BE Broadband

What you might have missed: 1 million likes and a 007 teaser

2012-05-22T18:03:00.000+01:00

It was a big weekend for Facebook. On Friday the company made its long awaited debut onto the NASDAQ. Although it hasn’t been the smoothest of starts, Facebook did break some records on its first day with over 89 million shares traded.

On Saturday, Mark Zuckerberg (who is now personally worth around $20 billion) then surprised a few people and married his long term girlfriend Prescilla. The picture that Mark posted of the two of them managed over a million likes in less than 48 hours. Not bad really.

In other news we have seen the release of the first official teaser trailer for the next Bond Film, Skyfall. Although the film is not out until November and they haven’t even finished filming yet, this first look at what Director Sam Mendes is creating has caused a lot of hype among Bond fans and film critics. Take a look:

And finally, we’re still looking for inspiration for our timeline. You can check out our brief history of the Interwebs here. Let us know if you can think of any other milestones in internet history that need to be there. We will be creating some more sketches for the biggest events you think have been missed off.

Presenting – A Brief History of the Internet

2012-05-16T09:28:00.000+01:00

You can imagine at BE House there is a lot of love for the internet. Many geeks walk the corridors debating the date the world wide web came about or whether we are in the web 1.0, 2.0 or even 3.0. Either way, there is a lot of love.

So when Facebook changed the design for Facebook pages, of which some of you may be fans of, we decided to do something a little different. While we have now set up the timeline to feature key events for BE, we have also created a brief history of the internet!

The timeline begins at 1969 with the creation of ARPANET. Following on from there we've highlighted key events such as the first email, the World Wide Web and even the bad stuff like Justin Beiber.

Head over to our Facebook Page to take a look, comment on your favourite milestones, debate whether we've got them right and let us know if you think we need to add any more - we're open to which events you want to be shown so please do get in touch. We will create more sketches to go with the best suggestions for new milestones too.

We also care about your history with BE, so if you think you've got something interesting to share - maybe you attended one of our socials or your cat started sleeping on the BE router, we'll add it in. Let us know on Facebook or in the comments below if you have anything to add.

Take a look at our brief history of the internet here.

What you might have missed: someone new at Yahoo!

2012-05-15T10:52:00.000+01:00

We've been blogging weekend wrap ups for a while so now we’d like to introduce the series as ‘what you might of missed’ – our weekly post covering tech news you might have missed from the past week.

The big news from this weekend has to be in the form of Yahoo! The company has officially announced that Fred Amoroso will be the new Chairman of the Board of Directors and Ross Levinsohn is the interim Chief Executive Officer.

It marks the end of difficult couple of weeks for the former CEO Scott Thompson who has been in the middle of a controversy over his CV. Do you think claiming you did a different degree is a reason to get rid of your CEO or do you think Yahoo! should have stuck with their man?

In other news, you may remember a few weeks ago we mentioned that Apple were in a bit of trouble over their slightly stretched advertising claims in the UK. The company had been advertising the new 4G capabilities of its latest in the UK even though the 4G benefits it has can only be used in North America.

According to the Advertising Standards Agency they had been "working closely" with Apple to amend the way the iPad is advertised and that the consumer electronics firm had been “very co-operative” during the investigation. Apple said the confusion all came about because of the ways operators refer to different high-speed mobile technologies.

Have you seen any decent tech news we might have missed too? Share your finds in the comments below.

A quick Glancee at the last week

2012-05-10T17:37:00.002+01:00

First up is the news that Facebook has made yet another acquisition, this time being Glancee. Just weeks after purchasing Instagram, the Glancee team posted a notice on their website to let everyone know what was going on (read it here). I’m sure you remember, but Glancee was actually one of the apps we flagged in our round-up of SXSW back in March.

From the other side of the world, news from India that mobile internet use is growing. The latest figures show it’s set to overtake fixed line internet by the end of this year. Mobile internet had a tiny 2 percent usage figure back in January 2009, but it seems the lack of infrastructure has been a key driver to pushing the population, especially in rural areas towards mobile. You can read more on the story and see the graph here.

Finally, Francis Maude (MP for Horsham and Minister for the Cabinet Office and Paymaster General) was speaking recently during a visit to Estonia where he warned people of the “dark side of the internet” and how it might impact the London 2012 Olympic Games. He warned that “the Beijing games saw 12 million cyber security incidents during their Olympics” and went on to say that "we have rightly been preparing for some time - a dedicated unit will help guard the London Olympics against cyber attack - we are determined to have a safe and secure Games." We were wondering what you thought about the security surround the Olympic Games, will you be taking any extra precautions online?

