse of patent boxes — countries adopting lower taxation for companies to commercialise their patents and R&D.

Governments which offer them say they encourage innovation and high-value jobs in research and development. Critics see the scheme as government-sanctioned tax avoidance.

“We have to decisively move forward on this in Europe or we will not live up to our own expectations,” he told reporters.

In another move towards more cooperation on tax issues, the Swiss government reaffirmed on Friday its willingness to abolish some corporate tax regimes, such as the different treatment of domestic and foreign revenues. Disagreements over corporate taxation have strained relations between the EU and Switzerland for almost a decade.

“In return, the EU member states confirm their intention to lift corresponding countermeasures as soon as the regimes in question have been abolished,” it said.

Deutsche Telekom is in talks with U.S. video streaming company Netflix about a possible marketing alliance, a German magazine reported on Friday.

German monthly Magazine Manager cited people familiar with the matter as saying the talks were far advanced but no deal had been clinched and that Netflix was also in touch with other German telecoms groups.

Netflix in May unveiled plans to launch in both Germany and France this year, in the biggest test so far of its global expansion strategy.

Manager Magazine said Deutsche Telekom was open to accommodate Netflix’s expansion even though the service would compete with the German company’s own web-based TV offering called “Entertain”.

Deutsche Telekom declined to comment.

Netflix, whose internet-based delivery of movies and TV series such as “House of Cards” has disrupted pay-TV markets in the United States and elsewhere, wants to grow its international business to reach new customers and increase its buying clout with content providers.

It is already in more than 40 countries, mostly in Latin America, and has entered Britain, Ireland, the Nordics and the Netherlands in the past two years.

In Germany, it would compete with Amazon’s Prime Instant Video, ProSiebenSat.1’s Maxdome, Sky Deutschland’s Snap and Vivendi’s Watchever.

Germany has the highest number of broadband households in Europe, with 29.1 million in 2013, according to estimates from SNL Kagan.

($1 = 0.7302 Euros; $1 = 0.5935 British Pounds)

Business software firm Hyland said on Wednesday it had made a 1.3 billion Swedish crown ($198 million) cash bid for Sweden’s Readsoft (RSOFb.ST), topping a bid from printer maker Lexmark (LXK.N) last month.

Privately held Hyland Software said in a statement it offered 42.86 crowns per share in Readsoft, 7 percent above the 40.05 crowns offered by Lexmark on May 6.

Ohio-based Hyland, which makes software for storing and organizing company documents, said buying Readsoft would boost its product offering and its presence in Europe.

Shares in Readsoft rose by 10.8 percent to 44.20 crowns by 1024 GMT, above the new bid level, indicating market expectations of a continued takeover battle for the Swedish firm which supplies business software for invoicing and processing sales orders.

Readsoft’s board recommended shareholders to accept the Lexmark bid, which offered a 118 percent premium, but had not made an announcement over the new bid on Wednesday.

($1 = 6.6415 Swedish Kronas)

Training immune cells with genes harvested from a patient’s own tumor could make an already promising new cancer treatment even better.

A highly personalized medical technique is allowing patients with advanced kidney cancer to live nearly three times as long as they normally do. In an experiment involving 21 patients, around half lived more than two and half years after diagnosis with kidney cancer that had begun to spread. Five patients are alive after more than five years.

“That seems to be out of proportion with what you would expect for any commercial therapy and longer than what you would expect from patients with similar prognostic variables,” says Robert Figlin, an oncologist at Cedars-Sinai Samuel Oschin Comprehensive Cancer Institute in Los Angeles, who is leading the study.

The findings are part of a large wave of positive results coming from a class of oncology treatments called cancer immunotherapies. Many drug companies, large and small, are working on treatments that instigate the immune system to attack cancer (see “The Revival of Cancer Immunotherapy”). There are a variety of methods for revving up immune cells. In some cases, like the experimental kidney cancer treatment, doctors train a patient’s own white blood cells to spot a cancer cell among its harmless neighbors.

Most so-called cancer vaccines are off-the-shelf products that teach immune cells to attack cancer cells bearing a particular protein. Since cancer is known for its tendency to mutate, these off-the-shelf treatments “may be targeting something that doesn’t exist in each patient,” says Jeff Abbey, CEO of Argos Therapeutics, the Durham, North Carolina, biotech that developed the kidney cancer treatment. Argos is taking a more personalized approach. “We think that the only way to win is to do an active specific immunotherapy that captures all the mutations,” Abbey says.

Argos’s therapy begins with a piece of a tumor removed in cancer surgery. From that bit of biological material, scientists at the company extract RNA, the molecular cousin of DNA, which represents all active genes in the tumor cells. The collection of active genes then becomes a vaccine for the patient’s immune system. Two or three weeks after the cancer surgery, doctors collect white blood cells from the patient in a process similar to blood donation. Those immune system cells then get shipped to Argos, which modifies them with the tumor genes and some chemicals so that they learn to target the mutations found specifically in a patient’s own cancer cells. The cells then alert other immune system cells to attack the cancer.

