Today is Towel Day, an annual celebration on the 25th of May, as a tribute to the late author Douglas Adams (1952-2001). On that day, fans around the universe proudly carry a towel in his honour.

Less formally, the X-Wing symbolizes an obscenely profitable partnership, now in its 14th year, that has sold more than 200 million building sets, 30 million copies of four video games (according to NPD Group), and 450 different Lego Star Wars mini-figures. Lego Star Wars has been a major contributor to a five-year run during which Lego has averaged 24 percent year-on-year growth in sales and 40 percent growth in profits.

Now that’s how to use PR and marketing to get a corporate story out there on the history of Lego. I just wonder who’s going to have promotional sets at Eurovision next year?

One of the most infamous ex-F1 drivers to live in the area is Taki Inoue who is regularly spotted attempting to cross Casino Square only to get hit by a passing car causing him to roll over its bonnet in an amusing way.

I wonder if Microsoft would have been in a better position at the end of 2013 if the Xbox One had the compatibility, and Windows 8 didn’t?

Just looking at advertising, DMGT said that digital advertising growth across DMG Media now exceeds print advertising decline: “This is a significant inflection point for the business”, the company said.

John Tracy was initially to be one of the main characters in the series but Gerry was never happy with his looks or voice and consigned him to Thunderbird 5 where he only made brief appearances.

At the height of its power, the photography company Kodak employed more than 140,000 people and was worth $28 billion. They even invented the first digital camera. But today Kodak is bankrupt, and the new face of digital photography has become Instagram. When Instagram was sold to Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012, it employed only 13 people. Where did all those jobs disappear? And what happened to the wealth that all those middle-class jobs created?

Download StifleStand. Connect iOS device. Press the button marked ‘Hide Newsstand.’

Now why couldn’t Apple do that?

You’ll get a live commentary from the team in the press room (and it’s not the same as our long running Alternative Commentary MP3, which you can find here).

During each Eurovision show you can hit the green thumbs up button, or the red thumbs down button, to share your view on the song, and the worm will show the combined thoughts of everyone using the app.

Its a free download from the Apple App Store. Head to bit.ly/esccommentary to download the app for your iOS device. Or you can search for ‘ESC Commentary‘ in the store.

What are you waiting for?

That is all.

t’s subtle, but I reckon the Eurovision Song Contest hits the three original tenets of the BBC – to educate, to inform, and to entertain. The Eurovision provides one way of looking at population movements across Europe via the often commented on voting process. Is there any other mainstream programme where you can hear so much local music from other cultures? And when a live show brings in millions of viewers across a continent throughout a three hour spectacular (and even more come in from the iPlayer and time-shifted recorded versions), can there be any doubt that is entertaining?

You can read all my thoughts on About the BBC.

Instantly recognisable, but with a twist. Iconic design with a simple one-piece thick leather cover, slightly rounded corners and strap with gel popper cap. Beautiful in its simplicity, with perfectly balanced proportions. Working with extra thick leather and using traditional construction techniques, these personal organisers are made by our UK factory who piece together the components by hand, using thick thread to carefully stitch them together.

Unfortunately it’s still the 25mm (7/8 inch) ring size. I’m still waiting for a new Filofax with a Winchester sized 31mm (5/4 inch) ring size.

At the time, I figured it wouldn’t be long until I could experience the game for myself, as a device-carrying member of the app-consuming public. I even got to try an unfinished version of it once, at the apartment of a friend of the developer, in a somewhat frantic thirty-minute session that left me both slack-jawed with awe and certain I’d no more scratched Faraway’s surface than I had physically exited our solar system’s heliosheath.

That was two years ago.

“These agencies use communications date – the who, when, where and how of a communication, but not its content – to investigate and prosecute serious crime,” it says. ”Communications data helps to keep the public safe – it is used by the police to investigate crimes, bring offenders to justice and to save lives.

“This is not about indiscriminately accessing internet data of innocent members of the public.”

The problem is this. Until someone has had their day in court and declared guilty by a jury of their peers… they are all innocent members of the public.

Colour me surprised.

For the sake of discussion, let’s use $3 per device as our figure. This number is an estimate, but given all information in the market it’s our best guesstimate.

We can now do the math: 860 million Android devices in 2013, of which 65% pay Microsoft a fee, and that fee being $3 leaves Microsoft with $1.677 billion in Android revenue this year. That works out to just over $400 million per quarter, which fits with our earlier statements of Android patent revenue being in the low hundreds of millions.

The Next Web looks at just how much Android is making… for Microsoft.

DRM means permanent lock-in. Once you get permanent lock-in, readers don’t switch. They don’t switch because the cost of switching is losing all existing books bought from the vendor. Readers are locked-in – once again at the mercy of Gatekeepers. Authors too are at the mercy of the new Gatekeepers. If people don’t leave the two biggest stores because of DRM related lock-in, then we’ve just replaced The Big Six with The Terrible Two.

Authors have no means to get to readers without ‘pleasing’ these two big ebook stores.

This is why Amazon never puts in that extra effort to make its hardware superb. It doesn’t have to. This is why B&N never goes out of its way to match Amazon prices – it doesn’t have to. This is why eReaders are evolving at a snail’s pace. Amazon and B&N know that they could add ZERO new features in the next 5 years and their readers would still be reluctant to switch because they have $500 to $2,000 to $5,000 worth of books locked into the ecosystem,