How bloggers and new media will make their presence felt in the coming general election.

You can see why the political parties are nervous about the general election. The media playing field on which it will be fought has a new, unfamiliar terrain thanks to online competition. Local newspapers may have closed or slimmed down, but political bloggers have forced politicians to rethink their relationship with the press.

What was once a cosy, exclusive Fleet Street corps of lobby reporters must now include irreverent, self-made stars of the blogosphere such as Guido Fawkes and Iain Dale. And new technology, from the online video that exposed Alan Duncan’s belief that MPs were forced to live on “rations” to the Conservatives publishing shadow cabinet expenses in real time, has changed the public’s expectations.

Set-piece campaigns, for instance, are now more problematic than ever before. A £500,000 Conservative poster campaign featuring an apparently airbrushed David Cameron was intended to get the election year off to a flying start. Within a few days, dozens of photoshopped spoofs appeared on MyDavidCameron.com. But new media also presents politicians of all persuasions with a chance to talk more directly to the public than ever before. Tom Watson, Labour MP for West Bromwich East, is one of many who have become adept at using micro-blogging website Twitter to speak simultaneously to constituents and the media.

Mr Cameron himself has assiduously used websites such as Mumsnet to reach out directly – with varying levels of success – to specific groups of voters.

And blogging tools and idioms, too, have allowed nimble new pressure groups such as the TaxPayers’ Alliance, widely seen as a deniable attack-dog of the Tory Right, to emerge.

The fact remains, however, that the audience for political blogs is fairly limited. It may no longer be possible to dismiss them as a small band of bedroom obsessives poring over the traditional media’s droppings, but newspapers will still lead in setting the tone of the popular campaign.

Yet while many newspapers will still drip daily scorn on Gordon Brown rather than Mr Cameron, the social media will also play a key role. The internet, after all, can provide good copy. It is for their impact on the sociology of the political class and the Fourth Estate that this generation of political bloggers will be remembered.

Since the 2005 election, we have raced past the tipping point. Facebook has 23 million British users. About half of the eligible voters are social networkers, sharing and seeking recommendations among peers rather than trusting broadcast messages. The real contest is not the three-way blogs/newspapers/politicians fight, but how effectively each can cast its bait into the social networking sites, and who will have the greatest effect.

So what can we expect from this campaign? There will be widgets explaining tactical voting options to more people than ever before. As a result, the numbers voting against parties rather than for them will increase. Small parties without the resources to hit doorsteps may use these tools to reach that swelling protest vote.

The major parties will have “deniable outriders” to do poisonous negative campaigning on their behalf. Politicians will get personally savaged. There will be more tenuous attack-oriented arguments – ones that journalists wouldn’t have touched in the past.

The most interesting contribution social media may make is that it could offer the Tories an opportunity to project themselves as a responsible government-in-waiting. Tory strategists have already acknowledged that public pessimism may hurt them: if things really are that bad, the Conservatives know there’s a risk that the public could put aside their distaste for Gordon Brown and stick with the devil they know.

This will be a “downswing” election dominated by spending cuts rather than promised tax-handouts. Being positive will be difficult, and attack-bloggers won’t exactly help. So to sell the idea that responsible positive action is possible in a restricted economic climate, parties need a “big idea”.

The Tories’ “post-bureaucratic age” narrative relies heavily upon dynamic collaboration, a hallmark of the social web. It aims to apply open-source thinking to convene good judgment from a disparate community and to cut waste by reducing pen-pushers and consultants and by automating processes.

One of the brains the Tories have turned to is MySociety founder Tom Steinberg. His fingerprints appear to be all over shadow culture secretary Jeremy Hunt’s pledge of £1 million in Cabinet Office funding to the best idea for crowd-sourcing public intelligence.Several politicians would be tempted by the reflexive offer to let voters “have your say”, but this is a cannier step. Mr Hunt is looking to get the public to help interpret and re-present government data.

The Conservatives need the social web to help create a positive, reassuring buzz around them. Offering a narrative that breaks the economic stalemate may be Cameron’s brightest hope. Playing a part in that may be the real impact that social media has on the 2010 election.

Paul Evans blogs at blog.localdemocracy.org.uk

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/election-2010/

The rapid pace of technology is creating ‘micro-generations’, where teenagers are left behind by younger siblings, says James Delingpole.

