The Weekly Round-Up: 20.06.08

The Round-Up tries not to make a habit of getting caught with its pants down but this week's laughs are brought to you from the surprisingly comfy confines of trap number three in the local conveniences.

Not because of a dodgy tummy, oh no - this is serious business, dear readers.

The Round-Up is halfway through putting together a PowerPoint presentation for an important meeting next week, and what better place to come for a bit of peace and quiet.

And it seems the Round-Up isn't alone, according to a survey of 1,000 travelling professionals in the UK and US.

The survey, by managed office company Regus, found almost half of remote and mobile workers spend at least half a day per week working in a public place. But finding a private place to make confidential calls or work on sensitive documents has become a problem.

So much so, in fact, that half of road warriors admit they have resorted to working in pubs (yeah, right) two-thirds in busy restaurants - and one in six from toilets.

Kurt Mroncz, UK sales and marketing director at Regus, said: "Many organisations just don't realise the staggering problems which their staff face when out on the road. From a dangerous lack of privacy to difficult and absurd working environments, business travellers are often put in impossible positions as they try to carry out their professional role." Where Mr Mroncz was making his statement from goes sadly unrecorded although we do wonder…

And it poses a security risk for businesses, piped up David Porter, head of security and risk at tech consultancy, Detica. "These findings point to a significant vulnerability in British corporate security. The growing tide of professionals expected to work 'on the hoof' without proper support, is putting the UK's prized corporate intellectual property, trade secrets and deals at risk."

You may not get an expensive luke-warm cup of coffee-flavoured milk foam and jazz-lite soundtrack of your favourite coffee shop in the loo but it does at least guarantee some privacy while you work - unless we're talking US stalls where the doors are barely big enough to protect your modesty.

But care is needed operating your handheld device in the loo (oh, do behave), especially if you're making a 'stall call' with it. The survey also found two-thirds of people have eavesdropped on someone else's confidential business conversation, and more than a third have caught sight of sensitive documents or information on laptops in public places.

There's clearly a gap in the market for mobile workers. The future is wi-fi-equipped public conveniences with a coffee machine. And one of those irritating geezers who sell a squirt of aftershave or perfume, especially if they added printer paper and spare laptop batteries to their armoury of aftershaves and lollies. (Does anyone actually buy those lollies? The Round-Up doesn't think so). But what more would today's modern road warrior need?

Moving swiftly on, life isn't any easier for office workers chained to the desk, either.

The latest figures - courtesy of BT - show that most city centre office workers are tied to their desks and see less than an hour a day of natural sunlight, with nearly a quarter seeing less than 20 minutes of the sun's rays during the working day.

"Office workers now see less sunshine than coal miners", reckons BT, pointing out two-thirds of workers admit to being depressed at being chained to their desks… (but the Round-Up is not suggesting this is the answer.)

It's a tough lot, but on the bright side at least you're not likely to be subject to the terrors which used to be the lot of those doing 12-hour shifts down a shaft full of coal dust a mile underground.

Still, with the first official day of summer this weekend BT is urging people to free themselves from the trend of "chain-desking" and work outside the office. Good luck, if the British summer is anything to go by your portable device of choice will not only need to be wi-fi enabled but waterproof as well.

And it's not just the weather getting hot. Former Undertones frontman Fergal Sharkey has been getting hot under the collar this week about the nation's youth.

The iPod generation are getting their teenage kicks from stealing music and Sharkey, in his role as CEO of recording industry artist and publisher group British Music Rights, isn't happy.

A BMR study claims the average 14- to 24-year-old now has almost 900 illegal tracks each on their MP3 players - around half of the 1,770 tracks the kids of today, on average, each have on their music players.

Sharkey said: "Technology has greatly increased the value of these activities - but it is clear that the financial gains are not necessarily feeding back to the creators: artists, composers and songwriters."

And he dismissed claims that the current generation of file-sharing and song-swapping is the same as the taping of cassettes and copying of CDs of older generations.

"I need excitement oh I need it bad... I wanna hold her, wanna hold her tight," he might or might not have added.

Speaking of rubbish, middle England released a collective howl of victory when South Norfolk council revealed it has ditched a controversial scheme to microchip householders' bins to monitor how much rubbish they throw away.

The system, dubbed 'chip and bin', worked by using chips to weigh rubbish as it was lifted into one of the 12 lorries fitted with an onboard computer. An antenna in the chip sent the information about the amount of rubbish to the lorry's computer.

But the data collected by the system proved to be unreliable and inconsistent, according to the council. One of the main problems was that the system was only designed for 60 to 80 bin lifts per day instead of the thousands of such pickups every day.

This meant the binmen - sorry waste disposal operatives - were, when they weren't not busy tipping half the contents of the bins across gardens while making as much noise as possible, repeatedly forced to override the system to get the bins emptied and their round finished.

But the battle of the bins isn't over just yet. Ignoring South Norfolk's assessment that the system "wasn't robust enough to cope", the government insists other pilot 'chip and bin' schemes around the country will still go ahead next year ahead of a decision on a possible national scheme.

The Round-Up's just about finished now - in more ways than one - but here are a few more highlights of the week.

It's the end of the Bill Gates era, embrace the memories here.

Watch four intrepid silicon.com journalists jump off a 150-foot building.

Game, set, match. With cheery Andy Murray carrying the nation's hopes at Wimbledon next week take an exclusive peek at the tech behind the scenes of the tennis championship.

Follow the big Firefox 3 launch.

And if that's not enough, have a crack at the caption competition too.