BRITISH

OnLive, a streaming video-game service that aims to threaten the traditional console business, announced Thursday that it has stuck a deal that will bring it to the U.K.

Under the terms of the deal, OnLive will partner with British Telecommunications to deliver the service to homes across the U.K. BT also bought a 2.6 percent stake in the San Francisco-based company.

OnLive plans to go live in the United States on June 17. It will cost $14.95 a month and offer gamers the ability to buy or rent AAA titles from Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, THQ, Warner … Read more

IBM announced Thursday that it is working with the British Library on a project that will preserve and analyze terabytes of information on the Web before it is lost forever.

Recent research estimates the average life expectancy of a Web site is 44 to 75 days. Every six months, for example, roughly 10 percent of Web pages on the U.K. domain are lost.

In most cases of personal sites, this is no big loss. But in the case of organizations attempting to archive and chronicle elections, news, media, and video, this data leakage presents massive challenges. And even if … Read more

Back from a stint in outer space--literally--famed video game designer Richard Garriott has returned to his roots with a new social gaming start-up, Portalarium.

Known as "Lord British" and considered one of the industry's legends for his pioneering work on Ultima and Ultima Online, as well as his leading roles on Lineage, City of Heroes, and Tabula Rasa, Garriott most recently grabbed headlines by paying eight figures for a trip aboard a Russian rocket to the International Space Station.

Now, Garriott has come back home, literally and figuratively. On Wednesday, he formally announced his next venture, a … Read more

You've seen the film, probably with Helena Bonham Carter and Emma Thompson; now read the original book, on your Kindle, for nowt. The works of Dickens and Austen are among 65,000 classics of English literature digitized by the British Library and coming soon, for free, to Amazon's e-book reader.

The titles were scanned on Microsoft's dime as part of its now-defunct Live Search book search project. They're all from the 19th century and are out of copyright. Amazon will offer the e-books to Kindle owners through its Kindle store in late spring or early summer, … Read more

British speaker manufacturer Bowers & Wilkins doesn't revise its top-of-the-line 800 Series models often. It must have been a good five years ago when the company first introduced diamond tweeter equipped models.

The 800 Series speakers are not only highly regarded by serious audiophiles, but also they can be found in the best recording studios and mastering houses in the world including Abbey Road Studios in London, George Lucas' Skywalker Sound in California, and here in New York City at Sterling Sound. I've heard the 800 at Sterling, so I know it really deserves to be a benchmark design for audiophiles and professionals. Also, the 800 series is also drop-dead gorgeous.

The just announced diamond tweeter models are the sixth-generation 800 Series, but only the second with diamond tweeters. The new 800 line is also the first to feature diamond tweeters in every speaker in the seven-model range.

Why diamond? The vast majority of dome tweeters used in other speakers, including very high-end models, use either cloth or metal dome designs, but thanks to diamond's superior strength, the 800 Series tweeter produces less distortion and greater high frequency extension and resolution. The new diamond tweeter uses a quad-magnet design that offers superior efficiency, and greater dynamic range than the previous models' tweeters. Therefore, when the drummer whacks a cymbal or the trumpet player really wails, you'll hear it.

… Read more

There were a lot of impressive European sports cars on display at last week's International Auto Show in San Francisco. I've been giving Porsche and Lamborghini a lot of lip service lately in this blog, so I thought it was time to show a little love for the rather remarkable new Lotus--the 2010 Lotus Evora.

Like many of its European contemporaries, the 2010 Lotus Evora is a small, lightweight midengine sports car notable for sleek design and performance capability. What's strange is while Lotus isn't quite the household name that Lambo or Porsche is, the Evora … Read more

U.K. residents will now be able to monitor and regulate their home energy usage from any Web-enabled phone or computer regardless of whether their energy provider uses smart meters.

Google announced two U.K. partnerships this week concerning its PowerMeter software, one of which completely bypasses the need for cooperation from an energy provider.

Since the U.K. electricity and gas supplier First Utility began offering customers free smart meters in September 2008, it has had 30,000 customers take them up on the offer. Now, as a result of a Google partnership announced Tuesday, First Utility smart meter … Read more

As I noted earlier this week, American race car driver Bobby Rahal won the final European-based Classic Endurance Racing event that took place in the UK this past weekend driving his Lola T290 race car. For those of you not familiar, the Lola family of race cars is a British-made brand of race cars with a long and successful history. They have made many a variety of sport car, including Formula 1 and IndyCar makes among many others throughout the years. And while Lola is not quite a household name in the States, it is a manufacturer that is well … Read more

Write Source provides users with a word processor for .txt documents that successfully imitates Word. In addition, the program offers an added feature that will help users search for words.

We felt instantly comfortable with this program's interface since it smoothly mimics Microsoft Word all the way down to its layout. The Help file's instructions were necessary to master some of the more complicated features, but basic writing was a snap. Our previous experience with word processors that save as .txt files had been disappointing since they always seemed to fall short of Word with their clumsy layouts … Read more