My 11-year-old son, like all 11-year-old sons, thinks his Dad is incredibly, risibly out-of-touch. He mocks me for using words like “video” when I mean “DVD”, for preferring CDs to free downloads, for watching TV on the television instead of on the laptop, and for wearing my shirt with one top button undone when obviously it should be two.

But what the poor boy doesn’t yet realise is that the last laugh will be on me. Whereas it took me three decades to become the embarrassing fuddy-duddy I am now, he and his nine-year-old sister are going to be past their best in less than 10 years. Such is the weird side-effect of our fast-accelerating technology: you’re past it by the time you hit 20.

This phenomenon of the micro-generation gap – where 16 year-olds sneer at 19 year-olds for being oh-so-square, Daddy-O – came to light six months ago, in a widely publicised report written by a teenager on work experience at Morgan Stanley. Teenagers, revealed Matthew Robson (then 15), in a report named How Teenagers Consume Media, use their laptops as radios (streaming music from, say, Last FM so as to avoid adverts and DJ prattle), get round high cinema prices by watching pirated DVDs, prefer Facebook to Bebo, and never use Twitter, which they consider a hobby for old people like Stephen Fry.

The last two points came as an especial surprise to us oldsters, who imagined that teenagers Tweeted at least as regularly as we did, and that Facebook was more of a student-age thing while people of Robson’s age preferred MySpace. But we can hardly be blamed for failing to keep up with each tiny micro-trend: not when a new one seems to turn up every couple of years.

“People two, three or four years apart are having completely different experiences of technology,” Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project told The New York Times last week. “College students scratch their heads at what their high school siblings are doing, and they scratch their heads at their younger siblings. It has sped up generational differences.”

I’ve noticed this even in the tiny gap – exactly two years – between my younger children. Girl (9) is totally smitten with her Nintendo DS, as are most of her schoolfriends. Boy (11) considers that particular games console so impossibly uncool he won’t even borrow it. For him the only device worth having is an Apple iTouch, just like all his friends have got. This, I get the impression, has less to do with the joy of playing the games themselves than the matchless pleasure of running up huge and pointless bills downloading new apps from iTunes.

Before Boy and Girl came along I used to get all my techno advice from my stepson, Jim. But at 23, Jim is starting to seem dangerously passé. The other day we were playing on our new joint Christmas present to ourselves – Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 – on his Xbox, and wondering why the gameplay seemed to end after so few levels. After further inquiry Jim found the answer. “Hey, things have changed,” he said. “Nobody plays games on their own any more. They fight other people. On the internet.”

This is confirmed by research from Pew. Teenagers are much more likely to play online games than are twentysomethings (78 per cent versus 50 per cent), and also more likely to send instant messages (68 per cent versus 59 per cent). Which makes Jim as much a prisoner of his generation as I am of mine. Like so many kids of his era, he takes enormous pride in his ability to write text messages at high speed, because that’s what people born in the mid-Eighties trained themselves to do. When they hit their early teens and got their first mobiles, texts were the affordable alternative to phone calls, as well as the best way of communicating without being overheard by your parents.

For teenagers now, though, texting has been largely superseded by instant messaging – as Stephanie Lipman, a 17-year-old Londoner, explains. “I did text for a while, but instant messaging is so much better – like a constant stream-of-consciousness. You don’t have to bother with ‘Hello. How are you?’ or any of that. You just have this series of conversations with your friends which you can add on to when you’re in the mood.”

As Stephanie says, she just happened to be the right age for the right trend. Like most of her friends she subscribes to BlackBerry Messenger. When she was younger, BlackBerries were things that only businessmen had, but she came of age just in time to catch the tipping point for their transformation into the must-have teen accessory.

And what of the even-younger generations? According to Mizuku Ito, of the University of California Humanities Research Institute, they’ll make less distinction between online friends and real friends, and will be more discerning about what they choose to take from popular culture. And according to Larry Rosen, a California professor, they’ll be better at multi-tasking: his research has shown that 16 to 18 year-olds can perform seven tasks on average in their free time (texting, checking Facebook, watching TV, etc), whereas people in their early 20s can only handle six, while those in their 30s perform about five and a half.

