Vodafone 360, the UK operator’s social media interface and aggregation platform is making some headway. The UK firm said Tuesday that more than 7,000 apps have been made available to customers across eight European markets in the three months since the service launched.

Open source specialist, consultant and Harvard fellow David “Doc” Searls writes about why he believes openness has to be the future for mobile.

The driving forces behind Google’s foray into the mobile platform space - The Open Handset Alliance and the Android Open Source Project – have shown off developments for the operating system which will allow handset builders to deploy the platform on yet more devices, even as it is gaining some significant traction in the market.

There was a report on the news in the UK this morning that this autumn will be a bumper season for spiders in this country. This is terrible news for just about everybody, because spiders are horrible. The Informer once spent a month in Costa Rica, a glorious country, and encountered some of the biggest spiders in the world. But that hasn’t helped him overcome the panic he experiences when even the most unprepossessing common-or-garden UK spider scampers into view.