The male team came up with something called Slangatang, an app which allows you to annoy your friends by shouting out catchphrases in a variety of unconvincing regional accents. "Who'd want that on their phone?" I hear you cry, but to be fair there are a lot of dafter apps - think iFart - which have done really well. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed that it might be just dumb enough to work.

And Mike Butcher, writing on Techcrunch all the way back in October, seemed mildly impressed:

"If they get it right and introduce the features they plan, it's the kind of thing that could go viral, especially if celebrities get involved."

The chaps at Wired were less convinced, worried that the app might prove offensive

But if Slangatang looked weak, the female team's effort had me - and plenty of my fellow viewers - slapping my head in despair. They came up with another audio idea - Ampi App - with sounds to shock and noises to nuisance, though for the life of me I couldn't work out what users were supposed to do with a series of pig, elephant and other animal noises.

With only the chaps at Wired backing Ampi App, and the boys proving far better at presenting their work, the techies and most of the huge Twitter audience agreed that Slangatang was home and dry.

Then the results came in. The apps were made available for free download for Nokia, Blackberry and Android phones, though you may not be surprised to hear that Apple didn't agree to rush them into its App Store. More astonishing was the fact that thousands downloaded both apps, with Ampi Apps and its lame noises the clear winner.

What we learned was a few simple lessons. That people will try anything if it's free. That in a global marketplace, something that's stupid in any language - like a phone that makes animal noises - is a better bet than an app that speaks to a local sense of humour in a cod Welsh accent.

And that marketing and metadata are vital in getting your app seen amongst the millions competing for attention. The women may have been rubbish at presenting to an audience, but they somehow managed to get noticed on the global stage.

The real winners from last nights Apprentice were not the Venture team and their Ampi App, but Grapple, the software firm which built the two apps in a big hurry. There is an interesting piece about the firm on the Pocket-Lint site, and it can't harm their business to have been exposed to a television audience of eight million.

What would be nice now would be to have a rerun of the contest, with both Slangatang and Ampi Apps available for download again. Sadly, it appears that is unlikely to happen. Perhaps Lord Sugar thinks we have all suffered enough.

PSAs some have pointed out, "hundreds of thousands" did not download the apps, as I originally said. In fact, the female team had 10,000 downloads, compared to 3,000 for the boys.

We've grown used to seeing outlandish prices paid for businesses without a proven path to profit. But this is the third time Skype has been sold and the asking price this time was roughly four times what the investors who bought a majority stake in the business paid back in 2009.

So why is a business which has fewer users than Microsoft's own Windows Live service and is still not profitable worth so much? One person who does not believe Microsoft has overpaid is Ben Horowitz. Now that's hardly surprising - his investment firm Andreeseen Horowitz bought a stake in Skype in 2009 and so has just made a huge return.

But in an interesting blog post, Mr Horowitz points out that similar scepticism greeted the 2009 deal and explains why the world was wrong then and is wrong now to think that shifting technology will leave Skype "in the dust" and its investors out of pocket.

Just two years ago, with Google Voice about to steamroller all opposition and Apple apparently planning something similar, it looked as though Skype would fade into irrelevance as the web went mobile.

That's proved completely wrong. Google Voice has not taken off in a big way, and is still not available outside the United States, and many users of Apple devices still prefer to use Skype rather than the FaceTime service which has been the subject of so many expensive advertising campaigns.

Ben Horowitz says that what Microsoft is getting is a brilliant team of technologists, led by the founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, who have repeatedly proved that they can keep Skype at the forefront of modern communications.

Now Microsoft hopes to be a major force in the way we meet online, perhaps in business video conferences as well as in all those social encounters which Skype already facilitates.

So yes, there are some good reasons why Microsoft wants Skype. But I think we are still entitled to say "wow" about the price, and wonder whether the buyer was panicked into the deal on hearing that Google or Facebook might also be interested.

 

But, in a hurry to get the video off my phone and into the BBC system, I had decided that the quickest way was to put it on YouTube from where it could be downloaded and processed. After the blog post was published, I linked to the original video on YouTube - and within hours my inbox was filling up with comments.

I watched with mounting amazement as views to my YouTube clip accelerated. By Thursday evening it was heading to 10,000 views, but through Friday and Saturday the line on the YouTube Insight page - which I admit became something of an obsession - climbed ever more steeply, passing through 100,000, then 200,000. On Sunday the rate of growth started to slow, but by Monday morning nearly 400,000 people had viewed the clip.

