The head of global online auction powerhouse eBay said that China has essentially put up a wall when it comes to non-Chinese Internet firms.

"The domestic China market for Internet-based service is, in essence, closed," eBay chief executive John Donahoe said during an interview at a Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.

Cable television's USA Network said it has enlisted Internet startup Yap.TV to tap into the hot trend of people "chatting" online while viewing shows.

Yap-powered applications will let people take polls, dish about actors and more in online forums with friends watching programs at other venues.

Boudy Nasrala runs a successful brand design company in Lebanon, but when it comes to communicating with clients around the globe using the Internet, he knows to arm himself with patience -- lots of it.

"I recently finished a branding campaign for a new restaurant in Qatar but it would have been easier to put my work on CD and send it by express mail," sighed Nasrala, 34, who counts among his clients Pepsi and Microsoft.

Silicon Valley star Sean Parker said Facebook would have to blunder in a big way for Google's social network to steal its crown.

"Facebook would have to screw up royally and Google would have to do something really smart," Parker said during an on-stage interview that opened a Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.

Trying to make amends for massive outages last week, Research In Motion announced a free premium apps giveaway for millions of its customers who may still feel jolted, and a month of technical support for some.

The Canadian company said Monday that the apps, worth more than $100, will be made available over the coming weeks on BlackBerry(at) App World. They include iSpeech Translator and the games "Bejeweled" and "Texas Hold'em Poker 2." The offer runs until the end of the year.

Samsung Electronics is asking Japanese and Australian courts to block sales of Apple's new iPhone 4S in those countries.

The preliminary injunctions Samsung filed Monday in Tokyo District Court and the Federal Court in Australia are part of an intensifying patent battle between the smartphone giants.

Silicon Valley nobility and political heavyweights paid tribute to Apple co-founder Steve Jobs on Sunday at a private memorial service at Stanford University, local media said.

Security teams from Apple and Stanford along with local police officers cordoned off the main quad on campus, only granting access to those with invitations to the event in honor of Jobs, who died earlier this month.

The longest BlackBerry outage in many years left customers outraged this week, threatening to cost the granddaddy of all smartphones more business when it's already struggling to keep up in a crowded marketplace.

The three-day blackout interrupted email and Internet services for tens of millions of frustrated users and inflicted more damage on an already tarnished brand.

Cliff Blezenski was initially hesitant to think of "Gears of War" as a trilogy. The design director at Epic Games and mastermind behind the chainsaw-slicing video game shooter series knew that gamers were a particularly judgmental bunch, especially when it comes to the interactive industry's gluttonous strategy of constructing franchises from the ground up.

"I think if you come out and say, 'This is the start of a trilogy,' gamers get defensive, cross their arms and say, 'We'll see,'" said Blezenski. "You have to play it game by game. We had ideas of where each game could go in the series, but until we had confirmation, we never really started work on a sequel, except for coming up with pie-in-the-sky ideas."

Apple's iPhone 4S was available in several Beijing shops Saturday, despite not officially being for sale in China.

"Today we have got two from Canada, they're 11,000 yuan ($1,720) each. If you're interested, you need to come straight away," a saleswoman at a mobile phone shop at Hailong market told Agence France Presse.