A few Random Star Wars facts...May the 4th be with you

2012-05-04T15:20:00.000+01:00

If you didn’t know, today is Intergalactic Star Wars day. It all came about because of the popularity of the common pun based on the famous Star Wars phrase “May the force be with you”.

So, to honour the day, we thought we would take to the internet* and find 6 completely random facts you might not know about the famous film franchise. Feel free to get involved and share your best and worst Star Wars trivia with us.

1. It took three different actors to portray Darth Vader : David Prowse (body), James Earl Jones (voice) and Sebastian Shaw (face)

2. To avoid being disturbed while shooting Return of the Jedi, Lucas pretended he was making a horror movie called "Blue Harvest". He wanted the illusion so perfect that the whole crew was wearing caps and shirts especially printed.

3. The Sith were originally called The Damned, but a British band by the same name debuted in February 1977 forcing George to dub over with the word “Sith” in post-production. To this day George still hates punk rock.

4. Although the first two films had been massive hits, the studio refused to give the green light for Return of the Jedi until Mr Lucas drew out a detailed merchandising plan and promised more toy-friendly characters. Which is where Ewoks came in.

5. The original sounds for the LightSabers where recorded by moving a microphone next to a TV set

*The internets being Buzfeed & SWGuide.

More tech rumours, Apple’s 4G claims and an update on our competition

2012-05-02T15:17:00.000+01:00

Digg
The tech rumour mills have been working hard again this week. The latest story to make its way gently across the web is the news that social bookmarking site Digg may be in buyout talks with the Washington Post. Rumours are rife on the web for these sorts of things, but this one is interesting as Digg is a big deal when it comes to bookmarking sites – let us know if you use Digg and what you think of a potential buyout.

Apple
Apple has never been shy when it comes to marketing their products and it seems the new iPad is no exception. Even though North America is the only place you find widely available 4G networks, Apple has been advertising a 4G version of their new device elsewhere, including the UK. After a few complaints about this, the ASA have decided to step in. More on this here but let us know what you think too in the comments below.

Competition
Finally, it gives us great pleasure to announce Web User journalist Vicky Woollaston as our independent judge for our favourite tech blog competition. Vicky has been a tech journalist at Web User magazine since 2009 and has a specialist interest in mobiles, apps and gadgets. She also claims to be a bit of a fan of HTML5 and Last.fm. You can find Vicky on Twitter here.

We’re giving away an Asus Zenbook and two iPads in the competition Vicky will be judging, so head on over and enter here if you want to win.

New clouds available

2012-04-27T15:57:00.000+01:00

This week we’ve seen a few new players step into the personal cloud storage ring. In fact, you could say we have enough for a cage fight. Or, in this case, it would be more like a “box fight”. Dropbox has been the big player in the space for a long time; surely the others will have to do something different to topple them. So let’s have a look at a few of new contenders.

First on the list is Google Drive. The big feature for Drive will be the fact that it has been built to work seamlessly with everything ‘Google’. It will let you attach photos from Drive to posts in Google+. If you want to attach stuff from Drive directly to emails in Gmail you will be able to do that too. If you’re are a Google fan, then Drive looks like it will be the tool to pin it all together for you. Also you will get 5GB free storage compared to the 2GB free storage currently offered by Dropbox. You can sign up to Drive here.

However, reviews have identified a few downsides like safety and compatibility. Safety because it doesn’t look as though Google will provide two factor encryption, so if Google Drive is targeting the SME market, questions will need to be answered on data security and exposure.

The other surprise is the platform’s lack of compatibility with Linux. Although, following an almost instant outcry from the Linux community, Google has now updated their position. It will be heading to the platform soon, although no specifics as yet. You can read more on that here.

Other players stepping up this week are Microsoft, with SkyDrive for Windows and Mac and a new entrant, Cubby. SkyDrive has been heavily integrated with the Windows Phone platform for a while. It allows users to synch seamlessly from their handsets and free up internal storage on their device. We will soon see if SkyDrive for Windows and Mac can integrate as well and gain users as a standalone platform. You can check it out here.

Cubby, which is currently in beta, is a new offering from remote access company LogMeIn. Cubby gives you 5GB of storage in the cloud and allows you to turn your Mac, PC and any of your folders into "virtual cubbies." You can request an invite here.

So, the question is, which one’s for you? Will you be sticking with an old favourite? Or with so many new options is it time for a change?