My own prediction, from watching my 9 and my 11 year-old in action, is that kids will give up on conventional television. Boy and Girl now watch all their programmes via the internet on laptops, so that they can see exactly what they want when they want: Girl goes for Horrible Histories or cookery programmes on BBC iPlayer; Boy downloads the latest episodes of The Simpsons from the US. No one showed them how to do this, and they’re not especially techno-minded: they just intuited it in that scary way children do.

Will they all abandon printed books and start reading everything on Kindle? Or will it be the next micro-generation that does that? And will there be some kind of retro backlash where, in a statement of difference, kids start gravitating back to books and old-fashioned texting, or even vinyl LPs for their superior, warm, analogue sound?

The truth is we just don’t know, and anyone who claims otherwise is talking nonsense. As The Spectator’s techno guru Rory Sutherland, aka Wiki Man, points out, there’s not even consistency among age groups around the world. “For example, US kids were much earlier adopters of instant messaging than British kids, except in odd pockets like Cleveland, Ohio – where texting was huge. And in Japan eBay isn’t big, but Yahoo is colossal. And in Poland, they don’t Tweet, they Gadu Gadu, while in India and Brazil they prefer Orkut to Facebook.”

All we can say with confidence about future technologies is that they’re not going to be the disaster we Luddite oldies instinctively fear. (Remember the fuss about how texting was going to wipe out a generation’s literacy, thanks to abbreviations like gr8? These were largely an urban myth: hardly anyone used them, and those who did were shown by research to be children with the higher reading ages.) And that, in another couple of years, we’re going to find ourselves more passé than we could ever have imagined.

http://www.workfromhomeinuk.com/

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/twitter/

Microsoft is placing big bets on Office 2010 changing life for small businesses.
Microsoft is shifting its focus from selling small businesses licences to install its software to a subscription model as it prepares for the launch of Office 2010. The biggest innovations in Office 2010 are associated with mobile phone and internet connectivity.

Robert Epstein, head of small business, Microsoft UK, told Your Business that he expected the addition of web-based applications to the Office range to radically change the way that small businesses buy and use IT.

The applications will let businesses access, edit and share their Word, Excel and Powerpoint files remotely through the internet even if the software is not installed on their laptops or smart phones.

A standard bundle of software, which includes hosted Exchange email that can be accessed via an internet browser anywhere, costs £6.71 a month with a 12 month contract. (e-mail only is £3.36)

Mr Epstein said Microsoft was “recommending” that all small businesses take a serious look at this way of buying IT and services rather than acquiring hardware like servers that had to be maintained.

”For a small business the obvious offering we are recommending is the online route,” he said. “It makes an awful lot of sense.”

”We could be aiming towards 20pc usage within 12 to 18 months in some shape or form,” he added.

Firms with security concerns about using software and saving data on an outside system may decide it is not appropriate, said Mr Epstein. Those that had paid for bespoke applications to work with their software are also likely to prefer to have the software installed on their own IT systems.

Analyst firm Gartner is predicting that working with internet-hosted software, known as Cloud computing, will be the hot technology trend in 2010, but Microsoft believes that most small businesses do not know about the potential. “The awareness of this is incredibly low. There’s a completely new way of acquiring and using IT,” said Mr Epstein.

Unlike some software service providers, Microsoft will allow businesses to use both installed Microsoft software and its software that is hosted on the internet.

It means that businesses could chose to move just new members of staff onto the online service rather than junking their existing systems overnight.

Microsoft has been selling web-based software to small businesses for some time, including its Microsoft Office Live Web software that lets firms create websites and, for a fee, access documents and manage customer information online.

But Mr Epstein said the latest updates now gave small businesses access to sophisticated business process tools in the office and remotely and the ability to better manage the demands of the increasing flow of information about customers and suppliers.

”It’s the big leveller for small business. That capability when the snow hits to convert that crucial meeting in room five to a video conference online with document sharing over your phone, web browser or PC,” said Mr Epstein.

Microsoft cut the cost of its existing subscription-based services by over 30% in November and has just announced lower than expected US prices for its five Office 2010 packages.

It was announced as new pricing and the change varied across the individual products. In a move that may appeal to start ups and home-based businesses, those buying Business and Office Professional are able to install the software on both their PC and laptops. However, only the entry level Office Home and Student version is available as a family pack, allowing usage on three PCs in one household. This version does not contain Outlook.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/yourbusiness/

CES 2010: Amazon Kindle under threat from ‘unbreakable, light-as-paper’ Que e-reader.

