Futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil is joining Google as its Director of Engineering on Monday. Mr Kurzweil, who is well-known for his opinions on artificial intelligence and extending human longevity, made the announcement on his blog.

He said “In 1999, I said that in about a decade we would see technologies such as self-driving cars and mobile phones that could answer your questions, and people criticized these predictions as unrealistic.”

Disaster relief work in the typhoon-hit Davao Oriental province of the Philippines is being assisted by a portable mobile phone network provided by Vodafone’s charitable foundation.

This is the first time the Vodafone Foundation’s Instant Network has been used in an emergency disaster situation, although it was deployed earlier this year to help humanitarian work in Northern Kenya.

UK entrepreneur Brent Hoberman, best known as co-founder of lastminute.com, has joined the Shazam board of directors as an independent board member.

Shazam recently announced that its service had more than a quarter of a billion users and processed more than ten million tags per day, making it easier for consumers to identify songs and learn more about TV broadcasts.

Web browser company Opera has been looking at European web site usage in its latest State of the Mobile Web report.

Ignoring international online services such as Facebook and Google, Opera has produced top ten lists of local websites for each country.

Over 1 billion people will be using ‘over the top’ mobile VoIP services by 2017, according to a new report from Juniper Research.

That’s the equivalent of one out of every seven mobile phone subscribers worldwide.