Eight years on, more than 900 million people use Facebook and its young founder - who still wears a hoodie to work - has convinced investors that his company is the most valuable technology business ever to have offered itself to investors.

Facebook's revenue comes from advertising - and it's now worth six times as much as the world's biggest advertising business WPP.

When trading begins in New York, it's expected that the shares will rise as small investors rush to get in on the act.

The real question though is whether in a year's time Facebook will have started to deliver the huge growth in profits that shareholders will expect.

Can Facebook crack China?

Facebook: Behind the likes and pokes

Facebook feature growth timeline

Facebook's first female engineer

My frustration came to a head after I was sent £1 last week by someone using the Barclays Pingit system. Actually not just someone, but the man I consider the guru of digital money, Dave Birch, a consultant who writes about the subject and advises many of the leading players.

A few weeks earlier I'd been trying out O2's new mobile wallet, and after negotiating my way through about a dozen passwords, pet's names, best friend at school and other security paraphernalia I'd finally managed to send £1 via text message to Dave. He was now returning the favour (without interest, I may add - that's consultants for you).

Having registered once for Barclays Pingit - and then not used it - I assumed it would be easy to retrieve my £1 from Mr Birch. Not so. First I had to register my own bank account to the Pingit account to receive payments. That involved another string of passwords - and a verification code. Which would arrive from Barclays in the form of a letter to my home - how very 21st Century!

A week later, the letter arrived, and last night I excitedly punched the code into the Pingit app and waited. After about thirty seconds, the app crashed and refused to reopen, while I contemplated smashing the phone against the wall. Eventually, I did manage to get it going again and found that the £1 had made its way into my account. Exultant, I decided to send my wife £5 via the Pingit app. She is now looking daggers at me over the breakfast table and wondering why I can't simply hand her a fiver.

And here's the problem with mobile money right now. There are plenty of ways of using your phone to pay - from Pingit, to O2's mobile wallet, to the PayPal app or NFC phones where you simply swipe to pay. But right now the aggravation factor still outweighs the potential benefits.

In the developing world, it's a different story. Some recent figures showed that in Kenya, for instance, 96% of mobile phone owners use a mobile payments system - mainly MPESA which helps users transfer cash via text message. In countries where many don't have bank accounts, any complexities in using mobile money fade into insignificance besides the sheer usefulness of the service.

Here, though, the mobile money evangelists are struggling to convince consumers that their lives will be made simpler and better once they can pay by phone.

Still, I'm not easily put off. I've now got four different mobile money applications on my phone, and I'm going to see how far I can get without cash. I will report back in a week or so...

The main cause came from the company itself, which updated its advice to investors in official documents last week to include an extra risk factor:

"[I]ncreased user access to and engagement with Facebook through our mobile products, where we do not currently directly generate meaningful revenue, particularly to the extent that mobile engagement is substituted for engagement with Facebook on personal computers where we monetize usage by displaying ads and other commercial content."

In other words, the future of Facebook is on mobile phones, and we haven't the faintest idea how we make money from that. If you, like many people, spend much of your social networking time staring at a smartphone, you may have noticed something rather refreshing - a lack of advertising cluttering up the valuable real estate of the small screen.

Whatever the claims of a fast growing mobile advertising industry, it is proving hard for Facebook and other companies dependent on ad revenue to insert messages into the mobile conversation.

Mark Zuckerberg's company has responded to this threat with an extraordinary burst of activity in the run-up to the IPO (Initial Public Offering). There was the $1bn purchase of the mobile photo sharing app Instagram, the announcement that Facebook was launching an app store, and, over the weekend, news of trials of a system where users would pay a small fee to make their posts more visible to friends on the network.

But it's not clear any of this will generate a lot of revenue. Putting adverts around Instagram snaps, thereby taking screen space from your pictures, doesn't sound attractive. How Facebook will get much of a payback from an apps store if it is mainly linking to the Apple and Android stores remains to be seen. And, as for paying to make your friends listen to you, asking users to shell out for something that they have always got for free sounds like a no-no.

The other cause for concern for potential investors is the rising tide of anxiety about the implications of sharing so much of our data with the social network. With perfect timing, the Silicon Valley controversialist Andrew Keen has a new book out, Digital Vertigo, which is in essence a diatribe against the "frictionless sharing" that is at the heart of Facebook's business model. "Chillingly Orwellian" is his description of a world where our every move is tracked to generate better advertising returns.

Meanwhile there appears to be a user revolt against the broadcasting of one's media habits on Facebook, with reports that newspaper social reading apps are seeing a rapid decline in usage. Do you really want the world to know you've just read some gossipy diary item in the Guardian, or listened to a One Direction track on Spotify?

Now, Facebook is confident that these are the concerns of a tiny if vociferous minority, and that most of us want to share ever more of our lives online. But if its users become even a little more cautious about their privacy, that will be damaging to the revenue growth which is already built into a sky-high valuation.

The biggest counter-argument, the bull's case for Facebook, can be summed up in one word - Google. When the search giant floated in 2004, there was similar scepticism about its prospects, but shares priced at $85 at the launch had climbed above $600 three years on. And Facebook is a more mature business than Google was back then, with more than twice as much revenue in the year before its IPO.

