Mass-migration to OpenOffice.org in Kazakhstan may imply adoption of the international standard; Nokia makes use of KOffice, which also implies wide use of ODF

Kazakhstan gets a visit from Microsoft, which wants to "cooperate" with the government

"In high-technology markets, disruptive innovation is something to be taken as a given, like gravity. Businesspeople do their best to exploit it, avoid it or cope with it. Industry upstarts depend on it, while established companies fear it. But no one in the competitive world of high technology thinks they can stop disruptive innovation, any more than they can alter the laws of gravity. But what if you could? What if an industry could banish disruptive innovation, leaving only a "well-mannered marketplace" of incremental innovations that reinforced comfortable business models?

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was in Ankara to announce the opening of Microsoft Innovation Center which is founded in Bilkent University. The most important task of Microsoft Innovation Center in this process will be “Microsoft Government Project”.

Norway opened a national center for competence in Free Software in Drammen, near Oslo, on Wednesday.

Nepal's first FOSS Training and Research Center is opened at Brihaspati Vidyasadan School (BVS) at Naxal, Kathmandu, Nepal. This Center has been made possible by the financial help from Help Nepal Network and BVS Alumni and technical help from FOSS Nepal, the community involved in spreading free and open source technologies in Nepal.

In the past few years we've seen a lot of hardware-based innovation (or at the very least expansion). New products and markets have arisen built around hardware and its use. Smartphones, tablets, netbooks and gaming systems are all examples of markets that have expanded and some if not most of the products make use of free software.

The people who attend BarCamp and similar events don't limit their involvement to just those events. Many are programmers, but there are other constituencies as well: Authors of open-source code, bloggers, Twitterers, students, and corporate employees with "real" jobs. All can sense a grassroots technology groundswell and they want to be a part of it.

IBM announced today that it will increase the number of technical inventions it makes freely available to others by 50 per cent, and seek less patent protection for its inventions, in an effort to stimulate worldwide innovation and economic growth.