Airlines should scrap in-flight entertainment systems because they cannot compete with the thousands of songs and scores of movies that can be stored on modern media players, according to an aviation expert.

The pace at which airlines can update the selection of film, music, games and technology offered to passengers is being outstripped by constant advances in storage and functionality on media players, according to professor John Hansman, director of the International Technology Center for Air Transport at MIT.

In the future, your mobile phone could become your holiday concierge, reminding you to check-in the minute you arrive at the airport or automatically ordering a taxi for you when your plane lands.

It's a vision that airline passengers could see become reality within the next 12 to 18 months, according to Jim Peters, CTO at airline IT supplier Sita.

Revamped privacy settings are coming soon to Facebook.

The social network's privacy controls had reached the point where they were distributed across six separate pages and 40 different settings, according to a conference call the company held on Wednesday.

June was a month full of Apple-related news with the launch of the latest version of the iPhone, the iPhone 3G S, coming at the Mac maker's annual Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC).

O2 wasted no time in sharing details of the iPhone's UK pricing - revealing the new version would be offered at a higher price than its predecessor was when it launched a year ago.

IT staff at British Airways (BA) have saved the company more than £2m by working for free or taking unpaid leave amid forecasts of a slump in airline IT spend this year.

Techies were credited by BA CEO Willie Walsh for being among the 7,000 of BA's 40,000 staff who cut back on hours or pay to help the company through the credit crunch.

The government has been slammed over its decision to press ahead with the national ID card scheme following Home Secretary Alan Johnson's announcement that carrying an ID card will never be compulsory for British citizens.

Plans to make ID cards compulsory for airside workers and pilots have also been dropped this week by the Home Office with trials planned for Manchester and London City airports both scrapped.

British Airways CEO Willie Walsh has said the airline will not extend in-flight mobile comms to any of its aircraft already in service.

BA is currently planning to launch a mobile email, web browsing and texting service from OnAir on two new Airbus A318 aircrafts in September of this year.

The shift to digital and on-demand content has not been kind to traditional media business models. So how can media companies ensure their survival in this ever so demanding digital world?

Business intelligence could well be the order of the day.

Let silicon.com keep you up to date with all the latest CIO job moves and changes with our regular CIO Job Report.

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Levels of fraud have fallen at online payment provider PayPal thanks to cybercrime detection and prevention technologies.

Fraudulent transactions accounted for 0.28 per cent of the value of all payments using PayPal in 2008, down from 0.3 per cent in 2007, according to Garreth Griffith, head of risk management for PayPal UK.

O2 has upgraded the wi-fi connection software for its mobile-broadband customers, making it possible for them to use BT's Openzone hotspots.

The update to O2's Connection Manager software and the BT Openzone deal, both announced on Monday, provide an additional 3,000 wi-fi hotspots to O2's mobile-broadband users. The operator already has 7,500 available, including its own hotspots and those belonging to partner The Cloud.

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This is professor Kristina Höök, professor at the department of computer and systems science at Stockholm University. Höök heads up the Mobile Life Centre in Kista, Sweden, where a team of academics have around 21 million Swedish kronor (£1.63m) per year in funding until 2017 to research and develop the next generation of mobile services.

The team works closely with tech companies, including Ericsson, Microsoft, Sony Ericsson and Scandinavian mobile operator TeliaSonera, to explore how mobile apps and services could evolve in the coming years.

The BBC is using the latest online technology to boost its coverage of this weekend's Glastonbury music festival, which starts today.

The BBC Glastonbury website received more than 600,000 visitors in the week around Glastonbury in 2008 - a figure the Beeb hopes to beat this year.

The contactless payment industry needs to change the perceptions of both retailers and consumers if the technology is to take off in the UK, according to industry insiders.

Despite an increasing number of payment cards issued with contactless functionality - Barclays recently pledged to have all of its debit cards contactless by 2011 - the technology remains niche. Just eight per cent of Britons claim to have used contactless debit or credit cards.

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.

Google thinks it has made a breakthrough in "computer vision".

Imagine stumbling upon a picture of a beautiful landscape filled with ancient ruins, one you didn't recognise at first glance while searching for holiday destinations online. Google has developed a way to let a person provide Google with the URL for that image and search a database of more than 40 million geotagged photos to match that image to verified landmarks, giving you a destination for that next trip.

Despite a degree of reluctance to outsource, retailers are likely to increasingly warm to handing over their technology to third parties as the economy continues to struggle.

According to a new report from analyst house Datamonitor, pressure on margins from spending-shy shoppers and the resulting need for cost-cutting will prompt retailers to embrace outsourcing.

Singapore's Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*Star) has developed a gender-recognition system that could change the way advertising works in future.

