Compiled on KLM 1508 flying Norwich to Amsterdam and dispatched to silicon.com via wi-fi from my Amsterdam hotel a day later The expression 'a baker's dozen' originated around the 13th century in an early statute instituted by Henry III called the 'Assize of Bread and Ale', which aimed to prevent customers being short changed.

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Airwave CEO talks to silicon.com about the future of emergency services comms, the 2012 Olympics and data question marks O2, Orange, T-Mobile and Vodafone may loom large on most people's mobile radar but for the emergency services the name that matters is Airwave: every UK police force uses Airwave's Tetra network for their radio communications and, in the next year, every ambulance trust and Fire & Rescue service will be hooked up to the dedicated emergency services network too.

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Radical public sector spending cuts could spur government into delivering services through citizen-created sites and web 2.0 technology, senior Whitehall figures have revealed. Public service spending will need to fall by £50bn by 2020 according to Alexis Cleveland, director general for transformational government at the Cabinet Office.

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Version 3.0 of the iPhone OS will be available soon. Here's a tour of the main enhancements. The cut, copy and paste feature is long overdue. The interface is simple and user-friendly, and it works across all applications including notes, emails, messages, and text on web pages. To access the feature, just double-tap on the desired text. You then can move the grab points to select as much, or as little, text as you'd like. Choose the "cut" or "copy" option, open a new document, and tap the "paste" button. If you make a mistake, you can undo your action by shaking the iPhone.

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French visitors to Disneyland Paris will be able to access venue information by using their phones to snap 2D barcodes. The so-called Flashcodes - a French take on QR codes, which are big in Japan - will push visitors to a mobile portal containing a range of Disney info such as discount coupons, show times, videos and games.

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Despite a £75m government plan to roll out 25,000 mobile devices to police forces nationwide by 2010, the majority of forces remain unable to take full advantage of mobile tech. According to Jan Berry, the Home Office-appointed independent advocate for reducing police bureaucracy, handheld deployments are failing to live up to expectations.

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LTE? Isn't that a Chinese mobile maker?No, no, that's ZTE but you're in the right industry at least. LTE stands for Long Term Evolution - which, in itself, is short for Long Term Evolution of Universal Terrestrial Radio Access Network. LTE refers to the likely technical upgrade path for 3G mobile networks. Upgrade path?LTE is all about the mobile industry defining a standard to enable a move to an all-IP-based, data-centric infrastructure. LTE will also mean a speed boost for mobile networks, with downlink speeds of up to 100Mbps and uplink speeds of up to 50Mbps.

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Orange is aiming to launch its first Android handset for the UK before the end of 2009, and says the phone could even be out in the next three months. Yves Maitre, Orange's head of devices, told silicon.com sister site ZDNet UK at a London event on Thursday that the operator would "definitely" launch an Android phone during this year.

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Virgin Media could start suspending persistent file-sharers on a temporary basis, using information provided to it by the Universal record company. The ISP announced on Monday that it would, before Christmas, launch an all-you-can-eat music download service for its users, based on a monthly subscription fee. The tracks will all be DRM-free.

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Businesses can now build and run their external websites using technology from software-as-a-service company Salesforce.com. Launched today, Force.com Sites essentially uses the Force.com cloud platform to support customer websites and online applications.

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"Emergency services are not delivered from an office environment sat behind a desk. They're delivered on the street and not just the high street - they're delivered from remote areas, in extreme conditions, we're mobilised 24/7 365 in all sorts of conditions whether it be weather, storm, flood, snow," Olaf Baars, the deputy chief fire officer and president of civil contingency members association, Bapco, told the Westminster eForum keynote seminar last week. "The expectation is we can operate in all of them." But can they? UK consumers may have a range of UK mobile broadband networks to choose from to fulfil their data needs, the emergency services don't have the same luxury.

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The government's interim Digital Britain report doesn't offer enough help for business, according to a senior Cable & Wireless executive. The final report, due out this week, will set the government's digital agenda for the coming years, tackling subjects including broadband, spectrum distribution and online content. Phil Male, operations director at Cable & Wireless, described the interim report, published in January, as "an opportunity missed".

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The government has said that the Digital Britain report is to be delayed, and has confirmed timing for when Lord Carter will step down. The Digital Britain report, which is expected to recommend greater broadband access for the whole of the UK, was due to be published on Tuesday 16 June.

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The government has announced plans for a 50p per month levy on all fixed copper lines to fund the expansion of fibre broadband to areas where the market fears to tread. The proposals come as part of the government's Digital Britain report - its blueprint for ensuring the UK does not become the laggard of the global digital economy.

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Barclaycard is increasing the number of its cardholders that will have contactless functionality on their plastic. Barclaycard Gold and Classic cardholders on the receiving end of a new or replacement card will now be able to make payments of up to £10 by swiping their card against a reader, thanks to contactless payment technology within the card, similar to the system used for Oyster travelcards on the London Underground.

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Approximately two in three UK adults are still not using mobile banking - with both security and inertia playing a part in their decision to shun the technology. According to new research from analyst house Gartner, 30 per cent of UK adults said they were using mobile banking services at the end of last year - leaving 70 per cent who are avoiding the services.

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The Apple iPhone may have got a makeover last week but it's not enough to convince CIOs the device has a place in business. In the latest silicon.com CIO Jury, IT chiefs were asked whether they're planning to offer Apple's touchscreen device as part of their range of corporate mobile phones - and the vast majority of IT chiefs said they are not.

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Google is so firmly entrenched as most people's search engine of choice that it's entered common parlance as a verb. But it's not the only game in town: newcomers are pushing alternative models promising to tame the internet using crowd sourcing and "computational knowledge engines".

