Germany

Google's Android App Market will begin selling applications early this year. Google had promised a way for developers to earn cash for their applications.

Apple's App Store lets developers keep 70 percent of the revenue generated from application sales. RIM's Blackberry Application Store promises to give developers 80 percent of the revenue when its store launches in March.

For seven years, AirData, a small wireless operator in Stuttgart, did something the largest German mobile operators, including T-Mobile, were unwilling to do: It delivered broadband Internet to consumers in remote corners of the country.

But at the end of 2007, AirData's license to use the 2.6 gigahertz band expired after the country's regulator, Bundesnetzagentur, deemed AirData's service inappropriate for the frequency, which it wanted to reserve for mobile phone, not broadband, services.

The United States has just overtaken Germany (which happens to be about 27 times smaller than the US) as the world's largest wind energy producer. And now we're supposed to throw a party, right?

Dresden is one of the great success stories of German reunification. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the capital of the East German state of Saxony remade itself as the center of European semiconductor production, becoming home to major facilities operated by U.S. chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices as well as Munich-based Infineon Technologies. When a 1998 Time magazine article dubbed the region "Silicon Saxony," locals embraced the label and even founded an organization by that name to promote industry interests.

Regulators in France have put a stop to France Telecom's Orange being the only carrier selling Apple's iPhone in France. The Counseil de la Concurrence, the French Council on Competitiveness, acted after another carrier, Bouyges Telecom, filed a complaint.

The council asked Apple to cease its exclusivity deal with Orange and allow other carriers to offer service for the iPhone while regulators further investigate. Orange offers the iPhone in several countries in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, and had been exclusively selling the iPhone in France since July.

Most people in the U.S. and elsewhere in the West think of China and India largely as sources for inexpensive products and services. Few know that China, India, and other developing countries are taking center stage in the global war for innovation and talent.

When Google began hiring in Zurich for its new engineering center in 2004, local officials welcomed the U.S. company with open arms. Google's arrival is still bearing fruit for Zurich: 450 employees, about 300 of them engineers, work in Google's seven-story complex in a converted brewery on the outskirts of the placid mountain metropolis.

Microsoft on Friday opened an online store for U.S. customers. The company already has online marketplaces in the United Kingdom, Germany and Korea.

The home page for the Microsoft Store features the Microsoft Xbox 360 hit Gears of War 2, but also offers various flavors of the Microsoft Office productivity suite. Microsoft also features the Zune and a small ad for Vista Ultimate.

Hackers are always refining their methods of sniffing out other people's passwords. That's why experts advise that you always select tough-to-crack passwords. That means using different passwords for different web sites. Luckily, special programs are available to help you remember them all.

"There are two prime ways to steal users' passwords," explains Ruben Wolf from the Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology (SIT) in Darmstadt, Germany.

Next time you're stuck in traffic and antsy to get to your destination, think of this new mantra: What Would Ants Do?