Is the new Kindle the device that will finally make e-books mainstream, converting real book-lovers to reading in a digital format? The jury is still out on this one, but I think Amazon has a better chance of making this happen than Apple. And that's despite a little experiment I've conducted which suggests the opposite. Last week, I was lent the latest Kindle by Amazon, with an invitation to try it out. It's smaller and cheaper than previous versions but built very much along the same lines - it aims to be just an e-book reader rather than an all-purpose entertainment gadget like the Apple iPad. Amazon's strategy ...

Who is the latest star user of social networking tools like YouTube and Twitter? Let me nominate an unlikely candidate: the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, as North Korea likes to style itself. Perhaps the world's most repressive and closed country, it's set forth on a surprising journey into new media, with a YouTube account and a Twitter feed at @uriminzok. On a quiet news day, I tapped into the North Korean tweets this morning - and found that most of them were in Korean, leaving me none the wiser. Sticking one block of text into Google Translate produced this: "Great Comrade Kim Jong Il started his revolutionary leadership..."; I think you get the flavour. ...

The news about our multi-tasking media lives has been met with a mixture of shock, indifference - and just a hint of moral panic. According to Ofcom, we spend nearly half our waking lives watching telly, texting, surfing the web, and generally using every form of media and communications technology. That's the headline from the media regulator's annual chunky report on the communications market. And the reactions to the research have been interesting. Some - like me - were not at all surprised by the sheer volume. Never mind half, so far today I've spent just about all ...

Shocking news for the British video games industry this week - one of its most innovative firms, created by an industry legend, is in deep trouble. Realtime Worlds has called in the administrators and the jobs of 200 staff at its Dundee headquarters are under threat. The firm, which was founded by Dave Jones, the creator of Grand Theft Auto, can only survive if the administrators find a buyer pretty quickly. The news confounds the expectations of analysts and journalists that this could be a world-beating games firm. Just last October Realtime Worlds was named "hottest prospect" by the accountancy firm PWC at a ...

Has BT just blown a hole in the concept of net neutrality - in summary, equal rights for all forms of internet traffic? And if the telecoms giant has done that, is this an issue of any concern at all to British web users? It was a line in an interview conducted by my colleagues at BBC Click which provoked those questions. Jon Hurry, the commercial director at BT Retail told the programme: "[A]t the moment with our TV service, BT Vision, we deliver entertainment content, video, at peak time to consumers via our network and we prioritise the traffic in order to be ...