Still, Google was valued at around $23bn in 2004, while Facebook is looking at a price tag four times as high. Investors who do take the plunge are betting that Facebook will enjoy the same stellar rate of growth in revenue and profits that Google has experienced over the last eight years. And here the news is not so good. The most recent quarterly figures actually showed a decline in revenue on the previous three months, blamed on seasonal factors.

In the end, though, the Facebook IPO is a bet on the shape of our digital future. If you believe in a world where billions of us share our lives online with our friends and with advertisers, then shares in the social web's dominant business may look attractive. But if you think that people are going to start rebelling against the idea that, if they're not paying, they're the product, then maybe you won't be buying a stake in Mark Zuckerberg's company.

It will look at what people are listening to via new streaming services, both subscription and advertising supported, and will use data from the likes of Spotify, Deezer, We7 and Napster. The initiative from the Official Charts Company is obviously recognition - perhaps rather belated - that streaming, rather than owning music, has become a habit for millions of the music industry's customers.

To mark this new departure, a chart of the most streamed artists of 2012 has been released. At number one is Ed Sheeran, followed by Lana Del Rey and then David Guetta. Compare and contrast with the singles and album charts - which now combine both downloads and CD sales - and you'll see some intriguing differences.

Ed Sheeran, for instance is much lower in the download charts, while the top selling album artist Adele is only number 13 in the streaming chart. Now there's one obvious reason why the most successful recording artist of recent years isn't big on the likes of Spotify - her management have opted not to licence the 21 album for streaming.

I asked a much younger colleague with more experience of the current music scene to compare the charts. "Overall," she told me, "the streaming chart is more alternative, a slightly older demographic and features more music from artists who've not released albums for a while."

But what I really want to know is some information that you can't get from the streaming chart. Such as how big the streaming business is compared to paid downloads, whether it is an industry dominated by Spotify, in the same way that Amazon dominates ebooks, and why many artists are still so unhappy with the rewards it offers.

Streaming is obviously growing fast. According to the charts company, there were 2.6 billion audio streams in the UK last year, compared with 177 million single track downloads and 26 million album downloads. Obviously the two don't compare when it comes to revenue, but we'll come to that in a minute.

Who's winning in this new industry? Well Spotify is certainly the best known brand in Europe, and perhaps now in the US. But with only 3 million paying subscribers there is obviously a huge untapped market to aim at, and the battle is far from over. France's Deezer, with 1.5 million subscribers, is growing rapidly, and the word in the industry is that it is the best placed to challenge Spotify.

For artists, though, it is still less clear what streaming has to offer. I've heard suggestions that music insiders have a ready reckoner which values every paid download track as worth 350 streams. And we've heard from plenty of disgruntled artists complaining of getting pennies for hundreds of thousand streams and from others, like Adele, who've decided to stay out of streaming for fear of cannibalising CD and download sales.

I spoke to Will Hope from Spotify, and asked him whether there were any signs that relations with artists were improving. He pointed to the fact that music from Bob Dylan and the Red Hot Chili Peppers - artists who had kept away from streaming - was now available on his service. And he insisted that the rewards for musicians were growing rapidly. "We're only just beginning, we're one of the most significant revenue providers for artists."

The arrival of a streaming chart means that a new way of getting access to music has come of age. But for now - and perhaps for years to come - most artists will dream of getting a number one album or single, not a number one stream.

Streaming top 10

Singles top 10

Albums top 10

1. Ed Sheeran

1. David Guetta

1. Adele

2. Lana Del Rey

2. Gotye

2. Lana Del Rey

3. David Guetta

3. Jessie J

3. Emeli Sande

4. Rihanna

4. Flo Rida

4. Florence & The Machine

5. Coldplay

5. Nicki Minaj

5. Ed Sheeran

6. Gotye

6. Ed Sheeran

6. Coldplay

7. Jessie J

7. Rihanna

7. Rihanna

8. Emeli Sande

8. Emeli Sande

8. David Guetta

9. Florence & The Machine

9.Rizzle Kicks

9. Whitney Houston

10. Drake

10. Katy Perry

10. Jessie J

Source: Official Charts Company Top 10 year to date

That's what I did for the launch of a book called The Cambridge Phenomenon. It's a study of the emergence in Cambridge over the last 50 years of a clutch of world class technology firms, many of them born out of a university whose scientists have been behind everything from discovering the structure of DNA to building the world's first webcam.

At a launch party in the dignified but distinctly low tech surroundings of the Senate House, the Cambridge great and good had all turned up. I spotted Herman Hauser, founder of Acorn and now godfather to many start-ups, Sir Alec Broers, the scientist who after a business career which included many years at IBM, returned to the university as a vice-chancellor determined to forge stronger links with the outside world, and Warren East, the chief executive of ARM, the chip designer which is Cambridge's biggest success story so far.

The speakers described a culture which encouraged students and academics to look outwards, and a community which supported young companies with a spirit of collaboration and advice from those who had gone before. So, for instance, ARM was born out of Acorn Computer in the 1980s, but is now itself providing help and inspiration to the next generation of start-ups.

