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The Forbes Rich List is out again and Bill Gates has been knocked off the top by Carlos Slim. See how the lists have changed since 2000
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It's all change in the Forbes rich list of billionaires today. Bolstered by a surge in the share price of his America Movil empire, Mexican telecoms tycoon Carlos Slim's wealth edged ahead of the $53bn fortune amassed by the Microsoft boss Bill Gates.

As Andrew Clark writes today:

The old order is under threat at the world's billionaires club. Traditionally dominated by Americans and Europeans, the top ranks of the world's richest people have been infiltrated by scores of ultra-rich entrepreneurs from the developing world.

Well, we've extracted all the top 10 billionaires since the year 2000. Besides the rankings, you get an interesting picture of declining worth in the recession. Warren Buffett, for example, has seen his net worth go down from $62bn in 2008 to apaltry $47bn in 2010.

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Advice for civil servants attempting to impersonate answerphones

The tone of voice is easy – but the beep is a challenge

If you happened to call the Department for Work and Pensions this week, only to be told about high call volume and then cut off, there's a chance that wasn't an answerphone. Due to strike action, the scabs (or "civil servants who continued working" as they like to be known) say that managers told them to pretend to be machines, and read out this message: "Due to the high volume of inquiries we are currently experiencing we are unable to take your call. Please call back later."

It's an imperfect solution, this, because even when you're pretending to be a robot, outside the boundaries of human courtesy, it still sticks in your craw a bit to put the phone down on someone. When trying this at home, if you prefer, you can just pretend to be your own voicemail message. I just did it. "Er. Hello. Leave me a message." "That was very convicing," came the voice. "Really? You really mean that?" "Well, that's how everybody sounds on their voicemail message, stupid; like they've just woken up."

But now there is the infernal beep. You could try doing it yourself, but you'd have to warm up to this, maybe by spending a couple of years at human beatbox evening classes. It would be better to activate something that sounds like a voicemail beep. You can probably buy something on eBay for this very purpose, though I'm not sure what your search term would be (tip: start obvious. "Beeping machine, sounds a bit like phone"). You'll also be suckered into listening to the message, of course, and you'll have to guard against butting in with "no way am I going to that vegan fleapit, I'd rather eat mud" when you're meant to be a silent machine.

This is silly. Just drop the call. And you, civil servants, just don't pick up. This is why the phone was invented, so you don't necessarily have to deal with it.

Stephen Carter named director of marketing, strategy and communications at Alcatel, Lucent in Paris

Lord Stephen Carter, who resigned from the government last summer after delivering his Digital Britain report and white paper, is joining Alcatel, Lucent, the Franco-American global telecoms supplier.

His new job sees him become the company's director of marketing, strategy and communications. He will be relocating from London to headquarters in Paris.

The company's chief executive, who recruited him, is Ben Verwayen, the former head of BT.

Carter was the founding chief executive of the communications regulator Ofcom between 2002-2006, and in that position led tense negotiations with BT, over local loop unbundling, accelerating the spread of broadband through competition.

After leaving Ofcom Carter worked briefly for the financial PR company, Brunswick. He then moved, again briefly, to assist Gordon Brown at Number Ten, which proved an uncomfortable brief.

He was then granted a peerage, and put in charge of the Digital Britain project, with offices at the Department of Business & Regulatory Reform, under Lord Mandelson, and the Department of Culture Media & Sport. He was tasked to create the framework for a fast broadband and networked British economy and society of the future. But he is widely judged to have damaged his standing by resigning as soon as the controversial report was delivered, rather than seeing it through the testing legislative process.

The digital economy bill is currently mired by disputes at the House of Lords committee stage, with opponents lined up against a number of its proposals, including an annual £6 levy on phone lines to pay for the extension of broadband to rural areas; concerns over copyright protection, including powers to cut off broadband to serial offenders; severe Conservative opposition to three publicly funded regional news pilots, and their additional belief that BT needs to be forced to open up its ducts to rivals, so they can lay superfast fibre.

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Science fiction turns fact as 'internet of things' draws closer

The idea of a world where even mundane objects like shoes and food can be connected to the internet may sound like a plot culled from Hollywood - but a new report suggests that it is fast becoming reality.

