The End User: Start-ups redux, in Europe
It's the 1990s all over again on the Internet in Europe. That, at least, is the premise of some leading venture capitalists, the ones who supply the funding to make the start-up world go 'round.

MySpace hoax leads to suicide, but no laws broken
Megan Meier died believing that somewhere in this world lived a boy named Josh Evans who hated her. But he didn't exist. He was the creation of a former friend's mother.

Google's next frontier: Renewable energy
Google said it would spend hundreds of millions of dollars on renewable energy, part of that to hire engineers and experts to investigate alternative energies like solar and wind power.

'Gray' market for iPhones thriving
A handful of professional resellers and some individuals have been offering the iPhone, often with no strings attached.

The funeral industry increasingly goes digital
Webcasts of funerals, online tribute pages and more have been changing the funeral trade, and even the way mourners grieve.

Tiffany and eBay clash over fakes
In a weeklong bench trial in U.S. District Court in New York, lawyers for Tiffany argued that eBay allows the trading of counterfeit Tiffany items.

BlackBerry approved in Russia
After two years of trying, Mobile TeleSystems, the country's top mobile phone operator, won approval from security officials to import the device.

WTO to investigate Chinese restrictions on sales of U.S. media
The investigation into sales of U.S. movies, music and books is Washington's fourth commercial complaint against Beijing in about a year.

Hot spots with a catch: Ads
AnchorFree is one of a handful of companies offering a model in which the advertiser pays but the retailer and the Web-surfer do not.

The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission said Wednesday he had proposed granting the media group Tribune Co. a temporary exemption from U.S. media ownership rules, removing an obstacle to a leveraged buyout of the company.

Kevin Martin, the FCC chairman, said he proposed to the other FCC commissioners that the agency grant the waivers for a period of two years, or six months after the end of all litigation connected to the ownership rules.

He said the commission would vote on the proposal by the end of the day on Nov. 30.

An exploding cellphone battery may have killed a South Korean man, the police said Wednesday.

The man, identified only by his family name, Suh, was found dead at his workplace in a quarry and his mobile phone battery was melted in his shirt pocket, said a police official in Cheongwon, which is 135 kilometers, or 85 miles, south of Seoul.

"We presume that the cellphone battery exploded," the police official said on condition of anonymity because the investigation was still under way.

Kim Hoon, a doctor who examined the body, said the death was probably caused by an explosion of the battery.

An LG Electronics official confirmed its product was involved in the accident but said a fatal explosion would be virtually impossible.

EUROPEAN UNION REGULATORS said they had opened an intensive antitrust inquiry into a $4.2 billion takeover of the Dutch digital map maker Tele Atlas by TomTom. The European Commission said a preliminary investigation "indicated that the proposed merger raises serious doubts" about whether the joint entity would leave the EU market of portable navigation devices open to enough competition.

GOOGLE upgraded its maps software for cellphones with a feature that recognizes users' locations. The My Location technology uses information from mobile phone towers to estimate where people are, the company said.