But having heard from the Cambridge veterans, I was on the lookout for evidence that the spirit of innovation really was still alive, and that clever new companies were emerging from the university. And in the nostalgic crowd, I found two young entrepreneurs, both products of the university, and both convinced that this is the place to grow their companies.

Billy Boyle's start-up business Owlstone makes gas sensors on a microchip which can detect anything from explosive to disease. He and his co-founders took their research from a Cambridge engineering lab where they were working on a microchip design and turned it into a business.

"Right from day one we wanted to take what we had in the lab and out it out in the world," he told me. "One of the great things about starting a business here is the access to talent and the willingness of people who've done it before to help. When we started lots of people gave up time to help us."

By contrast, Emmanuel Carraud emerged not from a lab but from Cambridge's relatively new Judge Business School. His start-up, MagicSolver, enables smartphone users to discover the latest and best apps from the thousands now cluttering up the Apple and Android stores. It doesn't sound a very hi-tech business, but Emmanuel told me that Cambridge software expertise and the collaborative culture were among the many good reasons to base his firm here. "There's great talent, great advice from mentors, it's really international and there's a great vibe."

So, a few reasons why Cambridge, rather than London's Tech City, may offer the UK's best chance of generating world-class technology companies. What London does have is easier access to the venture capital firms which seem so reluctant to travel outside the capital. What it lacks is strong links with a world-class university, and a powerful network of people with a track record in both science and business, willing to pass on lessons to new companies.

But the main lesson from Cambridge is that you cannot build a technology cluster overnight. When I made a programme about the Cambridge phenomenon in the early 1990s, a number of people told me that the place still needed a few billion dollar companies to act as an inspiration for others.

Now, at the latest count, it's got nine such businesses. Twenty years from now, perhaps Tech City will be home to a similar collection of world-beaters, but first it may need to attract more scientists and fewer web designers.

I've been to several major gadget launches - the original iPhone, Sony's PlayStation 3, Microsoft's Xbox Kinect - and last night's unveiling of the Galaxy S3 smartphone in London's Earl's Court may well have been the most over the top and extravagant yet. In the cavernous halls where everyone from Pink Floyd to Madonna has strutted their stuff, thousands gathered to see a rectangular slab of plastic and metal.

Why? Because only one smartphone has challenged - perhaps surpassed - the iPhone in terms of sales, technology and consumer appeal. And the latest version will undoubtedly set the standard for Apple and the rest of the industry to try to match.

For all the extravagant talk of a device which allows you to "live the life extraordinary", the latest Galaxy looks at first sight like any other modern touchscreen phone. It does have a bigger sharper screen than its predecessor, and some clever touches. There's a voice recognition function which seemed in the demo to do everything that Apple's Siri does and more, there's eye-tracking technology which means that the phone goes to sleep when you stop looking at it, and there's NFC (Near Field Communication) built in, allowing users to simply tap each other's phones to share content.

But at its heart is the latest Ice Cream Sandwich version of the Android operating system - and that's on plenty of other impressive phones from the likes of HTC, LG and Sony. Why the new Galaxy matters is that the previous models have established it in consumer minds as the number one Android phone - and in this business, it's increasingly apparent that the winner takes all.

Look across the wider smartphone battlefield, and it seems that there could soon be just two players left standing. Last week Apple revealed that it had sold 35 million iPhones in the last quarter, a figure that left industry analysts gasping for breath. Only for them to suffer another fainting fit on learning that Samsung had sold more than 44 million smartphones in the same period. With the Korean firm's cheaper phones also roaring ahead, it has now overtaken Nokia as the world's biggest mobile maker.

But what is truly astonishing is the share of industry profits these two companies are winning. Look at this infographic of recent profit trends in mobile phones, compiled by a respected mobile industry analyst, Horace Dediu.

It shows that Apple captured 73% of phone industry profits over the last three months, with Samsung getting 26%. HTC got 1% and the rest made losses, or profits so small they barely register.

From the mobile operators' point of view this emerging duopoly must be deeply worrying. Having been forced to bend to Apple's will, they were very happy to see the emergence of Android, with its promise of a multitude of manufacturers competing for their attention. Now it looks as though Samsung is in position to call all the shots in the Android market.

What happens next? Could RIM, which has been previewing its new Blackberry 10 system this week, make a comeback in the autumn with innovative phones that revive its appeal? Will Nokia's Lumia range - apparently doing reasonably well in the United States - pull the Finnish giant out of its death spiral? Or will a Chinese giant like Huawei start flexing its muscles in Western markets?

The mobile networks will hope that all of those eventualities - however unlikely - come to pass. But in the meantime, they will all be helping Samsung with its massive marketing push behind the Galaxy S3 - and making it into an inevitable and very profitable hit.

The politician was Claire Perry MP, who has been leading the fight to get internet providers to do more to police the internet and protect children from pornography. She squared up to Nicholas Lansman of the Internet Service Providers Association - surprise, surprise, none of the big ISPs seemed keen to put their heads above the parapet.

The discussion did not really focus on the practicalities of blocking The Pirate Bay - which many in the internet industry believe will be ineffective - but on the responsibility of ISPs in general to act against any illegality online.

