Telefonica UK and Chargemaster plc have announced a partnership that’ll see O2 SIM cards used in the machine-to-machine technology connecting Chargemaster’s UK-wide network of electric vehicle charging points.

Chargemaster recently announced a national charging network called POLAR. It’s the UK’s largest private sector-funded network, with around 4,000 electric vehicle charging bays due to be installed in towns and cities across the UK by the end of 2012.

Everything Everywhere has launched a new machine-to-machine management platform. The platform has been developed in partnership with Transatel - which already works with the network on its MVNO products - and will be supported through a new relationship with vehicle tracking specialists Redtail Telematics.

It’s described by the company as a major step towards its goal of becoming partner of choice in the M2M space.

Telefónica has announced three significant changes to its organisational structure.

It’s setting up a new business unit called Telefónica Digital. Matthew Key, who joined O2 in 2002 and had previously been in charge of Telefónica Europe, will run the unit. It’ll be based in London with offices in Madrid, Sao Paulo, Silicon Valley and a number of locations in Asia. Around 2,500 staff will be drawn from Telefonica and its associated businesses.

Machine-to-machine communications specialist Wireless Logic has been sold by Peter Jones CBE.

The deal, worth £35 million, involves private equity firm ECI Partners and the Wireless Logic management team.

In five years' time, smart metering will account for over 40% of the 400 million machine-to-machine connections around the world. That's the prediction of a new Juniper Research report.

Although M2M smart meters don't make as much money per connection as other M2M segments, Juniper says the volume of smart meter deployment will means it's still an important revenue stream.