Today's podcast was recorded at Mobile World Congress 2013, where Mark Bridge has been reporting on the latest news from handset manufacturers.

He also drops into the Global Mobile Awards - and finds out who won the inaugural Dead Technology Award at the unofficial festival fringe.

4.3 million home and business alarm systems will be connected to mobile phone networks in Europe by 2016, according to a new report from Berg Insight.

The research company predicts that the total number of tracking devices and wireless alarm systems monitored from a European alarm receiving centre will grow from 9.1 million last year to 39.7 million by the end of 2016.

Machine-to-machine (M2M) communication is offering mobile networks an unrivalled opportunity to dramatically increase their connection figures. At the moment, over 100 million M2M-enabled devices - from vending machines to smoke alarms - are providing information automatically, with mobile networks carrying the majority of this traffic

Jürgen Hase, Vice President of the M2M Competence Center at Deutsche Telekom and Chairman of the M2M Alliance, offers his M2M predictions for 2013.

A new report by IMS Research forecasts that the number of mobile machine-to-machine (M2M) connections worldwide will treble in five years, from around 107 million connections in 2011 to 326 million connections by 2016.

It says this growth is being driven by a number of factors, including government regulation, a desire for increased efficiency, declining costs and the availability of services that make it easier to develop M2M applications.

Ofcom has launched a consultation about new laws that would allow ‘white space’ technology to be used the UK.

These so-called ‘white spaces’ are the unused parts of frequency bands that have been reserved for other uses, such as TV broadcasting, but could also be used for other applications such as broadband and M2M connections.