Mrs Perry, who wants internet users to have to opt in to access to pornography, insisted that this was not about web censorship of the kind we see in Burma or China but about giving parents the ability to protect children. Mr Lansman pointed out that his industry was giving consumers the filtering tools to block access to pornographic material, but was not keen to impose their use, or to end up policing the internet.

Now there's little doubt that Mrs Perry speaks for a wide strand of public opinion which would like to see internet firms be more proactive in child protection. The Daily Mail, with its instinct for Middle England's concerns, has given her campaign vigorous backing.

But just look at the reaction on Twitter and in emails to this morning's debate, and you will see a rather different view. Many believed the discussion showed a fundamental lack of understanding of the internet, and some that it was the job of parents, not ISPs, to block children's access to unsuitable internet sites. "You want DIY stores to be responsible for what buyers of crowbars do with them," asked one tweeter.

And as for the Pirate Bay blocking orders, there was widespread outrage online at the very idea that the music industry should act to stop consumers getting access to copyright material. "UK ISP blocking of #piratebay is the beginning of the end - equivalent to China's censorship policy. What's next?" read one message.

In summary, there is a gulf opening up between two views of the internet. On the one side, you've got those who feel strongly that there needs to be far more effective regulation, with action to block access to certain websites, and child protection trumping any concerns about censorship.

On the other, a libertarian strand online is opposed to any limits on how individuals use the internet, and views action to prevent access to copyright material or pornography as not only ineffective but morally wrong.

On some issues - notably government plans for greater web surveillance - some of the pro-regulation camp will shift to the libertarian side. But, as media firms step up their battle against piracy and popular newspapers demand action from politicians on web filtering, the internet culture wars are going to get more heated.

The answer, according to the Dutchman running Britain's biggest mobile operator, is that we're a long way behind the United States and many European countries. And he puts some of the blame on the industry's appetite for litigation.

This morning, Everything Everywhere - the bizarrely named amalgam of T-Mobile and Orange - is launching a campaign to heighten awareness of the benefits of 4G to the UK economy. It's the brainchild of Olaf Swantee who came to the UK in September to take up the reins at EE (let's call it that to save space).

When I went to see Mr Swantee in his office in Paddington, he professed himself puzzled by what he'd found on arrival in London. This country, he told me, had long had a reputation as an early adopter of mobile technology - now it was in the 4G slow lane.

The industry had underinvested in the fundamental digital infrastructure, and he intended to do something about it - first by spending £1.5bn on his own network, then by whipping up interest in the importance of 4G.

Hence the 4G Britain campaign. But what exactly is this supposed to achieve? The 4G auction has been delayed until the end of this year, so I suppose the campaign could apply some pressure to speed that up. But Ofcom says the spectrum for 4G - mostly the dividend from the digital switchover - won't be available until next year anyway, so there is no real prospect of accelerating the timetable.

And whose fault is it that things have moved so slowly? Well speak to anyone at Ofcom and they will point to the constant threat of legal action from the mobile operators. Even now, we can't be sure that the auction won't be further delayed by litigation from one network or another which doesn't like the rules of the game.

Mr Swantee seems to agree that this is a problem in the UK. "I've been surprised at how often lawyers are used to resolve problems here," he told me. "Any litigious behaviour that delays 4G further would not be good."

He said it would be very damaging if operators were tempted to sweat their existing assets - the 3G networks in which they invested a decade ago - while continuing to use their lawyers to postpone any investment in 4G.

But who started this? The courtroom battles began way back in 2008, when Ofcom's attempt to make available some of the spectrum for 4G was stymied by a legal challenge - by T-Mobile, now part of EE. Mr Swantee makes the fair point that that was under a previous management, and he has brought in a new approach.

But his rivals are cynical about the motives behind the 4G Britain campaign. They point to the fact that Everything Everywhere is currently awaiting a ruling from Ofcom on whether it can use some existing spectrum to bring in a 4G service early. There's been talk of legal action if the regulator waves that through - so no wonder Mr Swantee wants everyone to join hands and sing songs about the 4G future around the campfire.

And over the last week or so I've had a glimpse of the rivalry within the industry. The PR team preparing the 4G Britain campaign suggested that other networks, along with celebrities and various technology companies would be joining the movement. One operator got in touch to stress that they would not be signing up and a technology company told me that claims of their support were inaccurate. Even the celebrities seem to have thought twice about it.

Mr Swantee certainly makes a convincing case on the need to get on with building a 4G Britain. But in a mobile market which is one of the most competitive in the world, it may be a little optimistic to expect peace to break out and lawyers to be put out of work.

Even now, we can't be sure that the auction won't be further delayed by litigation from one network or another which doesn't like the rules of the game.

Britain’s 4G delays - blame the lawyers

When the Digital Economy Act was rushed through Parliament in the dying days of the Labour government, it appeared to be a great victory for the media industries.

But the ISPs fought back, and although their legal challenges largely failed, they resulted in this long delay in implementing the law.

Four years is a very long time in the fast-changing world of digital content. By the time the process of sending letters to suspected illegal file-sharers begins in 2014, the whole landscape may have been transformed.

The media firms may then find the Act is not as powerful a weapon against piracy as they had hoped.

