One in 20 UK homes watching IPTV by 2011

According to research from the Centre for Telecoms Research, improved broadband speeds will boost use of IPTV to five per cent of UK households over the next few years. Five per cent of the UK population - some 1.5 million UK households - will be watching TV over an internet connection (IPTV) by 2011, according to a new study by the Centre for Telecoms Research (CTR). ...more

Tile your bathroom with Sony's graphics chips

Sony is back in the news again, this time the EETimes has the latest on a paper presented at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC), detailing Sony's new graphics chip which boasts a footprint of 21.7 x 21.3mm. ...more

Humans, in XML form

It sounds vaguely Sci-Fi, with a twist of bureaucracy: the OASIS HumanMarkup Technical Committee has been created to develop "a specification for conveying human characteristics through XML". The day of the avatar is obviously getting closer - we have already covered virtual assistants for online shopping and "emoti-photi-cons" for adding emotion to emails - and maybe HumanML will help standardise the process. The "human characteristics" they are interested in include "cultural, social, psychological and intentional features", and targeted applications include AI, virtual reality, advertising and even psychotherapy, art, workflow, advertising, cultural dialogue, agent systems, diplomacy and business negotiation. ...more

CeBIT 2007 video: The Flybook angle-poise laptop

Dialogue has used its CeBIT stand to demonstrate its Flybook VM laptop, due to make its UK debut in May. The VM looks much like any other laptop until you pull the screen up and angle it over the keyboard. Not only does this give the machine its unique look, but Flybook also claims that it makes the VM far more comfortable to operate than other laptops. ...more

Sanyo has the recipe for biodegradable corn CDs

Sanyo has developed a biodegradable CD made from corn, in an attempt to reduce the number of undigestible polycarbonate discs currently being buried in landfill sites. Together with Mitsui Chemicals, Sanyo has a process that converts corn into unrefined dextrose which is then fermented to produce lactic acid. This is then converted into a polymer to form the basis for the disc. ...more