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.

The Home Office has announced a £39m deal to help emergency services comms cope during the London 2012 Olympic Games.

The National Police Improvement Agency has signed the £39m contract with Airwave, the company that provides the mobile radio network used by every UK police force and currently being rolled out to every ambulance trust and Fire and Rescue service in the country, to fund an increase in the system's capacity in time for the 2012 Games.

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'.

Earlier this year, Google launched a collaboration platform called Wave.

Using the platform, individuals can access shared windows called 'waves' where they can collaborate in real-time, swapping IMs, photos, videos, maps and documents as they work together.

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.

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.

Augmented reality? Is this another name for Apple CEO Steve Jobs' infamous reality distortion field? Nice try but no. Augmented reality (AR) means overlaying computerised elements, such as graphics or text, on top of a real-time video or other real-world display with the aim of providing additional information to the viewer.

That sounds pretty abstract - do you have a few examples? The most basic examples of AR can be seen on televised sports games, where scores are overlaid on match footage, or digital annotations are added to show the trajectory of the ball or highlight a particular player.

With just over 1,000 days to go until the start of the 2012 London Olympics, the team in charge of the Games' tech is poised for the real work to get underway.

After a year of limbering up, Atos Origin - the company leading the consortium of IT companies designing and building the 2012 Games' tech infrastructure - is getting ready to hit the track.

The Guardian Jobs site has suffered a hack that could have exposed the sensitive data of some users.

Personal details included in users' job applications may have been accessed by the hackers, according to an email sent to affected users by Guardian Jobs on Saturday.

Today's increasingly feature-packed smartphones are likely to propel the use of augmented reality into the mainstream in the coming years.

Augmented reality - the process of superimposing digital information or objects onto real-time video streams in order to create the illusion that they are part of the physical scene - will be pulling in revenues of more than $350m by 2014, up from $6m in 2008, according to analyst ABI Research.

Following its sale by parent company Ford last year, car maker Jaguar Land Rover has had to face the thorny problem of cutting itself loose from Ford's web of business applications.

JLR is spending £200m separating its IT operations from Ford, largely on carrying out the painstaking process of copying and cloning more than 1,600 business applications.

The EC has called for cross-border online shopping to be simplified, following research that found six out of 10 shoppers attempting cross-country purchases had their transactions blocked.

The European Commission's research found language and regulation barriers, and lack of trust to blame for the blocked transactions.

When you think of gambling, smoky casinos populated by tough guys chewing cigars and nursing their whiskey probably come to mind.

UK online gamblers might not quite fit this image but they can increasingly get into the spirit of their Vegas counterparts through technology that allows them a way to banter across the baize with their opponents.

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."

The BBC Trust has rejected a proposal that would allow UK broadcasters such as Channel 4, ITV and Five to share the BBC's iPlayer technology.

The BBC Trust, the body that oversees the BBC, announced yesterday it thought the scheme "was not the best way to share the BBC iPlayer or to deliver increased public value to licence fee payers".

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.

This competition is now closed.

To celebrate Small Business Week, BT Business is offering one lucky silicon.com reader a trip to Edinburgh for the famous Hogmanay New Year's Eve celebrations.

In just 12 months, Windows 7 will become the standard operating system for business PCs, analysts believe.

Currently, eight out of 10 new PCs run Windows XP, nearly eight years after the operating system was first released. By next year, that figure could drop by more than half, according to new research from industry watchers Forrester.

Channel 4 has signed a deal with YouTube to bring its flagship shows to the video-sharing site.

The agreement will see programming from Channel 4's catch up service 4oD made available for free through YouTube.

ICT workers looking for a new job should keep their eye on the telecoms sector.

The number of job vacancies in the industry rose sharply last month, according to new research.

Compiled at JFK Airport whilst waiting for BA 178 to fly me home via London Heathrow. Dispatched to silicon.com via a free LAN connection in the BA lounge.

I just boarded an early morning shuttle bus from my hotel at JFK airport. Barely awake, I heard the driver call for airlines and terminals. Someone piped up "United" and the immediate rejoinder from the rest of the passengers was a chorus of the song "United Breaks Guitars".

The ICT industry must lead the way in conserving energy and reducing carbon emissions, according to the EC.