“If we can prove that it works, it will be a game changer for how we think about generating immune responses against cancer,” says Figlin.

The proof will be in whether 450 patients in an ongoing randomized study experience the benefits seen in the smaller trial, he says.

Mobile e-commerce is booming, and an Amazon phone will foster a captive customer base.

Hardware is hot, and nowhere is that more evident than in the startup scene. But most startups don’t have the requisite experience needed to handle sourcing materials and managing a supply chain — basically taking their products from prototype to mass market product.

To help them out, consumer electronics manufacturing company PCH International announced last summer that it was launching a hardware accelerator, Highway1. And today in San Francisco, we saw the second batch of startups to graduate from it. The four-month program includes a small monetary investment, work space for the startups to develop their products, and a trip to Shenzhen to make all the connections needed to get their products built on a mass scale.

Here are the 12 companies to participate in Highway1′s second batch:

Construkts
Construkts is a learning platform that includes physical blocks designed to improve hands-on learning by connecting the virtual and physical world. It enables children to challenge themselves with software puzzles that connect to the blocks to improve learning.

Keyboardio
Keyboardio makes a brand new programmable keyboard that is designed for comfort and beauty. After dozens of prototypes, the company has created a keyboard that puts columns in rows under your fingers and an enclosure made of anodized aluminum with wood-grain handrests.

Lumo
Lumo is an LED projector that is installed on a wall and enables interactive gaming. The device was created to get kids, who now spend about eight hours a day on screens, to play with a giant surface area on the floor. In addition to the games that come with the device, kids can buy and make their own games.

Modbot
This startup wants to make creating robots quick and easy, by making available a number of essential building blocks to consumers in an easy-to-assemble package. The key to the product is its Servo core technology, which packages all the machinery needed to run a robot into a single unit that makes building one 10x faster. It also has a mobile app to help in the creation and control of robots you built.

Palate Home
Palate Home makes next-generation cooking appliances for home chefs, starting with a connected grill designed to ensure the correct temperature and doneness throughout a piece of meat. You control the grill through an ipad app to select the type of meat, cut, and preferred level of doneness and it automatically finishes just the way you want. Because it’s connected, you’ll also be able to share recipes with friends.

Podo
Podo is a portable camera that connects with smartphones via Bluetooth to enable users to shoot photos that aren’t limited by the length of your arm. The device is a tiny square with a suction cup on the back that allows you to place the device anywhere and send a live feed of what it’s capturing to your phone. It can do video and also time lapse, and you can connect multiple cameras in different places in a room.

Sensilk
This company is seeking to make smart clothing with natural silk fibers to sense movement and give feedback to motivate people wearing it. Today Sensilk has created a sports bra with a heart rate monitor built-in that connects with your smartphone. The belief is that in 10 years more data will be generated by clothing than by devices. Along with the clothing, the company has developed a proprietary fitness score to help users exercise smarter and make the most of their workouts.

Shortcut Labs
This company has built a product called Flick that is a wireless shortcut button that can be used to launch shortcuts for virtually any application on a smartphone or Internet of things devices. Priced at $19, Flick will allow users to push a button and launch applications on their smartphone like navigation while in their cars or an emergency button to notify friends and family of their GPS location. The company is also releasing an API to enable third-party developers to build applications that connect to Flick.

sigSense
This startup is hoping to bring big data to field service, with a new type of device that makes gathering data for technicians incredibly easy. That starts with an instrument that has changeable module heads, which connects to the technician’s cell phone to collect data and then upload it into the cloud. It will provide a field service dashboard to users, but also an open API so that customers can use the data in their own third-party applications.

Sugarcube
Sugarcube is a pocket-sized media device that enables users to share content from any device to their TV. As a tiny HDMI dongle, the device is being targeted at universities and other places where presentations are used. The company will be doing live testing in the next month and hopes to launch later this summer.

SwitchEmbassy
SwitchEmbassy is working on making fashion technology smart. The first product is a white leather handbag that enables users to upload designs or display animations. The handbag can have texts sent directly to the product, and could be used to charge your cell phone or locate your purse. But the company hopes to design other products, like shirts and other devices that have the same display technology.

Wink Labs
The company is taking on an existing $2.5 billion dollar market for digital picture frames, enabling users to instantly share and relive moments in a passive way. The first product has a walnut base with a slight incline, connected to a 10.1″ high-resolution display. The display connects to an app that allows users to take pictures and send photos in moments. Wink plans to ship early next year.