A company founded by two Cambridge University professors is making an ambitious attempt to challenge Amazon, Sony, Apple and Co. in the increasingly competitive electronic book reader market.

Among the blackjack tables and cancan girls of Las Vegas’s famous strip, Plastic Logic unveiled a new e-reader with a screen made of plastic, rather than glass, that has the potential to reinvigorate newspaper and magazine publishing.

Henning Sirringhaus, one of the Cambridge dons who founded the company, which was spun out of the university’s Cavendish Laboratory in 2000, said the 10in screen on the Que reader is “unbreakable”. “It’s light, you can treat it like paper, you can stuff it in your briefcase,” he added.

Developers claim future devices based on the innovative technology might even be flexible enough to be rolled up like a sheet of papyrus. The current market leaders, Amazon’s Kindle and Sony ’s eReader, have been criticised for having heavy glass screens.

As they can connect to the internet through mobile phone networks, analysts believe e-readers open a new world to the publishing industry as new editions can be downloaded on to them effortlessly.

The huge potential impact of e-books was underlined this Christmas, when more people downloaded an electronic book from Amazon than ordered a hard copy.

Hearst, the US publisher of Cosmopolitan, Esquire and the San Francisco Chronicle, believes the trend towards e-books is so strong that it has produce its own its own e-reader – the Skiff – which at mere 0.25in thick is the slimmest on the market.

James McQuivey, analyst at Forrester Research, said the e-reader category is “red hot” and will “dominate” the CES (Consumer Electronics Show) trade fair , which sprawls over 1.8m square feet of exhibition space across Las Vegas’ most famous super-casinos.

“The Kindle set the bar pretty high. It’s the entire end-to-end experience, with instant delivery [of new books]” he said. “But Plastic Logic is clearly pointing to the next generation of these devices.”

Plastic Logic has already signed deals with the Financial Times and USA Today and is in discussions with other major newspaper and magazine publishers.

However, the Que is launching into a ferociously competitive market currently dominated by the Kindle and Sony’s eReader. Yesterday, Korean electronics group Samsung entered the market, and host of other companies, including Indian start-up Notion Ink, are expected to use the trade fair to launch rival products.

Amazon has attempted to stamp its authority on the market by announcing it would make its larger 9.7in Kindle available 100 countries later this month, following its launch in the US last year.

The Consumer Electronics Association, which hosts the Las Vegas show, estimates that e-reader sales will double each year before peaking at 16m in 2014.

Although the market for e-readers is expected to grow in the short-term, some analysts say the products may be superseded by so-called “tablet” computers, which allow users to browse the internet and play games as well as read books.

The launch of Apple ’s much-anticipated touchscreen tablet, thought to be called iSlate, on January 27, is expected to be the device which turns the e-reader market on its head.

Although Apple has not provided any details about the device, Kai Fu Lee, a former employee and ex-president of Google China, claims the California-based iPhone developer plans to sell 10m tablets at $1,000 (£628) a pop in the first year.

John Jacobs, of computer market research company DisplaySearch, estimates that sales of tablets could reach $3.5bn by the end of the year.

However, he warned that the key to creating a successful product is providing a comprehensive catalogue and an intuitive interface for consumers to browse and download titles.

“Apple does a great job of this. The question will be whether others can match or better what it did with music and the iStore,” he said.

Mr McQuivey said it was “impressive” that Plastic Logic has got its device to market ahead of Apple’s tablet, which has been rumoured since 2007, and suggested the iSlate should really be called the “isLate”.

Analysts warn that the array of tablets and smartbooks – a new category designed to fill the “gap” between sophisticated mobile phones and mini laptops – could stall the growth of the netbook and laptop market.

Lenovo, the Chinese-owned laptop maker that bought IBM’s PC business for $1.25bn in 2004, and Hewlett Packard both launched smartbooks this week.

The rise of this category is a boost to ARM, the British microchip designer, as most of the devices run on its smartphone chip designs.

As internet search giant Google vaults into the mobile phone market with the Nexus One, analysts say it will become increasingly difficult to draw a line between mobile phones and the new wave of handheld computers.

