YouTube’s embeddable flash video player is being given a makeover that adds improvements to its user interface, along with some additional functionality. The unofficial Google blog, Google Operating System, discovered some instances of the new player, and has published screen shots and further details.
New functionality includes the ability to skip forward to any point in the video, even before it’s finished loading (something inherited from Google Video). The new version of the player also improves the way it handles recommendations; hover your mouse over the video and a Mac OSX-like dock pops up, offering thumbnails of related videos.
Accessing the embed code has also become easier. Click on the menu button and you’re given two options: grab the embed code for the video or the URL of the YouTube page that displays the video.
With an ever greater amount of video being consumed online, many Internet users are in for a shock. There’s a dirty little secret in the broadband industry: Internet Service Providers (ISPs) don’t have the capacity to deliver the bandwidth that they claim to offer. One way ISPs attempt to conceal this problem is to place a cap of say 1GB per-month per user, something which is common in the UK for many of the lower-cost broadband packages on the market. Considering that a mere three hours viewing of Joost (the new online video service from the founders of Skype — 
Although most modern cell phones have a built-in calendar application, trying to sync your appointments (or remembering to do so) between different devices, such as a smart phone and desktop computer, can be a hassle. An increasingly viable alternative — as mobile web access becomes ubiquitous and more affordable — is to store your data ‘in the clouds’ by using web applications such as those provided by Google and Yahoo. But for this to work requires those companies to create a mobile-friendly version of their web app — which for email, both companies have done, but until now, only Yahoo (out of the two) offered a mobile-friendly version of their calendar app.
Sony’s PS3 has joined the ranks of the AppleTV, XBox 360, and numerous media extenders from companies such as Linksys and Netgear, in trying to solve the 
BT and Sony have inked a four year deal that will see the two companies bring voice calls, video conferencing, and IM functionality to PlayStationPortable (PSP) users across Europe. The partnership intends to integrate the PSP with BT’s existing broadband video and voice ‘softphone’ products, and in the following months, additional features will be launched to enable calls and messages to PCs, fixed lines and mobiles. The service will initially roll-out in the UK, with other parts of European to follow.
The recent dashboard update to the XBox 360 delivered Windows Live Messenger functionality to Microsoft’s next-generation console, which 
Just weeks before Apple launched it’s AppleTV (then known as the iTV), I wrote a post for ZDNet titled: