Many companies in Germany that are not already international are planning to move beyond their borders. Although some are looking at setting up their own offices in foreign countries, others are seeking partnerships with companies in Europe and the United States. This is a good opportunity for American firms-blue-chip companies and smaller firms alike-to build or extend networks across Germany and take advantage of both the wealth of talent and the breadth of the market in central Europe.

In the United States, one is likely to hear about the two coasts running the e-business sector. Germany isn't a bipolar market dominated by Silicon Alley and Silicon Valley, though there are some regional centers of technology business. Munich in the south of Germany probably enjoys pride of place as far as technology goes, but there are other economic centers, with important regional differences, to familiarize yourself with when you're doing business in Germany.

As the nation';s capital, Berlin may be the German city most misunderstood by Americas. This is the result of the city's tempestuous history in the last century. As the imperial capital of the Kaisers, the city served as the political, cultural, and economic center of the German empire and de facto leader of central Europe. The inter-war Berlin of the Weimar Republic became the epicenter of a tremendous outburst of art and innovation memorialized by writers such as Christopher Isherwood, but was soon felled by economic crisis and the rise of the Nazis. After the Second World War yet another Berlin emerged: a city divided whose population and business fled to other parts of West Germany as East Berlin fell victim to economic decay, symbolized by its ugly Soviet architecture.

The current, still-under-construction Berlin is working feverishly to erase the east-west division. But one of the biggest hurdles to its attempts to encourage business growth is that very little in the way of a corporate tax base remained in the metropolis after decades of Cold War division. Even with tax incentives to encourage people to live in the city, Berlin became less known for cultural, political, and economic leadership than for its anarchists and other fringe constituencies. Today, in an attempt to develop a viable tax base and to bolster the city's renewed status as the capital of a united Germany, Berlin is offering businesses assistance with moving and setting themselves up in the city.

Is encouraging business migration a zero-sum game that only takes business away from another German city? Not necessarily. Fork Unstable Media, for example, was lured to Berlin with city aid to help it find new office space, but it retained its presence in Hamburg.

New Media Spark, which funds startups, is a U.K.-based firm with offices in Stockholm, Boston, Madrid, and India that opened a Berlin office in 2000. "It's more fragmented here in Germany," says Anders Enochson, senior investment manager of Spark in Germany."It has to do with Germany being more decentralized. The first thing we had to decide was to go into Berlin or Munich. Most VCs are in Munich."

Munich, says Enochson, was the first German city to realize what it could gain from providing assistance to technology startups. As a result, Munich is the home to more hard-core technology companies, while Berlin is making a name for itself as a center for creative media. Some of the latter's success does come at the expense of nearby Hamburg, which has long served as Germany's media capital.

A business trip to Berlin is pretty simple for Americans because English is widely spoken. In my first trip to Berlin, in fact, I found it difficult to find someone who did not speak English to serve as a victim of my poor German-language skills. This shouldn't have surprised me, however, because ever since Frederick the Great and his parents welcomed victims of French religious persecution and other political refugees, Berlin has been a remarkably international city filled with a vibrant mix of languages and peoples. After suffering setbacks during the Nazi persecutions and the population outflow of the Cold War years, this internationalism is rebounding strongly.

Oliver Vater, managing director of Düsseldorf-based advertising firm Add2media, notes that northern Europe, in general, tends to have higher numbers of English-speakers than southern Europe; it also has higher levels of Internet adoption. "The Internet is a global medium," Vater says, "but it is very localized." As a result, he says, ad campaigns still need to be in local languages.

Localized marketing in the various regions of Germany is a capability touted by online marketer Adtech. "We're able to localize the user in 80 regions," says Dirk Freytag, public relations representative for Adtech. He notes some differences between Germany and surrounding countries; for example, he says, marketers in Spain want data on unique users, and consequently cookies are used more often there. German firms are more likely to simply count the number of ads served. "There's no question in Germany about how many unique users you get," Freytag says. "They're not interested."

The mix of regions, languages, and governments provides many opportunities for e-business in Germany, opportunities that German e-business has yet to fully exploit. Thomas Nisters, corporate communications manager for Hamburg-based consultancy IconMedialab, points to Stockholm, Sweden, where people can submit their government documents over the Internet, and says that electronic banking transactions are also more up-to-date in Scandinavia than in Germany. For now, Germany is playing an aggressive game of catch-up, building up its education sector, working with its technology businesses, and rethinking its regulation of employment and online commerce.

Wherever the technology business is based in Germany, it has a hard-working and well-educated workforce to draw on, as well as good connections with universities and research institutions. "The technology is excellent here, the knowledge, the skills," says Enochson of Sparks. "They like technology."