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John Lamb's Week: Robocop rides again
E-minister Patricia Hewitt will be smashing the champagne bottle at the launch of the UK online for business/InterForum Awards on Monday. The awards are part of Hewitt's mission to push the UK back up the ebusiness league tables of Europe.

By John Lamb

Published: Friday 26 January 2001

The trick of being top dog in ecommerce is to improve the statistics on the number of companies with an internet connection and the value of goods bought online. If the number of surveys on ecommerce counted towards a country's rankings, then the UK would be streets ahead of those Finns and Swedes with their fancy mobiles

The annual awards handed out to organisations that are using ecommerce in an ingenious way and show signs of being entrepreneurial are laudably fair minded. The metropolitan smarty pants who seem to dominate the new economy will not have it all their own way thanks to twelve regional heats that will culminate in a national award carrying a prize of £30,000.

That cash could come in handy if the gloomy news coming from the Davos economic summit is anything to go by. As the bleary-eyed captains of world industry struggle back from their annual jamboree in Switzerland over the weekend, talk of adjustments in technology stocks, soft landings and hard landings can't disguise the fact that the economic pundits are talking up a recession.

The police may sometimes struggle to keep abreast of technology developments - in the early days of PCs investigators often failed to recognise floppy discs for what they were. However, they are now keen to exploit web technology to solve crimes more quickly and to cut red tape.

On Monday and Tuesday, high-tech cops from around the world will be in London for the World e-Police Summit. The Royal Ulster Constabulary will be talking about its virtual police station, while Los Angeles' finest will be demonstrating their work with electronic mug shots and facial recognition software. Delegates will also be considering police strategies for tracking wrongdoers on the web. Further information can be found at http://www.iqpc.com.

There's likely to be even more wailing and gnashing of teeth over third-generation wireless communications next week. The deadline for bids for licences to run high bandwidth radio networks in France expires on Wednesday. But at the time of writing there were only two applicants for the four licences on offer at the bargain price of $4bn apiece. The pundits are forecasting chaos.

For some time now the telcos who will run networks offering data transfer rates of up to a theoretical 2Mbps to your mobile phone have been grumbling about the cost of the licences. There will be no money left over to build services, they say. It sounds like a bad case of crying wolf. Surely companies that can orchestrate global networks work out complex payment agreements and take long term decisions over things like satellites and undersea cables can work out in advance what they should be paying to run wireless networks.

As soon as it looked as though taxpayers were going to strike a good bargain, for once, all hell broke loose and we were told there would be no money left over for transmitters, video conferences and 3G personal digital assistants. It doesn't wash - £22bn seems a small price to pay to buy into the future of telecommunications.

Talking of PDAs, fans will be gathering in Amsterdam on Thursday for the PalmSource Forum Europe 2001 conference. These bashes are always fun because delegates are so passionate about their favourite gizmo. A Psion executive who addressed a company user group on Bluetooth and short range wireless once was almost torn limb from limb for failing to address the key questions for the audience of memory upgrades, new software and improvements to the laplink cable on the Psion 3C. You have been warned.