What's intriguing about O2's new venture is that it's the biggest attempt so far by a mobile operator, rather than a bank or credit card issuer, to enter this market.

In developing countries like Kenya it is mobile firms which have successfully pioneered mobile money innovation - but that's because products are aimed at the many who don't have bank accounts.

In the UK, where that isn't the case, O2 will have to convince customers that their money is safe on their mobiles.

If and when UK phone users do get enthusiastic about mobile money, there's a very lucrative business opportunity - and mobile operators will find themselves in a battle with the banks to grasp it.

As the dramatic events at the Leveson Inquiry roll on, you might think the answer was obvious - Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. But over the last 24 hours, there has been news from two other American giants, Google and Apple, which you might argue play a far more influential role in daily life in Britain.

Last night, the staggering economic muscle of Apple was underlined again in another set of sparkling results. In the last three months, the company made over $11.6bn - that's around £8bn - and sold 35 million iPhones. We don't know just how much of that profit was made in the UK, but we can be pretty sure that Apple, which sells into the UK from Ireland and Luxembourg, did not pay much corporation tax. A report from the business magazine Forbes suggested that the figure in 2010 was just £10.3m.

But Apple's influence over the way we live is not just about economics - our methods of communication, the way our creative industries are shaped, our education system, are all being deeply affected by decisions made at Apple headquarters at Cupertino in California. What Apple does not seem to care about is lobbying politicians, and trying to shape government policy.

In many ways, a company which is self-confident to the point of arrogance seems deeply uninterested in talking to anyone but its customers. You're unlikely to find Tim Cook popping into Downing Street for a cup of tea, or senior Apple executives lunching with ministers or newspaper editors.

Now that is not the case with another Californian giant, Google. Last night the company launched its latest service, Google Drive, which allows users to store all manner of material in the cloud, and will make life harder for smaller firms like Dropbox. And if it succeeds, it will mean that millions of British users will be handing over more and more of their secrets to a company which already knows a lot about them.

Over the last decade Google has built a huge business in the UK, on course to earn around £2.5bn from advertising this year. Like Apple, it is thought Google pays little corporation tax - the firm will only say this: "We have an obligation to our shareholders to set up a tax efficient structure, and our present structure is compliant with the tax rules in all the countries where we operate."

Its almost universal adoption by UK internet users, combined with that huge flow of revenue from advertising makes Google a very powerful force in this country - certainly wealthier than most, if not all, media firms. And the company has been keen to make its voice heard in the corridors of power, with a battery of spin doctors and lobbyists.

The company has all bases covered - its most senior PR executive is a former Conservative adviser who is married to one of David Cameron's closest confidants, while its European communications boss is a former Labour Party adviser. Google's chairman Eric Schmidt has been a frequent visitor to Britain, with his speeches quoted admiringly by the prime minister.

And News Corp certainly does not underestimate Google's influence. An interesting detail in the raft of emails about the BskyB bid released at the Leveson Inquiry is News Corp's concerns that Google might have too much sway over the government's thinking on the Hargreaves Review on copyright reform.

In November 2010, the prime minister launched the review in a speech which talked approvingly of how Google had benefitted from the US "fair use" system. A month later, an email from News Corp's PR man Fred Michel describes a meeting with George Osborne's special adviser: "Gave a strong feedback on David's comments praising Google and US fair-use for the IP review. Gave detailed feedback on the pitfalls to avoid in the IP review process."

What Google does not have, of course, is a newspaper empire ready to pour buckets of ordure over politicians who fail to live up to its expectations, or to promote policies which favour its business. But, as newspaper sales decline, the power of old media empires is on the decline.

From Google to Apple, from Microsoft to Amazon, American technology firms now hold huge sway over the way we live our lives, far more than what we read in the morning papers. As politicians wake up to that fact - and run scared of being seen to associate with newspaper moguls - we can expect the voices of the technology giants to be heard ever louder in the corridors of power.

Millions of misty-eyed middle-aged men - and I'm pretty sure the Spectrum was mainly a boy's toy - are remembering that their first experience of computing meant getting their hands dirty. Before doing anything interesting like playing a game, they had first to go through the laborious job of typing in a program - and, the argument goes, that very process meant that programming itself became interesting.

Whereas today's teenagers turn on their computers, their tablet computers and smartphones, and start playing games without any of the creative input that programming involves. The result, say the nostalgists, is that today's "digital natives" are in fact a lot less savvy about computers than their dinosaur dads who grew up with the Spectrum and the BBC Micro in the 1980s.

One possible solution to this problem arrived in my home over the weekend, the first computer that has ever come into the house via the letterbox. (Here's a video showing just how small it is.) The tiny Raspberry Pi, a cheap credit card sized computer, is a project which has caught the imagination of the same crowd which remembers the Spectrum with such affection.

While it has a processor 200 times faster and a memory bigger by an order of thousands, the Pi is in some ways even more basic - and more demanding of its users - than its 1980s predecessor. You have to find not only a television, but a keyboard, mouse and your own power adapter before you can actually get going.

So will the digital generation have the patience to tackle the Raspberry Pi? "My impression is that the attention span of young people over the last 30 years has probably not lengthened," Richard Altwasser, who designed the ZX Spectrum, told the BBC.

