Planet Business

LAURA SLATTERYlooks back at the week in business

Shop talk

A bag-free digital dawn has reached women’s fashion retailer Oasis, which has remodelled its flagship central London store so that each changing room contains an iPad on which customers happy with the style-fit-price trade-off can order the goods – bypassing till queues – and have them delivered straight to their homes. Staff will also be kitted out with an iPad to check if different sizes or versions of an item are on the shop floor or in the stockroom. Since it opened last week, around a fifth of the Argyll Street store’s turnover has been generated via the iPads, suggesting in-store tablets will soon become a common fixture of the retail scene. Well, either that or they all break down faster than you can say “do you have this in a 12?”

£500:The sum that UK business secretary Vince Cable was fined for failing to promptly pay a VAT bill on his media and publishing royalties. "A bit embarrassing," he admitted

Status update

Economic crumble: Where Mount Vesuvius failed, Silvio Berlusconi has apparently succeeded, with the collapse of a wall in the ruins of Pompeii blamed on a broken funding promise.

Delayed arrival: Boeing's 787 Dreamliner has made its maiden commercial flight, touching down in Hong Kong - its some three years behind schedule thanks to a series of production glitches.

Tweet vote: Viewers of the US version of the X Factor will be able to vote for their favourite warbling wannabe via Twitter, using the direct message (DM) part of the social network.

Dictionary Corner: Cuddle class

New Zealand: good at rugby, location filming and air travel innovation. “Cuddle class”, which has found its way into the Collins dictionary, is an industry tag for Air New Zealand’s Skycouch, whereby two passengers book three seats and then retract the armrests and pull up footrests, converting the trio into a short and narrow single bed for intimate flying.

The third seat is priced at roughly half a full-price seat, meaning the cost of horizontal travelling per person is 25 per cent above the cost of an economy class airfare.

An Air New Zealand survey – of unknown scientific rigour – found that the man to whom British UK and US travellers would least like to “cuddle up” on Skycouch was Piers Morgan.

"It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine"

The late Steve Jobs told biographer Walter Isaacson that Apple had “finally cracked” how to build an integrated TV that would wirelessly sync with its other iDevices