There seems to be no end to the flow of good news from courts around the world for online auction platforms. Here is another big breakthrough for eBay (and indirectly Naspers). A French court decided brand manufacturers must work with auction platforms to get a handle on the counterfeit (fakes) problem.

I am happy to report (first, as always) that the German economy is slowly waking up out of its long (too long) winter sleep! 

I know it is, because the “Freelance Writer Early Business Cycle Indicator” (developed by me) started climbing slowly in the last two weeks.

This reliable indicator (well, it worked very well, and very early, at the start of the economic downswing!) is calculated by looking at the number of jobs advertised for freelance writers in Germany and the number of actual job offers I get.  

In August/September last year the indicator went into a steep, seemingly endless dive, leaving me with lots of free time and very little money. For 6 months thereater, the indicator scraped along the bottom, before lifting its head in late April. 

Let’s hope the indicator works as well on the up as it did on the down.

For the record and my database – this GSK/Aspen deal.

The MAN bribe debacle (see below) made it onto the cover of Financial Times Deutschland (FTD) as the lead story today and the issue is bigger than thought until now.

Thankfully, South Africa hasn’t been mentioned to date. Let’s hope it stays that way. [Read on]

The parallels between what’s happening now and what happened in the period 1994 to 1996 are heaping. And the result will be the same: Growing uncertainty about the economic policy intentions of the South African government, to the point where it starts weighing on the rand.   [Read on]

Oops, suddenly it looks as if the arms bribe allegations might be back to haunt Jacob Zuma, SA’s teflon-president. [Read on]

According to a 46-page business plan Fiat CEO Sergio Marchionne presented the German government in Berlin today, the Italian auto company also wants to take over the General Motors (GM) business in South Africa.

The good news: If Marchionne gets his way, GM South Africa will continue to be managed independently under Fiat. [Read on]

One of the leading German business daily papers Handelsblatt, in the stable of Naspers “gatgabba” Georg von Holtzbrinck, has now also decided to “cooperate” with the world of blogs, rather than “ignore” or “compete” with them. 

From today, every article on Handelsblatt.com will be “strengthened” with a list of posts pulled from German blogs on the same topic. In other words, commenting on a Handelsblatt article and then linking to the article (as I often do), might now give my blog some “air” on Handelsblatt.com in return.

That will, no doubt, be good for my traffic.  

I wrote “might”, because it depends on whether they judge my blog to be good enough. In a press statement Handelsblatt explained all blogs will be checked for their quality and only those German blogs pulled in which “adds value to the theme” and “upholds the editorial standards of Handelsblatt”. (If I pass the quality hurdle, the language barrier might still get me…) 

Also in the press statement: Handelsblatt follows the lead of The Sunday Times of South Africa on this. Apparently, The Sunday Times has been working with the same Swedish blog search engine Twingly.com (providing the blog links for Handelsblatt) for a while.