Out of tune

Even more violent feelings are invoked when the hold music has clearly been composed by a five year-old on a cheap Casio keyboard (perhaps using the 'bossa nova' rhythm setting).

And this is a serious issue. One in five callers hang up after queuing for 20 seconds (regardless of the tune keeping us company). Half slam the receiver down at 45 seconds. So getting the right accompaniment could be crucial.

So it was with some sadness that networking company Avaya uncovered some truly spectacular examples of inappropriate (if not downright crass) hold music.

For example, there was the mail order company playing 'Hanging on the Telephone' by Blondie; the clothing firm specialising in larger sizes for women playing Queen's 'Fat-bottomed Girls'.

That set the Round-Up thinking of other utterly wrong tunes various companies could play ('Crash' by the Primitives for BA, perhaps). But we couldn't top the hospital casualty unit which wisely piped Chopin's 'Funeral March' down the wire to anyone on hold. Fact really is stranger than anything we could make up.

Found: millions of missing buildings. Yes, it seems that our local councils' rather antiquated record keeping practices have caused them to 'lose' about one in ten buildings in the UK, possibly leading to tax shortfalls.

But cue the triumphant trumpets as technology comes marching to the rescue. The Innovation and Development Agency (IDeA) is working with Intelligent Addressing to put all the nation's address lists on a single group of standardised databases (as silicon.com, working with the Guardian, exclusively revealed earlier this week - see http://www.silicon.com.a44118 ).

Greater Manchester was a prime example of inefficiency, maintaining over 50 different sets of addresses before the project began. The big sillies.

In one demonstration of the new system, a local authority discovered 40 houses it didn't know it had. If only that could happen in Monopoly...

So hurrah for technology and local councils, unlucky for any subversive houses which wanted to live outside society: the government wants to know about you. Speaking of which...

It's Census time, which as you might expect is something which relies on a fair bit of intensive IT usage. ICL is the lucky recipient of some of the work: millions of completed Census forms will pass through its document processing centre in Widnes, Cheshire.

But Lockheed Martin, the developer of the accident-prone Swanwick air traffic control system, has developed a Data Capture and Coding System (DCCS) to do the actual processing.

And (cue the trumpets again) the technology can read your handwriting. According to Lockheed Martin, the system has been tested "exhaustively" and the results validated in a few dry runs. It reckons it's fully capable of handling "as large an image recognition project as this".

And we're talking 33 million forms here (assuming we all get round to completing them), so indeed, it is large.

The optical character recognition (OCR) engine sounds pretty clever, and should be able to read your scrawl accurately 85 per cent of the time. Even when it's not sure what your wobbly handwriting says, it will fall back on a more primitive technology (ie. the human being) by alerting an operator that there's a problem. The government reckons this will help achieve the overall accuracy target of 98 per cent.

The system can even recognise "fat, slanted, little and tall As".

Splendid.

Unusually this week, the Round-Up's email inbox was veritably bulging with letters of support for BT. Well, we got two emails defending everyone's favourite telcos. And they were both from BT employees. But still, for the sake of balanced reporting, here they are:

"Your newsletters are a right riveting read, but please, please, please note that I and many other of your subscribers work for, and are loyal to BT (despite the seemingly constant tirades of abuse)."

And number two: "Your CRM capabilities are sadly lacking. If they were better you'd know your customers better. This one works for BT and finds your constant carping pathetic. Maybe you should look for more difficult targets - but that might mean being really inventive."

Ouch. We ought to be more inventive eh? We'll certainly take that on board. In the meantime, why not click here (http://www.silicon.com/a44190 ) to find out what we think BT's new chairman, Sir Christopher Bland, could do with the £500,000 he's being paid every year for his three-day weeks... Here's one idea to whet your appetite: if he really wanted better publicity, he could come to our local and buy us 212,765 pints of Export, and still have enough money left over to treat us to four games of table football.

Who said we weren't inventive (and at the same time, very mature)?

To end this week on a cheerful note, here's some good dot-com news. Priceline.com's losses have narrowed, and revenues are up 18 per cent on its previous quarter. Travel site Expedia has actually made a profit - $4.4m for its third quarter to be precise. In the last year, the value of bookings made through its site have risen 68 per cent, generating revenues of $110m. Ebookers also thinks it's on course to make profits by the end of the year. Even Letsbuyit.com has managed to get some new backing - E25m from equity group GEM. (OK, so it lost £87.4m last year, but let's look on the bright side).

According to Nielsen//Netratings and Harris Interactive, $3.5bn was spent online in the US in March, a month in which eBay notched up 1.4bn page views. Nearly one in two Americans now buy online, according to Nielsen.

Unfortunately, the Round-Up's joy is not unfettered: in April, around 17,000 dot-com employees lost their jobs worldwide, compared with fewer than 10,000 in March (according to job placement company Challenger, Gray and Christmas). But placed in the context of a general economic downturn, even that's not as bad as it seems.

So, if the Round-Up can be so bold as to paraphrase Mark Twain, and to speak for dot-coms everywhere: reports of our death have been greatly exaggerated.

Until next Friday (assuming we haven't gone bust by then...)