“The average consumer will be asking themselves ‘What the heck is this thing?’,” McQuivey said. “It’s not a phone, but it’s something that’s light that you carry with you all the time to give you an even richer experience wherever you go.”

Despite the recession and a sharp fall in electronics spending, Garry Sharpio, president and chief executive of the Consumer Electronics Association, said attendance is expected to hold steady at about 110,000 after a 20pc drop in numbers to last year’s show.

“In my 28 years of attending CES … I can honestly say there will be more innovation at this show than any one in history,” he said.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/ces/

Google is to launch its first official mobile phone, the Nexus One, in a move that will see the search giant directly challenge the dominance of Apple’s iPhone.

Called the Nexus One, Google will unveil the handset at its Silicon Valley headquarters in America tomorrow, and the device is set to go on sale there from January 12. A UK launch date has not yet been announced, but it is likely to follow early this year.

As increasing numbers of people are using their mobile phones to access the internet, Google has already launched its own mobile phone operating system, called Android, that works on a range of devices. However the Nexus One will be the first handset that the company has designed itself.

Like the iPhone, Android offers fully integrated web-browsing, music and video playing and a large library of applications that users can choose to install to add to their phone’s capabilities. One of the services likely to be available for the first time in America is European-based music service Spotify, which challenges Apple’s iTunes.

The Nexus One has been built by manufacturer HTC, and is rumoured toinclude a larger screen and better camera than those featured on the iPhone. It also offers free satnav capabilities, which are only available for an additional charge on the iPhone.

The handset is likely to cost consumers $179.99 (£111) on a contract with T-Mobile, but will also be available for $529.99 (£324) without any contract tying users to a specific network.

Google’s announcement is timed to challenge the dominance of the world’s largest technology fair, the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, which takes place this week, and to overshadow Apple’s launch of a tablet computer, which is expected on January 26.

The name Nexus One is a reference to the film Blade Runner, which is reported to have led to the estate of author Philip K Dick threatening to sue Google.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/

If you want phone, broadband and digital television, consider bundling up with one provider, where typical savings could amount to £130 a year.

If you want phone, broadband and digital television, consider bundling up with one provider, where typical savings could amount to £130 a year. There are often discounts for customers who buy two or more services through one supplier and it is more convenient to deal with one provider instead of three.

For example, if you sign up for the Sky+HD package, you would pay £28.50 a month, compared to £39 a month if you subscribed to television, phone and broadband separately.

But remember to make sure that you are comparing like-for-like bundles. In their bid to win customers, some providers of bundled packages sometimes exclude costs such as line rental and call charges.

Julie Owens, spokesperson at moneysupermarket.com said, “People that pay separately for a phone, internet and TV package can save a substantial sum over the year by bundling their products with one provider. With providers fighting for new customers and dropping their prices, savvy consumers can easily change to a better deal.

“Having to speak with different providers and organising various bills can be a nightmare. However, with bundled deals you’ll receive just one bill each month making it far easier to keep an eye on expenses. Also if something goes wrong you only need to ring one provider.”

One of the main reasons that people stick with the same providers is that buying digital television, broadband or home phone services online can prove a frustrating experience. Often the comparison websites require a level of product knowledge and techno-speak that is unfamiliar to many of us.

For example, according to research by Simplifydigital, eight out of 10 customers do not know which suitable “download limit” is relative to their usage, while seven out of 10 do not know what “up to 20mb” actually means in terms of increased computer speed.

But there is help for those who want to save money on these bills without the guess work. The new Simplify Personal Shopper is an interactive tool where users tell it what they want in plain English, much as they would a shop assistant, and it then goes away and matches their unique needs to the best value packages on the market.

For more information, call 0800 138 8388 or use the online service at www.simplifydigital.co.uk

http://www.utilitywarehousenetwork.com

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/new-year-money-makeover/

Shoppers staged a last minute rush to the high street yesterday ahead of the increase in VAT, as retailers reported sales were up a third on this time last year.

Sales of so-called “big ticket items” such as white goods, televisions and furniture were 31 per cent since Monday compared with the same period last year, according to retailer John Lewis.

These items provide shoppers with some of the best savings from the reduction in Value Added Tax, which today reverts to 17.5 per cent from 15 per cent.

A John Lewis spokesman said: “We had strong sales in the run up to Christmas and this has continued to be the case in the past week, meaning customers benefited from the lower rate of VAT.”

