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Google Android has overpassed Nokia’s Symbian platform as the most popular smartphone operating system in the last quarter of 2010. According to the stats provided by a research firm Canalys phonemakers sold 32.9 million Android-equipped phones in the last quarter, roughly seven times more than a year ago, compared with Symbian's sales of 31 million.

IBM and Samsung will be jointly developing semiconductor technology for smartphones and other mobile gadgets as it appears from the conjoint statement made by the two companies this week.

International Business Machines Corp and Samsung Electronics Co plan to research new chip materials and improvements in process technology, to develop smaller and more energy efficient semiconductor products, they said.

American people will soon be assigned special Internet passports to roam online. The White House is developing a "National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace" under which the Commerce Department becomes responsible for an "Identity Ecoystem".

The stats from comScore showed that Canadians spend more time on the Internet and use social media including Facebook and YouTube than other nations. comScore says that Canada has the highest penetration of Internet access, with around 68% of Canadians routinely surfing online, against 62% in France and Britain. Percentage of Germans account for 60% while Americans make up 59%.

Most decelerating are Italians with only 36% of the population going online, notes comScore.

Tighter Internet regulation was approved by the Venezuelan Parliament adding to a set of laws aimed to strengthen President Hugo Chavez's position before another Assembly oath.

The move will bring Venezuela in compliance with the international standards for policing the Internet, as believed by the ruling Socialist Party. Meantime, the opposition members think the regulation will help the government to prevent any dissent.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, a founder of the Web, criticized social networks and other Internet services claiming they are "a threat to the web." He thinks that Facebook-like websites encourage users to enter their information, which is captured and then reused, but not shared with other websites.

"Large social-networking sites are walling off information posted by their users from the rest of the web," he said in the Scientific American journal.

The World Wide Web Consortium's Web Fonts Working Group announced the launch of version 1.0 of The Web Open File Format (WOFF) which provides a platform for open source and commercial providers of fonts to make their creations easily available across the Web, according to W3C fonts activity lead Chris Lilley.

With millions of Internet users spending their time and money on the web, contextual advertising appears to be a really attractive alternative to offline marketing. The best thing about contextual advertising is that online ads are placed on the sites with relevant content, so that visitors are more likely to click the ad, buy the product or even become repeat customers. So, how does it all work?