Virgin Media Business has won its bid to provide a free public WiFi service to Bradford and Leeds city centres.

The service will be operated on behalf of Virgin Media Business by Global Reach Technology and will launch in Leeds’ Briggate and Bradford’s Bridge Street later this month. Millennium Square in Leeds and City Park in Bradford will be added in early 2013.

News Corporation has decided to stop publishing its American ‘iPad newspaper’, The Daily, although it says the brand will live on in other channels. The last edition will appear on 15th December, after which its technology and some of its staff will become part of The New York Post.

Launched in February last year, The Daily was priced at 99 cents per issue or $39.99 (around £25) per year.

Today is the 20th anniversary of the Short Message Service used for sending 160-character messages via mobile phone networks. The first official SMS message was sent on this day in 1992, when an Sema Group engineer named Neil Papworth sent a text message from a computer to the Orbitel 901 mobile phone being used by Richard Jarvis of Vodafone UK. The message simply said ‘Merry Christmas’.

SMS had been devised some years earlier; Finnish engineer Matti Makkonen is credited with creating the initial concept in 1984.

Mark Bridge writes:

Dumb pipes. The phrase infuriates many people involved with mobile phone networks. But what does it mean – and could it be the prelude to phones becoming dumber, too?

Mark Bridge writes:

As the end of the year approaches, so the volume of ‘real news’ tends to reduce as it’s replaced by annual reviews and seasonal surveys. We’ll be joining in with our predictions for 2013 in a few weeks’ time... but first, here’s a look back at the biggest stories from the past seven days.