The roll out of contactless payments on the London Underground has been delayed by a year, after Transport for London (TfL) was forced to admit that “there is a huge amount of development to be done” before it can be launched, Computing.co.uk reports.

The news will frustrate travellers who wanted to utilise the new ‘Wave and Pay’ system to pay for travel on the Tube, a service that would have complimented the Oyster card system and debited funds directly from a debit or credit card and also compatible smartphones.

TfL had originally planned to enable the service across all of London’s transport by the end of 2012 but it now appears that a “small number” of buses will operate the service by the Olympics and the Tube network will receive an upgrade by the end of next year.

The UK government has been rushing to upgrade public transport in London, announcing that it would roll out Wi-Fi access to Underground stations in time for the Olympics. Virgin Media was awarded the contract to roll out wireless networks in 80 tube stations by the start of the Games, and 120 stations in total by the end of the year.

Smartphone manufacturers are also pushing NFC-compatible phones that enable contact payments by waving a smartphone in front of a contactless terminal. Official Olympic sponsors Samsung and Visa recently announced that the Galaxy S III would be the official smartphone for the event, giving owners of the device an option to wave and pay using their handset in hundreds of Olympic locations.

Does you car need a decent scrubbing? Need someone to go pick up your groceries at the store because you’re on a tight deadline at work? Could you use someone to install that damn Ikea closet in your kid’s room before the weekend?

Not unlike TaskRabbit, Viatask and Agent Anything in the US, Milk.ly is a new marketplace that helps you get small things like that done by willing people in your neighborhood. That is, if you’re in London, which is where Milk.ly is starting out.

Co-founded by former head of Display Platform at Yahoo EMEA Sal Matteis, Milk.ly is essentially a peer-to-peer marketplace that lets people outsource errands, tasks and a wide range of small jobs to a curated network of ‘runners’ or ‘milkmen’.

The company also teams up with local businesses looking for ways to expand their reach and tap into new revenue streams for their services.

As for the business model: Milk.ly takes a 15 percent commission on each transaction that results from its marketplace.

Over time, the fledgling company also aims to introduce ‘corporate’ accounts that would allow office managers to have small errands or tasks handled by trusted and verified ‘milkmen’.

From what I can gather, they’re currently focused on laying the groundworks for a sophisticated system that would enable ‘milkmen’ to receive notifications of newly posted tasks by email, through native mobile applications and even SMS. Milk.ly is also building a solid API to let third-party developers integrate with their service.

The short-term goal is to expand to several urban areas across Europe this year. Long-term, Milk.ly wants to, oh, disrupt the entire labour market.

The startup is backed by pan-European startup accelerator Seedcamp.

Now, can someone pick up lunch for me please?

The ‘Samsung Mobile PIN’ will come to Westfield in Shepherd’s Bush and Old Spitalfields Market on May 29, offering customers an “immersive” and more convenient way to peruse products or shop for a new device from the Korean giant’s stores.

Westfield has been redeveloped extensively with the Games in mind, and 70 percent of all Olympic spectactors are tipped to pass through Westfield Stratford City en route to Olympic venues.

Here’s a taste of what to expect, via the Samsung Mobile Facebook Page:

China Telecom has launched a UK mobile service this week, just in time for the upcoming  Olympic Games in London, and revealed plans to expand its operations to other key European markets in the coming months.

In partnership with Everything Everywhere — the joint operation between T-Mobile and Orange — and European MVNO-enabler Transatel, it has launched CTExcelbiz, a pre-pay service that caters specifically for Chinese people in the UK.

The service is the first Chinese MVNO (mobile virtual network operator) outside of China. It runs on the Everything Everywhere network and will give customers access to the UK’s widest 3G network, in addition to speedier 3.5 G (HSPA+) services.

China Telecom Europe — which is the carrier’s brand across the continent — believes that the service will appeal to a range of expatriated Chinese, from students to business users and tourists.

Benefits of the service include Chinese language voicemail and dual English-Chinese customer service, in addition to what the company calls “competitive” pre-pay bundles and free calls between CTExcelbiz customers.

More is coming soon, and the company reveals it will add a number of other features including local Chinese numbers — to allow cheaper calling with friends and family overseas — and a pan-network chat application, though it remains unclear what advantages this would have other existing chat services and social networks.

