Tech start-up job fair Silicon Milkroundabout is offering candidates 1,500 free tickets to each of its two days this year. Saturday 26th May is for Product Management and Design, while Sunday 27th is Engineering day.

The event launched in May 2011 and was followed by a second fair held in October. A total of 1,876 jobseekers attended and 168 jobs were filled.

The UK’s tech and digital industry appears to be growing strongly, with Sunday’s Silicon Milkroundabout jobs fair in London rapidly filling up. It’ll see over 100 start-up companies offering 500 + developer jobs with salaries of up to £100,000.

London’s first Silicon Milkroundabout was held in May this year, welcoming over 400 attendees and 45 participating companies.

Chinese telecoms firm Huawei says it plans to create 500 new UK jobs during the next three years, doubling its current staffing levels.

The company, which is based in Basingstoke, also says it'll generate over a thousand jobs through subcontracting.

With the end of the year just a couple of weeks away, The Fonecast has invited London-based dealer Faisal Sheikh and mobile recruitment expert Spencer Davies to discuss the past 12 months... and the potential for 2011. Plus, as usual, the team takes its regular look at news headlines from the last seven days – including mobile payments, mobile shopping and mobile fraud.

With the end of the year just a couple of weeks away, The Fonecast invites London-based dealer Faisal Sheikh and mobile recruitment expert Spencer Davies to discuss the past 12 months... and the potential for 2011. Plus, as usual, the team looks at mobile news headlines from the last seven days.

Mark Bridge writes:

We're told it's not merely 'sales'. No, it's an art. "The art of selling". And with over 4 million hits on Google, you could easily argue that the art of selling is more popular than painting.

The same goes for the two sub-categories of cross-selling and up-selling. They're arts as well, you know. Mystic and creative disciplines...

The security of 3G and GSM mobile phone calls has been questioned recently. Mark Bridge spoke to Dr Simon Bransfield-Garth, Chief Executive of Cellcrypt, at Mobile World Congress to find out how real the problems are. The interview was included in our podcast on 19th February 2010; here's an edited transcript of the interview:

James Rosewell writes:

Apps (defined as games, information services, social networking video and web content among other things) dominated MWC10 with debate focused on the provision of radio network capacity to support them, the technologies used to create them and the methods for Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) to monetise them. Given the fragmentation in technology and the investment needed from MNOs to provide capacity coupled with a lack of reward for MNOs, we would be forgiven for thinking the App as we know it is not long for this world. However new technologies offering broader platform support, plus smart network investment coupled with new business models, mean the App will evolve and come of age ready for 2011.

Mark Bridge writes:

We queued in the rain outside the Catalonia Barcelona Plaza hotel. We sat on the floor in a basement room. And we watched on TV as Steve Ballmer announced Windows Phone 7 Series.

The life of a reporter is not a glamorous one.

Mark Bridge writes:

I’ve previously talked about a report from 2009 which warned how touch-screen phones that weren’t true smartphones were pushing down ARPU. Consumers thought they were buying something that was relatively advanced but were being seduced by form over function.

This week HTC stepped in to the arena with the HTC Smart, described by HTC's Peter Chou as "a more-affordable smartphone". Although it may not fit everyone’s definition of a smartphone, it certainly ticks most of the boxes. It has an open operating system, Qualcomm’s Brew platform, which has over 18,000 available applications and has been installed on over 1200 handset models worldwide.

Iain Graham, James Rosewell and Mark Bridge return to review their mobile industry predictions from last year. Which mergers, partnerships and developments did they forecast correctly... and which didn’t work out as planned?

Later in the programme, the team anticipates some of the topics that will be hitting the headlines during 2016.

Mark Bridge learns about the mobile technology trends at Mobile World Congress 2015 by chatting to James Rosewell of 51Degrees, Dr Kevin Curran from the IEEE and Chris Millington of Doro.

They talk about wearable devices, wireless charging, mobile operating systems and much more... including some of their favourite products from the exhibition.

We're taking a look back at the biggest mobile industry news stories from February 2015, including allegations that the UK's security service tried to breach SIM card security by hacking into one of the world's biggest SIM producers.

We also talk about the planned BT and EE merger, the creation of two new UK virtual networks, some acquisitions in the mobile payment arena and a new Ubuntu smartphone.

In today's programme Mark Bridge talks to Chris Millington, who's Managing Director for Doro UK and Ireland.

They discuss the state of mobile retailing in the UK, the future of wearable devices and - as you might expect - smartphones for seniors.

We're back with a month of mobile industry news, including takeover talks and takeover rumours. O2 and Three are said to be discussing a merger... but is there any truth in the suggestions that BlackBerry could be up for grabs?

We also discuss Apple's record-breaking quarterly figures, the highlights of CES and the launch of Microsoft Windows 10, as well as saying farewell to the current version of Google Glass.