According to a press release from the Taiwanese company Antig this year's Cebit will be used to showcase an improved methanol fuel cell for notebooks.

We expect this technology to go mainstream in probably the next 2 years. Prices will then also come down dramatically. The current methanol fuel cells are still not ready to replace an Li-Ion battery pack but make sense already in certain user scenarios, such as if you need 20hours+ of continuous runtime, and that on a regular basis. Field service people in remote areas, for example, are already getting interested in this and are willing to pay for it.

The International Motor Show Geneva (2.-11. March) will again be used by car manufacturers to showcase new models, as well as to brag with futuristic designs.

As reported by the German newsaper FAZ car sales will only slighty increase (by 1% to 14,65 million new cars) in Western Europe in 2006. The biggest increases are to be expected in the small and the diesel segments. As they report, people have money but are saving it rather than spending it on expensive cars. This is particularly true outside of Germany. In Germany luxury cars are often still considered a status symbol and sell better than in e.g. Spain or Italy. What they also say is that the US trend of incentive wars is coming to Europe, hinting as well that the market there is much more competitive. I think this is not really true, though. As far as I know, the margins for car dealers in the US are very healthy and much, much better than in Europe. I guess the manufacturers are making such stories up to keep their dealers in line! Huge consolidation among the many car dealers is going on in Germany e.g. where the number of car dealers went down from 18'000 in 2000 to 10'500 in 2004. (see Institut für Automobilwirtschaft) This trend will continue in the next years and the same trend can be seen in other European countries as well, although not so extreme.

The Swiss government has officially handed in a request at the world patent institute for the rights to the domain name swiss.ch. (WIPO)

As far as I know, this is the first time ever WIPO is confronted with a domain name dispute. In the past people got nice money from respective companies. In this case the Swiss government prefers to pay taxpayer money for lawyers, not sure if this is the smartest and most successful approach though.

A business savvy private person owns swiss.ch and svizzera.ch. A search on Switch, the Swiss domain registrant, reveals that the owner lives in Zurich. Please don't tell anybody in the Swiss government that there are also .com, .net etc. domain names registered and, as I have just managed to find out, also owned by private people in Switzerland; otherwise they might have to raise the taxes to pay for all those lawsuits.

Domain name:
schweiz.ch

Holder of domain name:
Stefan C. Frei
Alderstrasse 49
CH-8008 Zürich
Switzerland
Contractual Language: English

Consumer spending in ICT increased much less, from 33 to 50 bn EUR, clearly reflecting the current general consumer spending problem in Germany. More German consumers (32%) than the EU average (20%) use the Internet for purchasing, though, and 54% of all companies used the Internet for purchasing compared with the EU average of 39%. Online banking is done by 74% of all companies.