This week’s app of the week is a big favourite of mine it’s the BBC News App. It is my go to app first thing in the morning and several times throughout the day to keep me up to date with the latest goings on. The news stories all include one minute video news summaries to keep you informed on the go.

You can also personalise the app to suit your interests and download content for offline browsing which include - Top Stories, World, UK, Local News, Entertainment, Sport, Business, Politics, Health, Education, Science & Technology and Features. Plenty of stories and categories to keep you up to minute with events and world news.

My favourite feature is the live streaming of the BBC news channel which I am always popping on to during the day to see what is happening.

This is a must have app for news junkies like me and best of all it is Free!!!

Technology on Campus.

This has been a big week for my little niece – it has been her first week at High School. As you can imagine and I am sure sympathies with this seems to be a much bigger deal for the adults in the family than it is for her. All of a sudden our cute little girl that used to put the bows from presents in her hair on Christmas morning is far too cool for us. Her big brother has just started 5^th year and his thoughts are now turned towards university (I think we have successfully now convinced him that International Rock God may not necessarily be the wisest career choice!)

With this on my mind and also the English exam results being received yesterday it got me thinking about kids going off to Uni with their backpacks, text books and pencils.....wait a minute! That was 10 years ago - now they go off surely with a Laptop, EBook and iPod???

The university experience has changed – instead of notebooks and pens in their backpack, students now carry to class the latest laptop with a copy of windows 7 and office 2010 Home and Student edition to help with all those essays and projects. Not only is this technology great for students but it also works well for parents whose kids are leaving home to go and study – just make sure that you install Skype on the laptop and you can talk to your kids while looking at them on screen. Also, this is a great way to ensure that your little cherub doesn’t have pink hair or a new piercing!

Text books you would think would survive technological advances and to a certain extent they do, but so many course text books are being converted to E-Book format. It would be silly to lug around massive heavy books if you could carry them round in a neat little E-book reader like the incredibly popular Amazon Kindle which has (finally!!) being released for sale in the UK at a very reasonable £109.

A lot of universities are also encouraging their lecturers to record and upload their classes as podcasts. I think this is such a fantastic idea - as it gets closer to exam time to be able to actually go back and listen to exactly what your lectures have said 10 months or ever years earlier in a class is invaluable.

Now for the serious part of this blog – with all this technology being used in such a vital way for you or your kid’s education it is absolutely essential that they are backing up their laptop as many ways are possible. As a minimum it should be backed up to an external hard drive every day and if you wanted to be really safe you should be backing up to an online backup facility of which there are many.

This laptop will have all the class notes, essays and projects stored on it, it may possibly have text books and class podcasts so be careful get a good anti-virus and a good backup plan and that way the only thing to worry about is the amount of washing they will bring home at Christmas!

App of the Week – WhatsApp messenger

This week’s app of the week is the brilliant WhatsApp Messanger a must purchase for all you texing nuts out there. This is a brilliant app for busy offices with lots of people on the go - it is a great way to stay in touch!

WhatsApp messenger is a smartphone to smartphone messenger currently available for iPhone, BlackBerry and Nokia phones only. The application utilizes push notifications to instantly get messages from friends, colleagues and family. Switch from SMS to WhatsApp to send and receive messages, pictures, audio notes, and video messages at no cost. All features are included in our base price without the need for extra in-application purchases.

* NO HIDDEN COST: Once you and your friends download the application at a bargin 59p, you can use it to chat as much as you want. Send a million messages a day to your friends for free! WhatsApp uses your Internet connection: 3G/EDGE or Wi-Fi when available.

* SAY NO TO PINS AND USERNAMES: Why even bother having to remember yet another PIN or username? WhatsApp works with your phone number, just like SMS would, and integrates flawlessly with your existing phone address book.

* NO NEED TO ADD BUDDIES: Your Address Book is used to automatically connect you with your contacts. Your contacts who already have WhatsApp Messenger will be automatically displayed under Favorites, similar to a buddy list. (You can of course always edit Favorites any way you like)

* OFFLINE MESSAGES: Even if you miss your push notifications or turn off your iPhone, WhatsApp will save your messages offline until you retrieve them during the next application use.

* STATUS: Use the status feature of WhatsApp to inform your contacts if you are busy, in a meeting, at the gym, or available for a chat.

The Gadgets that Time Forgot

As technology evolves, there are bound to be some bumps in the road; some gadgets which seem like a great idea at the time, but are eventually revealed to be epic flops. This is a list of some of my favourite gadget flops from recent history.

Sega Dreamcast

When I was a young pup Sega used to compete with Nintendo to be the games console of choice in playgrounds all over the country. Then Sony came along and changed all that with the launch of their Playsation. Sega finally gave up the fight just 3 years after its UK launch in 2002, announcing that it was switching its focus from making hardware to just making software.

Sony MiniDisc

I had a Sony MiniDisc when I was in high school for about 5 minutes before I got bored of it. The idea behind the MiniDisc is it was like CD but smaller. It was a pity that the designers at Sony didn’t see the MP3 revolution which was just around the bend. The Sony MiniDisc trudged on for most of the 90’s, however thankfully it seems that Sony let that one finally go to the gadget neverland.

