germany

Regulators in Germany slapped Microsoft's local subsidiary with a fine of 9 million euros ($11.8 million) for improperly influencing pricing of Office during a retail promotion.

"Microsoft has influenced the resale price of the software package--Office Home & Student 2007--in an anticompetitive manner," Germany's Bundeskartellamt said in an English-language version of its press release.

The agency said that Microsoft unduly influenced pricing of Office Home and Student 2007 at a particular retailer as part of a fall 2008 promotion with office supply stores, which included financial support from Microsoft.

"Even before the launch of … Read more

YouTube has pulled the plug on music videos in Germany as Western Europe starts to look like a hostile environment for Web music services.

A YouTube spokesman confirmed that YouTube is no longer playing music videos belonging to the largest music labels after talks with Germany's biggest royalty collections group, GEMA, broke down.

The conflict is almost identical to YouTube's spat with a royalty group in the United Kingdom, but with one important twist. According to YouTube, GEMA is asking for royalty rates that are 50 times higher than those asked for by PRS, the British organization, and … Read more

Imagine being able to control street lights with your mobile phone. This isn't a prank, but an eco-friendly solution now in place in parts of Germany.

The (I must add) responsible denizens there have put in place a system called Dial4Light that lets cell phone users turn on the street lamps only when someone actually needs illumination. We won't suggest this for streets like Harlem or the dodgier parts of Asia since it's so easily subject to abuse.

Much like your very own on/off switch at home, this one requires you to dial up the lights, … Read more

In a move to stop the spread of child pornography on the Internet, German officials will soon be asking ISPs to filter out Web sites they deem offensive, according to news magazine Der Spiegel.

German regulatory officials have been working with Google and other search engines, providing them with a blacklist of sites to block, according to the article, which was reported on Google Blogoscoped on Friday. Google already excludes from its German and French search results content that is pro-Nazi.

There have been other censorship efforts recently related to images of children. Internet service providers in the U.K. … Read more

Last week in Hamburg, Germany, I had the pleasure of lunching with a SPIEGEL editor in the iconic news magazine's iconic canteen, or "Spiegelkantine," as the Germans call it. The extravagance of the interior design (created by Danish designer Verner Panton, who worked with Arne Jacobson, in the 70s) -- a lavish, ultra-red cave with highly disruptive stalactites hanging from the ceiling -- is reminiscent of "Clockwork Orange" and so ostentatiously out of line with the earnest, purist, social democratic SPIEGEL culture that it appears to be almost deliberately cynical -- and that again is … Read more

The International Herald Tribune reported on Thursday that Facebook attempted to acquire a look-alike German social network before finally suing it in a federal court last month.

StudiVZ, a German site geared toward college students, is 10 times the size of Facebook's user base in Germany. It also looks just like Facebook, with a different color scheme, which is what ticked off the site's legal team. The court complaint, which called StudiVZ "a knockoff," says "a year and a half after the debut of Facebook's Web site, (it) was built by copying the look, … Read more

Yahoo has agreed to start marketing Netlog and showing ads on the German social-networking site, the companies said Tuesday.

The multi-year partnership makes Yahoo's ad network the exclusive supplier of display, or graphical, ads, the companies said. While textual ads appearing next to search-engine results have proved powerfully profitable for Yahoo's top rival, Google, the market for showing display ads has many more players jockeying for top position.

Netlog is used by 1.3 million different people each month, and through the deal, advertisers can use Yahoo or Netlog to reach more than a third of German Internet … Read more

The CEO of German chipmaker Infineon Technologies will step down next week, the company said Monday.

Wolfgang Ziebart, who has run the company since 2004, is leaving on June 1 "due to different opinions on the future strategic orientation of the company," Infineon said in a statement.

Peter Bauer, an executive vice president and head of Infineon's automotive, industrial, and multiple-market business group, will assume Ziebart's position as spokesman of the company's management board.

Bauer, who was CEO of Siemens Microelectronics in the 1990s, joined Infineon when chip operations were spun off from Siemens in … Read more

Excessively blinged USB thumb drives are so common that they've become passe, but this may be the first one we've seen from a German manufacturer. The defiantly named "Adamant" comes from a company called Golden Store, a limited-edition gold USB key accented with 3 diamonds and lapis lazuli deposits. There's even a solitary diamond in its lacquered box, according to BornRich. Sure, $5,650 is a lot to pay for a flash drive, but what other accessory would be appropriate to use with a $760,000 gold and diamond PC?