Over 20 million Americans returned home from college last month with trucks full of stuff destined straight for the basement—boxes of books, bedding and thousands of dorm TV destined to gather dust. For the books, companies like Chegg have built businesses worth in the hundreds of millions just to try to save you money through rentals. So why can’t it work for the more expensive, harder to divvy up TVs? With a planned presence on 300 campuses this fall, Boston area startup CampusTVs think it’s figured out how to make the logistics work. So even as the upstart company rents thousands of TVs to the incoming freshman class, it’s already looking to mobile as its next target.

CampusTVs is an upstart with big friends. Through partnerships with The Home Depot HD +0.3% and Vizio, the startup served 50 campuses this past year across thousands of students at universities like the University of Southern California, where it moved hundreds of rental units alone. But with $2.2 million now in the bank from European-based venture firm Nauta Capital now, the once-bootstrapped company’s now found a third major partner to bring to school. And that’s where CampusTV could really start to get interesting.

“We are often in the dorm room of a college freshman on the first day of their college career,” CEO Scott Pirrello says. “You’ve got a respected campus leader there to install a TV, right alongside your parents. With that trust, there are a lot of interesting upselling opportunities.”

The new opportunity is to help wireless carriers sell their services, to international students at least at first.  One of the big four (CampusTV can’t say for competitive reasons) is now working with the startup to rent SIM cards to international students at low rates and without long-term contracts or deposits. That’s what has investors like Nauta’s Dominic Endicott most excited, even with what he says is a $5 billion market for the television and hardware needs of out-of-state and international students alone.

None of it would be possible if not for CampusTV’s original partners, however, California-based Vizio and Atlanta, GA-based Home Depot. Vizio provides the actual goods, 32-inch or 40-inch HDTVs. CampusTVs picks them up from Home Depot, its distributor partner. Then bundled with that is a deal with Roku, which students can sign up for and keep after graduation to add streaming and music to their set-up.

That’s one possible area of trouble for CampusTV in the future–it needs a reliable and sizable pool of responsible students to represent the brand at the local level, putting the onus on remote managers to maintain uniformity and company culture. But there’s also the problem of just getting the TV to the campus rep in the first place. Pirrello works with regional warehouses for summer storage, but for expansion, the company depends on The Home Depot. The home improvement retail giant serves as distributor for CampusTVs, buying inventory from Vizio to in turn sell to CampusTVs. The startup cuts off pre-orders a week before move-in and sends over the order, then picks up the TVs in pallets of 18.

It took a lot of hustle, if not some bluster, for Pirrello to get Home Depot and Vizio to take a chance. Without them, the whole system wouldn’t work at any level of scale beyond Pirello and cofounder Colin Fahey buying the TVs for a higher rate at Costco or Best Buy BBY -0.14% (which they did while serving 7 colleges for the 2012-2013 school year). Luckily, CampusTVs’ TV partner seems to enjoy the brand boost they get from partnering with young entrepreneurs to reach the college demographic.

“Our brand is young, and we are a young company,” says Vizio vice president Paul Hernandez, who called Pirrello back almost a year ago out of curiosity and some skepticism about the pitch. “This is a creative way to go get TVs to people, and students will need to buy a television eventually.” The risk is low on Vizio’s end, too. Smaller batch orders trickle in during the year, but once Vizio’s dropped off its units with Home Depot, it’s made its money. Home Depot, meanwhile, then counts on CampusTVs to make good and pick up.

CampusTVs, meanwhile, is careful to charge upfront, meaning it has money to put back into the business right on day one. Pirrello says students also are typically compliant and rueful when charged for any damages. “The students pay, they’re typically just embarrassed,” he says.

This summer will prove a critical test for Pirrello and Fahey’s team of 7 as the company expects to serve as many as ten times more students as last year overall. There’s a lot of education to do with each and lot of incoming class of 2018 Facebook groups to infiltrate. But not all the company’s TVs are in storage, waiting for those new students for the season. In another push for growth, the startup’s also piloting summer program rentals for temporary or future students. For that, theMerrimack College graduates looked to another local school with a large incoming international population, Harvard, to launch a pilot. Then there’s the carrier partner launch to prepare.

“We have a pipeline of other services, but for now the company is focused on making sure they can execute flawlessly in this year’s TV-rental campaign and then soft-launch [mobile],” its board member Endicott says.

For Pirrello, CampusTVs has a lot of options, even if its name may ultimately prove a bit narrow in its focus. “Once we earn a student’s trust, there’s so many directions we can go,” Pirrello says.

Maybe eventually Pirello can figure out how to legally help students rent each other Netflix and HBO GO accounts.

The race for dominance in the dinner-kit delivery business — where companies ship out packages of fresh ingredients for specific recipes, ready for customers to turn into home-cooked meals — is intensifying.

One of the earliest entrants in the industry, HelloFresh, said on Wednesday that it had raised $50 million in a new round of financing led by Insight Venture Partners and an existing investor, the Russian firm Phenomen VC.