Yan Ou, managing director of China Telecom Europe, said that the service will offer something new for expatriated Chinese in the UK: “We are very excited to launch the CTExcelbiz brand into the UK, and offer the Chinese population here services that have not been available to them before.”

Yan also revealed that the company would “launch in other European markets over the coming months.”

The UK is estimated to have more than 270,000 Chinese residents, but holidaymakers are an equally important target. Chinese tourist numbers rose 23 percent to number 110,000 in 2010, and the upcoming summer Olympics in London is expected to attract 170,000 visitors from the Asian country.

Elsewhere in the world, China Telecom is already active in the US, where it is aiming to offer dual US-Chinese phone numbers. The firm’s president for the America’s revealed that it would like to run its own US infrastructure one day, but current US security concerns make such a move unlikely for now.

London-based content and technology 7digital is showing some interesting results from its developer program ‘Innovation Time’.

Launched in the UK in 2004, 7digital’s download store and mobile applications give consumers access to over 17 million tracks across Europe and North America. That’s nice for consumers, but the company also looks after developers with open APIs for licensed and non-commercial use.

7digital also likes fosters the work of its developer team by providing two days a month for work on their own projects.

The developer programme started in March 2011 and to date, over 80 projects have been produced with 53 of those have been published to GitHub for use for by other developers, 18 have been fully developed and adopted into production and a furher 18 are in the pipeline.

The apps have been developed to address a range of demands from ways to improve customer experience on the site such as a search function, to improving internal operations like the identification of site issues before they become risks.

As developers are often first to spot problems before they go haywire, it’s a sound investment to let them have some free time to explore. It certainly seems to be paying off for 7digital.

Rob Bowley, Head of Development at 7digital thinks that this is a good commitment in innovation. He says,“Most people seem to misunderstand the nature of innovation. If you’re even slightly aware of your history regarding invention and discovery you’ll see a large proportion came about by happy accident, mostly when trying to prove something completely different. Our approach is to find and nurture talented people and then give them the space to try things out. Not only has this resulted in a significant benefit to 7digital through progression, it’s hugely motivational for our developers who can feel empowered to make a real difference.”

Alternative education

To go with these impressive results, 7digital has announced the launch of its Technical Academy for graduates and new developers. It’s part of a move to expand its own development team and hopes to equip budding developers with skills to work in the industry.

The Academy takes fresh graduates and rookie developers and puts them through a thorough six-month training programme.

Each apprentice is assigned a mentor and takes part in pair programming in their assigned teams as well as participating classroom sessions.

The classroom sessions are taught by senior developers, external tutors and industry thought leaders, with the two days’ innovation time to work on their own pet project. Once the programme has been completed, graduates become 7digital developers, further growing the talent in the 7digital team.

That sounds like a fair investment in the company’s own future as well as supporting new developers who get to learn from old hands.

With tech industry leaders bemoaning the state of computer science education in the UK, it’s good to see companies taking the initiative, even if it’s to their own benefit. The skills that are learned on the job are extremely valuable and well, there’s also the chance that developers will at some point move on to other things.

Cloud-based collaboration and task management software company Huddle has raised $24 million in Series C financing on the heels of setting up an office in New York, and plans to use the proceeds to triple its team size in the next 12 months.

The round was led by Jafco Ventures with participation from DAG Ventures. Prior backers Matrix Partners and Eden Ventures also chipped in, as did super angel investors Subrah Iyar (founder of WebEx) and Herb Madan.

Huddle has now raised $40 million in funding to date.

Founded in London in 2006, Huddle has come a long way. The company says it has seen business triple in size each year since its inception, and plans to use the fresh capital to accelerate growth and enhance its enterprise content management and social software offerings.

The company says more than 100,000 organizations in 180 countries use its products to store, share and collaborate on content in the cloud across devices.

High-profile clients include Procter & Gamble, Saatchi & Saatchi, NASA and PwC.

Says Huddle co-founder and CEO Alastair Mitchell:

“Huddle is revolutionizing the ECM market by making it collaborative, social, ubiquitously accessible and – above all – intelligent.

Our intelligent collaboration platform opens up content silos across the global enterprise ecosystem, enabling people to share, discover and work on content wherever, whenever and with whomever they need to.”

(ECM stands for enterprise content management, in case you’re wondering).