In a recommendation adopted by the Commission last week, it called on the ICT sector to become 20 per cent more energy efficient by 2015, and to outline, by 2011, the practical steps it will take to achieve this target.

Business support services company Rentokil Initial has signed up for the biggest enterprise deployment of Google Apps to date.

The implementation of Google Apps Premier Edition will eventually cover 35,000 of the company's users across 50 countries.

Airport operator BAA is hoping the roll out of Windows 7 will help simplify its IT infrastructure and contribute to a cost-cutting initiative across the company.

Speaking at a Microsoft customer event in London this week, BAA CIO Philip Langsdale said the company has been testing Windows 7 and now plans to roll it out across the company.

Technology has helped Sainsbury's keep the tills ringing throughout the recession.

The supermarket giant is busy revamping its tech, from fitting stores with self-scanning technology to replacing its warehouse and supply systems.

Amazon is preparing to launch its Kindle e-book reader in more than 100 countries worldwide, including the UK. This is the first time the device has been available outside of the US, where it launched in November 2007.

Photo credit: Amazon.com

The Amazon Kindle then - is that one of those book readers?That's exactly what it is. e-book readers are typically small, thin devices - about the size of a paperback novel - that can store hundreds or thousands of books in digital form. The text is displayed on the device's screen, with readers able to flip virtual pages with the touch of a button.

The Kindle's been around for a while, hasn't it…About two years to be exact - the first Kindle was launched in November 2007.

Andy Hopper is co-founder of the iconic Acorn Computers and currently head of the computer laboratory at the University of Cambridge. silicon.com's Nick Heath talks to Hopper about the BBC Micro, Acorn's early days and sustainable IT.

The BBC Micro, with its beige box and chunky keys, gave many people in the UK their first taste of personal computing.

Amazon is moving into the world of mobile payments with the launch of a new service that will allow consumers to buy goods, services and mobile apps using the payment information stored on their Amazon accounts.

The retailer has made APIs available for the service, called Amazon Mobile Payments Service, which will allow other merchants and mobile app companies to offer their users the ability to make purchases without the need to set up a separate payment account.

Amazon's Kindle is coming to the UK.

On Tuesday, the web retail giant announced that its e-book reader, previously only available in the US, will now be available in more than 100 countries.

CIOs spend hours listening to suppliers pitch their latest technology. How would these vendors fare with just one minute to get their message across?

silicon.com turns up the heat and gives vendors only 60 seconds to impress a panel of CIOs with their products. The IT chiefs then quiz them before delivering their verdict on the technology in the form of a red or green light.

Bonhams previewed some vintage tech last month as the London auctioneer prepared to put a selection of classic hardware under the hammer.

The sale includes Sinclair computers such as the ZX81 machine and a ZX Spectrum 48K extension shown here.

The recession is turning the UK's CIOs into tech cowards.

According to new research, the recession is causing IT chiefs to shy away from seizing on new technology, despite suffering tech woes as a result of outdated kit.

IT workers chasing the big bucks should pay close attention to which sector they choose to work in.

The best paid sectors for IT staff are the legal and finance sectors, where the average annual salary for an IT worker is £42,832, according to new research.

Want to avoid getting burned when signing a BPO deal? There's a set of warning signs that buyers should look for in order to avoid unreliable vendors.

Choosing the right BPO outsourcing partner is becoming increasingly important with analyst house Gartner predicting that one quarter of the biggest BPO providers will not exist in their current form by 2012.

Nokia has bought a social network for travellers.

The Dopplr service aims to connect travellers who want to meet up with fellow travellers along their route.

Air travellers flying between London and New York won't have to go mobile cold turkey from tomorrow.

On Tuesday, BA will go live with an in-flight connectivity service from OnAir, which will see passengers on the all business class route able to use their mobiles to send texts or emails and browse the web.

Intel may not have attained the same dominance in TVs as it has in personal computers, but the company remains convinced that interactive, networked, computing-intensive tasks will win the company a foothold in the world of video.

The company touted various elements of its plan Thursday at its Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, including a new Atom CE4100 processor for TVs, technology to automatically extract a highlight reel from a football match, companies moving PC games to TVs, and big-screen 3D video that CTO Justin Rattner believes ultimately will arrive in people's homes.