Ring-back tones offers consumers yet another way to customise their mobile phone service. Yet despite this - and the revenue opportunities that can be generated - many network operators don't provide ring-back tones.

In today's special feature we talk to Florent Stroppa of OnMobile to discover why the UK doesn't really seem to be bothered about ring-back tones... and whether the next-generation of interactive ring-back services could change this.

The North Yorkshire village of Weaverthorpe has been the first to benefit from the UK government’s £150 million Mobile Infrastructure Project.

In the next couple of years, hundreds of other communities are expected to benefit from the national scheme.

A new research report from Berg Insight expects shipments of consumer-focussed M2M devices to increase from 5.3 million worldwide last year to 13.8 million in 2017. That’s a compound annual growth rate of 21.1%.

It notes that eBook readers and personal navigation devices are the most common consumer M2M devices.

While the UK government is trialling the use of SMS text messages and GSM cell broadcast to inform members of the public during a local or national emergency, Twitter is introducing its own scheme.

Twitter Alerts enable the sender to highlight urgent tweets, which will cause them to be delivered by text message and highlighted with an orange bell icon when they’re received by the Twitter iOS or Android app.

The Office of Fair Trading - the UK government department responsible for competition and consumer law - has told mobile app developers and games producers that it wants consumers to be warned about optional extra costs before they download or start playing.

Ending the possibility of unintentional ‘in-app’ or ‘in-game’ payments is just one of eight principles the OFT has published today.