World Economic Forum

After weeks of back-and-forth negotiations between Internet search giant Google and the Chinese government, Google says it will continue to oppose China's efforts to censor information on the Internet. For the past several years, Google has censored results on its Google.cn search engine as requested by the Chinese government. But recently, Google decided to pull the plug.

Computer scientist Carol Realini was planning to take early retirement after Chordiant Software, a customer-relationship management software company she chaired, went public in 2000. Relishing her newfound freedom, Realini went on a social-action mission to Africa. The experience was eye opening, to say the least: In the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire), she saw people haul sacks of devalued currency to local vendors to buy scratch cards that would provide a few minutes' calling time on their mobile phones.

Innovation in the trillion-dollar-per-year construction industry has been pretty sluggish over the past century. The low-tech method for producing standard gypsum drywall, for instance, was invented in 1917. It has plenty of drawbacks -- including the release of some 20 billion pounds of CO2 into the atmosphere annually -- but is still in use.

One of the biggest complaints about Apple's groundbreaking iPhone has been that it doesn't support Adobe's Flash for interactive animation and video. But late last week Adobe Systems CEO Shantanu Narayen said his company is working with Apple to make it happen.

"It's a hard technical challenge, and that's part of the reason that Adobe and Apple are collaborating," he told the Bloomberg News Service in an interview from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. "The onus is on us to deliver."

Good News, Bad News

Talk about an image problem. For weeks, newspapers around the world have carried stories about dairy-poisoned babies -- at least six have died, and 300,000 have been sickened -- and chronicled how milk, eggs, soy-based foods, and even candy bars containing ingredients from China have been contaminated with melamine, an industrial chemical used in plastics and fertilizers.

The Middle East isn't known as a hotbed of technological achievement. But in the seventh annual Global Information Technology Report released on Apr. 9 by the Geneva-based World Economic Forum [WEF] and French management school INSEAD, the region demonstrated the most improvement in its tech-readiness and expertise of any in the world.