Dell has taken to the echo-filled Google+ social networking stage to apologise to all women for comments made by a speaker at one of its events.

Elektronista blogger Christiane Vejlø was unfortunate to be in the audience at the event, where she was stunned by the hiring of Mads Christensen, an outspoken Dutch celebrity.

"I am in a state of shock realising that a large professional company as Dell will consciously hire someone with the well-known agenda Mads Christensen has," she noted.

"I have a really hard time seeing how the communication team in such a big organisation can justify booking a speaker/moderator that always talks with the agenda that women should shut up and men should learn to tell them that."

Christensen outdid himself at the event by recommending that the men in attendance say "shut up, bitch" to their partner on returning home.

"The IT business is one of the last frontiers that manages to keep women out. The quota of women to men in your business is sound and healthy," he is also quoted as saying.

Someone at Dell had hired him for the job, we don't know who. And someone at Dell has penned an apology.

"Mads Christensen made a number of inappropriate and insensitive remarks about women. Dell sincerely apologises for these comments. Going forward, we will be more careful selecting speakers at Dell events," said Dell in its Google+ post.

"As members of our Dell Women's Entrepreneur Network (DWEN) know, Dell is an enthusiastic and committed advocate of women in business and IT. These comments do not reflect Dell's company values and undermine much of the work we've done in support of women in the workplace overall."

In what will undoubtedly be seen as yet another sign of the shifting global economic sands, China has topped the US in terms of quarterly PC sales for the first time, according to the latest stats from IDC.

The analyst firm recorded shipments of 18.5 million units in the People's Republic in the second quarter of 2011, compared to 17.7 million units in the US. The US is expected to end the year on top thanks to strong festive sales, but China will triumph in 2012 and, given its inexorable growth, for years to come.

IDC predicted that China will ship 85.2 million units compared to the US figure of 76.6 million in 2012, or a market share of 21.8 per cent versus 19.6 per cent.

"China's lead in the PC market is a huge shift that reflects the rising fortunes of emerging markets as well as the relative stagnation of more mature regions," said Loren Loverde, programme vice president at IDC's Worldwide PC Tracker.

"While the immediate economic circumstances in the US and other markets had a significant impact on the timing of China's move into the lead, they have not changed the trend, but accelerated it."

The stats come after a tough few months for the US and eurozone economies. The sovereign debt crisis in Europe is showing no signs of abating, while the US had its AAA credit rating downgraded for the first time in its history, as politicians foolishly turned the economy into a points scoring exercise and failed effectively to address the underlying problems.

It's not a massive overstatement, then, to say that the People's Republic of China has finally taken up its position as the preeminent global economic powerhouse.

This will mean different things for different businesses in different sectors, of course. However, across the board it should reinforce the notion among those who haven't done so already that a Chinese outpost is now a necessity, not a nice-to-have.

Aside from providing a neat little snapshot into the growing wealth of a nation whose economic potential has still not been realised, the growing number of PC users in China will have the pound signs flashing in the eyes of tech entrepreneurs everywhere.

Jeff Kim, COO of CDNetworks, a firm which helps content providers expand their presence in the region, was naturally optimistic of the opportunities that lay behind the IDC figures.

"This is clear evidence that China's growing middle class, already known for its strong consumerism, is also highly computer and internet literate," he told us.

"We see the trend continuing as evidenced by the recent high growth in the amount of web site and application content that we serve to Chinese internet users on behalf of our content provider customers."

The big name vendors have certainly wasted no time. Apple is reportedly building a cheaper version of its iPhone for emerging markets such as China, while Nokia chose Hong Kong on Wednesday as the venue to launch three Symbian Belle-based phones, which it hopes will make a big impact on these markets and help turn around its fortunes.

For those interested in tapping the vast Chinese market, however, there are still big barriers, and businesses would do well to keep their eyes fully open before taking the plunge, as we've highlighted before on Frontline. Hong Kong and Singapore, for example, can provide a useful hub and stepping stone from which to eventually expand operations into China.

However, firms that continue to procrastinate in expanding their bases into Asia and eventually China, in industries from publishing and accounting to finance and technology, will be left behind as their more agile and forward thinking competitors speed past. And rightly so.

Taiwanese manufacturer Foxconn is to reduce its workforce by replacing them with as many as one million robots over the next three years, according to reports.