Now I've put other clips onto YouTube over the years, and some have attracted a degree of interest, notably Stephen Fry praising Windows phones. But that got fewer than 9,000 views, so nothing in comparison to the Raspberry Pi clip.

The fact that the clip was shown and promoted on the BBC website obviously makes a big difference - but that was also the case with this clip about the auction of a very early Apple computer, yet it attracted fewer than a thousand views.

I've used the word viral in the title of this post, and many will quite reasonably object that a video promoted (though not linked to) from a mainstream site can never be described as viral. But it's still a puzzle to me to work out what catches the imagination of casual web clickers and what leaves them cold.

There's a clue in one previous viral clip posted by my former partner in blogging Darren Waters. His video of a Microsoft Xbox console at a games show suffering the notorious red ring of death proved immensely popular - and I think there are three reasons for that.

It was about a subject of great interest to a technically literate section of the web population, it was exclusive footage, and it was picked up and spread by a host of bloggers. Similarly, a lot of tech-savvy types are interested in new cheap forms of computing - and my video was the only way to see the Raspberry Pi device and hear David Braben talk about it.

All I need to do now is find something else that everybody wants to see and get some exclusive video. Any ideas would be welcome.

The games developer David Braben and some colleagues came to the BBC this week to demonstrate something called Raspberry Pi. It's a whole computer on a tiny circuit board - not much more than an ARM processor, a USB port, and an HDMI connection. They plugged a keyboard into one end, and hooked the other into a TV they had brought with them.

The result, a working computer running on a Linux operating system for very little, and a device that will, like the kit computers of the 1970s and 80s, encourage users to tinker around under the bonnet and learn a bit of programming. And it's a yearning to return to those days that is driving Braben and the other enthusiasts who are working to turn this sketchy prototype into a product that could be handed to every child in Britain.

They believe that what today's schoolchildren learn in ICT classes leaves them uninspired and ignorant about the way computers work. David Braben says the way the subject is taught today reminds him of typing lessons when he was at school - useful perhaps in preparing pupils for office jobs, but no way to encourage creativity.

Raspberry Pi is a non-profit venture, whose founders are mostly part of Cambridge's thriving technology sector. Their hope is that teachers, developers and the government will come together to get the device into the hands of children who may not have access to a computer at home or would not be allowed by parents to "muck about with it".

In some ways, the project resembles the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) scheme, which sought to create a laptop for children in the developing world at a cost of $100. OLPC was successful in promoting the idea of cheap computing, spawning lots of netbook imitators, but has struggled to get the price as low as they promised and to convince governments to back the idea.

There's a lot of work for Raspberry Pi to do. The volunteer team has to produce a better working prototype, has to show that it really can be manufactured for around £15, and then has to capture the imagination of the people in the educational establishment who will decide whether to give it the thumbs up.

So there is no guarantee that a new generation will discover that there's more to a computer than turning it on, updating your Facebook status, and making a Powerpoint presentation. But wouldn't it be great if an idea dreamed up by a group of Cambridge enthusiasts ended up inspiring young people here and perhaps across the world to engage with computers in a new way? I will keep you up to date here with how Raspberry Pi develops and my colleagues on the BBC's Click technology programme will also be taking a look at the project.

You may remember that a couple of weeks ago, Spofity announced strict new curbs on the amount of music that users of its free ad-supported service could play, apparently under pressure from music labels unhappy that free music was eroding CD sales.

Now those same users are being offered two things, the ability to manage MP3 players like the iPod through Spotify, and a new download service which offers cheaper deals if you buy lots of tracks at a time. Gustav Soderstrom, the man who has designed the new product, insists it's not just a compensation prize for the curbs imposed on free users. He says this is an idea conceived over a year ago after research into how people use the service and what they want from it.

There's a lot of talk in Spotify's press release about giving users the same experience as premium subscribers by allowing them to take their playlists with them on the move. They can only do that, though, with music they already own, so what is really being pushed here is a revamped download offering.

The Swedish firm freely admits that the existing download service - its third source of revenue alongside advertising and subscriptions - has been a bit of a disaster. Prices for single tracks have been too high to attract much interest and it was never clear to me who would buy when they could get music for free, with adverts.

