Drivers who buy certain Chevrolet cars in the USA next year will be able to use Apple’s Siri voice-controlled assistant to activate vehicle features when driving.

The option will be available on Chevrolet Spark and Sonic models that include the Chevrolet MyLink infotainment system.

The M-Pesa mobile payment and money transfer service, which was launched five years ago in Kenya by the Safaricom network, has been joined by a savings and loan facility called M-Shwari.

The new facility has been set up by Vodafone, Safaricom and the Commercial Bank of Africa.

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.

Business advisory firm Deloitte LLP has calculated that around £3.5 billion of Christmas spending in the UK will either be bought on or influenced by smartphones.

It says consumers who use their mobile devices to research prices, store their shopping lists and take their shopping conversations onto social media will account for £3.2 billion of this total, with £330 million of sales being made directly on smartphones.

Samsung Electronics has completed a review of suppliers based in China after a report from China Labor Watch criticised working conditions at one of Samsung’s Chinese suppliers.

CLW said that child labour appeared to be a common practice in one factory, also noting that it had additional concerns about working hours, employment contracts and working conditions.