The Next Web’s Weekly Recap: UK Edition

Welcome to The Next Web’s Weekly Recap: UK Edition.

Following suit of the main blog, we’ve decided to create a Weekly Recap which will feature the news from the past week in an easy-to-digest manner.

If you’ve got any news you’d like adding to the Weekly Recap, you can simply tweet a link to it and include the hashtag, #tnwukrecap.

This week saw a woman take her broadband connection in to her own hands, TiVo (the USA’s equivalent of Sky+) is heading to the UK and Sony Ericsson’s Satio has been taken from the shelves due to software issues. More recently, we covered an interview with the GoSquared Team and Apple confirmed Black Friday sales would be available in the UK!

Dig Your Own Broadband!

We all know, the odds of getting a really good broadband connection in the UK are quite poor. Very few people will benefit from anything above 2mbps, even the government have said that their aim is to have every resident in the UK on 2mbps by 2012. So for the unfortunate people who live in remote areas, particularly rural or countryside, getting a decent connection is a plain farce. Atleast thats what a group of people living in Cumbria think, they’ve took it upon themselves to fit their own fibre optic lines in a bid to get a 20mb connection!

TiVo is Coming!

After signing a contract with Virgin Media that says it will become the exclusive distributor of TiVo services and technology in the UK, the President and CEO of TiVo said the agreement would provide a “long-term, strategic partnership with Virgin Media.” According to the two companies the deal will involve TiVo developing a converged television and broadband interactive interface to power Virgin Media’s next generation, high definition set top boxes.

Satio Takes a Knock!

After a long list of complaints regarding the Satio’s software, street retailers Carphone Warehouse and Phones4u have taken the device off the shelves, this comes as salt to the wound after they recorded a 42% sales plunge back in October. According to the BBC, a Sony Ericsson spokesman said it was “giving this matter its utmost priority and working toward solving it”. They also sold 45% less phones from July to September than the previous quarter so it’ll be interesting to see how Sony will bounce back from this.

GoSquared Gets Interviewed

A rather interesting feature this week, we got the chance to interview the GoSquared Team. The main subject of the interview was how the company had come about, and what was in store for the future but they also provided some invaluable tips for budding entrepreneurs. “Persistance is key,” says James Gill, one of GoSquared’s Founders. Another tip was to ‘take criticism onboard’ along with ‘being prepared to work all hours’. With the GoSquared Team working on various projects, and just having released a beta of LiveStats, it’ll be interesting to see what the future holds.

Apple Bring US Celebrations to the UK

Black Friday, a US celebration as part of Thanksgiving is traditionally a day of savings. People will go out to ‘malls’ in the early hours of the morning to queue for the best offers from retailers, often getting upto 50% of normal prices. Apple decided it would be beneficial to bring the price cuts to the UK online Apple Store. So for one day only, you can get £71 off a Macbook Pro or iMac, £11 off an iPod Touch or £7 off an iPod Nano. Small savings, but savings nevertheless!!

In Other News

• Absolute Radio have made an innovative move by starting a service that allows listeners to ‘tag’ a song they’re listening to and purchase it via the iTunes Store.
• Peter Mandelson gets featured in a song. Well, it’s not good when you get a song about you, especially when its about the Digital Economy Bill he’s trying to introduce. Fun nevertheless!
• BBC iPlayer releases the degree of success they’ve had. Now provided on over 15 platforms, the service transfers approximately 12.5GB of data per second. Wonder what their bandwith bill is like?!
• Gary McKinnon, the well-known autistic computer hacker who is accused of breaking in to US military systems will face extradition and trial in the USA.
• Virgin Media made a controversial move after becoming the first UK ISP to test a filesharing monitoring system which will detect the level of illegal filesharing on its network.
• The UK arm of Borders, a popular book store, have suspended sales on their website. Following the footsteps of Zavvi and Woolworths, the move is tipped to be due to the recession.