Germany

Social networking site Facebook is opening an operations office in India, its first in Asia, to help manage rapid growth in the number of users.

The office, in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad, will have advertising and developer support teams, the company said Monday. It will supplement Facebook's other centers in Palo Alto, California; Dublin, Ireland; and Austin, Texas.

The move is part of a push to create support centers across time zones, with round-the-clock, multilingual support, the company said.

China's high-speed rail plans get more ambitious by the day.  Not satisfied with having the world's most advanced and extensive rail line in the world, China is now planning to connect its rail system to 17 other countries in Asia and Eastern Europe where it will join the European rail network.

Apple's iPad tablet will go on sale a few days later than originally announced -- a fact that is attracting attention. The company announced Friday that the Wi-Fi version will be released for sale on April 3 in the U.S. At the iPad announcement in January, the Cupertino, Calif.-based company said the product would ship in late March.

There have been rumors that the sale date was pushed back to accommodate an unspecified production problem. The 3G version goes on sale in late April, and preordering for either model in the U.S. begins in a week.

Reshaping the Landscape?

Google's Chrome was the only web browser application to gain global market share last month, with all other major browser platforms showing month-to-month declines, according to Net Applications. Mozilla's Firefox browser -- which had been racking up steady gains at Microsoft's expense through November 2009 -- saw its global market share fall for the third straight month, the web metrics firm reported.

A rash of new laptops set for display at the CeBIT computing trade show underline the growing shift in the market to tinier machines with fancier features such as 3D graphics.

Taiwan-based Acer will be at the show with the Aspire 5740D, which will retail in Europe for 800 euros (1,090 dollars). Thanks to a special coating on its 15.6-inch screen, users who wear polarizing spectacles can see the third dimension when they play movies.

Experts say 2010 will be the year that 3D becomes widely available on notebook computers.

T-Mobile USA, the fourth-largest U.S. wireless carrier, said Thursday it gained 371,000 new customers in the fourth quarter, reversing subscriber losses in the third quarter.

But the new subscribers were mainly low-paying ones who don't sign contracts, and T-Mobile USA's earnings and revenue fell from the same period a year earlier.

Last December I went on a trip to Doha - the city I had spent many year

by Manisha Verma

Better known as Momus, Nick Currie has, since the mid-1980s, led parallel careers in music (with 21 albums out so far), prose, art and journalism, exploring the nexuses between them while traveling the world and examining his favorite cultures. He has most recently turned toward traditional ink-and-paper publishing with two volumes, The Book of Jokes and The Book of Scotlands.