Compiled at the IoD, Pall Mall, London, and dispatched to silicon.com via a free wi-fi connection.

For more than a year now I have been in a state of mild bewilderment while watching and listening to the economic commentators. The truth is: I find it difficult to afford them much credibility as I have been here many times before.

UK managers have finally done the unthinkable - realised they are dispensable.

In the current economic gloom managers across the UK believe their redundancy is 'inevitable', research by the Chartered Management Institute (CMI) has found.

The Ministry of Defence is on the hunt for "budding Qs" to keep it supplied with the latest and greatest in gadgetry, the department announced today.

Any small businesses who fancy getting in on the MoD supplying action are invited to meet up with the MoD at a seminar next week in Glasgow.

Suffering from a dodgy stomach? Philips has come up with a high-tech pill that will make sure the right dose of drugs is delivered right to the heart – or the guts – of your problem.

Here's the pill in question, known as the iPill – a 11 x 26 mm capsule designed to deliver its load only when it reaches the right area of the intestines.

In a few short years CIOs are going to find themselves closer than ever before to the person holding the IT department's purse strings: as the global economic crisis bites, analyst house Gartner says it's vital CIOs and CFOs learn to trust each other - for the good of the business.

Data from Gartner's Executive Programs (EXP) from 2002 to 2008 shows a gradual upward trend in the proportion of CIOs reporting to the head of finance. Meanwhile, increasing numbers of CIOs also believe they will be reporting to the CFO in three years' time.

Many organisations have elaborate disaster-recovery plans. But how many plans are based on fragile theory rather than practical experience, asks the Naked CIO - and how many are stored on the network?

I recently had to review our procedures for what we would do in a disaster. On paper all the various bits and pieces were there. But I was concerned at the absence of practical experience behind the plans.

Conceived in a traffic jam on Interstate 80, written the next day in a coffee shop at Lake Tahoe CA and sent via a free wi-fi service.

I can't remember the moment or place when my interest in science fiction was first ignited. But I can remember my earliest comic books, which included The Eagle and Superman.

You may not be a mind-reader. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't have a shrewd idea about the questions you'll face in job interviews, says Cathy Holley of headhunters Boyden Global Executive Search.

If I had to choose one single gripe about senior level IT candidates it would be they often approach interviews as if we were having a general chat. We are not. Careers advice from Tessa Hood:Is your wardrobe business-ready?You won't get promoted looking like that

As public attention shifts to London and 2012, Jeremy Hore, chief integrator for Olympic worldwide IT partner Atos Origin, breathes a sigh of relief in his exclusive silicon.com diary. Follow the link for more on the technology behind the Games.

After four years of preparations, it was all over in just 17 days. It is only just sinking in that it's finished and how much the whole team has achieved. See what happened when silicon.com editor Steve Ranger went to visit the Beijing Olympics venues.

Bangalore authorities have introduced a deeply unpopular curfew for the city's traditionally bustling nightlife. Could this Cinderella Rule actually end up shutting out tech firms, asks Saritha Rai.

Step into the Hard Rock Café in downtown Bangalore at around 11pm and order a beer or some wine. Chances are you will not be served. Bangalore in pictures… ♦  Photos: Discover high-tech India ♦  Photos: High-tech Bangalore♦ Photos: The weekend in India's tech capital♦ Photos: SAP and Wipro in Bangalore♦ Photos: Bangalore's Electronics City♦ Photos: Boom town Bangalore

The art of personal presentation carries a lot of weight these days. But that does not mean plunging necklines for women or men trying to look like one of the suits, says Tessa Hood.

My first article on how to improve your career prospects by improving your appearance raised hackles among the silicon.com readership.

Written in a coffee shop in Mountain View CA and dispatched the next day from a free wi-fi service in the hotel.

What could be easier? Take that old paper passport and add some electronics to turn it into a super-secure means of ID and certification.

Public sector outsourcing may have doubled over the past 10 years to £80bn. But that apparently healthy growth masks some fundamental issues with procurement, says Martyn Hart.

Although the public sector has learnt a lot from previous engagements in the outsourcing market, breakdowns such as those in the NHS show that some aspects of public sector procurement still has a long way to go. More on outsourcing… ♦ Gov't stung by 'rip-off' outsourcing deals♦ Shell signs $4bn IT outsourcing contract♦ Cloud computing – the data centre of the future?♦ Tough bargaining forces outsourcing price cuts♦  Profile: Nandan Nilekani, co-chairman, Infosys♦  India losing status as offshore king?♦ Productivity gains driving IT outsourcing♦ Tax payer still owed millions by EDS♦ Cheat Sheet: Offshoring♦ Special Report: Inside India

Despite the nerves and apprehension, all the hard work seems to be paying off, says Jeremy Hore, chief integrator for Olympic worldwide IT partner Atos Origin, in his exclusive silicon.com diary. Follow the link for more on the technology behind the Games.