But amongst some of those who learned their computing the hard way there is something of a backlash against the idea that today's children - or older beginners - need to be given an easy introduction into the world of coding. My post last week on a one day course promising an introduction to coding provoked quite a response.

Many people were enthusiastic, but some coders felt that I was belittling their profession, that web languages like HTML, CSS and Javascript were a long way from proper coding, and that the idea that you could learn anything in a day was a joke.

Leading the charge was Andrew Orlowski, a brilliant but provocative software engineer turned writer, whose articles in The Register are always a good read - even if he's talking arrant nonsense. In a piece headlined Compulsory coding in schools - the new nerd tourism, he describes the sudden burst of interest in coding by "bien pensant media folk" as "staggeringly ignorant and misplaced" and says it could end up doing far more harm than good.

Really? There is certainly a move to reform the teaching of ICT in schools - but it has been led by teachers themselves, by computer and games industry executives and by coders, not by "bien pensant media folk". And the picture Mr Orlowski paints of weeping children being frog-marched into compulsory coding classes owes more to his overheated imagination than reality.

Far from ordering schools to teach programming, the Education Secretary Michael Gove has effectively told them to do whatever they like about ICT, leaving many unsure what computing education will look like next September.

Mr Orlowski may, however, have a point about one thing - coding is unlikely to become a mass market activity. The same of course was true of the 1980s. The ZX Spectrum may have been Britain's best-selling computer but it was still a minority sport and millions grew up without learning anything about coding.

But what's the better message to send to today's schoolchildren? Don't even think about coding, it's much too hard. Or have a go, you might just like it.

I spent a day on one such course run by an organisation called Decoded. It aims to give people who will probably never need to code for a living a basic grounding, so that by the end of the day they have an insight into what is involved.

So at 09:00 one morning I found myself in a very attractive loft apartment in East London sipping coffee with 10 executives from an advertising firm. Most of them had more experience of coding than me - mainly because they were young enough to have messed around with a BBC Micro or a ZX Spectrum as teenagers.

But, like me, they were unlikely to need these skills in their daily work. So what was the point of sending them on a course with a pretty hefty price tag? They gave me various reasons, from gaining a better understanding of consumers to shaping their firm's digital future, but I thought Tom, a young strategy director from the agency, put it best: "There's this phrase, the geeks will inherit the earth.... when they do I want to be talking the same language as them."

Then it was down to work - first a potted history of code, with an emphasis on the importance of web languages. Alasdair Blackwell, our main tutor and the co-founder of Decoded, is an impressive evangelist for the open web, and the need to give ourselves the tools to make best use of it.

He argues that today's teenage iPad users, far from being digital natives, actually have less understanding of what makes computers tick than his generation, who got their hands dirty with machines like the BBC Micro. "The children playing on iPads, I actually despair for them because they're just using software, not creating software for themselves."

Next, we started to learn about the building blocks of the web apps we were each going to make - HTML, the basic coding language for any website, CSS, for the style and appearance of the site, and Javascript, to make it come to life with all manner of audiovisual tricks.

HTML and CSS seemed reasonably easy to grasp, but by the time we got to Javascript - with its elements, functions and curly brackets - the brain of someone last in a classroom more than three decades ago was beginning to protest. Then we were each set to work to start building our own web apps, which needed to have a location based element, and to work on a mobile phone as well as a computer.

My idea, surprise surprise, was for a news app that would tell you about stories which happened in particular London locations as you arrived there. As we each followed the tutor through the various stages of HTML, CSS and Javascript, there were cries of pain from around the table, as our creations failed to respond in the way we intended.

But what we learned is that coding is a collective pursuit - together with our tutors Alasdair and Monique, we debugged each other's sites so that by 17:30 we all had something basic but rather clever.

By using some smart piece of Javascript found in the free online library Jquery, we had inserted some geolocation code on our sites. This meant that a computer - or phone - using the apps at the door of our current East London location would be served an extra piece of content. As each of us refreshed our web apps, and found that they worked, a ripple of quiet satisfaction spread around the room.

Now, like most of those on the Decoded course, I rather doubt that I will ever be asked to code as part of my job - and a few days after the course I'm already struggling to remember which brackets go where in Javascript.

But I came away from my day of coding exhilarated by the experience and with new insights into the development of our digital world. So maybe one day soon I will sit down and start coding for real.

One big story of the week, the billion dollar deal that saw Facebook snap up Instagram, provoked two instant reactions. That this was evidence of a new dotcom bubble, and that Instagram would soon be rendered worthless as users dismayed by Mark Zuckerberg's takeover packed up and left. And, as I Instagrammed away on my Moroccan holiday, both seemed to me to be wrong.

OK one billion dollars for a business with no revenues seems a bit daft, and there's a good chance that the social network will never make a return on its investment. But remember, Facebook is rather in the position of a Russian billionaire paying way over the odds for a London mansion - with a flotation imminent at a valuation of about $100bn it can afford to splash out without worrying too much.