The round comes less than two months after another big player, Blue Apron, raised $50 million at a reported $500 million valuation.

While the HelloFresh co-founder Hamish Shephard declined to disclose the company’s valuation, he boasted that the start-up is now profitable in its European markets. The company now ships more than one million meals per month.

Competition is arising in an unlikely business, one that seizes upon both the popularity of home cooking and the continued explosion of e-commerce. Unlike traditional meal-delivery services, these companies deliver nearly everything needed for a meal — except for the actual kitchen preparation. Subscribers generally pay $60 to $70 per week for the ingredients to make three meals for two people.

The fund-raising is part of HelloFresh’s efforts to become better known in the United States, after having flourished in its home market of Germany. Its initial backer is Rocket Internet, a German e-commerce start-up factory.

With the rivalries rising between HelloFresh, Blue Apron and other competitors like Plated, the battle is on to expand delivery to more of the country. With its new fund-raising round, HelloFresh plans to expand to 37 states from 30, covering an estimated 75 percent of the United States’ population. It will also expand its marketing campaigns.

“We’ve had better-than-expected success” in the United States, Mr. Shephard said in a telephone interview.

He contended that his company is focused on providing exceptionally high quality: It sources its cheeses from Murray’s Cheese in downtown Manhattan, and the chefs who prepare its recipes have spent time in popular restaurants like Momofuku and ABC Kitchen. Freshness is a priority: Ingredients arrive around 9 a.m. at the company’s New Jersey delivery center and ship out by 4 p.m. that same day.

He also argued that his start-up has an advantage in having started a few months earlier than competitors and in learning lessons abroad. (That said, he believes the industry can support a number of different players.)

“Our experience is a fantastic advantage for us,” he said.

Amazon.com Inc’s newest mobile device, a smartphone that may sport a 3D screen, is the retailer’s latest attempt to exert its influence over the way consumers shop online.

Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos will preside over a mystery launch on Wednesday near its Seattle campus. Industry observers predict the arrival of a long-rumored smartphone after years of development.

It is unclear if a 3D display, as widely reported, is enough to help the new entree stand out in a crowded field dominated by Apple Inc’s seven-year-old iPhone and Samsung Electronics Co Ltd Galaxy devices. Three-quarters of U.S. consumers online already own a smartphone, according to online data tracking service comScore.

But its introduction reflects how smartphones and tablets are fast becoming how many consumers view and buy items online. Mobile commerce grew at almost twice the rate of online retail during the first quarter, according to comScore.

Analysts said Amazon has more opportunities outside the United States. Only 30 percent of the 5.2 billion phones on the market are smartphones, Topeka Capital Markets analyst Victor Anthony said in a June 5 research note.

“As the world shifts toward mobile, how do you make sure Amazon is front and center?” Jefferson Wang, senior partner at IBB Consulting, said in an interview.

Two sources have said the device contains 3D features visible to the eye without special glasses. Analysts expect Amazon’s Prime membership program, which offers features such as movie streaming and two-day delivery, to be tied to the phone.

A phone would represent yet another new area for Amazon, which got its start selling books and has since expanded into everything from original television shows to grocery delivery. It could also boost adoption of an Amazon payments platform.

On Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal reported AT&T Inc would carry the smartphone exclusively, as it did the iPhone for years and a short-lived Facebook phone made by HTC Corp that at one point was discounted to 99 cents.

“Let’s hope @amazon doesn’t fall victim to the @att curse that is the facebook phone,” T-Mobile CEO John Legere tweeted.

A phone would be the third new device Amazon has introduced this year after its FireTV streaming video device and Dash grocery-ordering wand. In recent years, the company has moved more aggressively into hardware, selling its devices at cost in hopes of spurring purchases on Amazon’s website.

It has also used its devices to test emerging markets. This year, Amazon began selling the Kindle online in Brazil after years of selling the device in stores. The move gives Amazon a chance to work through some of the country’s logistics problems.

The International Monetary Fund will urge the European Central Bank to increase efforts to ward off the risk of deflation with steps including programs to purchase government bonds, according to a person who has seen the recommendation.

The recommendation, contained in a two-page technical report at the end of an IMF assessment of the euro zone, is in line with similar calls from the fund in the past for the ECB to be more aggressive in easing monetary policy to stimulate growth.

But it is the first time it has repeated the call since ECB President Mario Draghi raised expectations of possible U.S.-style quantitative easing by saying the Frankfurt-based central bank could take further steps after it cut its deposit rate to below zero in June.

“The draft from the euro zone mission restates more strongly the request previously made to the ECB to do more to fight the risks of deflation,” said the source.

“It doesn’t mention ‘quantitative easing’ but it does talk about bond purchasing programmes,” the source said.