Terry Gou, founder and chairman of the company, which builds products for several big name tech brands including Apple, Nokia and Sony, told the Chinese Xinhua news agency that the move will boost efficiency and cut costs.

Foxconn will increase its 10,000 robots to 300,000 next year and to one million in three years' time.

The news will come as a blow to the one million-plus Foxconn workers on the Chinese mainland, but it's unlikely that any cost savings will ultimately be passed on to customers.

Rising labour costs are ostensibly the main reason for the shift to robotic assembly of products such as the iPhone in future, but margins will still be extremely tight.

In an irony that staff will no doubt be aware of, one of the reasons for rising labour costs at Foxconn is the wage increases offered to some staff in the wake of a spate of suicides over the past year.

Foxconn maintains that the reason for the increase in automation is to move its employees "higher up the value chain", although whether the firm can really do this while keeping a grip on costs remains to be seen.

One thing's for certain, though: robots generally don't run the risk of incurring bad publicity by jumping off buildings.

Digital technologies are great - crisp, clear and with the scope to deliver far more content over the spectrum on which they run than traditional analogue services. The main battle, though, is getting people to switch over.

This is not an issue in the TV market, as the spectrum for analogue signals is being switched off to make way for 4G phone coverage in the future. It will be replaced by digital signals so that services likes Freeview can offer more content and channels to consumers.

But it's not so simple in the radio market. Standard radios that pick up AM/FM stations are still the dominant devices as consumers fail to understand the benefits of digital radios, mostly because they never actually use the technology.

However, the key driver to the take up of the technology looks like it will come from the car industry as manufacturers start to fit digital radios as standard.

Internet minister Ed Vaizey said during a speech at the Intellect Conference in London that in-car deployments are on the up, and that he welcomed commitments from major car manufacturers to make the technology standard for all new vehicles.

"Forty per cent of cars have DAB [Digital Audio Broadcasting] radios as standard now, up from just four per cent a year ago. Ford has promised that all cars will have DAB installations by 2012, and BMW and Vauxhall have made similar announcements," he said on Tuesday.

It's not just digital radios that are entering the cars of the future. Satnav devices are often built in these days, and other, more exotic, forms of technology are on the horizon.

Ford announced at the CEBIT show in Hanover in March that it will launch a number of vehicles in Europe with built-in voice-activated technology designed to allow drivers to integrate devices such as smartphones.

The Ford Sync technology will be built into 10 vehicles due to be launched in Europe next year, including the latest Ford Focus. 

With all these innovations to come, and 4G wireless signals to offer speeds of 30Mbit/s or above while on the move on smartphones and tablets, our cars are set to become a lot more fun, although the driver needs to stay focused on the road ahead, of course.

So often, when a company hypes an announcement it's either a massive letdown or it's not an announcement at all but confirmation of well-known speculation.

Yet, richer-than-you'll-ever-be Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has promised that his company has something "awesome" to announce next week, according to the folks at Reuters.

We at V3.co.uk thought we'd have a stab at guessing what it might be. Obviously it could be something practical and useful, like a dedicated iPad application to help users navigate and interact with Facebook on their shiny Apple toy, or perhaps some form of dedicated photo-sharing application so friends can pass content around.

But maybe it's something more exciting and outlandish than that. Perhaps Facebook is launching its own tablet, maybe a smartphone built and crafted by its own fair hands.

Or what about a 'dislike' button? There's certainly enough self-pitying, political-baiting, showing-off statuses written by the millions of users on the site that need to be taken down a peg or two.

No, we've got it, they've got a celebrity innovator onboard. Following on from Justin Timberlake getting involved in MySpace and Intel buddying up with Will.i.am, Facebook has Lady Gaga, Beyoncé and Rihanna waiting in the wings: Zuckerberg's Angels.

Or maybe Zuckerberg likes Google's Circles system on the Google+ social networking tool so much he's going to add it to Facebook.

We'll just have to wait until next week to see what Facebook's got up it sleeve, although it's probably the dedicated iPad app. Boring.

But what do you think? Let us know below and we'll see who's closest next week.

The recession has been shaping the course of the UK for the past few years, but success stories do exist within the doom and gloom.

The BBC2 show Made in Britain, fronted by everyone's favourite TV economist Evan Davis, has set out to prove this point. Monday night's show focused on the work of chip company ARM as an example of the high-quality innovation the UK can boast.

