Google plans to pay Android application developers starting in the first quarter of 2009 for each application sold, with 70% of the proceedings to the developer, and to keep 30% for itself, to cover carrier and billing-settlement fees.

In an email from the Android Market, Eric Chu said:

"Android Market will support priced applications starting early Q1 2009, as we'd originally stated last fall. Given the country-by-country work required to set up payment support for developers in different countries, we will enable priced app support in Q1 for developers operating in these countries, in the following order: (1) United States and UK; (2) Germany, Austria and Netherlands; (3) France, Italy and Spain."

This policy change to Google's growing app store, to compete with the already very successful Apple iPhone AppStore, could bring forth a new number of developers to help increase the number of applications in its marketplace, helping to push creativity in the global trend of mobile applications.

It is no surprise Google has entered the market of paying developers for per application sold, where consumers see no problem on purchasing applications, games and other content for their mobile phones. Developers have also been patiently waiting to release their applications on the Blackberry Application store.

Wikimedia Foundation, the company behind the Wikipedia website, set themselves a target in 2008 for donations and announced today they reached it.

Running a website like Wikipedia costs a lot of money and asking for donations is a great way to cover the costs, of course you didn't have to donate but after the founder Jimmy Wales released a personal appeal the donations kept on rolling in and in the end it totaled over $6 million.

The total number of donors is not fully known but over 125,000 people donated and in December over 50,000 of them donated near to $2 million. The money will be spent in covering the day to day runnings of the site all the way to the end of its fiscal year which is in June, the money will also be used to help some of the volunteer foundations that Wikimedia help run for example the Wikimedia Academies.

With Wikipedia being the destination for many on the Internet you would think maybe the inclusion of adverts would help the site but the founder has always said that there would never be any form of advertising on the web site.

Chinese computer manufacturer, Lenovo is planning to cut 200 jobs at the company's headquarters in Beijing, Reuters reports.

Lenovo is only one of the growing number of companies slashing their work force due to the poor economic state. Lenovo plans to announce restructuring changes on January 8, 2009, which it hopes will get it out of debt, since acquiring IBM's PC unit back in 2005 for $1.25 Billion.

Recently, IBM has been moving back from the Lenovo series after it had a number of sell-offs over the past year, where customers are not adopting the brand as expected in North America. IBM, which currently still has shares in Lenovo, has a sales agreement to continue selling desktops and laptops until 2010, where both companies could see a departure if sales continue to decline.

Lenovo is currently the largest computer manufacture in China, and fourth largest in the world, from both its desktop and laptop line up. Lenovo saw $16.4 billion in revenue in 2008, from its entire line up of products including, tablet PC's, monitors, projectors, desktop and laptops.

One of the new features announced at the recent Windows 7 Reviewers Workshop in LA is that Windows 7 will natively support a number of popular media formats, so that users don't have to worry about finding, installing and downloading third-party codecs.

This is an evolution in media support which is similar to the inclusion of native MPEG-2 playback in Windows Vista, providing the DVD playback functionality which was missing in Windows XP.

News source: Source