China will soon become the world's largest Internet and information economy, surpassing the United States, the president of one of the Chinese government's two main telecommunications companies predicted at the World Economic Forum.
By 2008, China will have between 200 million and 300 million Internet devices and millions more users, said Edward Tian, CEO of China Netcom and a pioneer of the country's Internet revolution.
He spoke at a panel on "China's Rise: Regional and Global Impacts" at the World Economic Forum in this snow-covered Swiss Alpine resort, an annual meeting of top business and government leaders who have singled out China as one of the few economic success stories in the past year.
Last year, China was the only country where information technology continued to grow and it has become a key market for Western technology companies: No. 1 for Nokia (NOK), and number two for Ericsson (ERICY) and IBM (IBM), he said. China was also the only country to see growth for the telecom equipment market in 2002.
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Sapphire's source hunted: Computer experts were investigating whether Hong Kong was the origin of the "Sapphire" worm, a computer bug that infected Internet traffic worldwide.
The task won't be easy, said officials at the government-funded Hong Kong Computer Emergency Response Team.
"Checking the origin of the worm is like finding which part of a river a drop of water comes from," said S.C. Leung, senior consultant with the computer team.
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IBM pushes grid: IBM unveiled 10 powerful "grid computing" products, its biggest push yet to drive the nascent computing trend into big business.
Grid computing is a cluster of servers and computers linked through the Internet. The idea is to link the computers -- potentially in the millions -- to make processing power available on demand, rather like water or electricity is in developed countries, boosting computational power while cutting costs.
With the announcement, IBM (IBM) said it is angling to push the adoption of grid computing in the corporate world. IBM is also seeking to recreate the success of its adoption and endorsement of the freely available Linux operating system several years ago with an aggressive backing of grid computing in myriad industries, a spokesman said.
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Hold mail online: People who want their mail held or need to schedule a package delivery can now arrange for the service online.
The U.S. Postal Service said it has added those services to its website, www.usps.com.
To have mail held just click on "Hold Mail" and provide the necessary information. Mail can be held for three to 30 days for people on vacation or away from home or for other reasons.
People who receive a notice of attempted delivery for an item that needs a signature or is too large for their mailbox can also schedule that a new delivery attempt by clicking on "Receive Mail and Packages."
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MSNBC.com's new boss: The popular news website has hired a former employee to be its editor in chief, a position that has been empty since Merrill Brown quit in June.
Dean Wright, one of MSNBC.com's original producers, said he will start Feb. 10.
Wright most recently worked for AOL Time Warner (AOL), where he was senior director for programming integration for AOL. There, he led efforts to take content from Time websites, repackage it and incorporate it into AOL's network.
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Gates tackles disease: Saying that medical science has solved the "easy" problems of the rich world, Microsoft (MSFT) founder Bill Gates announced a $200 million fund aimed at luring researchers into finding original cures for the poor world's ailments.
The $200 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will be used to set up the Grand Challenges in Global Health initiative, which will dole out money in grants of up to $20 million each to scientists around the world.
The program will be administered by the U.S. National Institutes of Health Foundation and the new fund is heavy on big names in U.S. science. It will be headed by Dr. Harold Varmus, a former NIH director who is now president of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.
AP and Reuters contributed to this report.
