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Today's lead story in the Observer is a maddening and excellent investigative piece revealing that for three decades, the UK's biggest construction companies worked with British police and spy-agencies to build illegal dossiers on whistle-blowers who complained about unsafe working conditions and trade-unionists. The victims of these investigations -- thousands of them -- were economically ruined as the firms conspired to keep them from being hired at any job-site, and saw to it that if they were ever hired, they were promptly fired.

"The Open Data Institute, a UK-based incubator and promoter of open-data businesses that was first conceived by Tim Berners-Lee and artificial intelligence pioneer Nigel Shadbolt, is today announcing its first international investment. The Omidyar Network, the investment firm co-founded by eBay's Pierre Omidyar and his wife Pam, is putting $750,000 towards the ODI. The money comes on top of the £10 million ($16 million) that the UK government, via the Technology Strategy Board, has already committed over the next five years for the project."

"Bitcoin-Central got the go-ahead thanks to a deal with French financial firms Aqoba and Credit Mutuel. The exchange is one of many that swaps bitcoins, computer generated cash, for real world currencies. The change in status makes it easier to use bitcoins and bestows national protections on balances held at the exchange."

IT professionals will increasingly act as data managers as the role of application manager becomes superfluous, according to a report called Technology Vision 2011, from IT services firm Accenture. In addition, the coming years will see IT decision-makers choosing platforms that are best able to manage soaring volumes of data as opposed to platforms designed to support applications. Read more: http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/2024987/management-accenture#ixzz1rlnYqkgY  Computing - Insight for IT leaders Claim your free subscription today.

On Tuesday, a new company called Planetary Resources will announce its existence at the Charles Simonyi Space Gallery at The Museum of Flight in Seattle. It's not clear what the firm does, but its roster of backers incudes Google cofounders Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, filmmaker James Cameron, former Microsoftie (and space philanthropist) Charles Simonyi, and Ross frikkin' Perot.

There's no doubting the cloud invasion. But the research firm Gartner believes the personal cloud will replace the PC as the center of our digital lives sooner than you might think: 2014. "Major trends in client computing have shifted the market away from a focus on personal computers to a broader device perspective that includes smartphones, tablets and other consumer devices," Steve Kleynhans, research vice president at Gartner, said in a statement on Monday. "Emerging cloud services will become the glue that connects the web of devices that users choose to access during the different aspects of their daily life."

Dan Siroker helps companies discover tiny truths, but his story begins with a lie. It was November 2007 and Barack Obama, then a Democratic candidate for president, was at Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California, to speak. Siroker-who today is CEO of the web-testing firm Optimizely, but then was a product manager on Google's browser team-tried to cut the enormous line by sneaking in a back entrance. "I walked up to the security guard and said, 'I have to get to a meeting in there,'" Siroker recalls. There was no meeting, but his bluff got him in.

From disrupting the peer-reviewed journal publishing tradition to utilizing a dispersed model to test code, the academy has been trying out new ways of innovating an overburdened scholarly apparatus using technology. One of the latest areas to see this sort of experimentation is that of IP, or intellectual property. Marblar, a startup launched by three British PhD students, is hoping to successfully crowdsource the resurrection of "dormant" IP, to flatten and widen the process of tech transfer. A major British venture capital firm, IP Group, has invested about $600,000 in the startup.

The Yomiuri Shimbun It may be possible to travel to space in an elevator as early as 2050, a major construction company has announced. Obayashi Corp., headquartered in Tokyo, on Monday unveiled a project to build a gigantic elevator that would transport passengers to a station 36,000 kilometers above the Earth. For the envisaged project, the company would utilize carbon nanotubes, which are 20 times stronger than steel, to produce cables for the space elevator.