Radio and tagging technologies have loads of promise - though the applications may not be quite what you were expecting, says Quocirca's Rob Bamforth. RFID and its close cousin near field communications (NFC) have both been touted for great and sexy futuristic applications. These range from the tagging and tracking of all consumer goods to the conversion of mobile phones into all purpose 'super wallets' where simply waving the phone at the checkout would pay for your items.

Working out your budgets and trying to figure out the tech priorities for your HR department in 2010? Nick Heath has a few suggestions for HR directors as to where to invest that cash on technology to get the most benefits for your team and the rest of the business. Consider standardising your systemsTake a look at what you do in the HR department and the chances are a number of companies are doing exactly the same thing: processes like payroll and benefits administration or training and recruitment will need to be carried out at any large organisation. As a result, adopting standardised systems for common processes is worth considering for enterprises that are relying on expensive, bespoke IT systems.

Zurich Financial Services has announced an outsourcing megadeal. The company said yesterday is has signed a 10 and a half year deal with CSC to supply datacentre and IT services.

eBay has released an app for BlackBerry. The application, co-developed by the auction site and RIM, lets users search, track and buy items using their smartphone.

The Metropolitan Police's Central e-Crime Unit arrested two people earlier this month for the suspected criminal distribution of the Zeus Trojan. A spokesman for the Met Police told silicon.com sister site ZDNet UK on Thursday that the man and woman were arrested on 3 November, but have been released on bail and not yet been formally charged.

Money transfer, location-based services and mobile health monitoring are likely to be among the most widespread mobile applications within the next three years. The increasing adoption of smartphones and the success of app stores has ignited the mobile apps market (follow the link for silicon.com's run down of the top iPhone apps for business).

Four men have been sentenced to prison time for being part of a gang that stole just under £500,000 from UK bank customers. The men were sentenced last Friday at Southwark Crown Court in London for their part in an international criminal network that stole the money from 138 account holders.

In this age of mobile working, should businesses consider ditching their offices? Richard Leyland weighs up the pros and cons. At the recent Workplace Trends conference, one speaker dared to ask: "Do we even need an office these days?"

The controversial ID project has hit another delay, with the government missing its own deadline to get the cards into the hands of Manchester residents. The Home Office announced today that people living or working in Manchester will now be able to enrol their details for an ID card from 30 November, with the first cards issued around 10 days after enrolment.

As the hype around microblogging builds, should your business join the tweet-fest or keep schtum? silicon.com's Natasha Lomas deconstructs this Digital Dilemma. So you've heard about Twitter. You might even know what the word 'tweet' means. Well done. Your finger is well and truly riding the social media pulse. But here's the rub: should your business join the tweet-fest and set up shop on Twitter? Is microblogging the new marketing?

Organisations that lose individuals' data could face a fine of up to £500,000 under proposals being considered by the government. From next year, the privacy watchdog the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) will be able to fine companies that recklessly or maliciously breach the Data Protection Act (DPA). The Ministry of Justice yesterday launched a public consultation on the maximum amount such fines can run to - a figure it proposes should be set at £500,000.

Businesses that want to use green IT to save big bucks need to look beyond the server room and start getting creative with their business software. Companies should stop thinking that green IT ends with ramping up server utilisation or replacing desktop PCs with thin clients, Warren Wilson, senior analyst with Ovum, told the Green IT Expo in London this week.

Soon offshoring will no longer offer the considerable tax incentive it has to date. Lawyers Belinda Doshi and Nick Beecham explain how financial firms can protect their business. Banks, insurance companies and other financial services providers should be aware of an important change to the VAT rules due to come into effect on 1 January 2010.

Businesses thinking of switching to cloud computing should expect a bumpy probation period, if the experience of The Telegraph Media Group (TMG) is anything to go by. The company's CIO Paul Cheesbrough knows all about the challenges of moving to the cloud, after recently migrating 2,000 staff from Microsoft Outlook and Exchange to Google Apps Premier Edition and Google's email archiving service Postini.

While the debate over bankers' bonuses may still be generating headlines, it seems the financial services industry has found one way to cut back - slash IT budgets. Financial services firms' IT budgets fell by 8.3 per cent between 2008 and 2009, meaning the banks have cut their budgets more than other industries, and saw spending fall by 6.8 per cent year-on-year.

Fraudsters have attempted to steal an estimated $100m from corporate bank accounts using malware and money mules, the FBI said yesterday. The FBI is seeing several new victim complaints and cases every week, according to an Internet Crime Complaint Center report.

Since Google launched its Wave collaboration platform this year businesses have been testing how they can make use of the system. The Wave platform offers users a chance to chat and work together in real-time within a window in a web browser that Google calls a 'wave'.

Microsoft announced on Friday it is to kill off its Office Accounting product line. Microsoft's Redmond campus. The software giant has called time on accounting software(Photo credit: Microsoft)

Amazon has launched a new payments system based around a user's memorable phrase. The PayPhrase service, launched yesterday in the US, will see Amazon users able to combine a set of payment details - such as their credit card information and shipping details - and then name the data with a memorable phrase.

Drivers with contactless bank cards will soon be able to use them to pay for their parking. From next year, parking meters in the West End will accept contactless payments from motorists with wave and pay functionality built into their debit or credit cards.

It may have only been launched a few months ago but Google's Wave collaboration platform is already attracting attention from businesses, according to one of the key architects of the service. Lars Rasmussen, Google's software engineering manager and co-creator of Wave, said unlike typical Google services, Wave has stoked early interest among both consumers and enterprises.

Apple's iPhone might be seen by many as largely a consumer device, with games and media apps regularly topping the 'What's Hot' list on iTunes. However, the App Store currently stocks more than 2,000 business apps and, with the iPhone currently dominating around 13 per cent of the smartphone market, the device's potential as a business tool can no longer be ignored. Here we take a look at some of the best business apps that can help turn your iPhone into a portable office.

Don Trotta has left his role as CIO with Barclays and taken a new position with SAP. Trotta has been appointed the ERP company's SVP and global head of financial services, responsible for product strategy, development and overall market positioning activities in the banking and insurance industries globally, according to SAP.

Some businesses that are partway through upgrading to Windows Vista are asking to swap the OS for Windows 7, according to Microsoft. Speaking at the London launch of Windows 7 today John Curran, the Microsoft exec who until recently headed up the Windows client group in the UK, said: "This is the first time that we have had customers talking about slipstreaming the deployment of one OS into another version, so they started with Vista and continue with Windows 7."

If you haven't guessed already: 2009 was a bad year for IT spending, analysts have found. But fear not - things are looking brighter for the coming years. According to research from Gartner, enterprise tech spending is down 5.2 per cent on 2008 figures.