Drunk Facebook pics, iPlayer, BT and outsourcing hotspots

February started with a silicon.com exclusive that discovered UK police officers and border guards had no way of reading the information stored on ID cards' chips.

But help could be at hand for troubled government IT schemes, as India's outsourcing giants revealed they were among the frontrunners to manage major new IT projects in Whitehall.

Stories of the month - February 2009

Click on the links below to read the stories everyone is talking about...

Exclusive: ID cards are here - but police can't read them

Indian tech giants to transform UK government?

Outsourcing: Bye bye Chennai, g'day Brisbane

Barclays CIO quits

Inside Standard Life's IT strategy

Virtual meetings to ground two million airline seats

Drunk Facebook photos killing your job prospects?

"Android is not open. It's a marketing label"

Why BT is panicking about the 2012 Olympics

'If you look at iPlayer from a distance, it's still very web 1.0'

India's dominance of the IT outsourcing market could be set to waver in the future, however, with consultant KPMG predicting that Brisbane and Belfast are set to be the next offshoring hotspots.

Closer to home Barclay's CIO of global retail and commercial banking, Bob Rickert, quit his post after three years in the job.

Meanwhile, fellow financial services group Standard Life opened up about its IT strategy and how it will deal with the challenges posed by the credit crunch.

Elsewhere it seems the downturn could be good news for teleconferencing, with analyst house Gartner predicting virtual meetings will replace more than two million airline seats by 2012.

February also saw a warning over posting drunk pictures on Facebook, with a survey finding a third of HR and business managers search social networking sites for information on potential recruits.

The month also witnessed a clash between Google and Symbian over their rival mobile platforms, in a cat fight over which was the more open OS.

BT's 2012 head, Stuart Hill, also revealed last month that he "wants to panic every moment" about the challenge of providing the comms backbone of the London Olympic Games.

Hill isn't the only one with his eye on the future. Erik Huggers, director of the BBC's Future, Media and Technology unit talked to silicon.com about what's in store for the Beeb's online audio and video on-demand service iPlayer.