The January Update

I'd like to wish all readers a very happy new year. I hope 2008 is a successful year for everyone, and that we can all build on our achievements of 2007.

Lots of great software utilities this month, as well as some positive news for the future Internet - super-fast broadband and the release of HTML 5!

Regards

Ben Roberts
Editor

Industry News

UK homes to get super-fast fibre

Super-fast Internet connections are to become a reality in the UK. Either Bournemouth, Northampton or Dundee will be offered the service first, provided by fibre firm H2O. The normal process of laying fibre optic cables is to dig up the roads, but H2O have an innovative solution which is significantly faster and less costly - they lay the fibre optic cables within the existing sewer network.

"While deploying traditional fibre over a two-kilometre area would be six to 12 months in the planning. We can do it in four hours"

Speeds of up to 100MB/s are expected, which is more than 10 times the speed of most people's ADSL broadband connections at the current time. Whether there is a real use for this kind of bandwidth is still to be determined, but vendors and content providers seem optimistic, and countries where super fast connections already exist, such as South Korea, have already seen significant usage.

Full Article (BBC News)

End of the road for analogue televisions

Currys, Dixons and PC World are to stop selling analogue televisions, in favour of integrated units which combine a TV and a Freeview receiver. Whitehaven, in Cumbria, has already had its analogue television signal switched off, and other areas are to follow shortly with a country-wide switch off due in 2012.

Full Article (BBC News)

Next generation of HTML is unveiled

It's been 10 years since the launch of HTML 4, and finally the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) have released a preview of the next generation Hypertext Markup Language, or HTML 5. This is a big step forward, and includes support for many of the things that users and developers demand from today's Internet.

HTML 5 has standard support for rich media, drawing 2-dimensional graphics, control documents and much more. It also acknowledges the need for use on alternative platforms, such as mobile phones.

Full article (The Register)

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Software Selection

LogMeIn

LogMeIn is a remote desktop application, that works across Windows and Mac platforms, which in itself is pretty handy. For example, you can log in from your office PC running Windows XP to your Apple Mac laptop at home running OS X.

In addition to LogMeIn's cross platform capabilities, it also has another trick up its sleeve. Normally remote desktop solutions require you to permit access to on the remote machine by configuring the firewall. Not so with LogMeIn, which uses a client application running on the remote machine itself to initiate the connection via the LogMeIn online service, so there's no messing about with opening ports on your router or configuring your Windows firewall etc which really sets it apart from run of the mill remote desktop applications.

Before you start you must create an account at the LogMeIn web site, and then install the small client application on all the machines your want to have remote access to. Once you've done that, whenever you want to remote in you simply log into your LogMeIn account, select the machine you want to access and bingo - you're in.

LogMeIn homepage
https://secure.logmein.com/home.asp

Drop.io

Drop.io is an free online file-sharing service. It is very simple, and instead of creating an account, you create a 'drop' that is to contain your files, and then simply upload your files to the 'drop'. If you upload video or photos, it will automatically embed the video for immediate playback via the browser, or create thumbnail images and a gallery for the photographs, which is very neat.

You can also have your files encrypted, and organised in groups if you require a more orderly approach. You can have as many drops as you want for free (each containing one or many files), but each drop is limited to 100MB in size. You can pay for a premium service which allows you to have drops up to 1GB in size.

Drop.io is very quick and easy to use. You don't have to worry about privacy as you can specify password and encryption options, and the drop will automatically expire and be removed after a user-defined interval (although you can renew the lifespan regularly to keep your drop open if required). All in all a very useful utility.

Drop.io homepage:
http://drop.io/

JungleDisk

JungleDisk is a backup service, that uses Amazon's S3 online data storage facility. The S3 system is a distributed (i.e. spread over many servers) online data storage solution created by Amazon - disk space costs just $0.15 USD per gigabyte which is very cheap. JungleDisk is a Windows, Mac and Linux client that manages the uploading of your data to your S3 account.

With Amazon's S3 service, your backup data is fully encrypted, and safe from fire, theft and hardware failure.

JungleDisk also has an automatic backup facility. You can tell it which files to backup automatically, at what time of day, and how often etc. You can also limit the upload speed so it doesn't hog your Internet connection.

JungleDisk homepage:
http://www.jungledisk.com/

That's all for this month

Thank you for reading. I hope you enjoyed this issue. If you know anyone who might appreciate this please take a moment to refer them - it will be much appreciated.

Until next time,

Ben Roberts
Editor

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The January Update