Now, after more lengthy negotiations with the music labels, it has come up with something it believes will prove irresistible to the kind of people who build huge playlists on Spotfiy and would like to take them with them on an MP3 player. So if you buy 10 tracks at a time, they are priced at 80p each, but if you want 100 you will pay 50p apiece.

Every aspect of this new service is aimed at iTunes, the Apple software which is not universally loved but has a virtual stranglehold on digital music. If Spotify's plan works, its users will soon be syncing all of their music onto their iPods without going near iTunes and they will be able to sync over their home wi-fi, something Apple's software still does not allow. Then when they want new music they will find it cheaper to get it from Spotify's download service rather than the iTunes store.

So should Apple be worried? Well it may be more concerned by the activities of a much bigger business closer to home. Amazon, whose MP3 store has been around for awhile, has just launched a price war in the United States, cutting the prices of top chart tracks to 69 cents - nearly half of what iTunes charges.

When and if Spotify finally hatches the deal with the music majors that allows it to launch in America, then Apple may pay attention to its upstart challenger.

But in the meantime, this new plan for what I described to Spotify executives as their freeloaders - they weren't enthusiastic about that term - really needs to work. While it's real aim is to turn the nine million free users into paying customers as quickly as possible, the music streaming service needs to keep a steady flow of new arrivals coming through the door.

Last month's bad news about limits to the service is bound to put some off trying Spotify, even though the brakes aren't applied to new users for six months. Now the firm has to hope that that a new way of managing their music will keep more customers coming and perhaps persuade a few of them to buy the odd track too.

More than 200 million people use iTunes and hand Apple their credit card details to manage their digital music. If Spotify can persuade even a small share of them that it has a better way of doing things, then it may at last find the path to profitability.

Already this is being described as another huge day for the micro-blogging service - "Twitter just had its CNN moment", as one American website put it, comparing this event with the first Gulf War, where millions suddenly woke up to the fact that cable news was the place to observe a war unfold in real-time.

I assumed that Twitter had merely been very fast to pick up on what more conventional news sources were saying - but it appears not. More than an hour before President Obama delivered his address with the news of the operation, this tweet from a former aide to Donald Rumsfeld popped up:

So Twitter was first with the news, partly because it has become the medium now used by people in the know to spread information. But what was more remarkable was that the raid on the Bin Laden compound was actually tweeted live by a witness who didn't realise what he was seeing.

Late yesterday evening, a man called Sohaib Athar, who describes himself on Twitter as "an IT consultant taking a break from the rat-race by hiding in the mountains with his laptops," reported the presence of a helicopter hovering above Abbotabad:

He then went on to document first his annoyance about the helicopter's noisy presence, then an apparent explosion, and his dawning realisation that something big was going on. Eventually, he tweeted:

"Uh oh, now I'm the guy who liveblogged the Osama raid without knowing it."

Sohaib Athar, or @reallyvirtual, had been transformed within a couple of hours from an obscure IT guy in Pakistan to an eyewitness to history. According to new figures from Twitter, he is among a global population of 200 million users. Such is the power of this network that it has become the key resource for older media trying to stay ahead of events - a journalist who does not use Twitter is now like one who abjures the mobile phone.

Other crowdsourced online news sources - from Wikipedia with its swiftly updated Osama Bin Laden entry to Google Maps which rapidly had a location for his Abbotabad compound - also proved their worth.

But there's a harsh lesson for some news organisations trying to adapt to the digital age. I looked at The Times and the Telegraph iPad apps this morning and neither had changed their front pages to reflect the news about Bin Laden. Most days, it does not matter that iPad editions "go to bed" at the same time as the papers. This morning, it made them look like 20th Century relics - and if users are being asked to pay for the apps, as is the case with The Times, they may have some searching questions about what they're getting for their money.

Now though, he says, the advertisers have less choice, because the industry, through Vevo, presents a united front.

"Vevo can say to advertisers, only we can present you with 60 million video viewers in the 18-34 demographic. Ubiquity for the fan, scarcity for the advertiser is the best way to maximise the value of the content."

And while he wasn't releasing any numbers, Mr Caraeff said the business was on the path to profitability, and was succeeding in its mission to convince advertisers that music was premium content in the same league as sport or TV drama.

This set me thinking about Spotify, another digital music business which appears to have a less comfortable relationship with the big labels, as we've seen recently. Rio Caraeff said he'd decided that video was a much safer bet than another audio business - and explained that was because he'd studied the psychology of music-label decision-makers:

"If I'd made it an audio business people would have been worried about cannibalisation and the impact on the incumbent business model."

So, for Vevo, he'd managed to negotiate the kind of global and long-lasting licensing deals which are still eluding Spotify.

But can Vevo, created by an industry which has repeatedly failed to embrace the digital era, succeed where other efforts have failed?

"There's a history of failed ventures," admits Rio Caraeff. "Did the music industry create Spotify, did they create YouTube, did they create iTunes or the original Napster? No." But he says all the businesses created by the music industry were based on protecting the legacy business model - whereas Vevo is focussed on what music lovers want.

It is of course also focussed on a free advertising-funded model. What's ironic is that the labels appear content to see Vevo pump out music to millions of YouTube viewers for nothing, while remaining nervous about letting Spotify do the same. Even if Mr Caraeff understands the psychology of the music industry it remains a mystery to me.

This looks like something of a crisis for a firm trying to position itself as the major force in home entertainment - and it's also worrying for any business trying to persuade consumers that the "cloud" is a safe place to store valuable content or personal data.

The 75 million people with PlayStation Network accounts have plenty of questions about the outage. They want to know what caused the problem at the network, whether their credit card details have been compromised, and crucially, how soon they will be able to get online again.

But so far Sony has been less than forthcoming on any of these issues. A spokesman told me Sony engineers were working around the clock but that the company wants to make sure it has a long-term solution to the security problems with the network, rather than just rushing to patch it and restore access. "We can live with the short-term embarrassment," he said. "The protection of our consumers is paramount."

WIth Xbox owners rushing to play the hit new game Portal 2 with online friends, this was not a great time for its rival console to be offline. It was also unfortunate timing for today's unveiling of the device which Sony hopes will make it a major contender in the battle with Apple's iPad. The Sony Tablet, which will go on sale in the autumn, looks promising. It comes in two forms - one with a 9.4 inch display another with two 5.5 inch screens.

The tablets will be integrated with other Sony devices so you will be able to use them as remote controls for your television, and to project content on to the bigger screen. And the promise is that users will also be able to get music and video from Sony's Qriocity service, and play games... via the PlayStation network.

So the Tablet looks ready to rival the iPad in terms of hardware and content - but only if Sony's network is back online and enjoys the trust of the consumer. Maybe that is the reason the company is taking so long to fix whatever it found last Wednesday. Better to leave millions of gamers frustrated for a few days now than to have the network fall over later this year, just as Sony Tablet owners try to stream a film or play a game.

The file which sits on your phone and on the computer with which it is synchronised was discovered by two security experts, Pete Warden and Alasdair Allan. They proceeded to build an application enabling iPhone users to access the file's data and then map it.

Just twelve hours after it was revealed, mapping your movements has become something of a craze. Naturally, I've tried it, and have spent some time zooming in and out of a world map, and finding out where and when I've travelled with my phone.

As you can see, I have criss-crossed southern England and Wales over the last year. And then there's my skiing holiday in January - you can see me landing at Chambery in Southern France and making my way to and from the slopes.

This obviously has intriguing implications for anyone who possesses one of these devices. What, for instance, if you had told your wife that you were off on a business trip - when in fact you had slipped off to the slopes with some mates - and she then managed to track down your iPhone location file? (I should stress that this is an imaginary scenario).

For divorce lawyers, particularly in the United States, the first question when taking on a new client could be "does your spouse own an iPhone?" And law enforcement agencies will also be taking a great interest in the iPhones - or iPads - of anyone they are tracking.

There has been a mixture of amusement and outrage at this news. Other researchers say they discovered this some time ago. The point is that millions of Apple customers probably didn't read that material. And some privacy campaigners are saying that Apple should have been far more open about what it was doing.

The company can however point to this clause buried somewhere in the 15,200 word iTunes terms and conditions:

"Apple and our partners and licensees may collect, use, and share precise location data, including the real-time geographic location of your Apple computer or device. This location data is collected anonymously in a form that does not personally identify you and is used by Apple and our partners and licensees to provide and improve location-based products and services. For example, we may share geographic location with application providers when you opt in to their location services."

This will still be a matter of concern to some users, so journalists have naturally been asking Apple to answer a few questions about the issue. But in its normal manner, Steve Jobs' firm has said nothing. Which you might think is pretty creepy - and not that cool.