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Communications minister Lord Carter has put the idea of mobile coverage on the London Underground back on the government agenda - only months after it emerged a planned Tube mobile trial had been shelved indefinitely. Back in March, silicon.com revealed Transport for London (TfL) had quietly dropped plans for a six-month mobile Tube trial. The pilot, which was to have considered whether it would be technically and commercially viable for coverage to be extended across the entire Underground network, was shelved after TfL said it had not received any commercially "credible" proposals from the market.

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Communications minister Lord Carter has said that "substantial savings" can be made in public spending by building a government-wide cloud computing platform. In the government's Digital Britain report published yesterday, Carter said the so-called "G-Cloud" should be created within the next three years, to allow local and central government departments to share centrally hosted applications.

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On Tuesday, Opera Software released Opera Unite, its application platform for turning your computer into a server from which you can share photos, files, notes, music and websites. Opera Unite's web server is a component of the latest experimental version of the Opera 10 browser - available for Windows, Mac and Linux. But viewers can access the content from any browser.

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Virtualisation software company Citrix is aiming to drive uptake of its technology by giving away several of its latest products for free. The company's server virtualisation software, XenServer, has been available for free for several months and Citrix is now offering Citrix Receiver, its application delivery client, and Dazzle, its self-service application management software, on the same basis from this week.

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The science of web search is a constantly moving feast. In his new column Net Effect, Stewart Baines outlines the basics. Ever wonder how to rise above the noise?

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Many of the iPhone's long-awaited features will finally become a reality on Wednesday when Apple rolls out iPhone OS 3.0. Current iPhone owners can download the software from iTunes for free, and iPod Touch users can get it as well, but for a fee of $9.95, just like the last OS update. What time exactly, we don't know yet. Apple will only say iPhone OS 3.0 will come out at some point on Wednesday.

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A government plan to allow the intelligence services to monitor all UK web communications is technologically impossible, according to experts from the London School of Economics. The Interception Modernisation Programme (IMP) calls for internet service providers to record the traffic details of all web communications. They must also present those details to the intelligence services and other public authorities in a way that establishes the links between different pieces of data associated with, for example, an individual's phone, email address or user IDs.

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The Digital Britain report has drawn criticism from politicians and technology experts over its proposals for dealing with fibre rollouts and illegal file-sharing. The report, published on Tuesday, outlines the government's plans for the UK's telecommunications infrastructure and digital economy. Shortly after its publication, Jeremy Hunt, the Conservative Party's shadow secretary of state for culture, media and sport, called Digital Britain a "colossal disappointment" and lambasted the plan's proposal for a monthly 50p tax on fixed copper lines.

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IBM is to invest millions of dollars for research into new mobile services and capabilities. The company said on Wednesday it is setting aside $100m over five years to "bring simple, easy-to-use services to the millions of people who have bypassed using the personal computer as their primary method of accessing the internet".

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Apple has patched nearly four dozen security holes in the iPhone and iPod Touch with its iPhone OS 3.0 release, made available on Wednesday. The 46 flaws could allow an attacker to bypass security restrictions, shut down an application, disclose sensitive information, conduct cross-site scripting and cross-site request forgery attacks, or take over the device, Apple said in an advisory.

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BT is about to formally launch a virtualised infrastructure service called BT Virtual Data Centre, which will form the basis of its cloud-computing strategy. VDC involves the virtualisation of servers, storage, networks and security delivered to customers via an online portal as cloud-based services. On Thursday, BT's Global Services division announced the customer rollout of VDC, which will initially target multinational corporate customers and the public sector.

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Competition in the smartphone market is heating up this summer as one new hot smartphone after another hits the street. The latest is T-Mobile's next Google Android device, called the myTouch. T-Mobile is set to announce the new smartphone today. It is the second smartphone the carrier has introduced that uses Google's open-source mobile operating system, Android. T-Mobile introduced the world's first Google Android phone, called the G1, last autumn. And so far the company claims it has sold more than one million devices.

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All new mobiles will be packing a RFID chip by summer 2010 - ultimately opening up the possibility of your phone also becoming the keys to your car or your house. That's the prediction of Ericsson's VP of systems architecture, Håkan Djuphammar, speaking at the mobile infrastructure company's Business Innovation Forum in Stockholm on Tuesday.

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Intel and Nokia have announced a long-term relationship that will see the development of Intel-powered, Linux-based, handheld mobile computing devices. The deal between the chipmaker and handset manufacturer was announced on Tuesday. Intel and Nokia will collaborate on several open source mobile Linux software projects and Intel will license HSPA/3G modem intellectual property from Nokia, the companies said.

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Canvas eh? Are we talking painting or boxing here?Neither - it's a broadcast industry initiative around TV over broadband. It was announced in December 2008 and is expected to go live in 2010. What does that mean then?Well the broadcasters BBC and ITV along with telco BT have teamed up to create a platform for bringing on-demand content to the UK's televisions through new broadband-enabled receivers.

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In a series of gateway reviews published between 2002 and 2007, and released to the public for the first time last week, the Office of Government Commerce (OGC) set out the difficulties that have faced the National Programme for IT (NPfIT). Of the 31 reviews into different aspects of the programme, nine were given a 'red' status indicating immediate action on the project was needed.

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Nokia Siemens Networks will buy Nortel Networks' wireless technology business for $650m. Nokia Siemens said on Friday it will use Nortel's CDMA and long term evolution (LTE) technology to expand its presence in the US. CDMA, (code division multiple access), is one of the two major networks operating in the US and is used by Verizon Wireless and Sprint. LTE is 4G wireless technology that will potentially replace today's mobile networks.

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Businesses have been slow to adopt unified communications, but Freeform Dynamics's Josie Sephton says its popularity could soon improve. The evangelists are calling for businesses to implement unified communications (UC), citing a whole raft of reasons - from cost savings to improved customer service and better productivity.

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