Smartphone penetration across France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom hit 54.6% during the three-month period from August to the end of October 2012, according to the comScore MobiLens service. It found that Spain had the highest smartphone penetration in Europe (63.2% of mobile phone users) followed by the UK at 62.3%.

Spain also had the most dramatic growth, up almost 15 percentage points from last year.

Mark Bridge writes:

It’s the week before Christmas, which can only mean one thing for the mobile industry: plenty of research news. Yes, when there isn’t anything new to talk about, a survey or forecast is the perfect way to fill the silence.

Mind you, things haven’t been entirely quiet when it comes to mobile products and services.

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.