BIS's offer to help rescue South Korea from financial crisis last winter has also not passed unnoticed in Basle.

ECONOMIST: Lenses of last resort

BIS's work counts for least where it should matter most: in emerging-market economies such as those in Asia, where weak financial regulation turned currency turmoil into full-fledged economic crisis.

ECONOMIST: Lenses of last resort

One to watch is the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill from Vince Cable's BIS department - where intra-coalition tensions could appear clause by clause.

BBC: Tough justice?

Many corporate customers said they had not lost service, suggesting that the problem was with Blackberry's BIS consumer systems, rather than its BES enterprise systems.

BBC: Blackberry users complain of fresh crash

The next recipient of the BIS pin is most likely to be Nasa's Michael Foale, one of the most experienced astronauts in history.

BBC: 'UK spaceman' Nicholas Patrick honoured

It's hard to fathom that it's taken this long, but hey, we'll take it -- unfortunately, it's up to each carrier to decide when they're going to deploy BIS upgrades, so your mileage may vary on the wait time.

ENGADGET: RIM's BIS 3.0 email features apparently leaked, finally does Gmail justice

Every three years, when the BIS releases its new foreign-exchange market survey, the WSJ Dollar Index will be reweighted using the bank's latest trading volume figures, making it a dynamic index that evolves with the constantly changing market.

WSJ: WSJ, FX Trader Launch Dollar Index

In a patent app made public this month, RIM's lab geeks describe setting up a proxy server right on the phone that would intercept the browser's web requests and bundle, compress, and send them to a gateway on the other end (BIS, we presume) that would know how to deal with the packet.

ENGADGET: RIM patent app will have you barely browsing the web at incredible speeds