After years of trying to wrest the rights to the Gmail name away from a German businessman, Google decided to abandon the fight.

Private investors and venture capital firms in Germany are looking to social networks when they make investments according to a study.

Angel investors, who usually invest their own funds, said about 41percent of their capital goes towards social networks, a study of 539 investments in 2008 of 49 investors, and venture capital firms revealed.

Germany, Europe’s biggest economy, is experiencing a digital divide, according to German industry association Bitkom.

Western German states, including Hesse and Bavaria, have the majority of Internet addresses ending in the German ".de" country code domain, with the country’s five former Communist eastern states landing at the bottom of the list.

A few inches of snow are supposed to fall on Lexington, Kentucky today, and if history is any indicator, everything will cease to work.  Yesterday, folks in Germany had it comparatively easy – only Google didn’t function.

We know, we know – it’s almost March.  But a story a story relating to what ended a few months ago just emerged, and it turns out that in comparison to 2006, the number of German Internet companies created in 2007 more than tripled.

Email reputation service provider Habeas has partnered with eco, the whitelist provider in Germany and the Association of the German Internet industry.

Habeas identifies and certifies email marketers who comply with a set of standards and a code of conduct relevant to the European market. This reduces the time Internet Service Providers (ISPs) spend determining if the sender should be included on a whitelist.

One of my chief complaints about YouTube has always related to the crappy video quality.  It now looks like I’ll have to find something else to whine about – the site has increased its limit on files’ sizes by a factor of ten, and files’ lengths still can’t exceed ten minutes.

Last week, Germany’s ruling parties – a coalition of SPD & CDU, with efforts in the digital area recently spearheaded by minister of interior Wolfgang Schäuble (pictured) – passed a bill for new data retention laws*.

Thanks to its gorgeous scenery and impressive car industry, Germany is likely to have a lot of sights worth seeing.  And thanks to a new version of YouTube, Germans will have a special place to share them.

A German court has fined Google for using the Gmail.com domain in Germany despite not being allowed to use the trademark in that country.

The court ordered Google to pay $14,000 (10,000 Euros) because the use of the domain, even though Google calls it Google Mail there, means that Google is only partially complying with the law and infringing on the true owner of the Gmail name.

At least it wasn’t a lot of money.

Google’s not one to hold a grudge; today, Google.de features a logo celebrating Germany’s 1990 reunification.  But yesterday, a German court fined the search giant a little more than $14,000 for using the m.gmail.com domain for mobile search.

Some people love Wikipedia, some people hate it, and pretty much everybody knows better than to cite it as a source.  A new editing system aims to make the online encyclopedia a bit more reliable, however.

The online marketplace is in danger of losing out on the lucrative German market, and eBay has entered full panic mode in an effort to staunch the bleeding.

According to Spiegel.de, German internet provider Arcor has blocked porn sites Sex.com, YouPorn.com and another site for its 2.4 million users.

YouTube’s in trouble again, and this goes far beyond issues of copyright law; the German government, along with at least one major Jewish group, is angry about the presence of Nazi propaganda on the video-sharing site.

The problem with open societies, free speech, and Web 2.0 is that any ol’ jerk can believe and say anything they want. That you’d rather they didn’t is kind of your problem. But it’s a bigger problem for larger entities like YouTube and Google who provide the platform, or, since Microsoft’s not using it, the soapbox for the jerks to stand upon.

Bad news for Google in Germany after a court denied any further action against Daniel Giersch in order to wrangle the rights of the GMail trademark from him. Giersch began using the GMail mark in 2000, four years earlier than Google.

This is a stereotype, but at least it’s a positive one: the Germans are an efficient and precise people.  Now, for less of a stereotype and more of a fact: Wikipedia can be far from precise.  You may be surprised to learn, then, that the German government is going to give resources to the German version of the site.

An all-but-final loss of the Gmail trademark case in Germany and a newly-passed law on retaining personal information on its users has Google’s email service reeling.

In recent weeks and months, I’ve noticed that the Internet seems to have its own c-word: censorship.  I’ve also noticed that, like most companies, Yahoo wants nothing to do with this word.  So it wasn’t a huge surprise when Yahoo’s photo-sharing service, Flickr, relaxed its filters in Germany.

Earlier this week, we learned that Flickr had started supporting seven new languages.  Unfortunately, news has now come that Flickr is “filtering” – not censoring, mind you – content in several of those tongues.

Flickr Says No To German Photos