We're at day 10 of the competition. The month or so before the Games was hectic and although we've been testing and preparing for years there were lots of last-minute implementations at the venue. In fact, it was busy right up to the opening ceremony but once the competition started everything just flowed. See what happened when silicon.com editor Steve Ranger went to visit the Beijing Olympics venues.

People take charge of IT from all kinds of backgrounds and they don't need to have risen through the tech ranks to be successful. But some backgrounds are definitely better than others, says the Naked CIO.

CIOs come from all sorts of disciplines and backgrounds. Perhaps because of that diversity, people always seem intrigued to know what route you've taken. I'm often asked about my background and the path that led to my current position.

For open source software to achieve its full potential, people's perceptions must change. Yet how can that happen when open source is so woefully neglected by analysts, asks Martin Brampton.

Industry analysts can play a valuable role. But their shortcomings are particularly evident in their coverage of open source software. And, apart from analysts, what viable alternative information sources exist?

Senior execs in the UK are looking to take jobs abroad to further their careers and escape the effects of the credit crunch, a survey of more than 13,000 executives has found.

Blighty has the third biggest exodus of top brass in Europe, with eight per cent of senior execs seeking greener and richer pastures abroad. Only France and Germany recorded larger migrations, with 14 per cent and 12 per cent of their senior execs seeking a better life elsewhere, respectively.

Few outside the IT department realise just how much effort goes into making sure systems don't fail. If more board members understood that, we might see a greater business emphasis on robust systems, says Martin Atherton.

Software resiliency has been a challenge for so long many organisations just accept it as part of using IT. But there is no need for that inertia - there are a number of steps organisations could take to reduce failures.

Given the extensive preparations for the Olympics, what could possibly stop the technology working? Certainly not an unfortunate encounter between a lawn mower and a network cable, says Jeremy Hore, chief integrator for Olympic worldwide IT partner Atos Origin, in his exclusive silicon.com diary. Follow the link for more on the technology behind the games.

After four years of preparation and more than 200,000 hours of testing, I still felt apprehensive in the final minutes before the start of the opening ceremony on Friday. There were still many small things to be done.

Sound infrastructure projects often fail to win board backing because of flaky ROI demands. But come up with a hare-brained scheme and boards fall over themselves, says the Naked CIO.

Over the past week I have been consulting various interest groups about the capital budget for 2009. These discussions mark the beginning of what I affectionately call the silly season.

Ask most industry people to name a success story and they might well mention Salesforce.com. But they would be overlooking the far more impressive achievements of Infor, argues Bob Tarzey.

Salesforce.com is set to become a $1bn applications company, with latest quarterly revenues of just under $248m. For Mark Benioff and his team to have done this in just nine years is impressive.

Written poolside at my hotel in Rome and dispatched via a 3G HSDPA data service.

The economic downturn and collapse of the dollar have resulted in a lot of my business migrating out of the US into the EU and south-east Asia. Wireless from A to Z Click on the links below to find out more… A is for Antivirus B is for Bluetooth C is for The Cloud D is for dotMobi E is for Email F is for FMC G is for GPS H is for HSDPA I is for i-mode J is for Japan Air K is for Korea L is for LBS M is for M2M N is for NFC O is for Operating systems P is for Pubs Q is for QoS R is for Roaming S is for Satellite T is for TV U is for UMTS V is for Virgin W is for WiMax X is for XDA Y is for Yucca Z is for Zigbee

To improve our credibility we could all start by rooting out the waffle, the weasel words and the technical jargon. And a little more honesty wouldn't go amiss either, says the Naked CIO.

As a CIO I probably have as many pet peeves as the next person. But one thing particularly rankles with me. It's people casually bandying about words and phrases to conceal complex ideas.

The French courts have already dealt several financial blows to eBay. But an adverse ruling in its US case with Tiffany & Co could spell disaster, say lawyers Kate Withers and Kate Ellis.

Last month eBay was ordered to pay €38m to luxury goods manufacturer LVMH, for allowing online auctions of fake copies of the luxury goods.

Smaller firms that still see technology as a cost ripe for pruning are making a big mistake. Now's the time they should be swapping their dependency on oil for a focus on silicon, says Rob Bamforth.

When the economy starts to slide, the easy option is to cut back, rather than invest. After all, every cost saved goes straight to the bottom line and every sum invested will be subject to tighter scrutiny. Even new revenues generated will benefit from decisions on acceptable margins.

