Kathryn Edwards

Bill GatesMicrosoft co-founder and chairman Bill Gates has delved into the Twittersphere and is being welcomed with open arms by celebrity Twitter veterans such as Ashton Kutcher and Ryan Seacrest. His verified account already has tens of thousands of followers and is growing by the minute.

The billionaire philanthropist, who famously quit Facebook last year because he found he found the mountain of friend requests "irritating," appears to have re-kindled his affection with social networking, at least for now.

At this week's Gartner Symposium in Sydney, the analyst firm presented its top 10 strategic technologies for 2010.

Gartner senior analyst and mobile guru, Nick Jones, presented the strategic technologies, and defined them as the ones which will impact CIOs within the mainstream enterprise between the next 12 to 36 months.

A computer program using new imaging technology which enables moving police cars to automatically detect stolen cars in traffic, has been developed by researchers at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), Australia.

The new techniques, based on hexagonal pixels rather than the common square pixels, enables a computer linked to a camera to accurately identify and read number plates in real-time, so the plates can be checked immediately against a database.

A third, or 34 per cent, of disused hard drives still contain confidential data according to a new study, which found missile defence system data and media records on ebay purchases.

The study, sponsored by BT and Sims Lifecycle Services, researched by Wales' University of Glamorgan, America's Longwood University and Australia's Edith Cowan University, also dug up secret data from the German Embassy in Paris and business dealings from a US bank.

Spread some festive cheer this month by adding a Christmas application to your Facebook profile.

Christmas Tree