Win an ASUS Zenbook by blogging about your favourite tech subject (runners up will win an iPad)

2012-04-26T16:47:00.000+01:00

Fancy winning a brand new ultrabook, with Office Professional 2010 and an Arc Touch Mouse? That’s exactly what we have to give away to one lucky winner and a couple of new iPads for two runners up.

Interested?
We really like hearing about the things you guys are into – that is one of the main reasons we host BE socials and is why we recently asked you if any of you blog (blogroll coming soon). So we want to give you the opportunity to blog about the tech subject of your choice, and get rewarded for it – in the form of some great kit.

How to enter
If you want to enter the competition then all you have to do is take to your blog and write about some of the latest technology you love – or even technology that’s been around for a while, but you still think is awesome.

Simply write a post on your personal blog entitled ‘Tech I love – BE Broadband competition’ and post the link and your BE username in this form below. If you don’t have a blog you can set one up quite easily through WordPress, Blogger, or any other platform you fancy.

Prizes
Once all the entries are in, we’ll take a look at the blog posts, along with a third party judge, and decide on one winner and two runners up, based on which we think are the most interesting of the bunch.

The winner will receive an ASUS Zenbook 13”, with Office Professional 2012 and an Arc Touch Mouse, while the two runners up will win a brand new 16GB WiFi iPad (aka the iPad 3) each. The top three blog posts will also be featured here on the BE blog.

The competition is now open and will be running for two weeks, until 10th May, so get blogging about your favourite tech subject now – and don’t forget to enter the link below.

Click here for terms and conditions

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Free broadband anyone? Get £40 each time you recommend a friend to BE

2012-04-25T15:01:00.000+01:00

We’ve increased the amount of credit you receive on our refer a friend programme from £15.32 to £40. That’s £40 for you and the friend you recommend. Each time you recommend.

You can recommend a friend 6 times a year and if you do recommend the full 6 then you’ll get a bonus £40 credit to say thanks – that’s a total of £280 credit if all 6 sign up.

That means members on both the Value and Unlimited packages could get their internet for the year entirely free. And BE Pro members would only have to shell out £44 for their service. That’s not bad going.

So if you want some dollar (or pounds) credited to your account then head over to this page and tell your friends now! Remember 6 is the magic number for that bonus credit and the free internets.

Twitter, Tupac and the Titanic

2012-04-20T15:15:00.001+01:00

It seems that everyone was after Instagram. In our blog post last week, we looked at the news that Facebook had purchased the photo sharing site for a whopping 1 billion dollars. More news stories have followed and it appears Facebook weren’t the only site looking to make a rather large purchase. Twitter had apparently been very interested in trying to buy the service for a few months. In addition to this, there have been more suggestions that the purchase was made because of Zuckerbergs’s insecurities above anything else.

One of the coolest stories we’ve seen since the weekend has come from the Coachella festival. Rapper Tupac (who died 15 years ago... or did he?) performed to an amazed, freaked out and slightly stunned crowd. If you haven’t seen the video yet, then we would strongly suggest you take a look, even if Tupac isn’t usually your cup of tea. And, for those of you more interested in how they managed to do it, you can find out here.

Finally, after many memorial services at the weekend to remember those who lost their lives when the Titanic sank 100 years ago, Google has created its own 3D tour using Google Maps. The video, which can be viewed here, allows you to explore the ill-fated ship from the comfort of your home. Using imagery from National Geographic, Google has created an updated 3D model that allows you to explore different parts of the ship.

Old vs. New

2012-04-16T10:31:00.003+01:00

Here at BE HQ there seems to be a running conversation over which is/was better, old stuff or new stuff.

As you can probably imagine, the debate is usually over technology and gadgets. There are the usual battles between team PC, team Mac and team Linux; as well as the more recent iOS vs Android debate. But then there are also the slightly more sophisticated arguments over which technology is better, the old gear or the new gear. It tends to be fairly subjective though “this changed the world” vs “I liked this one better” doesn’t really stack up.

So it got us thinking, why don’t we make it a regular feature on the blog. Get a couple of experts to talk about why they think the old tech was cooler, or why the new tech version shaped humanity for the better.

We want you guys to be involved too, so to get the ball rolling, we’ve listed 5 battles below for you to vote on. Let us know which you prefer and why!

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The 2 billion dollar weekend

2012-04-10T12:46:00.000+01:00

It’s been a busy Easter break. While we were away enjoying a holiday on the banks, a few people in the US we’re busy flexing their retail muscles.