Amstrad E-m@iler

Having the misfortune to look like an early 90s IBM trying to procreate with a telephone, the E-M@iler charged lucky users to check their email, once they'd wrestled their way past a calamitous keyboard and OS. Its USP - that it allowed anyone to email - looked out of date from the moment it hit the shelves in 2000.

Robot Vacuum Cleaner

This is the one I wish the designers and tech bods had got right. It promised so much and delivered so little - What was promised as the gadget to end domestic suffering turned out to be a wheelie bin lid driven by three bickering, blind mice. Not only do these machines take hours to get around your house, they usually fail to pick much up, too.

Segway

We thought we were given legs to walk, it turns out this is not true, or at least that is what Dean Kamen tried to convince us in 2001 which the launch of his Segway. The personal mobility Scooter/bike/ personal green transportation – whatever it is, never really took off with only 50,000 units shifted in 8 years. For the sake of our waist increasing nation let’s be thankful for that!

Zune

Billed by Microsoft as an iPod Killer but by everyone else as the iPods ugly cousin. Zune was criticised for its ugly design, bad sound quality and flawed music sharing interface. Apple never really had anything to fear.

Lights, Camera,Technology - Best IT Movies & TV Shows

It is one of my life time ambitions to go to Comic-Con in the States - I am a complete movie/TV buff and nothing makes me happier that combining my two hobbies technology and Movies. So I thought as my blog this week I would give you a run down on my favourite Tech movies & TV Shows for you to check out this weekend.

Minority Report - Released in 2002 this science fiction movie was directed by the fantastic Steven Spielberg and was loosely based on the short story ‘The Minority Report’ by Philip K Dick.

In 2054, an experimental Washington, D.C. police force called Precrime has completely neutralized murder in the city. Precrime employs three "precogs", mutated humans with precognition to view murders that occur in the future; the officers of Precrime then analyze and interpret their visions to track down and stop the murder before it happens. John Anderton (Tom Cruise) is chief of the force, working under its director Lamar Burgess, however, he hides the fact that he is addicted to an illegal psychoactive drug called neuroin since the disappearance of his son Sean, which also caused his wife Lara to leave him leading to all kinds of trouble. I won’t give away anymore but I will say to watch out for the eyeball transplant scene - yuck!!

This movie has to have your full attention all the time as it can get quite confusing but definitely worth putting in the work.

Matrix - One of the best trilogies’s of all time. The film describes a future in which reality as perceived by humans is actually the Matrix: a simulated reality created by sentient machines in order to pacify and subdue the human population, while their bodies’ heat and electrical activity are used as an energy source. Upon learning this, computer programmer “Neo” is drawn into a rebellion against the machines, involving other people who have been freed from the “dream world” and into reality. The film contains many references to the cyberpunk and hacker subcultures; philosophical and religious ideas; and homage’s to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Hong Kong action cinema, Spaghetti Westerns, dystopian fiction, and Japanese animation.

Make sure you have all 3 movies & a whole day before you start to watch as you will want to view them all in one sitting.

War Games – The film follows David Lightman (Broderick), a young hacker who unwittingly accesses WOPR, a United States military supercomputer programmed to predict possible outcomes of nuclear war. Lightman gets WOPR to run a nuclear war simulation, originally believing it to be a computer game. The simulation causes a national nuclear missile scare and nearly starts World War III.

Classic movie must see movie!

IT Crowd - Set in the offices of Reynholm Industries, a fictional British corporation in central London. It focuses on the shenanigans of the three-strong IT support team located in a dingy, untidy and unkempt basement – a great contrast to the shining modern architecture and stunning London views enjoyed by the rest of the organisation. The obscurity surrounding what the company does serves as a running gag throughout the series – all that is known is that the company bought and sold ITV and once made part-year profits of "eighteen hundred billion billion". The team consists of a dynamic go-getter - Jen, a genius -Moss and a workshy Irish man - Roy.

Such a fun TV show and I will promise that if you have an IT dept or know people in IT you will know a Moss, Roy and a Jen.

24 - An American serial drama television series starring Kiefer Sutherland as federal agent Jack Bauer. The show is presented in the semblance of real time, with each 24-episode season covering 24 hours in the life of Bauer.

Bauer is the only character to have appeared in all eight seasons, as well as appearing in every episode of the series. The series begins with him working for the Los Angeles based Counter Terrorist Unit (CTU), for whom he is characterized as a highly proficient agent, but one taking an "ends justify the means" approach regardless of the perceived morality of some of his actions. Throughout the series most of the main plot elements unfold like a political thriller. A typical plot has Jack Bauer racing against the clock as he attempts to thwart multiple terrorist plots, including presidential assassination attempts, nuclear, biological and chemical threats, cyber attacks, as well as conspiracies dealing with government and corporate corruption.

The writers of 24 clearly don’t come from an IT background as their outrageous use of IT ‘lingo’ drives true IT geeks daft. You can’t send anything to a screen and who knows what opening a socket will do?? But the tech toys and gadgets make it worth watching if you can get past all the gushy scenes and emotions that the Americans do so well.

Also worth a little mention is the brilliant Big Bang Theory which I think is one of my favourite TV's shows of all time but more Geek chic that IT based.