He added sales also increased as a result of pent up demand among shoppers who had delayed purchases earlier on in the year due to the uncertainty in the economy.

The retailer has promised to keep prices down until the end of January by absorbing the VAT rise instead of its customers.

Experts predicted that sales figures would begin to decline in the New Year as households reigned in their spending to reduce their debt and boost their savings.

Kien Tan, a retail director at PricewaterhouseCoopers, said: “I expect the sales momentum to begin tailing off. Unemployment is continuing to rise and the availability of credit is more difficult.”

Several other high street names, including Tesco, Boots and Morrisons have pledged not to raise the prices of thousands of goods, saying they would absorb the costs to customers when VAT reverts to 17.5 per cent on New Year’s Day.

Tesco claimed it was maintaining prices in a £12 million VAT freeze.

But the Daily Telegraph revealed data earlier this week showing the prices of many products have gone up in recent weeks, leading to accusations that retailers have already taken steps to protect their profits.

Tesco, Boots and Morrisons, however, insisted they were committed to offering great value to their customers and prices moved in line with market conditions.

Many retailers have campaigned against the VAT rise, saying it would be an “administrative nightmare” to introduce it during the January sales.

They warned it would lead to confusion among shoppers, particularly among smaller retailers who struggled to change their prices in time, leaving buyers seeing a lower value on price tickets and paying a higher value at the tills.

Trading Standards said it is giving shops two weeks grace to sort out the change in prices, but retailers will lose out if they are not implemented straight away as they still have to pay the Exchequer the 2.5 per cent increase.

A spokesman for Trading Standards said: “A lot of shops are not changing their prices straight away.”

• The cost of modern living rises today as millions of mobile phone, broadband and cable television customers see a rise in their monthly bills. Their bills were reduced when VAT was cut to 15 per cent but will now increase when VAT rises today by 2.5 per cent. A spokesman for mobile phone operator O2 said: “We have to follow what the Government is doing and it is an administrative headache for us.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/

Speculation over the impending arrival of its new tablet computer the iSlate has boosted the US technology company.

According to recent rumours, the technology company is set to launch a touch-sensitive mini-laptop, thought to be called the iSlate, possibly as soon as next month.

Hopes that the launch could do for the nascent ebook and netbook market what the iPhone did for the mobile phone world pushed shares in the company to a record high of $209.06 on December 24, up 3.4pc on the day alone. The shares have more than doubled in the past year.

According to reports, the company has rented space in a venue in San Francisco for late-January, a time when it has typically made significant announcements about new products. Evidence has mounted that the company is planning a successor to the iPhone – a product that sits between an iPod Touch and a laptop, which will play movies and music and serve some of the traditional functions of a mobile computer.

Some have reported that the company has been in discussions with various newspaper groups, suggesting it plans for the device to be used as a mobile news source.

The company has had a successful year, recording a 47pc jump in net income in its most recent quarter to $1.7bn (£1.1bn), on revenue of $36.5bn. This is in spite of the fact that the company failed to launch any major products in the period.

Its chief executive Steve Jobs, who returned this year from a period of convalescence following illness and a liver transplant, has increased the size of the company so quickly that, with a market capitalisation of more than $182bn, it is now bigger than Dell and Hewlett-Packard combined.

Technology analyst Yair Reiner of Oppenheimer said the tablet device could arrive by late-March or April, while Brian Marshall of Broadpoint AmTech expects it to launch late in the first quarter of 2010.

According to some experts, the share price increase towards the end of this year may have been partly influenced by investors’ end-of-year portfolio reorganisation. However, the company also launched the iPhone in China earlier in the winter.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/retailandconsumer/

Advances in business technology promised much in 2009 and delivered new operating systems and innovations like Vodafone’s Access Gateway.

A year is a long time in business technology. In January prototypes are announced, promising lower costs, greater efficiency, unparalleled security and controlled accountability. By March, release dates are adjusted, prices reluctantly hiked and features scaled back. Come September, a more modest product is released, often feeling tired on its first day. Some technologies have been on their way to world domination for years now (Bluetooth, wireless recharging systems) without really taking off.