An analysis from the McKinsey consultancy suggests that the "internet of things" - where everyday devices are able to send information over the web - is closer than ever, resulting in a series of new technological and social advances.

Using a variety of technologies, including Wi-Fi and RFID – the electronic chip system used in the Oyster card – all sorts of objects will soon be able will be able to feed data back about their position, status and location. A successful internet of things could help people keep track of their actions or help businesses improve efficiency, it suggests.

And while McKinsey accepts that such systems still have some way to go, the report says that the pieces of the puzzle are now falling into place.

"The widespread adoption of the internet of things will take time, but the time line is advancing thanks to improvements in underlying technologies," it says.

"Ever-smaller silicon chips for this purpose are gaining new capabilities, while costs - following the pattern of Moore's Law - are falling. Massive increases in storage and computing power, some of it available via cloud computing, make number crunching possible at very large scale and at declining cost."

Many technologists have been working on such systems, largely through small-scale experiments and pilot projects aimed at exploring the boundaries. Current work in the area is being done by telecommunications companies including Alcatel and Nokia, as well as academic institutions such as MIT – which ran a scheme to track rubbish in Seattle as a way of checking the effectiveness of the city's waste removal and recycling services.

The McKinsey report suggests areas for future growth such as the creation of complicated systems that can act independently of an operator, as well as other developments in tracking, decision-making and automation.

The concept of so-called "ubiquitous computing" has long been a favourite subject for science fiction authors, but recent developments have made the concept of embedded, connected – and even intelligent – devices much more like a reality than a fantasy.

The writer and futurist Bruce Sterling coined the idea of "spime" – physical objects that can be tracked through GPS and interact with their environments using RFID. Meanwhile Adam Greenfield, an information architect and designer now working for Nokia, developed many concepts at the heart of the movement in his 2006 book Everyware.

While some of the ideas in the report bear all the hallmarks of fiction, its authors point out that many of these technologies are already in use.

"Pill-shaped micro-cameras already traverse the human digestive tract and send back thousands of images to pinpoint sources of illness," they write.

"Precision farming equipment with wireless links to data collected from remote satellites and ground sensors can take into account crop conditions and adjust the way each individual part of a field is
farmed—for instance, by spreading extra fertiliser on areas that need more nutrients."

The internet of things is not without its problems, however. Two years ago scientists demonstrated that could use radio signals to hack into pacemakers - effectively taking control of a life-saving technology that had been implanted inside a patient's body.

McKinsey's report suggests that companies working on such ideas must examine a number of areas, including privacy, security and data protection.

It's been a tough year for Palm. The company is betting everything on its new handsets, the Pre and the Pixi - but with sales not doing as well as expected, the company issued a profit warning yesterday.

To explain what was happening, chairman and chief executive Jon Rubinstein sent out a memo to the company's staff.

As is typical with these things, it was largely stuffed with corporate speak and coded messages - so I've come up with this handy paragraph-by-paragraph translation that might help explain what Palm thinks is going on.

Team,

Hey guys! Whatever I say, don't forget we're in this together.

This morning we announced preliminary results for our 2010 third quarter. Since the quarter has not yet closed, it is too soon to offer exact numbers, but we stated that we expect to report revenues for Q3 between $300 and $320 million.

We're not selling as many phones as we thought we would: sales were flat despite the fact that we started selling handsets with Verizon - America's second-biggest phone network (with 91m users) - in January.

We were expecting sales to go up. They didn't. This could be awkward.

We also announced that we expect our revenue for this fiscal year to fall below the guidance we gave to Wall Street, which ranged from $1.6 to $1.8 billion.

Given how sales have gone over so far, we'd probably need to double our sales in the next three months to satisfy our original targets. Let's be honest, that's not happening, is it?

As we mentioned in our press release, our softer than expected performance is due to slower than expected customer adoption of our products, which in turn has prompted our U.S. carrier partners to put additional orders on hold for the time being.

People aren't buying enough of our phones. And networks don't want to order phones that people aren't buying.

On a positive note, we expect to exit the quarter with over $500 million in cash on our balance sheet. We're scheduled to announce our full financial results in March.

