In an exclusive interview, Wikipedia founder and silicon.com Agenda Setter Jimmy Wales talks to Natasha Lomas about what's next for Wikipedia and why the site needs geeks of all kinds.

If you've ever written something about Jimmy Wales and posted it online, chances are he's read it. He mentions a Twitter post I made, prior to our interview, asking whether people think he's a hero or villain.

It's no surprise that for some companies green initiatives are dropping down the list of IT priorities. In a recent silicon.com survey, more than a quarter of respondents admitted green IT was off the agenda because of the recession.

But many organisations have found the key is to align green goals with broader cost-cutting initiatives - which are definitely in vogue with CIOs and CFOs. In some cases government policies are already giving businesses a shove in the right direction. For example, in July 2008, the UK government informed 10,000 businesses that they could be affected by the Carbon Reduction Commitment - a climate change and energy-saving scheme that will take effect in 2010.

It might not currently be as widespread as industry hype might have it - but server virtualisation is poised to grow rapidly as smaller businesses catch on to the benefits.

Server virtualisation allows multiple instances of an operating system to run simultaneously within one physical server, cutting the amount of hardware organisations have to buy and manage. And because fewer physical servers are required, virtualisation also helps to cut energy costs: no small thing for CIOs and CFOs after a recent study found that, thanks to rocketing energy prices, it now costs more to power some servers than to buy them in the first place.

2009 may not be over yet but analysts have already revealed the top 10 strategic techs that CIOs should be looking at next year.

According to Gartner, the 10 strategic technologies will have an impact on the enterprise over the next three years, with IT chiefs encouraged to make decisions on them within the next two.

It's never been easy being green, especially when it comes to electricity-hungry IT infrastructure.

And in the midst of a recession, with cost cutting a priority, it's easy to let slide worthy targets such as becoming carbon neutral - especially if the choice is between a project to shrink the carbon footprint of IT and one that could ensure the company makes a profit in these difficult times.

Unified communications (UC) implementations bring together a variety of digital communication tools to make it easier for users to collaborate and improve business processes.

For example it might mean bringing together instant messaging, presence information, video conferencing, as well as email, SMS, fax and voicemail to improve productivity, and potentially trim the cost of an organisations' IT infrastructure.

The mighty twin combination of cost-cutting (driven by the recession) and a desire to reduce IT power consumption (to tackle climate change) means virtualisation has become one of the hottest topics for the IT community, with a whole raft of associated terms such as bare metal hypervisors, virtual machines, and utilisation rates becoming standard parts of the vocabulary of the average CIO.

Virtualisation, is essentially about cutting the connection between the operating system and the underlying hardware it operates on.

While workers might create outlandish avatars to escape the restraints and monotony of their everyday lives, this may soon become a thing of the past as they are forced to dress their avatars appropriately for work and adhere to a code of conduct within 3D virtual environments.

An avatar is a virtual representation of the computer user, and can consist of anything from a two-dimensional icon to an animated 3D figure. And businesses are increasingly experimenting with virtual worlds - such as Second Life - to cut costs by conducting meetings online.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs has been named the most influential individual in the global technology industry, topping the silicon.com 2009 Agenda Setter's list.

Jobs has made pole position on the list for the second time (the first time being in 2003) - the only person to have achieved this feat in the 10-year history of the list.

Steve Ranger, silicon.com editor and panel chair Steve Ranger is responsible for the overall content on silicon.com spanning news, analysis and special coverage. An editor at silicon.com for more than four years, he has a decade of experience in technology journalism. Areas of expertise include the public sector, offshoring, security and web 2.0.

Simon Briskman, lawyer Simon Briskman specialises in outsourcing and IT law at Field Fisher Waterhouse and has considerable commercial in-house experience, having spent three years with Fujitsu Services. His work covers an assortment of sectors, including telecoms, financial services and retail, and his clients range from start-ups to some of the world's biggest names.

At RSA's Anti-Fraud Command Centre (AFCC) in Herzelia, Israel, more than 100 staff work to detect, dissect and block phishing sites and Trojan attacks 24 hours per day.

From the AFCC, the security firm sifts through more than 10 million emails every day, as well as domain names and fraudster chat rooms, searching for threats to its customers, which include a selection of Britain's high street banks.

Noshir Kaka is a director in the Mumbai office of analyst house McKinsey & Company. In an exclusive interview, silicon.com reporter Nick Heath spoke to Kaka about his forthcoming report on how India's 50 per cent share of the global offshore technology and business services market could slip away by 2020.

To view the full article Strengthening India's offshoring industry, just published on McKinsey Quarterly, click here.

This is the first glimpse at what the British ID card will look like.

The design for the British cards was unveiled by Home Secretary Alan Johnson at events in London and Manchester today.

The government has spent millions of pounds on a project to provide airport staff with ID cards - despite doubts over whether any workers will actually take part in the scheme.

According to the Identity and Passport Service's (IPS) annual accounts, published earlier this week, £12.4m was spent on the Critical Workers Identity Card (CWIC) scheme last year.

Is business intelligence too much bother for smaller organisations? Danny Bradbury looks at how analytics can work for all sizes.

When your business costs nine pounds per minute to run, it is imperative that you maximise your revenues. Luckily, David Wilkinson, the IT director at York Minster, is also the assistant to the chief accountant, so he understands how technology can help managers to find potential improvement in the business.

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 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.

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.

silicon.com experts weigh in on whether analytics can help businesses weather turbulent economic times.

Q: How helpful are business intelligence tools to the bottom line? Would you consider them a key investment during a recession?

The leader of Parliament's IT committee has backed a consortium calling for a £1bn fund to stimulate investment in green tech and shared services.

MP Andrew Miller, chairman of the Parliamentary Information Technology Committee (Pitcom), supported calls for the government to establish the fund, which would be used to loan money to central and local government organisations.

Business intelligence is getting a lot of attention amid the economic downturn as organisations try to use data they gather to become more efficient and compete more effectively with rivals.

With this in mind, silicon.com has picked the brains of analysts specialising in BI to come up with some top tips about how you can make the most out of this growing area.

Amid the difficulties the economic crisis inflicted on the computing industry, there's also been a silver lining: business intelligence software that's designed to help companies understand what's going on and make more informed decisions.

BI software certainly hasn't been immune to the spending clampdown on corporate computing. And it's not technologically flawless but the technology is helping those who have taken the BI plunge to adjust to today's new business realities.

Business intelligence is often touted as a way to boost profits. But how? Here Jesper Thorlund explains his innovative technique of turning lost trades into future deals.

Let's begin with a real life example that I observed as a BI consultant a few years ago.

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.

Catherine Doran, director of corporate development at Network Rail, has been voted the UK's most influential technology leader.

Doran pulled in the most votes in the annual silicon.com CIO50, which is shaped by the UK's top business and technology executives voting for their CIO peers on the basis of their performance during the last year.

The silicon.com CIO50 has now been revealed - and a quick comparison of this year's list with those from previous years throws up some interesting trends.

One is the enduring influence of a number of CIOs: this year's silicon.com CIO50 includes 11 impressive CIOs who have featured in all three of the lists since the CIO50 was first published in 2007.

Every year, the silicon.com CIO50 gathers the opinions of the UK's top CIOs to create the definitive list of the country's most influential heads of IT.

CIOs are asked to vote for their peers anonymously on the basis of their performance during the last year, taking into account their leadership ability, delivery and execution record, innovation and influence.

Every year the silicon.com CIO50 celebrates the best CIO talent in the UK. As well as recognising these executives for excelling in the day job and showcasing their talents, the profiles we compile as part of the special report give us a chance to take a peek behind the scenes and find out a little more about these technology chiefs.

As they are every year, the 2009 silicon.com CIO50 is an eclectic bunch with a wide range of interests.

While no panacea, business intelligence tools can give organisations the info they need to ride out the recession, says Andrew Donoghue.

Tough economic conditions have put pressure on corporate budgets in the private and public sectors alike - with tech spending under scrutiny like costs from every other department. CIOs are being asked to justify investments in IT for their ability to add to the company's bottom line and help drive increasingly tight margins.

'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.

How can business intelligence help your organisation? Andrew Donoghue speaks to three very different businesses to see what BI does for them.

While issues such as return on investment (ROI) and total cost of ownership (TCO) always figure highly in the negotiations around any new IT implementation, tough economic conditions mean those three letter acronyms are even more pertinent than ever.

Derbyshire County Council has inked a £5.6m deal with Capgemini.

Under the deal, the outsourcer will be responsible for refreshing Derbyshire's tech, replacing its mainframe-based IT systems with SAP.

What's in the works at Westminster City Council? Jo Best speaks to the CIO about the latest trends and projects.

After a career in IT and government spanning more than 20 years, Westminster CIO David Wilde doesn't appear to have lost his enthusiasm for the latest IT trends.

Business intelligence is due for a renaissance, says Danny Bradbury. Here's what it might look like in a few years' time.

It's Thursday. The CEO wants a plan to boost revenues by five per cent by the end of the week, and your retail manager hasn't got a clue.

Building a business intelligence system is a complex and daunting task, and yet executives need that data, especially in dire economic times when all of the information could help make their businesses more efficient.

Here are silicon.com's top five tips for implementing a successful business intelligence project.

London-based broking firm Martin Brokers has saved money and improved the management of critical data by moving to a new online back-up provider.

The firm is on course to save around £63,000 per year in storage costs and has a much more reliable system for dealing with critical data, following its switch to vendor oncore IT.

Companies will soon see outsourcing as a game of dice - hedging their bets and spreading outsourcing deals across the world, a report by the London School of Economics (LSE) has predicted.

Report co-author professor Leslie Willcocks said today the global growth in IT and business process outsourcing (BPO) in various new countries across the globe will allow businesses to gamble on many different offshoring deals.

Computer systems at Westminster have been infected by the Conficker virus.

The outbreak first came to light after an email by the parliamentary director of ICT was leaked online last night.

The Travelodge hotel chain has launched an iPhone app called Travelodge iBooker (pictured above), which lets travellers locate their nearest Travelodge and book a room.

Photo credit: Travelodge