We’re going to catch up with Mitchell in the coming days to take a more in-depth look of why they raised funding, and what they plan to do with it.

For now, read his blog post:

Huddle closes $24 million Series C round and here’s why …

The UK’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has upheld complaints against Amazon EU about the retail giant’s guarantee to Prime customers to receive One-Day delivery on orders.

The problem is that Amazon says that its Prime customers can have “All You Can Eat One-Day Delivery” as a benefit of paying a subscription fee.

It’s a promise that bets against any items not turning up within that time limit and there could be many reasons for a delay.

Complaints arrived that challenged whether the claim, “Amazon Prime members are entitled to free guaranteed One-Day delivery on all items marked as Amazon Prime eligible delivered to Mainland United Kingdom Locations” as misleading as customers who had signed up to the service found that a significant number of orders were not delivered within one day.

Define ‘one-day’

Amazon responded, saying that the time when an order is placed can affect the resulting delivery time. It stated that the Prime One-day delivery was a guaranteed service and that customers would receive their order ”1 business day after dispatch”.

The company also said that this would not necessarily be one day after the order was placed, but would be one business day after the order was due to be dispatched by Amazon as set out in One-Day Delivery terms and conditions and the help pages.

So when ordering an item for this type of delivery, it helps to read the small print and maybe not to order just before the weekend.

However, the ASA has upheld the complaints and says,

“Because we understood that Amazon used non-guaranteed services such as Royal Mail First Class for these orders, we considered that describing the service as “guaranteed” was misleading. Because we considered the “One-Day delivery” claim was ambiguous and the claim that the service was “guaranteed” was not adequately qualified or substantiated we concluded that the website was misleading.”

Amazon need not worry too much. This is more of a mild spanking as the ASA has told the company to include clear qualifications on pages which state ‘One-Day Delivery’ that this refers to one day after dispatch.

The regulator has also told Amazon to remove the claim that the service is guaranteed, until this can be substantiated.

What’s interesting about this outcome is that it only took three complaints to have the service scrutinised.

When so many of us exist in a digital world where a flash mob of righteous indignation can be stirred up in under an hour, it’s nice to see that the voice of the few is also heeded – especially when they know where to send their complaints.

Derwent Capital Markets raised eyebrows when it launched a hedge fund that used analysis of Twitter to predict movements in the stock market. Now the London-based firm is set to open up its technology for anyone to use via what it’s calling the “world’s first social media sentiment analysis trading platform.”

The service, set to launch in late summer, promises to allow investors and stock traders to monitor the global social media sentiment around any stock, commodity or currency in real-time – hopefully giving them an edge when they trade.

Derwent’s technology is based on a 2010 academic paper that showed how information from Twitter could predict how stock would perform. Since then it has been putting the theory to the test via its Derwent Absolute Return Fund. The new platform appears to essentially be ‘Radian6 for traders’, letting anyone put do the same with their own money. It will be available as both a browser-based service and a mobile app.

While the firm isn’t giving any more precise launch details than ‘”late summer,” we’ll be watching this one closely.

Ignite100, Europe’s first £1m ($1.6m) digital startup accelerator is calling out for a new set of startup teams to participate in its second program.

The North Eastern accelerator started work about a year ago when it invested £100k each in eight teams to provide support, mentoring and a general boost.

This year, over an intensive 13 week program, more teams will be working with Ignite100 and along with the advice of world class mentors, there’s a road trip on the cards around the United States.

The lucky startups involved will be headed to the SXSW conference in Austin, Texas as well as visiting co-working spaces in New York and San Francisco to meet tech leaders and other companies.

Up to £100,000 in investment capital is available to each team, as well as the chance to pitch to influential investors in both the North East and in London. Teams receive £5,000 per founder up to a maximum of £15,000, and can secure the remainder of the £100,000 if their startup makes the grade.

One of the things that companies working with Ignite100 benefit from is the proximity of other startups working in the same office. Paul Smith is the program manager at Ignite100 and he says that the atmosphere is one where companies are encouraged to work together and draw upon each others experience.

“We launched the first ignite100 program in June. We’ve had one round already with the final demo day last December. Several of the teams have stayed on, we have new teams that have joined us from other accelerator programs and some designers,” explains Smith. “Being able to keep the space on has meant that we’ve been able to further support the teams in a really interesting community.”

