What every eco-friendly/tech-savvy lady surely needs: a handbag covered in little solar panels. Cleverly, it has a USB connection inside it, drawing on the beneficent rays of Sol to charge your mobile phone or MP3 player or whatever. Superb! Let's have one for us guys now...

Here's what cheered me up this wet and blustery morning:

Hi David,

Have you ever thought about the nefarious side of Instant Messaging (IM), and what some employees are really using it for, beyond idle chit-chat with co-workers?

Active chit-chat with co-workers?

Imagine the implications if employees at a financial institution were sending clandestine IM correspondence to outside parties, tipping them off to sell their shares in a major company. It sounds a bit like the Da Vinci Code, I know, but it's real - and frighteningly easy to do.

I am proud to say I've neither read nor seen the Da Vinci Code, but I'm pretty damn sure it doesn't include nefarious IM conversations involving financial tip-offs...

Picture this: an employee types what appears to be an innocuous IM to an outsider, but highlights random letters in a different color. Put together, these characters spell out hidden messages that could leak proprietary company information or violate industry regulations.

Or they could meet in the pub. Or send a text. Or...

What's worse, many companies have yet to log their IM chats in their native file formats, meaning compliance managers cannot see the different fonts and colors to decode the text within.

Oh, let me guess what your product does...

If you're interested in exploring this angle further...

Let me stop you there. Really. I have nefarious work to do.

Here's an interesting one - it seems that, in negotiating their new contract, Orange has persuaded Carphone Warehouse to sell its broadband product instore, right next to the (remarkably similar) TalkTalk offering.

Not sure how they managed that, but the net result is that those looking to find a pretty cheap, none-too-spectacular "converged" broadband service can size up the two main rivals in the same store.

Mind you, Orange's business broadband offering is apparently good enough for Microsoft, who've just selected it to link up 1,500 of their UK-based homeworking employees.

Wow! BT's bringing out some kick-ass communications badges for doctors in Nottinghamshire! "Staff at Sherwood Forest Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust in Nottinghamshire are pioneering the use of a new communications system from BT," begins the press release.

"It allows users to speak to each other instantly anywhere in the hospital through a voice-controlled, wearable badge weighing less than two ounces. Staff simply have to say a person's name, department or role to be automatically connected to the appropriate person and can speak to them just like on a normal phone." Awesome!

Except... wait. "Pioneering"? Let's dig a bit here. OK, so BT's partner in this is Vocera... let's have a look at their website... hang on, this isn't pioneering at all. These badges have already been deployed in libraries in Minneapolis (July 2006), hotels in Austin, Texas (June 2006)... oh dear, it gets worse... back to the UK now, and back to the NHS: Royal Liverpool & Broadgreen University Hospitals NHS Trust (June 2006), "Trail-Blazing" Royal Cornwall Hospitals NHS Trust (February 2006) and, just to cap it off, a hospital in St Paul, Minnesota, in July 2005 (yes, BT brought it to America first, a year and a half ago).

Now BT, back to today's press release - accidentally (?) dated one year ago - about Nottinghamshire's "pioneering" badges. Do carry on...

Full marks to community member dercoss, who dropped into the site a week ago to give us a handy tip about the resignation of Hugh Paterson, erstwhile CEO of internet service provider Biscit.

For those unfamiliar with Biscit, it's the ISP which bought up V21 last year, only to have V21's wholesale supplier Netservices cut it off over some longstanding "burst bandwidth" charges. Paterson then accused Netservices of playing dirty by trying to force V21's customers onto another Netservices-supplied ISP, ezeeDSL. You see, Biscit has its own pipes and doesn't really need Netservices' supply at all.

So far, so complicated. Anyway, back to last week. After we reported problems that some overcharged Biscit customers were having with bouncing cheques, dercoss signed up to the site to comment that Paterson had in fact now left the board.

Now, of course we love our members giving us leads, and we follow them up whenever possible. A few days after dercoss's missive (and about three days ago now), we managed to get hold of Biscit, only to be informed by the nice lady on the other end of the line that "as far as I know, everything is as it was". Paterson was also not answering his phones. Cue large hmmmmm. But that's the way the, er, biscuit crumbles - no solid verification, no story.

And today? Voila! Paterson has indeed resigned, so he can "concentrate on future developments".

If precedent is anything to go by, you can rely on us and our members to keep you informed of such developments first...