Three months ago Microsoft took advantage of Mobile World Congress to announce the public ‘preview’ version of Windows 8. It’s now moved beyond this beta version to announce the availability of the Windows 8 Release Preview, which is the final development phase before the OS goes into commercial production.

The new tablet and computer operating system can be downloaded by customers who are currently using Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7 or the previous Windows 8 preview, depending on their equipment specifications.

Research from Juniper Research shows more than 1 in 4 of Western European and US mobile phone users will use an NFC-equipped mobile phone to pay in-store for goods by 2017. That’s a dramatic increase on this year’s total, which is expected to be less than 2%.

The total amount of money transacted in NFC mobile payments is set to exceed $180 billion (£117 billion) worldwide in 2017.

Cisco has published the results of its annual Visual Networking Index Forecast, which predicts and analyses worldwide Internet Protocol networking growth and trends for a five-year period.

It expects annual global IP traffic to reach 1.3 zettabytes (1.3 trillion gigabytes) by 2016, nearly four times the total in 2011. The number of network-connected devices is expected to reach 18.9 billion; almost 2.5 connections for each person on earth and approaching double the 2011 total of 10.3 billion devices.

The UK leads Europe when it comes to maps on smartphones, according to new research from comScore. Its MobiLens and MMX services have been looking at smartphone and computer usage in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom.

Overall, an average 35% of smartphone users and 49.5% of computer users had accessed mapping sites across the EU5 countries. Smartphone map users had increased by 55% during the past year, with map use on computers increasing by 8%.

Telefonica UK says it’s partnered with Jasper Wireless to deploy a market-leading platform that’ll help customers manage their machine-to-machine (M2M) connections.

The two companies have been working together on M2M projects since last year.