Davis went to ARM's Cambridge headquarters and spoke to president Tudor Brown, who explained that the company was formed on the back of a request from Apple for a chipset for its PDA device, the Newton, before growing rapidly in the mid 1990s.

"In the mid 1990s the mobile phone revolution started and Nokia was the first to adopt our technology. Now ARM power is pretty much in every mobile phone," he said.

Brown elaborated on the company's strategy, explaining that it makes a huge profit by designing the chipsets but leaving the production and distribution to others.

"We don't make the chips, but we license them to semiconductor companies and we get a licence fee for that. When they make and sell them they also pay us a royalty and we get a few cents on each chip," he said.

"Six billion were made this year, so add that up and it means the company is doing very well."

As Davis noted, this means that ARM is worth around £7bn and is one of the UK's most successful firms, despite being relatively unknown.

ARM works side by side with US companies like Apple, Google and Microsoft, and the firm's chief executive, Warren East, said with a wonderfully David Brent turn of phrase that its innovation-based strategy has helped it to rake in the profits.

"We enable, and we don't pick winners. We believe that sharing a slice of a very big pie is much better than having the whole of a much smaller pie," he said.

ARM's success may be buried deep inside the headline-grabbing gadgets of Google, Apple and Microsoft, but as the BBC found out, it's a success story which proves that the UK can innovate with the best of them.

You can watch the section covering ARM in the show from 23:48 minutes on the BBC iPlayer.

V3.co.uk was lucky enough to be invited to the headquarters of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) to see what lies behind one of the greatest technological and scientific projects on the planet. Here, groundbreaking experiments are being conducted in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), generating an entire petabyte of data every second.

We also snapped a few images along the way.

Straddling the border of France and Switzerland, the project at CERN represents a pinnacle in international scientific collaboration, with 20 nations supplying funding to the project to enable scientists to look for the origins of the universe.

There are four islands of computer banks at CERN for the management of the main tools, including the LHC, and this requires nine full time staff to be in the room every second of the year.

A cutaway of the LHC showing the two tubes through which particles are fired in opposite directions at just below the speed of light (299,792,458m/s) eventually meaning they can complete a 27km loop 11,000 times a second.

A replica model of what the LHC looks like underground. There are only eight entrace points to the tunnel, meaning staff may have to walk several kilometres to reach the fault they are trying to fix. Or they can take a bicycle.

The entire LHC is cooled to a temperature of 1.9 kelvin (-271C) so every piece of metal has to expand and contract - the entire machine becomes 80m longer or shorter depending on its heat, so building links into the metal like this is crucial.

Four machines capture the results of the impact at the four collision points, sending back huge amounts of data to the CERN control centre where it is stored for analysis.

This creates around 25PB of data which CERN needs to store, but rather than doing it all itself, the organisation stores around 20 per cent. It uses the Grid, a world network of datacentres and storage facilities that, in agreement with CERN, hosts the rest of the data.

Amazon's Kindle store is the latest online service to gain the attention of spammers after it was flooded with thousands of cheap books filled with pointless information, according to a report on Reuters.

The books are sold for next to nothing - usually around $0.99 (79p) - but clog up the store and mean that customers have to wade through pages of spam books to find legitimate novels and non-fiction titles, and may even download a fake book in the process.

Part of the problem is that anyone can publish to the Kindle store through self-publishing channels, which makes it easy for genuine authors to add their works but can overwhelm the store with unknown items, legitimate or otherwise.

V3.co.uk contacted Amazon for information on the scale of the problem and how it could be resolved, but had received no reply at the time of publication.

A spokesperson for Amazon told V3.co.uk the online retailer is working on the issue to ensure that customers do not suffer when using the Kindle service.

"Undifferentiated or barely differentiated versions of the same book don't improve the customer experience. We have processes to detect and remove undifferentiated versions of books with the goal of eliminating such content from our store," they said.

Nevertheless, the problem highlights some naivety on Amazon's part, as any new platform that involves financial transactions is always going to appeal to unscrupulous characters.

Furthermore, the e-book format is growing rapidly. A recent KPMG report found that UK citizens spend almost the same amount on book downloads as music files, as devices like the Kindle, Sony eReader and smartphones drive access to digital books.

It would seem that this spam flood will take advantage of the millions of people joining the e-book bandwagon who will be unaware of the threats and susceptible to fraud.