But 2009 had decent, evolutionary improvements to celebrate, like the impressive Lexmark Platinum PRO905 printer aimed at SMBs, with good running costs and a neat touch-screen interface. There were benefits for travellers like the Exspect Worldwide Triple USB charger, a simple device which can save valuable luggage space by connecting three USB-charged devices to one plug.

But 2009 was the year of computer operating systems. First came Apple Mac OSX Snow Leopard which built on the considerable success of Apple’s previous release and promised faster start-up and loading times, more efficient coding to give you back hard disk space and some cool graphical enhancements. Then there was Windows 7 which was a quantum leap forward from the last set-up – but then, it needed to be. Was it good enough to make us forgive Microsoft the hell we’d been through with Vista? Forgive, yes, forget, no. Microsoft’s other operating system release was the new Windows Mobile, version 6.5. This was also a big improvement on a dire predecessor, though far from perfect. It took Taiwanese phone maker HTC with its HD2 smartphone to manipulate the software into a truly usable experience.

Vodafone’s Access Gateway was a genuine innovation – a small box which uses a broadband connection to boost mobile phone coverage. Ideal if your office or home is in a black spot, it’s the first of its kind. One day we may all have mini transmitters in our homes. Don’t worry, the emissions are no higher than a wireless router.

The year saw the rise of the netbooks stall, as business users especially favoured power over portability. Still, the Nokia Booklet 3G was a triumph: a great-looking mini-notebook with a strong keyboard, impressive screen and built-in 3G connectivity. Thank goodness Nokia waited until it could put Windows 7 on it.

Apps on mobile phones were also big, with Apple’s App store going stratospheric. Many are ignorable (games and, excuse me, flatulence simulators) but some offer good productivity on the move like satnav or accessible rail timetables. A special mention should go to the iPhone Business Card Reader which for £2.99 snaps business cards and imports the details painlessly into your contacts.

Next year, as Augmented Reality (AR) takes off, there’ll be much more. AR uses a smartphone’s camera and overlays the image of the world in front of you with extra information – signs appear to float in the air, pointing to the nearest underground station in Barcelona, New York or London, or even finding the nearest restaurant or bank.

Meantime, BlackBerry’s largely business-oriented collection of downloadable applications which launched in April, App World, came into its own. After an iffy launch, this is now much better, with helpful tools every BlackBerry should have – even if some are still pricey.

Small businesses benefited from neat web offerings like 1&1 My Business which creates a professional, capable website quickly, easily and cheaply – what’s not to like?

What’s ahead on the technology front? The Cloud – the remote networks of computer servers that store our information securely, we hope – will be bigger than a sky full of Nimbus. Microsoft will put a free version of Office up there so we can access it anywhere from low-powered computers. Amazon will launch its own private cloud so you can rent space on virtual computers. Google is preparing its own operating system to make the most of the cloud, and Apple’s MobileMe is already a powerful subscription-funded tool to keep your calendar and contacts in sync, or locate a missing iPhone.

But while it’ll be great to access this remote world periodically, the price of using the cloud all the time could be prohibitive.

Gadgets could include the much rumoured Apple Tablet. This is the yet-to-be-announced touch-screen minicomputer which may be the businessman’s best friend: impeccable connectivity, an irresistible screen and outlandishly sleek styling. Lean, efficient and attractive – it sounds like the year we’re all hoping 2010 will be.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/yourbusiness/businesstechnology/

Google is in talks to acquire Yelp, a local business review site, in a bid to reach smaller business, according The New York Times.

Google and Yelp are believed to have been in talks for a couple of months and, though no deal has been done, apparently a price has been named.

Technology blog TechCrunch has said the acquisition price is more than $500m, however, The New York Times suggested that the price could be even higher.

Yelp was founded in 2004 by Jeremy Stoppelman and Russel Simmons, both formerly software engineers at PayPal. It is the market leader for local business listings and adverts in the US, with over 25 million people accessing it a month, and has a presence in the UK and Canada. Its biggest rival, Citysearch, was recently was in the news for being the first site to use Twitter’s new login API.

Google has been increasingly focussing on local businesses, especially in the US, and has given them more incentives and control over their presence on the search engine. In June 2009, Google gave local businesses control of their profile pages and has expanded what these pages can contain – for instance, they can now include maps.

In this context, it seems that Yelp’s local search expertise would be a good strategic fit.

Google was unavailable for comment.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/