That's not the case for most potential buyers of hot tech startups. In the last bubble, anything with dotcom attached to its name saw its value soar, whatever the weaknesses in its business model - that does not seem to be the case this time. For every "pre-revenue" firm like Instagram, there are plenty having to prove they can earn serious money before catching a buyer's eye.

As for users decamping in disgust, last week's news added up to a great free marketing campaign, introducing millions to Instagram for the first time. For every user that left, I wouldn't mind betting that 10 tried the photo-sharing app for the first time.

And if Facebook sticks to its word and doesn't mess with the brand, it's likely that Instagram users will care as little about the takeover as the YouTube crowd did when it was swallowed by Google.

Just six weeks ago Nokia's Stephen Elop was his usual sunny self at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. He told me that his new strategy was working, with sales of the new high-end Windows smartphones "exceeding our expectations" and Nokia continuing to perform well in the developing world with the Symbian platform.

But last week Nokia's shares plunged after a profit warning, as Mr Elop revealed that his "transition" strategy had yet to pay off. Sales of Symbian phones had fallen faster than expected, while despite brave words about the new Lumia range, only two million had been bought in the first quarter of 2012 at an average price of about £200. By comparison, in its last quarter, Apple sold 37 million iPhones at an average price of about £410.

In Barcelona I put the pessimists' view of Nokia's prospects to Mr Elop - that the Chinese would own the developing world, and Android and Apple would own the rest of the world, leaving his firm in a pretty desperate position. He came back and asked me what the optimists were saying.

I told him there was a view that Nokia might be able to beat RIM, makers of the Blackberry, to third place in the smartphone wars. But even that is beginning to look doubtful now.

But even for Apple, last week wasn't so great, as the firm came under attack on two fronts. Having reassured its customers for decades that the Mac operating system was safe from the viruses and malware that plague Windows users, Apple suddenly had to take action against an intruder. The Flashback trojan, which apparently infected as many as 600,000 computers, was a wake-up call for the Mac community - and evidence that they are now sizeable enough to attract the attentions of those who unleash malware across the web.

Perhaps even more worrying for Apple is that it is now evidently in the spotlight of the regulators. The US Department of Justice has launched a lawsuit accusing the company of colluding with publishers to fix the price of ebooks. Further action, on this and other issues, is likely from EU regulators. Publishers and authors have hit back, accusing the DOJ of actions that are likely to shore up the monopoly position of another American technology giant Amazon. But once the regulators have you in their sights, as Microsoft and now Google have found, you are in for a long and costly battle.

Apple's shares, meanwhile, hit a new high last week and are up 50% since the beginning of the year. So maybe they won't be too worried in Cupertino just yet, though it's worth remembering another company whose shares peaked right in the middle of a sustained assault from the Department of Justice. Microsoft's shares hit $58 at the end of 1999 - for much of the time since then, the company and its shares have been treading water.

So I thought I would give you two this week - from different ends of the UK. I've also asked each entrepreneur to give me a brief "elevator pitch" on video. (Please note that we're not endorsing their businesses - just giving them a chance to tell their stories.)

This London-based games developer is a good example of that old maxim, if at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Or rather, to use a fashionable term, pivot. That's what Adrian Hon did last year four years after founding Six to Start with his brother Dan.

They began by developing games and apps for other organisations, including the BBC, but late last year decided on an ambitious venture to produce their own running game for the iPhone.

The result, Zombies, Run!, is an app which involves plugging in your earphones, setting off for a run and being immersed in the unfolding story of a post-apocalyptic world where you are pursued by, guess what, zombies.

There was a new approach to funding too. After an early grant from the Nesta venture fund, the company had lived off its own resources for some years. But it turned to the crowd-funding site Kickstarter to raise $12,000 towards development costs, and ended up with more than $70,000 (£44,000).

What is interesting is that Six to Start chose to charge a hefty price, by app standards, for the Zombies experience - $8 in the United States, £5.49 in the UK - when there are plenty of much cheaper or even free game apps. "Everybody thought it was crazy," admits Adrian.

But, having invested in actors and quite a sophisticated production process, and taken money from Kickstarter investors, he needed to get a revenue stream pretty rapidly. And the gamble seems to have paid off, with thousands of downloads per day in the week after the launch at the beginning of March.

The game has got as high as number 14 in Apple's American chart of top grossing apps, and there's obviously a lot of excitement in this small business about its success, with plans for an Android version, in-app purchases, and multi-player capability. But revenues are still modest, there is no guarantee that they will grow, and with the whole future of the business hanging on this one game, Six to Start still has plenty to prove.

The likes of Rovio - whose huge hit Angry Birds came after a string of relative failures - have shown that a tiny firm can build a multimedia empire from one blockbuster game. But Adrian Hon and his small Zombies Run team may well find that keeping ahead of the competition is just as scary in the real world as in their game.

In what was once an anatomy laboratory at Glasgow University, Michael Newman hopes to prove that you can build a successful global technology firm far from the home of most venture capital firms.

His start-up, my1login, is entering quite a crowded field - helping people with dozens of different passwords and logins to store them securely and use them with ease. Just like Zombies, Run, the service went live at the beginning of March, but its founder has been on a rather different journey from Adrian Hon.

