What a sensational exhibition opened today in Essen, Germany, in the Villa Hügel (1873), which used to be the Krupp family residency and since 1953 has hosted some of the best temporary arts exhibtions in the world. This time they managed to bring Tibetan art to Germany. The collection is unmatched and has to be seen to be believed!

• As TechCrunch reports, Writely has been re-launched again now under the Google umbrella. This Ajax word processor will probably become soon part of a whole suite of applications as there are already Spreadsheet and Calendar and it is to be expected that Storage and also Presentation software will join the suite soon. "Writely is collaboration friendly, can import Word documents, save to PDF, OpenOffice, Rich Text Format and zip. The system autosaves your documents every 10 seconds and offers online storage." That Google takes this seriously could also be seen in a recent CNet Review where they came out on top.
• Netvibes, a French startup, accepted 15 million USD funding. The VCs who invested into this round were Index Ventures and Accel. Netvibes has been able to attract a few million users in just one year with its Ajax based personal home page. The funding is pretty high for a European startup but in light of the other - well-funded - competitors like Pageflake, the right move probably. Will be interesting to see if another European startup can make the race in this space also like e.g. Skype did in VoIP.
• China is to issue tough regulations for websites that distribute short movies. This is what Xinhua reports today and addresses MyTube while the Chinese "well-known" sites Sina, Sohu and Netease are authorized and can stay open as they are. I assume the Chinese have seen how e.g. Nasrallah has used his video underground production facility to keep in contact with the masses, producing a short video nearly every other day or so. A nightmare scenario still it seems for the Chinese government. Also take a look at this Chinese icon war production, I assume this one does not fall under censorship.
• Last weeks rumours of a soon-to-be-released iPhone from Apple turned out to be just that. Apple made an unusual - for Apple - public statement saying that they are NOT working on an iPod phone. Great, one thing less to follow in the ever growing bloggosphere. But iTunes movie store is to be expected to launch later this year at least.
• Mobile navigation system sales doubled Y-o-Y as Canalys reports nicely just a month before its navigation analyst event in Geneva. Good timing! While the majority of the GPS devices sold are still external ones, mobile phones equipped with a GPS are growing faster than the overall market, so will soon have a higher overall market share too.
• Northwest Airlines celebrated its very own style of how to fire people. In a letter to laid off people they recommend things like taking less time for showers or looking for usable stuff on the garbage pile. While they have apologized for it, I can only hope that everyone involved in this is to be fired as well so they have a chance to test these tips first hand in practice.
• An IEEE Spectrum article Why Metcalfe's Law is Wrong is getting people excited in the US (e.g. VC firm Polaris, where Bob Metcalfe is a partner). We will look into this too this weekend if the weather turns out to be as nasty as predicted, otherwise not. Have a nice one.

Sony's mylo is our Gadget of the Week. It is a combined entertainment and personal communicator device for teens and twens although some older folks might also like it. The list of features contains what one needs to stay well connected and entertained:

• Media player: Digital audio and MPEG-4 videos on a 320 by 240 pixel 2.4-inch LCD
• Internet access: built in Wifi, Opera browser and QWERTY keyboard lets you surf the web
• IM and VoIP: Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk and Skype are all on board
• Can wirelessly stream music to other mylo users using iTunes (not sure how/if this works though with Apple's stringent digital rights management measures)
• By numbers: 1GB flash memory, memory stick pro duo slot, $350 retail price, launch in September