The prevailing wisdom is that U.S. companies rule the Internet. Think again. This year Russia’s most popular Internet search engine, Yandex, raised $1.4 billion in an initial public offering on Nasdaq, significantly more than either LinkedIn or Groupon — the biggest IPO for an Internet company since Google listed in 2004.

Now the homegrown Russian search engine giant is moving into Turkey.Read more

If Italy’s Monte dei Paschi di Siena (pictured above), which has been operating without a break for over five centuries, represents the banking sector’s history, its future is more likely to resemble that of a 35-year old company: the one behind the iPhone, iPad and iTunes.

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Banks and mobile operators have been vying to dominate the mobile payments space but Silicon Valley companies could end up reaping the richest rewards.The reason?  It is not those that process the transactions but rather the companies that manage to leverage the rich information in the electronic trail clients leave behind – the so-called digital slipstream - that will win in the networked economy, say industry observers.Read more

Megan Smith, Google’s vice-president, new business development, is no ordinary engineer. She is adventurous: she once raced a solar-powered car 2,000 miles across Australia's Outback. She has a knack for business, helping PlanetOut, a gay and lesbian online community, grow tenfold in reach and revenue, during her tenure as chief executive. And she is a big believer in technology’s ability to bring about social change.Read more

During his tenure as Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt attended a private meeting in Davos with a group of senior telecom executives and tried to crack a joke. “Why don’t you make all of the investment and we will take all the profits,” quipped Schmidt, according to a story making the rounds in the tech industry. Nobody in the room laughed. His stab at humour hit too close to home.

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A proposal to build a national federation of interconnected computing clouds in France, funded in part by government in order to protect the country's sovereignty, data privacy and local jobs, is gaining favor. Some fear that the idea, which is in part a backlash against American companies like Google, will spread to other parts of the Continent, potentially undermining the promised benefits to Europeans of  cloud computing.Read more

Bloom Energy, a fuel cell company which aims to help homes and businesses generate their own electricity, publicly unveiled its technology and an impressive list of  Fortune 500 customers, at a February 24 press conference attended by California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and former U.S. Secretary of State General Colin Powell.Read more

 Google chief executive Eric Schmidt managed to snag a cherished slot as a keynote speaker at this year's Mobile World Congress,  the industry's biggest annual bash.   But announcements made at the show's opening February 15 illustrate how the mobile sector is struggling to grab the spotlight back from  Apple and Google.Read more