If you haven’t seen or heard yet, there were two significant purchases. The First of which was Mr Mark Zuckerberg announcing that Facebook has acquired mobile photo sharing site Instagram for 1 billion dollars...in cash! You can read all about it here. The company was valued at $500 million just last week ago, but Facebook decided it needed the social media platform so badly, it would pay a little over the RRP. Early reports are suggesting it was fear of a genuine competitor that drove Facebook to a snap decision.

The second purchase was a little less of a surprise. AOL sold 800 patents to Microsoft for 1.1 billion dollars. Although on the face of things this one is a little less exciting, it will be interesting to see what AOL’s next move is with all that cash in the bank. There has been a lot of speculation for some time now over what AOL would do with all of its patents. It seems as though pressure to monetising their growing media portfolio got too much.

So, all in all, a pretty expensive weekend really. While you were probably cracking open your second hollow chocolate egg, a serious amount of cash was changing hands. We would love to hear what you think will happen with the new purchases, or better yet what you would be doing if you had just landed a billion dollar in cash.

Update on fibre

2012-04-10T11:00:00.000+01:00

We're afraid we're not making very good progress on fibre. There are lots of reasons for this, but the bottom line is we're unlikely to launch a service across the BE network in 2012.

Many of you told us you were prepared to wait for a fibre service from BE, so we're sorry to bring you this news and for keeping you waiting.

We're still looking into launching a service on a limited basis later this year, combining our unshaped, unlimited network with the higher speeds of fibre-to-the-cabinet. It's just taking much longer than we'd like.

We'll continue to update you when we have further news.

BE launches new range of pet accessories

2012-04-01T06:00:00.000+01:00

We're extremely proud to announce our new range of warming animal accessories 'BEds for pets'. Following the success of early prototypes, we're rolling out the new range across the UK in partnership with all those pet shops you see on retail parks but never go into.

BEds for Pets launches with a line of heated decoy routers that will provide a warm spot for cats and even small dogs to sleep on, while preserving your primary router's internet speeds.

BEd for Pets prototype

We hope this new range of BE paraphernalia for pets will appeal to any pet owner's inner geek. While the BEds for Pets range are designed to look similar to the standard BE router, they are lined with a choice of catnip or bonio fragrances, instead of the internet.

If you see BEds for Pets today in your local pet store, share a photo with us and we will give out a prize of some sort.

SXSW Interactive round-up

2012-03-16T07:41:00.001Z

The Interactive part of SXSW is now over and the festival is being left in the hands of Film and Music. While we didn’t manage to make it over to the weeklong event, we did follow the news very closely. Here are our highlights:

Ambient Location Apps

Would you like to share your location with the entire world? It may seem strange to some but millions do this everyday with apps like Foursquare and the late Gowalla. But a new breed of ‘ambient’ location apps were launched at SXSW this year, such as Highlight and Glancee, which both share your location automatically with your friends – so no need to check in. But would you be happy to constantly share you whereabouts? PCWorld even likens the apps to ChatRoulette.

Jimmy Wales to Advise the Government

Usually politics is left out of SXSW altogether, but during the Crowdsourcing Government: Why Access Matters session a senior aide to PM David Cameron announced that Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia fame will advise the government in using tech to give the public more say on technology. Interested? Check out Venture Beat’s report on the story.

Angry Birds in Space

The game is often regarded as the number one mobile app around – if it were a band it’d be The Beatles, it was always at the top. It is so big in fact that the developers teamed up with NASA to create the latest edition, which features zero gravity. Now whether or not the gravity is true to life (in space) is another question – and one that Wired happily went into fine detail on.

Homeless Hotspots

This had to make the list for just creating so many headlines. The slightly controversial scheme of setting up homeless people with wireless hotspots didn’t seem to go down to well.

Did you follow SXSW Interactive? What were your highlights?

Congratulations to our friends at BE Wholesale

2012-03-13T16:00:00.002Z

We don't often talk about them, but since 2010 BE has had a sibling called BE Wholesale selling broadband to the wholesale market here in the UK.

Well, today they're announcing that they're becoming O2 Wholesale, which makes more sense given their products fit in nicely with O2's existing wholesale mobile and data services.

It doesn't affect us or our members at all, but we wanted to post to let you know and also to give them a big pat on the back for their hard work over the last couple of years.

The tale of the cat and the decoy router

2012-03-09T11:20:00.001Z

There’s something about the internet and cats that just works. Lolcats are one of the most prolific memes, being shared daily in offices around the world. But it looks like cats have now started taking in interest in the hardware that allows us to connect to the web.

