You may or may not have heard about Spotify – if you have you’re probably already raving about it – if not, then you soon will be. What is Spotify? Well it’s an application for you desktop that on first look seems a bit like itunes, or more precisely – the itunes store. Download it for free, start it up, type in the name of your favourite band, piece of music, song etc and spotify will give you a list of music it has available for you to stream. Click on a song and you’re off. You can build up playlists of your favourite tunes too.  Spotify have a huge library online – there are some noteable things missing, no Beatles, no Oasis, but generally most of what you want is there, from classical to pop, to rap to jazz, opera to ska. You’re probably already thinking – ‘but that’s what itunes store does’ … the only difference is that Spotify is totally free. Yes, totally free. It’s supported (in it’s free version) by ads every now and again – they’re pretty short (usually only 30 seconds) and fairly infrequent (maybe one every 20 – 30 mins)

I can hear you asking what the catch is? Well the only ‘catch’ is that this is a streaming service. You cannot download the tracks, put them on your favourite mp3 player and take them away. Well, not until now.

Spotify have just launched their mobile version. There are apps for the Iphone and for Android phones. I’ve been using the Iphone version for a few days and it’s pretty good. Streaming is okay on a 3G connection, but where it really works is that it allows you to download your tracks for ‘offline’ listening.  So in effect you ARE downloading the tracks to your favourite MP3 player.

Of course there is a catch with this – you need to be a premium Spotify user (which on the up side means you don’t have any ads!) – and for this privaledge you fork out a crisp tenner a month. There’s lots of chatter on the web about how expensive this is – how ‘outrageous’ it is…. but last night, with my iphone docked into my bose sounddock, listening to all the new albums that I’ve wanted for an age …. £10 seemed pretty good value for money to me.

You can find spotify at:

www.spotify.com

Most of us are familiar with our browsers, whether that be Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari or Chrome.  But there has always been another player, oft overlooked, who have frequently brought new ideas to the fore long before any of the others. Opera has reached version 10 now and for the browser that brought us tabbed browsing first, you’d expect some great new features.  So what’s new this is what Opera say:

• Exclusive Opera Turbo compression boosts slow connection speeds
• Innovative visual tabs displays Web sites in thumbnails
• Intuitive, sleek design
• Easy-to-personalize Speed Dial visual bookmarks

But along with Opera 10 – what opera have done is to try and break into the mobile browser market. As I am an iphone user – this is of little use to me – apple take the postition that mobile safari is the greatest, but I’ve heard good things about Opera Mini (as it’s known) – there’s a list here of compatible phones, if you’re one of these it might well be worth a download to try it out.

http://www.opera.com/mini/download/all/

And to download the desktop version you can click below:

http://www.opera.com/

The biggest announcement, however is the launch of version 9 of Itunes. The new version has a raft of new features and a much improved user interface. There’s also a redseigned Itunes store.

Itunes LP – Is apples attempt to bring back the love we all felt for viynl, not just the music, but the liner notes, the packaging, all the extras.

Genius Mixes –  You select a track and itunes searches through your library and makes playlists of  ’similar’ music, if you want it will them make suggestions from the itunes store of the music that you might like based upon the selection you made.

Improved Synching – Alot of work has been done to improve the way itunes works with your device – espcially nice are the new features to enable iphone/ipod touch users to organise their apps.

As always, you can get itunes for free from http://www.apple.com/itunes/download/

Before the days of the personal computer, we had the ‘mainframe’ and the ‘terminal’. The terminal was connected to the mainframe via a cable and the idea of the Network was born, the single terminal was replaced by many and people (as long as they had wires into the mainframe) could access data and computing power of the mainframe.

It was soon suggested that these seperate networks be connected together, somehow, to allow people in geographically different locations to communicate and this led to the idea of “internetworking” as it was termed (sound familiar?)  The first of these ‘internetworks’ ARPANET  began it’s life between the University of California, Los Angeles and the Stanford Research Institute on 22:30 hours on October 29, 1969

The British Post Office, Western Union International and Tymnet collaborated to create the first international packet switched network in 1978. and this grew from Europe and the US to cover Canada, Hong Kong and Australia by 1981. By the 1990s it provided a worldwide networking infrastructure.

In 1979, CompuServe became the first service to offer electronic mail to ‘dial-in’ personal computers. AOL and Prodigy quickly followed, with Bulletin Boards becoming popular with hobbyist computer users.

In the same year, two students at Duke University, Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis, came up with the idea of Usenet – a system to transfer news and messages.

As more and more networks were coming on line, a new way to connect them was required that would work across all networks. This protocol – TCP/IP – was the turning point and the internet became a reality as more and more networks joined together.

In 1989 Tim Berners-Lee at CERN proposed the protocol which was to become the World Wide Web based upon hypertext a markup language where text and links to other pieces of text were contained within one document.

In 1990 the first commerical dial-up provider came online making a way for commerical and homeusers to start to use the internet for reading electronic mail, visiting bulletin boards and reading Usenet.

In 1993 Marc Andreessen  at the National Centre for Supercomputing (NCSA)  created Mosaic the first graphical browser to view hypertext – with this came the first HTML (Hypertext markup language)

As the Mosaic Browser became Netscape, and Microsoft brought out it’s Explorer things started hotting up for home users. More and more providers gave access to the internet via dial up connections

The number of websites exploded, email became a standard method of communication from business to business.  From dial up we went to broadband, then wireless, then internet on our mobile phones and before we knew it – it was like we’d never been without it. We even had all those new words which only 15 years ago we’d never have had an idea what they meant …. googling, emailing, surfing, twittering, facebooking………