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The third Velo Mondial Conference will take place in Cape Town, South Africa in March 2006. Applications are being sought for the fourth conference, to be staged in 2012. The bid is open to all cities to participate, but preference will be given to cities in Asia, Australia or South America. Velo Mondial is an organisation which promotes the use of the bicycle and is run by two executive directors, based in London and Amsterdam, with assistance from a worldwide advisory board.

Don't try this at home, kids. "If you like your media on the go but don't like the shut-the-world-out feeling of wearing earphones, Sakar International's new family of Sound Cases will be music to your ears." But perhaps not the ears of passers-by as you pedal along blasting out your fave i-tunes... The Bicycle Sound Case works with other MP3 players as well as CD players.

Watch it at home, courtesy of the BBC (but best to attend, really, the bigger the crowd the better the event will look on telly).

Fuji of Philadelphia will donate 50 bikes each year for the next three years. The company hopes these bikes will help nurses and health care service providers reach the more remote and disaster-ridden areas in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and the other countries whose coastlines were devastated by the Boxing Day tsunami. Previously on BikeBiz.com, the main bicycle refurbishment organisations said they would not ship to SE Asia because of the indigenous bicycle industries in those countries and prior import restrictions.

The UK, Canadian, German, Swiss, and American divisions of Raleigh Cycle Ltd. are in robust financial health, CEO Alan Finden-Crofts announced today. The UK operation is the most improved of the bunch but across the board there's been a 7.3 increase in bicycle sales and a $7m year-on-year uplift in earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization