Jürgen Hase of Deutsche Telekom writes:

The Smart City is on its way. All over the world more and more cities are connecting all areas of their infrastructure. Pisa in Tuscany, for example, aims to improve its traffic management with a machine-to-machine (M2M) solution and a Big Data service provided by Deutsche Telekom.

Mark Bridge writes:

As one show closes, so another show opens.

It’s now more than a week since we bid a sad farewell to Mobile World Congress 2014 – I imagine hotel rooms for 2nd to 5th March 2015 are already being booked – but there’s now CeBIT in Germany to look forward to. Prime Minister David Cameron kicked things off last night with a speech that talked about UK-German partnerships, more funding for research around the ‘Internet of Things’ and the development of 5G technology.

Vodafone has agreed a European deal with Volkswagen and Audi in Europe to provide in-car connectivity, starting with new Audi models from next year.

These vehicles will have an embedded SIM chip that’s been developed specifically for the automobile industry and is designed to work at temperatures from -40° to +85° Celsius. 

This week's programme begins with some of the biggest news stories that came out of Mobile World Congress.

Iain, James and Mark then move on to the other headlines from the past few days, including Boeing's secret agent smartphone, Apple's plans for mobile in-car entertainment, a new structure for Telefonica and new technology for mobile payments.

Apple has used the forthcoming Geneva Motor Show to reveal CarPlay, a service that had previously been branded as ‘iOS in the Car’.

Drivers with CarPlay integration in their cars will be able to control an iPhone by pressing a voice control button on the steering wheel or using the car’s own multimedia interface.