The fact that the engagement was announced via the @Clarencehouse Twitter account showed the Palace’s digital ambitions - now the hope is to follow that up with a truly interactive and social media wedding. “This is first for us,” a spokesman said at a briefing this morning. “It’s a new and exciting way to add to the enjoyment of the Royal Wedding.”

 

So the official Royal Wedding website will be at the centre of an operation which will use Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and Flickr to provide material about the day’s events - and to solicit content from the public.

The biggest innovation is that the broadcast footage of the royal wedding will be live streamed on the Royal Channel on YouTube. The pictures will be from the BBC - but the commentary will be in the form of a live blog, provided by a couple of St James’s Palace press officers typing away furiously, while keeping an eye on Twitter and other networks.

There’s another YouTube innovation - a video Wedding Book launched today which allows anyone to send a message of congratulations to the happy couple. You won’t be surprised to hear that will be pre-moderated.

 

Then there’s a Facebook Event on the British Monarchy page, where you can click to say “I’m attending” the Royal wedding. No guarantee that you will receive an invitation to the Abbey, but the promise is that you will have a “virtual” experience of the day, and Facebook is also launching a “Stories” app inviting anyone to describe how they celebrate the day.

Google will play a key role in keeping this operation afloat, running the YouTube channel and hosting the official website as a Google app.

So far, the website, with nine million page views, has enjoyed reasonable if not spectacular traffic. But on the day, it could come under a lot of strain with millions around the world experiencing the wedding as a “two-screen event”, watching the television while interacting online.

The wedding could surpass Barack Obama’s inauguration as a live web event, testing the web infrastructure in the same way as the National Grid used to see a power surge when people put the kettle on after a big football match. Let’s hope Google has a data centre or two on standby.

One question - why is the Palace doing all this, when the web population will be providing plenty of its own content around the wedding? We are told that it’s partly because Prince William and Kate Middleton are part of a generation that has grown up in a digital, interactive world - and are themselves enthusiastic users of new media.

But there are limits. Asked whether either of the couple would be updating their relationship status on Facebook on 29 April, a spokesman smiled and said: “Pass.”

While he understands the need for the ISPs to manage the traffic on their networks, he is adamant that they should not be allowed to discriminate between different content providers. That would be like the days when AOL controlled your internet experience, he said, and it would end innovation online.

So it's clear that Sir Tim is not exactly a neutral arbitrator - he thinks net neutrality is a vital principle which must be defended. The big ISPs may not be too happy about that - though they will feel much warmer about his criticisms of the Digital Economy Act, which they have delayed through a judicial review.

At the end of our interview, Sir Tim turned the tables, asking for the right to interview me. He asked some tough questions about the BBC's ability to compete in the information age, and when he would be able to use the iPlayer in the United States.

Some of what he asked was way above my paygrade and I should stress I had no insider information and I was making it up as I went along. But I promised in the spirit of openness and transparency to put his interview online. Here it is:

 

You might say the same - with knobs on - about Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who opened the conference. The inventor of the web is extremely important - and still insufficiently recognised in his own land, given the scale of his achievements. While giving a talk to an engineering trade body recently, I put up a slide of Sir Tim - and asked some students in the front row to name him. "Err, the guy from Apple?" came the response.

But the man who two decades ago laid the foundations for our modern information era is also very geeky. When he speaks, usually without notes, ideas spill out of him at a rapid rate and, like a web surfer clicking on links, he tends to go off at a tangent.

In Oxford he was no different, giving us a potted history of the internet and the web which headed off in all sorts of directions at once. But he also had some interesting and important things to say.

Sir Tim stressed that, while it might seem we had made huge progress since the invention of the web, with 25% of the world's population now using it, it would be complacent to take that view. Instead, he asked: what are we going to do about getting the rest of the world on board? The infrastructure is there, so why are so many people still not taking advantage of it?

He lauded the web's power to promote democracy but again said that we had taken it for granted, "until Egypt goes and shuts down the internet".

He talked of social networking's power to connect people - but lamented the way debates on Twitter always seem to tend to extreme views.

And he said that open data programmes, which have seen governments in the US and UK allow citizens far greater access to their data, were vital to the democratic process. At a time of cuts in government spending, Sir Tim stressed that initiatives to promote transparency were all the more important.