The technology uses sophisticated algorithms to differentiate facial features of men and women. However, unlike the face-detection software found in digital cameras, the gender-recognition system can only detect faces that are facing the camera.

Performers in the UK took to the stage in the US yesterday as 3D holograms were beamed thousands of miles across the Atlantic.

Live music and comedy performances shot in London using the Musion Eyeliner telepresence system were streamed to the InfoComm09 conference in Orlando, where holographic performers walked around the stage and interacted with the crowd.

Drinks giant Diageo has signed two outsourcing contracts worth $35m with services company CSC.

The first contract, worth $7m, will see CSC design and install a new supply chain management system for the company, based on SAP.

BAA's tech team have had a busy past year with offshoring a large part of its IT, the opening of Heathrow T5 and the sale of Gatwick Airport.

Service delivery manager, Kevin Mercer, told the Gartner Outsourcing Summit this week how the team were helping steer the UK's largest airport operator through a challenging period.

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.

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.

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".

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.

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.

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.

Business intelligence has enjoyed a boom despite the less than healthy state of the global economy.

According to analyst house Gartner worldwide revenue for technology related to business intelligence, analytics applications and performance management grew by 22 per cent in 2008.

Internet service provider BT has admitted to throttling provision of the BBC iPlayer, and has called for content providers to shoulder some of the costs of content provision.

Last week BT was accused of limiting download speeds for iPlayer, the BBC video content player. On Thursday a BT spokesman admitted to silicon.com sister site ZDNet UK that it had been throttling iPlayer and other video-streaming content on its basic customer package.

Facebook's 200-plus million members will be able to customise the URLs to their profiles starting at midnight eastern daylight time (EDT) on Saturday, according to a post on the Facebook blog.

Currently, users' profile URLs have been structured as a string of numbers. At least for now, it doesn't look like the switch is mandatory.

Emergency services comms company Airwave already has one eye on its Olympics legacy.

The company, named earlier this year as a supplier to the London 2012 Olympics, will provide private mobile radio service for all Games venues.

Online sales of lingerie have dropped by more than a quarter, according to a new research report.

Web sales of smalls decreased by 26 per cent between April 2008 and April 2009 as cash-strapped Brits cut back on buying new knickers online, the research found. The figures come in stark contrast to the same period the year before, when lingerie sales swelled by 73 per cent.

At Apple's annual Worldwide Developer's Conference on Monday, the company announced refreshes to its flagship hardware and software. Included was a new version of the iPhone called the iPhone 3G S.

The 3G S sports a faster processor, longer battery life, video recording and a digital compass. It also comes with higher memory capacity than previous models.

'Business intelligence'? Is this just another oxymoron, like police intelligence or military intelligence?Don't be so harsh, though the basic principles of all three are certainly the same - gathering information and making informed, critical decisions.

OK. So what kind of information?Almost anything really - any data that a business creates and which could give it a strategic insight into what it is doing well, what it is doing badly and more importantly what it could do better. One area where this is proving useful is in retail.

Carphone Warehouse is to split into two separate companies, decoupling the retail and broadband operations.

In its preliminary annual results, Carphone Warehouse said the demerger would be completed by July 2010 at the latest. Carphone Warehouse sold half of its phone retail side to the US-based electronics chain Best Buy a year ago, and chief executive Charles Dunstone said in Friday's results statement that the time had come to separate the resulting joint venture from Carphone's TalkTalk broadband network.

Considering hitting the shops at the weekend? Looking for inspiration? Check out the latest in our series of gadget mini-reviews, courtesy of silicon.com's sister site CNET.co.uk, the home of technology reviews. For the full review and details, click on the link below.

What is it: Smartphone with slide-out Qwerty keyboard

Angela Morrison is to leave her post as IT director at supermarket chain Sainsbury's this summer.

Morrison, who had been at the retailer for four years, will be replaced by Rob Fraser, currently VP of consumer, technology and transport at CSC.

Cash-strapped Brits are cutting back on online shopping and switching to budget bricks-and-mortar alternatives, according to new research.

The UK e-Retail report by retail analysts Verdict Research has found shoppers in less well-off social demographics are switching away from the web to shops such as Poundland, Primark and Matalan in order to avoid delivery costs on cheaper items such as clothes and homeware.

Virgin Atlantic Airlines is integrating its IT and finance departments, with IT director Mike Cope leaving the company as a result.

The airline told silicon.com: "Virgin Atlantic is integrating the activities of its IT and Finance departments, as well as other business services, so they are closely aligned under Finance Director Tim Livett. As a result of this new strategy, our Director of IT, Mike Cope, is pursuing other opportunities.