The worm didn't get a chance to react to the technology policies of Australia's two aspiring PMs last night. They were too busy talking about boats.

In fact, you had to wait until the 56th minute of the hour-long debate before there was any mention of technology at all. Just before the final gong, Julia Gillard confirmed her intention to continue with the massive NBN project. Two brief mentions, and that was it.

Now, while it would be naive to expect exhaustive discussion about the various technology related issues facing the country in a national televised debate, surely just a little wouldn't hurt?

Couldn't they have found some time, in between "moving forward" and "stopping the boats" to touch on some of the factors that will affect virtually everyone in the country?

The issues they didn't discuss included:

* The NBN: This vast network will touch every home and business in the country. Yet no one knows whether its construction will even continue should Tony Abbott win the contest.

* Immigration: There's been much talk about sustainable population growth, but nobody is clear about what imact migration cuts will have on skilled technology specialists. Will Aussie companies have access to the pool of international skills they need to grow?

* R&D: Other countries do much in the way of stimulating technology development through schemes that support R&D through grants and tax breaks. What do our leaders think of this and what are their plans? Who knows.

* The internet filter: This issue has been delayed, but it's still bubbling away in the background. How about a bit of discussion?

Even just a few minutes on these issues would help to clear up where the major parties stand. The worm would have provided instant feedback and we could have used the details to guide our decisions come polling day.

Let's hope that, if further live debates are scheduled, technology issues at least get more than a mention.

Often in life, it's the little things that drive you nuts. In my case one of them is finding a way to keep my contact book in order.

I’ve tried various methods over the years. In my early days it was a simple as keeping an A5-sized notebook with tabbed pages for each letter of the alphabet. Contact details were written on the relevant page amid business cards held in place with stickytape. Low tech, but it worked.

Information retrieval was quick and out-of-date details could be corrected with a pen. The major downside was that, should you lose your book, your wealth of contacts could be gone forever.

I adopted a different method when the Palm Pilot arrived on the scene. This revolutionary little device allowed you to carry all your contact (and diary) details with you at all times. Retrieval was fast - though not as fast as the paper method - but you had to learn a quirky way of writing on the screen to enter new details.

One big advantage was that you could synchronise your Palm Pilot with your PC, allowing you to keep a back-up copy of your contacts.

For me, this method lasted until smart phones appeared on the scene. Ushering the Palm Pilot into the dustbin of history, they allowed you to keep your contacts synchronised with your PC and also use the stored phone numbers to actually make calls – revolutionary stuff. It seemed like the perfect contact management solution.

But now along comes another development called cloud computing. Rather than storing details on a physical device, the cloud allows you to store it on the internet and then access it from any device you choose.

This sounds great in theory, but I’m yet to get it to work properly in practice. I'm still searching for the easiest way to keep my Outlook contact lists synchronised with a cloud-based store and my smartphone. Sure, there are ways to do it, but I’m yet to find one that works seamlessly.

I’m constantly finding that details I’ve entered into Outlook are not on my phone. I’m also yet to find a cloud service that can work quietly in the background keeping everything together.

It’s frustrating because it’s not a difficult ask. Keeping a single, up-to-date contact list synchronised across multiple devices should be a straightforward and painless thing to do.

Any ideas? How do you keep your contact lists in order?

Back in the good-old days before the GFC, many businesses spent lots of time pondering ways to be 'green'. Are they still doing it?

As the financial storm clouds deepened, attention shifted from saving the planet to saving the business. Protecting market share became more important than protecting the planet.

True, some activities did benefit both. Cutting power and paper usage reduced costs and also helped the planet. But more far reaching projects with the potential to do a lot more were often put well and truly on the back burner.

Trouble is, in many cases they're yet to make a comeback. And now, with growing talk of a double-dip recession, it's not likely they'll be seen any time soon.

Have we seen the last of the green IT revolution?

It was only on the market for two months, but Microsoft's Kin phone line has been killed off as quickly as Australia gets rid of Prime Ministers.

One minute the new phones were being heralded as a new force in mobile social networking. Microsoft extolled features such Facebook and Twitter integration and pointed out that they were cheaper than the hugely popular iPhone.

Trouble was, the young people Microsoft was aiming the Kin at actually preferred iPhones ... or Android phones ... or Nokia phones. They weren't keen to sign up for a watered down handset that couldn't do all the cool stuff they wanted.

Microsoft's drastic response was to pull Kin off the market just two months after launch. Some US carriers will continue to sell their existing inventories - but at significantly reduced prices.

The way in which Kin was yanked says something about the ructions that are occurring deep inside Microsoft when it comes to mobile phones. Many on the outside were struggling to see why the company needed a platform other than its forthcoming Windows Phone 7 OS - now it seems the company itself agrees.

Microsoft already has a battle of gigantic proportions on its hands if it has any hope of grabbing market share from Apple's iPhone and the ballooning number of Android devices hitting the market.

Kin was just another distraction.

There's something unsettling about a big company being able to silently reach into your pocket and take things - but that's exactly what Google has done.

The search and advertising giant used a relatively obscure feature within its popular Android operating system to remotely access the mobile phones of some users and delete installed software apps. It's a little creepy.

To be fair, it was done with the best of intentions. As the company explained on a developer blog, it made use of its inbuilt Android "kill switch" to rid some phones of applications deemed to have 'misrepresented their purpose in order to encourage user downloads'.

It transpires that the apps were created by researchers (reason not clearly explained) and, although not malicious, were deemed by Google to be not appropriate for users to install on their handsets.

Google maintains that the "kill switch" facility is needed to give the option of removing apps in the future, should any appear that are malicious. Apple has a similar feature built into its iPhone.

While I can see the point, it still leaves me feeling a little unsettled that an external party can determine what I run on my phone. If they decide something has to go, it's gone.

Is this the price we have to pay to ensure the ongoing security of mobile devices?