So, through the mist emerged a clear picture of what still drives Sir Tim. He wants a web which is open, friendly, civil and ever smarter - and he wants governments to behave better towards it. Important stuff, and I'm sure you'll agree of interest far beyond the confines of a geeky conference.

But I'm hearing that Spotify had the move forced upon it by the record labels and the move reflects continuing tension between the fast-growing digital service and the music industry.

It seems that the original licensing deals which enabled Spotify to get off the ground a couple of years ago are coming to an end - and some of the labels in some European countries are getting restless about how much of their content is being given away for free, with minimal fees in return. Yes, 15% of Spotify's users are now paying customers, but as the service grows, millions of tracks are being played for nothing.

As someone put it to me, "the guy whose bonus still depends on CD sales is cutting up rough".

And it's worth remembering that Spotify is locked in a seemingly endless round of negotiations with those same labels about launching in the United States. Against that background, the streaming service has apparently decided to allay some of the concerns by putting strict curbs on what users can get for free.

I ran some of this past the respected music industry analyst Mark Mulligan. He said it seemed a plausible scenario, with the record labels still thrashing around in desperation as they try to work out how to make profits in the digital age.

"The industry is in trouble, downloads aren't working, CD sales continue to plummet, and Spotify was an easy target."

But he also thought that it was convenient for Spotify to blame the labels:

"Their own numbers still aren't adding up - they may have needed to do this anyway."

The record labels, for their part, know they need to support new digital services. After all, Spotify has persuaded one million people across Europe, most of them pretty young, to pay for music, something the labels find ever harder.

Spotify and the record labels are locked in a marriage that neither seems to be enjoying - but each needs the other if they are to survive into a profitable future.

So Fujitsu's plan to build its own network - in conjunction with Virgin Media, TalkTalk and Cisco - does two things. First, it provides the possibility of a third player in the fibre game, though one which will be closely allied with Virgin. So internet service providers (ISPs) without a fibre offering should be able to provide one via the Fujitsu network - if they don't like the look of BTs Openreach which will also be offering them a wholesale fibre deal. More competition, which sounds good.

Secondly, five million homes in rural Britain now have a real chance of getting fast broadband - and even, according to Fujitsu, having a better deal than is available in the towns. The company says that by delivering fibre direct to homes, rather than to pavement cabinets as BT mostly does, it can promise speeds of up to 1Gbps. Cue mutterings from BT about why on earth anyone should want those speeds - but for rural campaigners whose battle-cry has been "final third first" this sounds like very good news.

And Fujitsu says it's helping to push the UK up the global broadband league, and we need to be more ambitious about the technology we use. The UK is 27th in the OECD broadband rankings, Andy Stevenson of Fujitsu told me. You need 1Gbps from day one.

So to the questions - first of all, what will it cost to build, and then to buy? When the debate about next generation broadband was raging a few years ago, some huge figures were bandied around for the cost of bringing fibre to the whole of Britain - something in the region of 28 billion. Now Fujitsu is talking of building its network for two billion, which seems a bargain.

The company is getting access to BTs infrastructure - its ducts and poles - and that means there may not have to be too much expensive digging up of roads. Nevertheless, questions are being asked about how the sums add up. BT put out a pointed statement calling for more clarity and behind the scenes is frankly disbelieving: if we can not see the business case for this, how can they, asked one insider. We don't understand how they're getting it to this cost unless they're going to charge rural customers a lot more.

Still, its in BTs interest to be sceptical about the arrival of what could be a powerful new competitor - and the telecoms giant did spend many years saying fast fibre broadband was not really needed and not affordable, before deciding that the investment case did in fact add up.

But it's important to remember that this new network won't reach all of the final third - and we are not at all clear exactly where the five million homes to be offered this fast lane to the future will be. That all depends, says Fujitsu, on where the £530m set aside by the government for rural broadband projects is allocated.

That money, set aside from the TV licence fee, is crucial to the building of this network - work won't start without it, and Fujitsu is clearly hoping to get the lion's share of the cash. The company thinks the government would rather deal with one big provider operating nationally than dozens of small local projects - and judging by the enthusiastic reaction of the broadband minister Ed Vaizey to yesterdays announcement, it looks as though that's right.

So Fujitsu has gone a long way to providing an answer for the rural broadband campaigners, the government, the ISPs wanting a competitive fibre wholesaler - just about everyone except BT. All we need now is a bit more detail on how it all adds up.