Top 10 Business Deals

10. Apple Drops Google Maps

Apple’s decision to eliminate Google Maps from the latest version of its iPhone software was widely panned. Users complained that Apple’s proprietary Maps app was inaccurate in many cities and didn’t provide adequate directions for pedestrians or public-transit riders. But there’s reason to believe that Apple’s decision will be a profitable one for the company and benefit consumers in the long run. For Apple, the move makes sense. It was paying Google hefty fees to feature the Google application on its phones and foregoing lucrative advertising revenue that an in-house app could produce. For consumers, the decision will likely bring a new era of competition in the mobile mapping space. Google will soon release its iO6 mapping application, and as Apple works out the kinks in its mapping software (which already includes improvements over Google Maps, like turn-by-turn navigation), users can expect these two tech giants to have to continually improve their services in order to maintain a high base of users.

9. Softbank Buys 70% Stake in Sprint Nextel

Sprint Nextel has long been mired in a distant third place in the race for dominance in the cell-phone-carrier market, losing more than $41 billion over the past five years alone. Part of the firm’s problem has been its lack of resources to build out and improve its network, causing it to fall further behind rivals Verizon and AT&T. Enter Japanese telecom conglomerate Softbank, which announced a plan in October to buy a 70% stake in Sprint Nextel for roughly $20 billion, promising that $8 billion of that sum will go toward capital investment. Sprint knows very well that large mergers don’t always go as planned, as evidenced by its own widely panned acquisition of Nextel in 2005. But if Sprint has a chance to break the duopoly of Verizon and AT&T, it may just be the deep pockets of Softbank that help it achieve that goal.

8. Yahoo Hires Marissa Mayer as Its New CEO

Yahoo made waves when it hired Marissa Mayer as its new CEO earlier this year, and not just because the move made her one of the most visible female chief executives in an industry with a poor history of elevating women into leadership roles. The choice was admired by analysts and tech observers, who praised Mayer for her reputation as a brilliant engineer and for her work as a top executive at Google. Mayer has gotten high marks for her role in unloading much of Yahoo’s stake in Chinese Internet firm Alibaba, but the bulk of her work is still ahead as she tries to leverage her firm’s vast audience and technological assets into a formula for revenue growth.

7. President Obama and a Republican Congress Pass the JOBS Act

This year was not a good one for dealmaking on Capitol Hill. President Obama and the Republican Party spent 2012 positioning themselves for the fall election — maneuvering that left little room for compromise. But the two factions were able to come together to agree on the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act, which eases regulations on newer and small businesses and allows companies to raise up to $1 million through crowdfunding. Though the bill faced resistance from consumer-rights activists who feared it would open the door for scammers to take advantage of unsophisticated investors, its boosters hope provisions of the law will give would-be entrepreneurs access to that crucial initial round of funding, so they can turn their bright ideas into job-creating businesses.

6. Apple and HTC’s Landmark Patent Agreement

For years, the tech industry has been hobbled by an all-out patent war. The ease in which software can be patented and the power of those patents to protect even the most trivial innovation has incentivized large firms to spend billions of dollars annually securing software protection and using the court system to block competition or extract concessions from rival firms. Nowhere is this more evident than the smart-phone industry, where companies like Apple, Samsung and HTC have been engaged in costly litigation across the globe. But in November, Apple struck a licensing agreement with smart-phone manufacturer HTC, in which Apple agreed to license a host of patents for 10 years and cease all litigation against the Taiwanese hardware maker. While patent laws around the world are still in dire need of reform, the deal gave industry observers hope that the biggest players in the tech industry might start spending fewer resources on patent lawyers and more on making better products for consumers.

5. T-Mobile Acquires MetroPCS

If you spend any time watching television ads, it may seem like Verizon, AT&T and Sprint are the only three cell-phone carriers in the country. However, there are a handful of smaller companies that are trying to elbow their way into the big time, and T-Mobile made strides in that direction this year with its acquisition of MetroPCS. The merger gives the combined firm a user base of 42.5 million, just shy of third-place Sprint’s 56.4 million users. Along with the expanded user base, T-Mobile executives hope that cost savings from the merger will give the firm the needed firepower to compete with larger carriers as those firms invest in faster, more expansive coverage.

4. Facebook Buys Instagram for $1 Billion

Multibillion-dollar acquisitions may be par for the course for tech stars like Google and Apple, but they have been nearly nonexistent for social-media giant Facebook. As CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote announcing the $1 billion deal to purchase photo-sharing app Instagram, “It’s the first time we’ve ever acquired a product and company with so many users. We don’t plan on doing many more of these, if any at all.” So what was so special about Instagram? Zuckerberg knew two things for sure: users will increasingly interact with social media through mobile devices, and in the near term, his social network’s future lies in photo sharing. Whether it’s shots of the eggs Benedict you just had for brunch or pictures of your summer jaunt to Barcelona, photography has become the medium in social media. At the time of the acquisition, Instagram had a passionate user base of 30 million, and that’s before it launched an app for Android phones. With Instagram’s achieving such adoration from its fans, Zuckerberg saw the $1 billion as a small price to pay to add the company to the Facebook fold while eliminating a potential rival.

3. $25 Billion Mortgage-Fraud Settlement

Like a bad opera, the housing crisis that began six years ago is packed with too many characters and plot twists and has lasted far too long. But 2012 gave us several hints that the denouement is gradually approaching, the most important of which was April’s mortgage-fraud settlement between state attorneys general and some of the nation’s largest financial institutions. The deal penalized mortgage services to the tune of $25 billion for foreclosing on homeowners using fraudulent documentation and for the practice of robo-signing, or getting one employee to sign thousands of foreclosure documents without verifying the information therein. The settlement resulted in $2,000 checks for affected homeowners as well as programs to help underwater mortgage payers stay in their homes. Critics accused the deal of being too easy on the banks, but so far the settlement has been one of the few punitive actions taken by the government against financial institutions for their role in the housing bubble and its aftermath.

2. Yahoo Sells Half of Stake in Alibaba

Yahoo hasn’t made too many great moves over the course of the past decade, but you can put its decision to spend $1 billion on a 40% stake in Chinese e-commerce firm Alibaba in the win column. In September, Yahoo closed on a deal to sell half its stake back to the firm for $7.6 billion. New CEO Marissa Mayer plans to ship much of the proceeds of the sale back to shareholders in the form of stock buybacks but will keep more than $1 billion on hand in order to finance acquisitions and implement her as-yet-unannounced turnaround plan.

1. Yelp IPO

Social media and Wall Street have long had an awkward relationship. For some time, investors have been aware of the power and influence of Web-based media, but how they can profit from it has been less than clear. But when Yelp debuted on the NYSE in March, investors cheered, sending the stock up 64% on the first day of trading. Yelp has had its share of troubles since then: some investors have worried about the firm’s strategy to grow revenue from mobile users, while others remain loyal because they like the company’s business model of extracting advertising revenue from the very businesses that consumers are using the service to learn about. As Kendall Whitehouse, director of new media at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, says, “One of the things that is attractive about Yelp is the site’s closeness to the user’s purchase decision. Someone looking up a restaurant review in Yelp is very likely planning to go out to eat somewhere. And that should be easy to monetize.”