Michael Newman was the classic teenage bedroom coder, going on to university to study electrical engineering before rising through the ranks as an executive at major communications firms in Scotland. "Largely I've been involved in management not coding," he says, "but once you've done it, it's in your DNA." Four years ago, he had an idea for the business, and started working on it in his spare time.

He only left to go full-time on my1login last November, and much of the development of the product has been funded from his own resources. "I paid developers out of my own pocket," he explains, "remortgaged my home, pulled in money from all sorts of places."

Mr Newman has tried to get venture capital firms interested, but until a product was out in the market it proved difficult. The fact that most are based in London was also a factor - "the geographical barrier was quite significant" - though more positively a community of angel investors in Glasgow and Edinburgh and the presence of a cluster of technology businesses proved helpful.

But the flipside to the Glasgow location has been the availability of public money. Without a £250,000 grant from Scottish Enterprise and free accommodation in disused offices at the university under a city council scheme, this start-up would have stalled. "Now that we're out of the traps and have proof of concept," says Michael Newman," we'll be going back to London for second round funding."

My1login now urgently needs to start earning some revenue, from advertising in its free product and from persuading users to upgrade to a more sophisticated paid version. A quick scan of the web finds plenty of similar services offering secure ways to store your passwords, and my1login did not come up when I searched for "password manager".

So the next challenge for Michael Newman is to get his company known and prove to customers that it's better than what its rivals offer. Creating a buzz around a start-up business is all important - and it's still easier to do that in Silicon Valley, or even London's Shoreditch than in Glasgow.

As someone has pointed out the money that Six to Start got from Kickstarter was in the form of upfront payments for the game, not equity. So the people who contributed are in effect customers, not investors.

Web surveillance - who’s got your data?

I'll leave coverage of that to my political colleagues - but let's turn to the practicalities, and how this surveillance might affect you and me. Or, to be selfish, me.

From what we know of the plan, it involves asking Internet Service Providers and mobile phone companies to store records of users' email and web traffic - not the content, but the destination. So the companies could be asked to hand over details of who you emailed and when, not what you were talking about.

So how much of that data do they store already? I approached Virgin Media, my current Internet Service Provider, O2, a mobile phone network I use, and Google, which provides my personal email, to ask them for details of what they knew about me - and how much effort it would be to collect more data. Here's what I found:

My ISP Virgin Media says it doesn't store any data on my personal web or email use, though it does collect data at a network level to understand the overall patterns of traffic.

If it is served a warrant, though, it can allow the authorities to access data about an individual customer's web and email use. As far as I understand it that could include web-based email services like Hotmail and Gmail. The company was keen to stress that there are very strict limits on how many such warrants can be issued, under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, and Virgin itself doesn't get to see or keep that data involved.

So what happens if the government does want to go further? The company was reluctant to go into any detail, but I get the impression that starting to collect data on my web and email use on a routine basis would be a complicated operation, but by no means impossible.

Now I was left a little confused here because my understanding was that secure web-based email such as Gmail, where HTTPS pops up in your browser, could not be accessed by your ISP. So I then turned to Google.

As a user of various Google services, from search to Gmail, I know that the company does have plenty of data on me. For example, it obviously knows who I've emailed and when - the sort of information that the government may want to see in the future.

Google pointed me towards its transparency report which details requests for user data from the UK authorities. Between January and June last year, it received 1,279 such requests, and complied with 63% of them.

But what about that secure web email question? Here, Google had a different story from Virgin Media. The search firm insists that when I send an email from my Gmail account on my home broadband connection using SSL - the secure system - Virgin can't see who I'm emailing.

In other words, the security services may be more interested in targeting the likes of Google than your ISP if they want to know who you're talking to.

My mobile phone network, O2 pointed me towards their privacy policy which details what kind of information they collect. It's quite a list:

"Phone numbers and/or email addresses of calls, texts, MMS, emails and other communications made and received by you and the date, duration, time and cost of such communications, your searching, browsing history (including web sites you visit) and location data, internet PC location for broadband, address location for billing, delivery, installation or as provided by individual, phone location."

The policy says it can be disclosed to third parties "where required by law, regulation or legal proceedings", under the same rules which Virgin mentioned. The data is retained "for not less than six months and not more than two years".

What seems clear from this is that both Google and the mobile networks already collect plenty of data which might be of interest to the police and intelligence services - and which they can already access, subject to quite strict controls. A move to make it easier for the authorities to access that data might not impose much of an extra burden on them.

For ISPs like Virgin Media, however, it seems to be a different story. They will have concerns about the cost of collecting this information and the impact on their relations with their customers. And, given how disgruntled ISPs are already over plans to force them to police copyright abuse on their networks, prepare for a battle over what they will see as a new burden.

The arrival of Apple's iPhone and then Android phones using Google software left the Blackberry looking old-fashioned - profits suffered and the men at the top resigned.

But the company started just four years ago by Ben Medlock and Jon Reynolds may have a better chance of making it big than any number of trendy new media Shoreditch start-ups. Swiftkey is an app that makes it easier to enter text on Android smartphones and tablets, and it's already been installed by more than six million users worldwide. It sounds simple, but behind an app that throws up suggested words as you type is some very sophisticated technology and an interesting story of how companies start in Britain.