In one of the stranger requests we see at Be, a Member, Liam, made a request for a decoy router after his cat decided to perch on the current modem. The tech team took this quite seriously and decided to send the requested router.

The story has been told on Liam’s personal blog, ISP Review, Reddit and even The Mail Online. In doing so, we’ve noticed the situation is not isolated to cats alone, with rumours that the common house iguana also being favourable towards the BE modem...

Have any of your pets also taken a shine to your router? Share your interesting stories in the comments below.

Mountain Lion and Windows 8 – what do you think?

2012-02-27T10:50:00.001Z

Last week Apple announced Mountain Lion – a step even bigger than OS X Lion was towards iOS. Many people have called this the ‘tabletification’ of the desktop, with Apple trying to find a middle ground so apps across the iOS and OS X platforms work in harmony.

Microsoft has been quite innovative too in this area. Their Windows 8 product is certainly more tablet-looking than Mountain Lion, however it again finds the middle ground as apps will be able to switch between the new metro UI style and the older design we’re all used to. But with its ‘touch first’ design, could it be doing even more than Apple are in the tabletification arena?

Ubuntu too have stated their ambition to move onto devices other just your desktop PC or laptop. Tablets are a clear goal for them and the latest release of Ubuntu includes design elements that would work well on a slate.

What are your thoughts on the upcoming OS releases from Apple and Microsoft? Are you impressed by the improvements or would you prefer to see something different?

We’ve been awarded Recommended Provider for Broadband Services by Which?

2012-02-21T08:58:00.002Z

Which? Magazine has named us as a Recommended Provider for Broadband Services again. To win this award we had to score well for customer service, ease of set up, connection speed, reliability and technical support and receive an overall score of 70% in their consumer survey. We’d like to thank you guys for the awesome support and for helping us win this award, again.

Customer update on network packet loss

2012-02-17T14:58:00.010Z

Over the course of the last week, there have been a number of problems across the BE network, resulting in significant packet loss for a large number of customers and preventing certain web sites from being accessed.

We apologise for the inconvenience and difficulty this caused. Although we undertook extensive investigations to identify the root cause of the problem, a number of conflicting test results made it difficult to pin point the problem as quickly as we would normally expect.

We can now report that the issues, principally hardware faults, have now been resolved and service across the network has returned to normal levels.

Over the coming days, we’ll be working to better understand how these problems occurred and any lessons we can learn for the future.

---
UPDATE

We have since received information from the BBC who have confirmed they are in the middle of network migration and as a result there could be packet loss. We understand this may be frustrating for our members who use BBC services, but unfortunately this is out of our control and all we can do is wait for the BBC to complete their migration, which is due to be completed on 22 February.

We appreciate your patience with this and will continue to update this blog post with any more information we receive.

UPDATE 28/02/2012

The BBC's migration work was completed last week which means that packet loss to the BBC website was resolved. Separately, we are aware that a small number of customers are continuing to report packet loss to services including iPlayer and Eurogamer. We’re continuing to work closely with these customers and our peering partners to investigate and resolve. Whilst we don't have a fix in place yet for these customers, we understand the frustration and our network team is working hard to get everyone back to full speed. If you're experiencing issues but haven't yet notified our support team then please raise a ticket in the member area.

UPDATE 29/02/2012

Some BE customers are continuing to experience problems when running BBC's iPlayer. This is being caused by our link to the Akamai network, through which BE customers access BBC's video services, operating close to capacity during periods of heavy demand. Although we are increasing the capacity of the link to resolve this problem, the earliest date this can be done is end-April. Obviously, we'll try and get this done earlier if at all possible, and in the meantime we're working with other peering platforms to route overflow traffic away from Akamai during peak usage until the upgrade is completed; from the feedback we've already received via our forum this approach has improved the performance of iPlayer for those customers who've been affected.

THANKS FOR THE BLOGS – CAN WE HAVE SOME MORE?

2012-02-10T12:34:00.002Z

Last week we asked you to send us links to your blogs so that we can feature them in a brand new blogroll we’ll soon be putting live.

We’ve seen an awesome response so far, so thank you to everyone who has submitted their blog. They’ve been added to our Google Reader for now, so if you want to take a look at what we’ve got so far just click here.

The list includes sites about tech, design, Zen thoughts and even a blog post about couch surfing. But we’d still like to keep adding more.

So, if you have an interesting personal blog and wouldn’t mind it being added to the public list, then post a link in the comments below.