(Before we go on, I'm going to sugar the pill. Over the past year or two we've been burning through our cash reserves like crazy - having some money in the bank buys us some more time. That's awesome news!)

I realize this news is difficult to swallow. We made this announcement today to prevent a surprise for Wall Street when we announce quarterly earnings in March.

Yes, it sucks - but the pain you feel today is nothing compared to the pain you would have felt if we'd suddenly announced in a few weeks that we'd missed our targets by 30%.

In the meantime, the entire executive team has been working extremely hard to improve product performance, and have implemented a number of initiatives to increase awareness and drive sales.

We've been trying to work out what's gone wrong...

Dave Whalen and I just returned from a very successful meeting with Verizon Wireless, where they acknowledged that their execution of our launch was below expectations and recommitted to working with us to improve sales.

...and we've decided it was Verizon's fault.

To accelerate sales, we initiated Project JumpStart nearly three weeks ago. Since then, nearly two hundred Palm Brand Ambassadors, supplemented by Palm employees from Sunnyvale, have been training Verizon sales reps across the U.S. on our products.

In fact, we think they've done such a bad job that we're trying to school them so that they actually know what our products do. Plus, we gave it a cool name that implies we're taking action!

Early results from the stores have already shown improvement on product knowledge and sales week over week. You may have also seen a growing number of Palm ads on billboards, bus shelters, buses, and subway stations—all getting the word out about Palm.

Not many people know we exist - but when they know we exist, we sell a few more handsets. That's got to be positive, right?

All of these efforts are examples of how we are working to accelerate adoption and grow distribution of webOS. In the next few weeks, your management will work with you to make sure your priorities are laser-focused, primarily on helping to increase sales, improve product quality and differentiate the Palm product experience.

We need to get better at a few things - largely the "making things" part, and then the "selling things" part. Perhaps some of you haven't been as focused as you need to be (yeah, I'm talking to you).

Our goals are taking longer than expected to achieve, but I am still confident that our talented team has what it takes to get the job done.

I'm not firing anyone... yet.

We'll schedule an all-hands meeting after our earnings announcement in March, and I'll be happy to answer your questions.

Give me a few weeks to prepare before asking me anything.

Go team!!!

jon

I secretly watch lots of cheerleader movies.

Palm shares plummet as it issues profit warning

Pioneering smartphone manufacturer predicts substantial shortfall in three-month revenue, sparking precipitous drop in its stock as it battles Apple and BlackBerry

The pioneering smartphone manufacturer Palm, originally renowned for its breakthrough Palm Pilot models, saw its shares plummet 17% on a profits warning as it revealed that its sales are struggling in the face of competition from BlackBerrys and Apple iPhones.

Palm conceded todaythat its latest phones, including the critically acclaimed Pre and the cut-price Pixi, have failed to take off as quickly as it had hoped. "­Driving broad consumer adoption of Palm products is taking longer than we anticipated," said Palm's chief executive, Jon Rubinstein.

A trading update from the Californian company forecast revenue for the three months to February of $300m-$320m (£195m-£210m), far short of analysts' predictions of about $425m.

The warning is a serious setback for Palm, which has been fighting an uphill battle to challenge bigger players such as Apple and the Canadian company Research in Motion, which makes the BlackBerry smartphone. By early afternoon on Wall Street, Palm's shares had slumped by $1.45 to an 11-month low of $6.64.

Although it broke ground early in handheld devices with its Pilot models in the 1990s and later its web-compatible Treo phones, Palm has fallen behind in the race to capture the imagination of ­consumers.

Its Pre phone, released last year, runs on a new operating system called WebOS and incorporates a phone, a GPS system, wireless internet and a slide-out keyboard. It has won several industry awards but has lagged in other areas – for example, few third-party applications are available for the Pre in comparison to the hundreds of thousands written for Apple's iPhone.

Experts have become increasingly dubious about Palm's growth prospects. Ehud Gelblum, an analyst at Morgan Stanley, was initially positive but said in a research note that his optimism had waned, blaming Palm's US network provider: "Verizon has puzzlingly refrained from providing the marketing muscle behind the products that we had expected."

In the US, Palm has recently launched the budget-model Pixi, priced at $99, in an effort to attract younger customers.