Google's country head in India, Rajan Anandan, told the Wall Street Journal that the company forecasts India will reach at least 300 million Internet users by 2014, up from about 100 million now.

With just eight percent of its 1.2-billion population online, India is already the third-largest Internet market by users, behind China and the United States.

"Despite a lot of the infrastructure challenges we have as a country, 100 million Indians are online," Anandan, a former Microsoft executive who took over Google's India operations in March, told the newspaper.

"They're spending a huge amount of time online and they're doing a varied set of things online."

But capitalizing on that huge emerging audience will be challenging in a country where television and newspapers draw the most advertising and the government is throwing up regulatory hurdles.

"Making money off that growing audience, though, is proving difficult thus far for Google and other Internet companies," Anandan told the newspaper.

Indian online ad spending is only about $200 million per year -- a small fraction of the $80 billion global digital advertising industry.

E-commerce like airline and movie ticket sales generate about $5 billion in revenue in India compared to a massive $80 billion in neighbouring China, the newspaper said.

Anandan said he expected the next 200 million Indian web users to mainly access the Internet on the high-speed wireless networks that carriers are in the process of rolling out countrywide.

But for India to increase Internet use it is also crucial that mobile handset makers bring out smartphones at prices which India's masses can afford, he said.

Richard Gammel filed a suit in federal court in Southern California and asked a judge to give it class-action status to represent everyone who acquired HP stock between November 22 of last year and August 18.

The world's largest computer maker "issued materially false and misleading statements regarding the company's business and financial results," lawyers representing Gammel charged in court documents available online Thursday.

The suit specifically targeted HP chief executive Leo Apotheker and chief financial officer Catherine Lesjak.

HP misled investors about the health of its personal computer business and the potential for a webOS mobile operating system obtained by the acquisition of Palm to be a "game changing event" for the company.

Last month HP said it planned one last production run of its TouchPad tablet computer powered by webOS, which became a hot seller following a price cut and the announcement the company was killing the tablet computer.

Citing disappointing sales, HP, the world's largest personal computer maker, announced on August 18 that it was ending production of the TouchPad, its rival to Apple's iPad, after just seven weeks on the market.

Palo Alto, California-based HP also said it was halting production of phones based on the webOS mobile operating system acquired from Palm last year for $1.2 billion.

HP also announced in August that it was exploring a spinoff of its PC unit in a historic shift away from the consumer market.