The Fast Company magazine presents its new rating of the 50 most innovative companies in the world. In mid-February, they published the 2011 list, giving short descriptions to their picks. Apple scoops first place, pushing the digital giants Twitter, Facebook and Google to the 2nd, 3rd and 6th place correspondingly—with Intel, Microsoft, Linkedin,eBay, IBM and Cisco resting below them. The sport and fashion apparel industry is presented by Burberry (No.13, “for breathing new life into a luxury stronghold”), Nike (No.23, “for its mix of sports, style, and yes, plastic bottles”), Opening Ceremony (No. 28) the food and drinks business has two representatives—PepsiCo (No.33)—“for its ambitious nutrition R&D” and chocolate company Madécasse (No.50).

On February 16, at Humbolt University in Berlin, Germany, Google announced it is launching a new online service for publishers and users of all kinds of digital content. Google One Pass is aimed at providing the widest freedom possible to publishers of the content in terms of setting prices and choosing the subscription types for the content they offer. As far as users are concerned, Google says they will benefit from One Pass as they are granted access to the paid content across different platforms just by entering the same login and password.

On January 27, Google presented ‘Life in a Day’ documentary at the Sundance Film Festival. This crowd-sourced featured film by Kevin Macdonald was created from over 450,000 hours of footage, sent by 80,000 users from 192 countries. People from all around the globe were invited by YouTube to record their daily routines on July 24, 2010, to create “an emotional journey.

On Wednesday Google announced the fourth annual round of its ‘Doodle 4 Google’ project. This is a drawing contest which provides K-12 students with the opportunity to win a $15,000 scholarship and a $25,000 technology grant for their school. The task for the students is to create their own version of Google page that corresponds the theme of competition using a plethora of drawing tools.