If you travel around the UK a lot and find the homogenisation of High Streets into identical rows of bland coffeeshop multinationals a deeply depressing experience, you may find delocator.org.uk the perfect site for your needs.
Bearing a passing resemblance to the ‘store locator’ seen on the Starbuck’s site, the delocator lets you type in a UK post code and find the nearest ‘non corporate cafe’ near you, with a drop-down menu for selecting the distance range to search, from 1km to 15km.
The site’s still in early days and because it relies on users to input recommended cafes, the coverage isn’t as complete as it might be, but the author told Digital Lifestyles that he intends to add more functionality ‘in the Spring’ (he’s also asked for help in running this site – contact him here.)
Despite this, we still managed to find two non-corporate cafes within a 1km of us, with the results displayed in a text box containing a description of the cafe and address details, accompanied by a zoomable Google map.
Delocating the world
The first Delocator website started up in America, tasked with “assisting the public in finding and supporting independently owned cafes” and proved a great success, with over 5000 independent cafes across the States being inputted by users.
The site encouraged other activists to create their own delocator site using a downloadable toolkit, with a second site being set up for Canadian users, delocator.ca, with the UK site now being the third of what may turn out to be a multinational anti corporate franchise (now there’s a concept!).
With Starbucks promising to open a new branch every fortnight for the next decade in the UK, we reckon local, independent coffee shops need al the help they can get.
Free Rosey Lee in the East End
Elsewhere, Starbuck’s shiny new store in Whitechapel in the East End of London found itself the subject of an unusual protest last week by those cheeky scamps, the Space Hijackers.
Setting up a stall and dishing out free fair trade teas, tasty home made sandwiches and delicious cakes to passers by, the protesters hoped to illustrate “what the area will be missing if Starbucks and their ilk are allowed to settle in.”
Naturally, the urban75 website went along to lend their support (and scoff some tasty banana cakes) – see their photo report here
Yesterday, record company giants EMI Group PLC announced that it planned to unveil “an exciting new digital offering” with Steve Jobs and the gang at Apple, leading pundits to conclude that The Beatles’ music catalogue is finally about to be made available through Apple’s iTunes online music store.
The Beatles have famously refused to sign up to iTunes and other online music services for years, and many expect the download charts to be instantly filled up with the Fab Four’s songs as soon as their catalogue becomes available.
Although digital cameras make it easy to quickly snap product shots, the built in flash often creates unflattering shadows and reflections, so Lastolite are hoping that people will be prepared to shell out for their economy-priced ePhotomaker kit.A much smaller and less complex affair than the three hundred quid 
Also lurking in the bag is a sheet of blue ‘gel’ (to compensate for the yellow hue of the average light bulb) and two crocodile clips for attaching it to a desk lamp.
Conclusion
Today they’ve announced it’s for real. The new Complete My Album will give iTunes users 79p credit per track for each track on an album that they decide to purchase, if they’ve bought the tracks individually first.
LG have committed to release at least ten new mobile phone and will jointly market them as LG-Google handsets.
Sometimes the simplest applications can make the biggest difference to your productivity, and we reckon that freeware Clipboard Recorder by LW-Works could be such a fella.
The neatest way to can access the extended clipboard is by selecting the Windows+V keys or clicking on the system tray icon and selecting the desired text from a list of ‘headlines.’
Although it doesn’t possess the most attractive interface we’ve ever had grace our desktop, Clipboard Recorder does a very useful job without any fuss and for free, we’re not complaining.
Smaato News is a RSS reader for smartphones that lets users read RSS feeds of their favourite Websites and blogs and get other information on the move.
Although the application is free, the program is supported by adverts which appear on the top section of the screen (“if you see something interesting, don’t hesitate to click,” implores their manual, rather optimistically).
Microsoft’s Corporate VP Bill Veghte was clearly a chuffed fella, “We are encouraged to see such a positive consumer response to Windows Vista right out of the gate,” he purred in an official statement released on Monday.
The figures seem to stack up well against the 17 million copies of Windows XP sold in the two months following its release in 2001, but the PC market has increased exponentially since then: according to IDC, total worldwide PC shipments hit 136 million units in 2001, a figure dwarfed by last year’s 227 million total sales.
Although Windows marketing director Bill Mannion acknowledged that the upgrade program had nudged the sales figures in an upward direction, he played down the numbers saying that upgraders didn’t make up the “core component of the 20 million.”
Sitting on the tube, opposite such an ad, I figured that there were only two possible companies which could be accused of controlling 80% of information on the Web; it could plausibly refer to either Internet Explorer’s market share (and would therefore be an advert for Firefox) or Google’s market share. Since I knew Mozilla wasn’t planning any advert like this, I assumed that it was a competitor to Google, and concluded it was probably Ask (since neither Yahoo or Microsoft would manage to think outside the box to such an extent). However, I dismissed that idea instantly as it seemed so unlikely that a well respected company would attempt such a pathetic campaign, and that therefore it must be some new search engine with far too much venture capital. By that point I had lost interest, and began examining the ventilation panel.