There were high hopes for Bangalore's multimillion dollar air hub, which opened in May. But locating it in a near wilderness without a decent road was not a great start, says Saritha Rai.

Raghu Shenoy, chief executive of a small Bangalore IT services firm, thinks nothing of jumping on a plane to see a client. If a customer wants a face-to-face meeting, Shenoy will be in Europe in less than 24 hours.

In his latest video blog, Peter Cochrane reports from the foot of the 1960s BT Tower in central London. Like similar structures of its era around the world, the 189-metre tower has slipped from the forefront of microwave comms to become a redundant period curiosity. But could a new tech role for the building be about to emerge?

Never let it be said that we at silicon.com don't go to extremes to get you the best stories.

We've abseiled down buildings, walked the tracks of the London underground at 2am and this week headed into London's Victorian sewers, all to make sure you are getting exclusives that no one else can bring you.

Retail sales figures out today show the sharpest monthly decline for decades. History suggests those retailers that continue to focus on innovation now will emerge as winners, says Ged Keogh-Peters.

For retailers, now is the time to be looking at ways of maximising value. But not all changes need to cost a lot of money.

A landmark ruling against eBay amounts to more than the multimillion-euro fine imposed by the court. It signals a new intent to tighten online policing, says lawyer Simon Levine.

It's not just social networks that are facing pressure to improve the policing of content on their sites. Late last month, eBay was ordered to pay €38m to LVMH for allowing the auction of fake goods purporting to be luxury items from Louis Vuitton, Christian Dior and Givenchy.

Written while flying from London to Rome and dispatched on arrival at my hotel via a 3G HSDPA data service.

Some 20 years ago I was running a series of experiments involving multiple home and office fixed and mobile devices.

Clocks across the Chinese capital are ticking away what's left of the tech team's preparation time. Yet two major tasks remain to be completed, says Jeremy Hore, chief integrator for Olympic worldwide IT partner Atos Origin, in his exclusive silicon.com diary.

We are now on the last leg of our preparations and keenly aware every second counts. In Beijing specially installed clocks constantly remind us to the second the time remaining to the opening ceremony at 8pm on 08.08.08.

The outcry about the amount of data held on individuals is entirely understandable, says the Naked CIO. Our lives would clearly be much better if more information were held.

Over the past few years we've had some feverish debate about ID cards. But then again arguments about information sharing between agencies and healthcare institutions have also raised the temperature a few notches.

Bill Gates is just the most recent example of a big name leaving the world of tech. With the industry notoriously unkind to the over-40s, Simon Moores is thinking of following his lead.

I'm living in the twilight zone or at least that's what it feels like to me.

In his latest video blog, Peter Cochrane reports from the gloom of the former servants' quarters of a stately home just to the west of London. There he finds and tests out the cutting-edge communications technology of three generations ago.

With their piecemeal approaches, most organisations are merely dabbling with green technology. True sustainability is much more than hammering the data centre over power, says Martin Atherton.

The current penchant for invoking green IT whenever data centre power consumption is mentioned may suit the goals of IT vendors with new power efficient kit to sell; but it does little to help address the bigger picture.

Owning a trademark no longer means you're the only one who can use it. A major European ruling involving mobile operators O2 and 3 has big implications for trademarks on comparative advertising websites, says lawyer Siân Croxon.

Last month, mobile operator 3 won a four-year battle with rival O2 over the use of O2's signature bubbles trademark in an advertising campaign. Ruling in 3's favour, the European Court of Justice said the use of rival trademarks is permissible in certain, specific circumstances. Comparative advertising: Key issues 1. Association - comparative advertising allows smaller players to feed off recognised brands. 2. Price - demonstrating competitive pricing is becoming all the more important as consumers feel the strain of rising household costs.3. Information - brand awareness is no longer enough. Consumers will undertake their own background research before making informed decisions.4. Protection - understanding the nuances of trademarks is key to policing against infringements to your brand, products and services.

The bureaucratic bog created by politicians is only part of the problem for IT in this country. Failure to foster innovation and talent is what's really coming home to roost, says the Naked CIO.

Questions about the UK government's role in IT excellence and progress rarely produce a positive response.

In the early days of PC computing Joshua Greenbaum crossed swords with Bill Gates. Greenbaum thought he had the best of the encounter. Nothing could have been further from the truth.

Once upon a time, when Bill Gates still flew with the public and I was a budding journalist in need of a haircut, I had a number of opportunities to interview and otherwise interact with him.

silicon.com is 10 years old this week, which prompted me to take a look through the archives and find out what was big a decade ago - and I don't just mean the hair.

A lot has changed as a quick look at some of the headlines from that first silicon.com July in 1998 shows.