Google

Anyone driving the twists of Highway 1 between San Francisco and Los Angeles recently may have glimpsed a Toyota Prius with a curious funnel-like cylinder on the roof. Harder to notice was that the person at the wheel was not actually driving.

Analytics company Distimo is reporting that Google has added 13 countries to its list of markets that can buy paid applications from the Android Market. Two countries in Asia are soon to be included--Hong Kong and Singapore. The other countries are Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Finland, Israel, Mexico, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia and South Africa.

The attorney general of the US state of Texas has opened an inquiry into whether Internet giant Google manipulates search results.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s leading role in the social networking revolution will soon hit movie screens. But Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, whose idea for an Internet search engine turned them from idealistic Stanford graduate students into powerful billionaires, may not be far behind.

Spain has become the latest country to launch an investigation into the collection of sensitive wi-fi data by Google.