Cloud based video distribution provider Brightcove is moving into the app market for mobile, web, social media and connected TV.

After days of rumours, Twitter has announced that it is buying the popular feed organizer, TweetDeck, for US$40 million.

Citrix Systems wants to cover your back door and your front door.

ReviewWith HTC churning out a different handset for seemingly every demographic, the original Wildfire was ‘the weeny one’. The recent Wildfire S updates the concept with improved screen and processor, the latest (almost) Android 2.3 Gingerbread, plus GPS, Wi-Fi and 3G, at half the price of a high-end handset.

iOS App of the WeekWhen the leeches at NatWest recently decided to increase my home insurance premiums yet again, I decided it was time to take my business elsewhere. It was Bento that helped me to carry out an inventory of my home and belongings for my new insurance policy.

Disk drive market growth is slowing as consumers buy flash tablets instead of notebooks and netbooks with spinning drives inside.

Following yesterday's news that the Danish authorities had deprived Brit expats of their favourite yeast-based nourishment, the country's London embassy has seen fit to clarify the position vis-à-vis Marmite.

With a storming fourth quarter and year NetApp's 2011 fiscal year revenues grew 30 per cent as the company revelled in its server virtualisation storage business.

Netbooks may become rather cheaper next September, when Intel introduces the next generation of Atom processor for mini laptops at prices well below what it's charging for the current one.

We're delighted to report that the word "boffin" has achieved the international recognition it so richly deserves, securing a spot on the Merriam-Webster "Top 10 Favorite British Words" list.

IBM has put its big data array on the table, the DCS3700, OEMed from NetApp and based on the Engenio E5400 box.

AnalysisNASA has declared that its pork-tastic Orion moonship – whose primary mission disappeared with President Obama's decision that there will be no manned US return to the Moon – is now to be a "deep space transportation system", suggesting that the agency plans to send it on missions beyond Earth orbit.

Ofcom's report on mobile broadband shows O2 has the UK's fastest 3G network, and Orange the slowest, but highlights that coverage matters a lot more than speed.

A Twitter exec has defended the company's stance on fighting for its users' rights, after a report on the BBC yesterday suggested that the micro-blogging site would turn over the details of people who break privacy injunctions to UK courts.

Reindeer can see much further into the ultraviolet than humans can, according to new research. This is thought to offer the antler-sporting capreolines several important arctic survival abilities.

Scammers have developed a strain of Mac scareware that avoids the need to trick a mark into entering an administrative password.

Microsoft, in an extraordinary move earlier this week, described its CEO's comments about Windows 8 as a "misstatement".

The Communities and Local Government (CLG) department has launched two new online toolkits to help tackle the problem of empty homes in England.

NASA has announced it will send a roboprobe spacecraft to an asteroid to "pluck samples" from the near-Earth object and return them for perusal by ground-based boffins.

AnalysisA billionaire hedge fund manager is calling for Microsoft's chief executive Steve Ballmer's head. Could it be that the irascible Redmond kingpin's reign is finally drawing to a close?

CommentFacebook users can already use Spotify's streaming music service to share playlists and songs, but a new partnership will bring much deeper integration, predicts a report in Forbes. Neither company would comment.

Desktop VirtualisationVirtualising the client is not just about the desktop. It is also about application virtualisation.

I recently bought myself a Kindle, which is providing sterling service as an e-book reader for my daily trips in and out of Vulture Central.

The Office International des Epizooties (OIE) has announced that rinderpest, aka cattle plague, has been wiped out.

A new exhibit opens today at Bletchley Park that illustrates the entire World War II codebreaking process from signal intercept to final decrypt by Tunny machines.

The deadline for the implementation of a European privacy law on cookies passed with a whimper at midnight last night, after just two Member States issued a full notification to Brussels.

Product Round-upA kitchen is incomplete without a radio. Like a garden without a blade of grass, a song without emotion, or a footballer without a super-injuction, there are many without, but it just isn't the same. And even though dates for the proposed digital switchover haven't been set in stone, there's no harm in being prepared. Indeed, as Radio Ga Ga becomes Lady GaGa, it's surely time to upgrade from that grease-gunged FM box.

AnalysisIn six hours Google Wallet will be announced, but we don't know if Google wants to get into payments itself, or just plans to make money from someone else's service.

Intel execs poured cold water on overheated predictions for tablet sales today, pointing out to investors that notebook shipments still massively outnumber fondleslabs, and there is little prospect of that changing.

The European Space Agency's next Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) to roll off the production line will be called Albert Einstein.

Enjoying some new celebrity after being played by Justin Timberlake in the Facebook movie The Social Network, Napster and Facebook luminary Sean Parker says he wants to buy a major record company.

Skype went titsup on Thursday, days after the announcement of a deal to buy the VoIP outfit by Microsoft.

Intel's CFO has rubbished ARM's prospects of making a serious dent in the data centre, arguing that whatever the chip IP developer is aiming at, Intel will be well ahead. At the same time, Stacy Smith insists that Intel will soon be eating into ARM's position in the mobile arena, despite the recent flight of its anchor partner in that market.

Top boffins in Texas believe they will soon provide solid proof of an astonishingly useful biological fact: that if you drink eight bottles of red wine you can be punched in the head by a professional heavyweight boxer and it will do you no harm at all.

DesktopRun a scan over any company network and you will probably be surprised by what has been connected to it. Staff can be very creative, plugging in everything from printers to tablet devices to departmental servers and network-attached storage devices.

Activision's next best seller, Modern Warfare 3, has barely been announced, yet already the hype machine is in full throttle. A series of short MW3 teasers released this week, gave fans their first look at what to expect from the game - and immediately caused outrage.

Review"Amateur hour is over," reads the RIM PlayBook ad inside the Office Max shop around the corner from The Register's San Francisco bureau. As I walk by, looking for a printer cartridge, RIM tells me that its new PlayBook is the world's first "professional-grade" tablet.

Google has announced its NFC-enabled Google Wallet app and introduced its first banking partner: the world's largest financial services company, Citigroup.

Silicon Valley startup MapR has unveiled what it calls the "next generation" of Hadoop, revealing that this revamp of the open source distributed number-crunching platform drives the Hadoop appliance recently announced by EMC.

What should HDD vendors do, given that disk drive market growth is slowing because customers are buying tablets instead of notebooks and netbooks with disk drives inside?

Google's Chrome Web Store has quietly been purged of at least two games after a blogger revealed that the Flash-based browser extensions had unfettered access to all website data, browsing history, and bookmarks stored on users' computers.

Decryption is difficult and computationally expensive. So what if, instead of decrypting the content of a message, you found a correlation between the encrypted data and its meaning – without having to crack the code itself?

Facebook's billionaire boy genius, Mark Zuckerberg, is a confessed killer – and he's proud of it.

A startup called BlueStacks has come out of stealth mode with shiny new venture funding and an eponymous product that lets Android apps run on PCs.

Telecom New Zealand has attracted the wrath of competition watchdog, the Commerce Commission over the carrier’s plans to structurally separate.

A Bank of America insider who stole customers' personally identifiable information and gave it to identity thieves has cost the bank $10 million in losses, according to media reports.

Apigee – a company dedicated to improving the use of APIs across the interwebs – has unveiled an API delivery network designed to grease API calls in much the same way a CDN smooths the transfer of images and other net content.

Server makers got good news from IDC earlier this week, and now the box counters at Gartner are providing tidings of good first-quarter cheer.