In a shameful indictment of our wasteful, throwaway society, around 2 million mobile phones – many of them perfectly usable – are expected to be thrown away over Christmas.
The findings come from a recent Tesco Mobile survey which discovered that almost 11 million Brits expect to shell out for a new mobile phone over Christmas, with 20% of them just lobbing the old one in the bin.
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Google has held talks with pop svengali Simon Fuller about a new joint venture that “could change the way TV is watched over the Internet”.
According to The Observer, details of the extra-plus hush-hush talks remain a closely guarded secret, but their tipster claims that the venture could kickstart a ‘revolution’ in the way that TV programmes are distributed.
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There’s a couple of changes going on at YouTube that are worth highlighting – mainly because they look like they’re a big improvement, particularly for those who upload many videos at once.
Once a app has been downloaded, YouTube-ers will be able to batch upload videos, rather than having to do them one after the other.
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Retail big boys HMV and Play.com have announced that they will be joining the online party by launching their own film download services in the next six months.
Play is understood to be whipping out its a movie download service within the next few weeks, while HMV’s service is still getting polished up for a launch at the beginning of next year.
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Despite the Apple’s corporation’s best attempts to foist a ghastly US-style, all-whoopin’ and a-clappin’, backslappin’, high-fivin’, luxury goods-spendin’ iPhone ‘event’ on us Brits, initial reports suggest that the great occasion failed miserably to live up to the pre-launch hype. It doesn’t look like the UK sales on Friday are going to be adding to the expected 3m iPhone sales.
With the clock ticking down to the Apple-decreed hour of 6:02pm on Friday night, stockists Carphone Warehouse, O2 stores and Apple’s own retail chains were ready and waiting to deal with the expected rampaging hordes of credit card wielding punters desperate to shell out £269 for the privilege of owning an iPhone and spending 18 long months in the expensive company of exclusive carriers O2.
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We toodled along to the launch of Babel TV, a new TV/ PVR/ Internet/ Computing device, earlier this week.
Sadly we have to use that long, awkward description because, as yet, no one’s come up with a snappy term to match its wide range of functions.
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It appears that Hushmail isn’t quite as secure as it was initially thought to be.
Up to this point, it was thought that Hushmail was completely secure as messages were stored encrypted. Indeed Hushmail used to boast that not even their engineers would be able to read messages of users.
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The times are clearly changing. Metro, one of the give-away papers in London, covered YouPorn in a whole page article in yesterday’s edition.
As well as pointing out that YouPorn is supposed to be the 27th most visited site in the UK, three slots behind eBay, it surprisingly bigs up the benefits of amateur porn.
At the bottom of the page, they take it a couple of stages further and give tips on how you can look good when making your own porn video!
As a side issue, the piece also mentions a UK version of YouTube (new to us), which after a quick glance (you’ve got to research these things, haven’t you) looks like a poor copy of the original.
We suspect that having such high billing in the Metro, YouPorn’s popularity will be on the rise.
YouTube has been used to post a video-predicting the fatal shooting at a school in Finland, with the none too subtle title of “Jokela High School Massacre – 11/7/2007.”
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As promised, below is the interview we did yesterday evening with Mark Taylor, President of the Open Source Consortium, following their meeting the BBC Technology staff, giving you the latest news on the BBC’s view on changing the iPlayer to an open platform rather than the Microsoft-only approach they’ve taken until now.