Word to the wise

Smith has had plenty of experience working with new companies in an incubator environment. So what does he see when he’s working as a mentor?

“I often see how initially frustrated some teams can get with the process. They’re so keen and eager, but the whole point of going through the intensive mentoring is to get through that program and change along the way. For the good of their business it’s a better idea to hold back a little bit and learn from the mentors. This learning will shape the ways that teams work and hopefully make them more successful.”

Smith believes that there is plenty of potential in his region. “People are recognising their potential. 20 years ago you’d have a directory like the Yellow Pages and it would be full of businesses, all based in one small region. If you went back and looked at that book now, you’d see some had failed and some were household names around the world. All the rest would be viable businesses and I think that’s kind of how I see accelerators, you create superstars, some people fail and you make viable businesses that succeed. We’re at the beginning of the journey online and there are so many ideas that have not been attempted and everyone is keen to try theirs.”

A difference rather than a divide

It’s easy to put companies and accelerators into a simple North-South divide in the UK, Smith has a slightly different and more optimistic view. ” I’m entirely happy with it,” he says. “There are challenges of course. There’s a lack of developers as we lose them to London. I’d never want a startup to move from London to the North East, I’d rather the ones here put their heads down and worked. We’re happy here to get on and build something exciting that will attract people in time.

“Through having an accelerator here and a really good culture of investment. we don’t set out to take anyone else’s crown, we’re building an environment that startups want to be a part of. I wouldn’t want this to be a Tech City up here. I’d rather Tech city worked on taking the government to task over coding in schools, getting tax breaks for startups. We can build something ourselves that is also great.”

Ignite100 is backed by funding from the Finance for Business North East Technology Fund managed by IP Group plc, and the Finance for Business North East Accelerator Fund managed by Northstar Ventures. The programme also benefits from funding and support from angel investors including Hotspur Capital, Green Lane Capital, SCM Pharma co-owner Fiona Cruickshank and Alastair Waite of Onyx Group.

If you have a startup in the North East, get your presentation skills brushed up. The program starts in September, applications need to be in by June 30 and more details can be found here.

As part of a wide ranging tour, Google’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt gave a talk at the Science museum in London. Dressed in a smart grey suit and frankly looking pretty unruffled by the heat in the city that evening, Schmidt laid out a few visions of the future for different technological adoption rates, education and the battle for the web.

Schmidt opened by establishing the importance of science and engineering. With an audience of geeks sitting in the Science Museum, this is of course preaching to the choir, but there were interesting and poetic points made.

The Google top man is certainly enamoured with his craft, “Not to deny the importance of art, but we must not deny the importance of science and engineering. You need people to make the instruments. Music may be the food of love but engineers make the instruments.” Fair point, though it can be said that most violin artisans are also musicians. But it’s also fair to agree that culture makes life worth living and technology enables this.

The title of the talk was “Why Science Matters” but it’s possible that ‘Why computer science matters’ would be a more precise version. Schmidt said that there was no more viable seed for growing a new industry than technological innovation. He held up the web as an example and pointed out that the internet is a platform of more than 8% of the UK GDP.

A divided future online

Schmidt is pretty good at delivering stirring statements about the possibilities of the future. “To connect the world is to free the world. The web is much more than a network of machines, it’s a network of minds.” It all started to sound a little tech-utopian, but naturally this is Google, so there’s work to do.

There will be troubles ahead, and part of that is the problem of ‘have and have not’ when it comes to digital access. Schmidt looked at the digital divide of the future as a set of three broad categories; ‘early adopters’, ‘connected contributors’ and the ‘aspiring majority’.

Early adopters are at an advantage. Born in the right place with “a good education, economic prosperity and a democratic government”. Schmidt says that for this group the sky is practically the limit with the only restrictions being what science can offer and what society deems ethical.

He touched upon the future development of the internet of things, “This is world where tiny sensors can be embedded in everything. One estimate is that we’ll end up with about 50 billion such connected devices by 2020. For early adopters, intelligent robots, virtual reality, self driving cars will all be common place. Our cars have already driven more than 200,000 miles. So for this privileged few, science fiction will become a reality and it will redefine the way we live.”

That sounds pretty neat if you’re a privileged early adopter, but chances are the best of us will fall into categories two and three.

