Spain

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.

So now that you know my opinions of which innovations of 2008 are going to change the world the most...how about a less subjective metric. In fact, this list is purely objective, simply listing which cleantech venture deals managed to pull the largest number of dollars.
All together, the top ten account for about $1.8 Billion dollars, with all but one of those deals being in the solar power industry.

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.

The town of Santa Coloma de Gramanet near Barcelona in Spain wants to do its part in fighting global warming. But the densely packed town - 124,000 people crammed into 1.5 square miles - doesn't have enough land to dedicate tracts exclusively to the wind farms or solar panels that could help ease residents' dependency on fossil fuel.

Microsoft launched its New Xbox Experience on Wednesday, expanding the existing service to compete with Sony in turning the video-game console into an entertainment hub.

Don Mattrick, senior vice president of Microsoft's Interactive Entertainment Business, said the New Xbox Experience is the future for home entertainment. "It's on-demand, it's high-definition, it's always social, it's all in one place," he said.

A 'Personal Game Room'

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.

Solfocus, whose technology focuses 500x the normal strength of sunlight onto tiny bits of ultra-efficient (ultra-expensive) solar material has just released a new solar unit that it promises has "the highest energy density and energy yield of any photovoltaic system available today."

Ocean Power Technologies and the Navy have joined together to create a small wave farm off the coast of Oahu, Hawaii. The company has installed one of its PowerBuoy units one mile off the Kaneohe Bay Marine Corp Base, with plans to install others in the near future to generate 1MW.