Ask the MD

2012-02-03T14:33:00.003Z

Would you like to chat to Chris, the MD of BE? He’ll be jumping into the forum next Monday at 6pm – 7.30pm for the latest ‘Ask the MD’ session. So if you have any burning questions – we’re pretty sure you do – then save the date and bookmark the link.

To join the session, all you have to do is head over to the forum here: http://bit.ly/thebeforum and login with your BE username and password. Look out for the thread named ‘Ask the MD’ and then do what it says on the tin.

See you there.

Moar blogs please

2012-02-03T10:27:00.000Z

The majority of people read the morning newspaper, but at BE house we are literally plugged into ~~the Matrix~~ the internet, so blogs are more our cup of tea.

But the blog fix isn’t enough, we need more. So we’re asking you to share your blogs with us (post a link in the comments below) so that we can check out what you’re into, and maybe even add you to the blogroll we’ll be ‘rolling’ out soon.

So whatever you’re into – web design, coding, gaming or even knitting – let us know about it. Share a link to your blog and a description of what you write about in the comments below.

We’re looking forward to the new reads.

THE BEST OF CES 2012

2012-01-19T09:58:00.000Z

Image source: TechRepublic

CES (the International Consumer Electronics Show) was the hottest place for tech fanatics to be last week - and not just because it is held in Vegas.

If your tech company has a new product to launch, CES is the place to do it. Each year the hottest gadgets are announced and 2012 did not disappoint.

Take a look at the tech we’ve been most excited about from this year’s show.

Big, smart and beautiful TVs

Television may have been around for nearly a century, but they’ve never been as smart as they are now. TVs improved over the years of course; first colour, then widescreen, flat screen, high definition – but now they’ve hit their peak... until CES 2013 of that is. Now we can access the internet of TV and use apps to view content in different ways. Better yet, we no longer need to sit in front of a measly 37” screen; big and beautiful TVs were a major attraction this year, with OLED screens taking high definition to a new level.

A key highlight on the TV front has to be the Sharp 85-inch display with 7680x4320. Check out more about the TVs announced at CES 2012 in PC World’s blog post here.

Ultrabooks

As expected, Ultrabooks are taking over the industry in 2012. Netbooks are not powerful enough, yet most laptops are large and heavy so they don’t make good travel companions. The ultrabook on the other hand, is lightweight, portable and extremely fast. Credit must go to Apple for kickstarting the trend with the Air, but looking at the latest ultrabooks from CES - they’ll have a fight on their hands.

We’re itching to get our hands on the Acer Aspire S5 (world’s thinnest laptop) and the super small Dell XPS with its edge to edge screen. Take a look at SlashGear’s in-depth post for each of these ultrabooks and others.

Intelligent cars

Cars at CES may seem somewhat out of place, but wait until you see the technology the automotive industry has been creating. Heads up display may be something you’re quite used to in video games; but it isn’t exactly a feature of the school run or drive to work. Judging from the cars at CES, this shan’t be true for long. Road range appears to be on the out too, after Kia announced they’ll soon be adding technology to detect the driver’s mood and will even hint that a break might be a good idea if it thinks you’re tired.

Have a read of this Huffington Post article for more analysis on what the latest announcements from car manufacturers mean for the automotive industry.

What do you think of the announcements at CES? Let us know in the comments below.

STREAMING OFF TO A GOOD START IN 2012

2012-01-11T09:39:00.000Z

Last month we posted about the best ways to get internet TV content onto your living room screen (thanks for your comments too). Already this year there has been some big news that shows streaming of content from the internet is going to grow more popular in 2012.

Recently two major players in the movie and TV streaming market have been battling it out to become the UK’s number one service. Netflix has just launched in the UK, meaning you can now access hundreds of thousands of films and TV shows on various devices hooked up to the net. LoveFilm has responded by making sure it gets exclusive partners, including the BBC and ITV.

This means you’ll have a tricky choice on your hands if you were thinking of signing up to a streaming service – and it isn’t just LoveFilm or Netflix, read our previous post to see an even wider range of options. Then again, do you really have to sign up to one service that packages it altogether nicely?

Each terrestrial channel now offers a catch up TV service; BBC’s iPlayer, the ITV Player, 4OD and Demand 5. So if it is just TV you are after then maybe all you need is to hook your laptop up to a TV and enjoy these free services that are readily available to you.

Plenty of people are doing this already; over Christmas for example the BBC broke its peak usage levels with the new series of Sherlock reaching 4.3m on iPlayer the day after being aired. With such high usage, it seems the UK is taking streaming to a new level in 2012.