The connected contributors group is a much larger one and according to Schmidt, “This is a generation that grew up with increasingly sophisticated technologies as part of their daily lives. A generation born in a household with broadband and multiple computers and equipped with the skills and digital literacy to use them.”

That sounds like a lot of us today. But the Google man had a few ideas about how this middle class could leverage what it has. Although it may not be as rich as the early adopters, they could rent technologies that will be ubiquitous and so innovation will still open up their world.

The third and largest group in the future description is the aspiring majority. At around 5 billion poeple, that’s a huge market and one that technologists must think carefully about approaching.

Schmidt says, “There will be improvements in infrastructure, wire networks will get faster but we cannot imagine the future by extrapolating the past. For the aspiring majority, it’s not going to be dial up and broadband, it will be the smartphone that changes their lives.”

Smart phones hooked up to mesh networks are the devices that will open up tech in this part of society. Although Schmidt is sensible and acknowledges that, “No one is suggesting technology is going to suddenly transform the social, political and economic conditions of these communities, even in modest amounts can change lives.”

What keeps Eric Schmidt awake at night?

So, the future looks pretty bright in areas where access to the web remains stable. Providing that access is not blocked or filtered.

On which note we come to the things that Schmidt find worrying about the future of the Internet. There’s three on the list, but they’re big ones and worth pondering.

1: We built the Internet without criminals in mind. It didn’t occur to us they’d be on the internet too. While getting more and more secure, the vulnerabilities in its design will exist for at least the next decade. While threats come from individuals and groups of people, the biggest problem will come from nations that seek to do harm. It’s very difficult to identify the source of cyber criminality and stop it.

2: The fact that there is no delete button on the internet. Much of the existing privacy debate centres on the tension between the public right to know and individual privacy. I hope that ranking emerges that can distinguish between truth and falsehood.

3: I worry about governments filtering information. The government tried to turn the internet off in Egypt. Many governments are trying to build their own walled Internet, where we can’t tell what’s been witheld from us. Not only does filtering not work, it can create dark places where hate, radicalism and crime can flourish.

Filtering technology will become more effective. We face the real possibility that we could end up living in a society where software silently deletes our voices, our thoughts and our culture. Make no mistake, this is a fight for the future of the web and there is no room, in my view, for complacency.

Those are some huge problems and it is likely to take decades of work to put any of that right. At least for now there is some clarity about future and past of the internet and probably where to start if you’d like a job at Google.

Support your local comp-sci teacher

Through the rest of the talk, Eric Schmidt went on to outline the idea that there should be more support for education in computer science.

There appears to be a disparity between the actions of youth and its education. “Today’s generation is the first fully connected generation that the world has ever known”, says Schmidt. “If they’re awake, they’re online. That’s your children.”

So if they’re always connected, why is education not supporting their learning around the objects they seem to be perpetually attached to?

Schmidt says, “The root of this problem lies at the sorry state of computer science education in schools. I’m told that computing represented a half of one per cent of a level results in 2011 in the UK. that’s about 4000 students.” So that’s a F grade from Google on the UK’s education papers…

“Rebooting computer science education is not straight forward”, he continues. “What I mean is teaching computing as a science, the basic architecture of a computer, the concept of an algorithm, the logial reasoning that goes into writing a program. This matters, not only because it gives a glimpse under the hood of a tool that is intrinsic in everyday life, its useful because of the thinking involved.”

As a result of reading the research around computer science and teaching in the UK, Google is teaming up with a charity called Teach First,. The aim is to put exceptinal graduates in the most challenging schools.

Google has provided the funds for Teach First to train more than 100 science teachers with the majority focused on computer science. They’ll get a bursary for equipment too.  It might not be the ultimate solution, there are many ways in which computer science students and teachers can be encouraged and supported, but this is a start.

Schmidt ended his talk with a rallying cry, “We’ll do what we can, but ultimately this is a problem for everyone. If children are not inspired to learn about science, it’s a lost opportunity for them, and a loss for the world.

“Let us resolve to commit ourselves to building a world where everyone has a chance to be connected and enjoy a greater sense of freedom and opportunity. It’s literally in our hands.”

If funding like this does make a difference, then it may lead to other large companies in the science and technology sector also trying to find ways to support education. Though, are we ready for a nation of little Googlers?