FASTTAKES: Samsung, Google, FTC, Twitter, Altair

Former Samsung chairman Lee Kun Hee, who was convicted of tax evasion last year, has been granted a presidential pardon to allow him to lead South Korea's bid for the 2018 Winter Olympics.

 

Google has announced a secretive Android-related briefing for January 5, raising speculation that the company will use the event to showcase its rumored own-branded phone.

 

Consumer groups Consumer Watchdog and the Center for Digital Democracy have urged US trade regulator FTC to block Google's acquisition of AdMob, claiming the move could hurt consumers, advertisers and app developers alike.

 

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone has forecast that the micro-blogging site will handle 1 billion search queries a day and deliver “several billion tweets” an hour during 2010.

Chipmakers Altair Semiconductor and Sequans Communications, both of which have traditionally focused on Wimax for their 4G aspirations, are both developing multi-mode chip architecture capable of supporting LTE.