The Next Web UK: Weekly Re-Cap

Welcome to the first Weekly Re-Cap of 2010 at The Next Web UK and we all hope you’ve all had a fantastic start to the new year.

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

It’s been a week of interesting tid bits including tomorrows (4th January) social networking hypnotizing attempt by Chris Hughes over at SocialTrance.  See SocialTrance.com for more details on how to take part but essentially all you need is a computer with speakers and either a Twitter or Facebook account. (Full Article)

One of the events I’m most looking forward to in 2010 is the UK General Election and the role of social media and tech within it following Barack Obama’s heavily influential online Presidential campaign in 2008.  As fellow TNW UK writer Tim Difford has found out, the Tories already seem to be testing the water with the use of social networking with a £1million (funded by tax payer) crowd sourcing project. (Full Article)

This is the time of year when the Oxford English Dictionary unveils the latest words to have become popular enough to warrant official entry into the English vocabulary.  This year, a number of social media and technology related terms have made the list.  Tim Difford talks us through the latest tech related words to be entered into the Oxford English Dictionary for 2010. (Full Article).

Amazon.co.uk released their top sellers from the busy festive period this week with some interesting products.  Modern Warfare 2 hastopped the Amazon.co.uk chart of best sellers of 2009, making it the first video game ever to top the online retailer’s charts (around the world, the war game sold 4.7 million copies in the first 24 hours of release).  The game even topped the hugely popular Harry Potter series, and it’s most recent DVD ‘Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince’, which came in at number 2. (Full Article)

Nuance, a leading provider of speech recognition announced the acquisition of SpinVox this week.  In a blog post, Nuance says that the company “will leverage SpinVox’s carrier-grade voice-to-text infrastructure, network product portfolio, multi-language support and experienced UK-based development teams to further drive and accelerate adoption of voice-to-text around the world.  (Full Article)