Sonia Rykiel, the ‘high priestess’ of Parisian chic, is to design for the high street chain, H&M.

Rykiel will be the chain’s ‘guest designer’ for two seasons. For this winter she will create an exclusive collection of lingerie, and, for next spring, a knitwear collection for women, and girls, aged 18 months to 8 years, with co-ordinated, playful accessories.

The lingerie collection, a ‘first’ for the chain, will be launched in time for Christmas, on December 5th, in 1,500 H&M stores worldwide, including its London flagship at Oxford Circus, London, W1 and UK branches. In another ‘first’, the collection will also be sold in major Sonia Rykiel boutiques around the world.

To read more, click here

Cable group Virgin Media has confirmed plans to be listed on the London Stock Exchange.

The company said it expected its shares to start trading in London at 8am on Thursday this week.

However, Virgin’s primary listing will remain on New York’s Nasdaq exchange.

The move is seen as logical for a business headquartered in the UK and entirely focused on the British market.

It will make it easier for British and European investors to buy shares because they will now be able to pay in sterling as well as dollars.

Because Virgin’s primary stock listing will continue to be in the US, it will not be eligible for inclusion in the FTSE 100 index of the UK’s top listed companies.

To find out more,click here

Born in 551 BC, the influential Chinese philosopher Confucius was known for his intelligence and foresight. There is little chance, however, that even he could have predicted how the Western world would celebrate the 2560th anniversary of his birth: with a custom logo for search engine Google.

Having been brought up in poverty, and working as a clerk, a shepherd and, at the age of 53, Justice Minister in the state of Lu, Confucius began to expound the philosophy which grew to become the backbone of Eastern politics and thinking for centuries.

To read more, click here

One in five, some 422 million, households worldwide will have a fixed broadband connection in the home by the end of 2009, according to market analyst Gartner.

This is up from 382 million households in 2008, and the market will steadily grow with nearly 580 million households having a fixed broadband connection by 2013, the firm said in a report.

The UK is expected to slip from 11th most connected country today to 12th by then, it said (see table). However, BT said last week its fixed wire broadband network could reach up to 75% of homes by 2011, if consumers demanded it.

To read more click here

ChartTrack has announced that Microsoft’s Halo 3: ODST on the Xbox 360 has topped the all-format UK charts for the last week in September.

Halo 3: ODST got off to a blistering start, with 64% of the week’s sales being achieved in the first 24 hours after launch.

However, ChartTrack noted that Halo 3 itself sold far more copies in its initial week when it was released two years ago.

To read the full story, click here

Owners of Microsoft Xbox 360 gaming console will be getting Sky TV on their platform provided that they are already paying BSkyB customers.

According to Sky’s Official subscriber magazine, Xbox 360 users will get a free update on their console within the next few weeks which will be adding the feature to their console. It is possible that the update introduces Facebook and Twitter integration to the console’s dashboard.

As expected, those interested will need to have an Xbox Live Gold membership as well as a full subscription package as well as a decent broadband line (possibly from Sky); you won’t need a satellite dish.

Read more: Here

Ofcom has ruled that David Cameron did not break broadcasting rules when he told breakfast radio listeners that politicians who use Twitter risk making a “twat” of themselves.

The Tory leader also used the words “pissed off” during his July appearance on banal guitar pop station Absolute Radio, before adding “sorry, I can’t say that in the morning”.

Today Ofcom – which received 20 complaints – declined to take action against the station. “In the context of the interview and the programme overall the remarks did not breach the broadcasting code,” it said.

To read the full story click here

Apple today announced that users have downloaded more than two billion applications from its App Store.

The news comes on the same day that mobile phone fans discovered that O2′s exclusive hold over Apple’s iconic iPhone is coming to an end as Orange will be offering it to UK users on its network by the end of the year.

More than 85,000 applications are now available to the ever-growing iPhone and iPod Touch user base, which Apple reckons stands at around 50 million at present.

Back in July, the company celebrated reaching the 1.5 billion app download milestone, showing just how quickly things have changed in a matter of months.

To read the full story click here

Xerox, the world’s largest maker of high-speed color printers, is to acquire Affiliated Computer Services (ACS), a business process outsourcing (BPO) company, in an agreed $6.4 billion cash and share offer.

For Xerox, the deal provides an opportunity to expand into the growing BPO market, involving mainly paper-based back office document management – as opposed to digital data management – at big corporations and public sector organisations.

Xerox, hopes in particular that it will be able to combine its expertise in automated document scanning and routing with ACS’s largely paper-based operations.

Ursula Burns, who took over as chief executive of Xerox in July and will lead the combined group, described the deal as a “game changer” for her company.

To read the full story click here

The annual CoolBrands survey has seen the iPhone secure the top spot as the coolest brand in the UK.

Apple performed remarkably well in the survey, which is voted on by the general public and has been running since 2001. The Apple brand itself came in as the third coolest, with its iPod in fourth place.

Aston Martin, which topped last year’s chart, was ousted by the iPhone as it slipped to number two.

Although it’s unlikely we’ll see James Bond using an iPhone in the next film (not unless Apple add a piano-wire garotte to the phone’s expansive feature set).

In the online world, YouTube and Google were judged the most popular, placing at sixth and eighth respectively.

The BBC’s iPlayer was a new entry at number twenty, whereas social networking site Facebook dropped out of the top twenty.

To Read the full story click here