One of the nice things about Twitter is that firms on the site often share titbits of information about what they are up to, to help keep customers, partners and other 'interested parties' updated on their comings and goings.

It was with interest, then, that V3 spied a tweet by Intel UK that showed several employees, including its chief technology officer Justin Rattner, posing outside Number 10 Downing Street this morning.

Interested to know what Intel was doing at such a venue, V3 contacted the firm and, after a couple of hours, was sent a fairly vague statement claiming there was nothing unusual about the meeting, but that all discussions held were strictly off limits.

"With regards to Justin Rattner's visit to Number 10 this morning, as with all major companies, Intel has regular catch-ups with Downing St," Intel said.

"The subject of these conversations is always confidential; we will obviously announce anything significant as and when appropriate."

V3 wondered why, if you were so chummy with the folks at Number 10, would you post a picture advertising your presence there. That's when things got really interesting: on returning to Twitter to look at the picture once more, we noticed that, shock, it was gone.

Sadly, not expecting Intel to pull a fast one in this manner, none of the team in the V3 office had managed to grab a screenshot of the Intel folk outside Number 10.

So the firm is happy to admit the meeting took place, but leaving a picture on Twitter showing staff outside the venue was deemed too much?

This suggests the picture should never have been put online and was removed when questions from the press raised the alarm – creating yet more intrigue into what the meeting with the government was about.

Hopefully Intel will come clean in the future and explain what it was doing inside that illustrious residency – perhaps, as one colleague quipped, they were busy implanting a new chip inside Cameron.

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.

Analysts at IHS iSuppli have warned that the earthquake and subsequent power problems in Japan could affect electronics supply chains for some time to come, especially in the telecoms and consumer electronics sectors.

The rolling blackouts and shut downs of several key nuclear power plants across Japan which followed the magnitude 9.0 earthquake near Sendai earlier this month have caused the closure of key component facilities across Japan, many of which have yet to restart production.

These included over 20 semiconductor plants as well as display, battery and silicon wafer factories, which could have a knock on effect in the production of devices such as the iPad 2. Japan accounts for around a quarter of global silicon production, for example.

In the most likely scenario the disaster is unlikely to derail the global recovery, but some industries are likely to experience significant pain as continuing power capacity problems make it hard for these factories to get back on track.

IHS iSuppli even warned that supply may fail again during the high-demand summer season, causing more problems for electronics components manufacturers.

The market watcher said that the earthquake is likely to have cost the Japanese economy more than ¥20 trillion, which amounts to about four per cent of the country's GDP, although it predicted a strong bounce back once electrical generators come back online and factories reopen.