I’m extremely pleased to be announcing the brand new TechCast Reviews. Built using the WordPress engine with a bespoke theme, the brand TechCast Reviews brings together my latest reviews and news articles in one easy to find and easy to browse place.

Go and check it out at http://reviews.techcastnetwork.co.uk

The first promotion on Twitterspread finished last week, and we’ve been busy preparing a new website for the full launch.  We’ve teamed up with some excellent brands who are going to provide some fantastic competition prizes.  So get the latest up-to-the-minute news and announcements by following @twterspread.

Twitterspread.com just launched – a brave new venture in to the twitterscape.  What if it was possible to utilise the powerful connected community and viral-ripeness of twitter?  Twitterspread aims to connect people to the stuff they love and along the way, win some cool prizes.

Watch this space for details of the launch and keep up to date by following twitterspread @twterspread

TechCast Network will be bringing fashionLOFT out of beta in a few weeks time with some fresh new content and even more competition prize giveaways.  Watch this space for more details.

This video was made by Honda and is one of the three new documentaries they’ve released at http://dreams.honda.com/.  I’ve picked this one out because of the powerful message it holds.  It really impacted me when I saw it and it makes you realise that even during your worst times, when you’ve really screwed up, it isn’t the end of the world.

Update: Entries for this giveaway is now closed.  Thanks to all those who have entered.  The winners will be notified in the next few days.  If you missed out this time, do not despair!  I’m already working on more competition giveaways as part of the new TechCast Bookcase feature.  Stay tuned by subscribing to our RSS feed or follow me on twitter

TechCast Network is three years old this month.  Over the last year, the network has been through some extensive changes and development, which included the move to new web hosts and the addition of three new sites.  We’ve had some big hits on the site including the first detailed preview of Windows 7 and coverage of green technology.  TechCast Network received its first bit of fame on home shopping channel, QVC at the beginning of this year.  A small milestone, but one that we’re very proud of.

Thanks to you all who have visited the site, read our content and watched our videos.  All of you who have contributed your ideas and suggestions, they have been used to make this site and its content better.  So TechCast Network would like to thank its readers for giving us purpose to keep the site running and expanding.

To celebrate our third birthday, we’ve teamed up with some leading names in the tech industry, some we’ve worked with right from the beginning, to bring you all some great prizes that are up for grabs.  The list of prizes reads like a geeky Christmas shopping list which includes an 8GB iPod Touch and five copies of Toast Titanium Pro (worth £120 each!) from Roxio, a Mobiu USB drive that can be remotely erased, a bundle of goodies from Proporta,  three copies of Bento 2 from FileMaker, and much more (see below for the full prize list)!

To be in with a chance to win, all you have to do is send us your birthday message.  You can do this by leaving a comment below or on twitter.

Last day for you to send in your birthday wishes: 21st February 2009.

Disclaimer: By entering the competition, you give permission for the below companies to get in touch with you regarding their products or services. TechCast Network has agreed with the companies below that you will not be ’spammed’ or have your information passed on to any other organisations.

My trip to PC World last week to pick up my new MacBook Pro was quite a surprise when I saw that they had a large section of their shop converted to a mini-Apple store.

They had the full range of Macs and iPods out on demo that are fully internet connected, albeit on a slow connection.

To the side, they had some accessories, software and books for sale.  Quite an impressive setup I think and great for those who like me, don’t live nearby to an Apple Store.

This particular store only had one staff member working here and she was an employee of Apple rather than PC World and therefore wasn’t allowed to actually complete any transactions.

I half-expected that they wouldn’t stock the Dual-Link DVI cable that I needed as well, but luckily they had just got them in so I was able to leave the store with everything I needed that day.

What happened?

I’ve been taking a look at what kind of hosting service I was going to need for 2009 and onwards.  If you’ve ever done any research on hosting providers, you probably found an impossible number of companies and options to choose from, all vying for the opportunity to be your next host.

So each year, when it comes to renew, I make that tough decision as to whether I should stick with my current provider or bite the bullet and make a new nest elsewhere. Moving a website, or even worse, a collection of sites can be a daunting task.  That is why most of us don’t take the decision lightly when it comes to crunch time.

Having considered a whole range of options, I was glad to say that my final decision was a comfortable and reassuring one.  I settled for a California-based hosting company called Media Temple, Inc. or (mt) for short.  With over 250,000 domains under their belt including a selection of household brands that you’ll be familiar with (Sony, Warner Brothers, VW, TechCrunch, Starbucks Coffee, Adobe, and many others), Media Temple seemed like the perfect solution.

Here’s what I looked at when I was selecting a new host:

Will they be able to cope with peak traffic demands?
Is there a package that meets current and future demands?
Are they reasonably priced?
Can I trust them?

Technology

Media Temple uses a grid-based distributed computing platform to host your website.  Through the use of a complex mesh of servers and networks that combine to create a powerful system, Media Temple promises that they will cope with peak volumes of traffic.  Giving the issues that TechCast Network has experienced over the past couple of months, this is one of the attractive features that convinced me to go with them. Engadget funnelled a torrent of traffic towards my review of Windows 7 Beta 1, which brought the site down for a few hours and consumed most of my bandwidth allowance.  Lesson learned.

Here’s how Media Temple explain how their grid service works:

“With (mt) Media Temple’s GRID system your server site is no longer tied to an individual hardware server, rather it is spread across hundreds of server processors. The model gives your site ever expanding grid-cluster computing capability, which allows you to scale, and grow beyond the older shared server systems and even radically exceed dedicated server performance. The way this system is made possible is by keeping track of each customer’s individual usage using a system we created, called GPU (which stands for Grid Performance Unit). Each (gs) Grid-Service hosting plan includes a large number of GPUs, which have been carefully calculated to provide 99.7% of all customers with enough resources to never exceed the GPU allocation. For those clients operating large scale web sites experiencing daily or infrequent traffic surges, GPUs allow you to host your websites without worrying about reaching an arbitrary limit before getting shut down.”
– Media Temple, Inc. http://mediatemple.net/company/technology.php

TechCast Network now has access to that grid service along with 2.5x more bandwidth and 50x more storage space than in 2008, giving me plenty of room to grow in 2009.

Looking forward

A lot has happened since the start of TechCast Network back in 2006 and there have been some tough lessons along the way.  Today, I’m happy to say that TechCast is on a solid foundation and continues to deliver quality content to the thousands of readers that come to the sites each day.

This site will be the new home for the TechCast Network where you’ll be able to keep up to date on all of my latest projects.

And finally, I thought I’d say thank you to all of you who have been following the site, commenting on my content and helping to spread the word.  Without you, it wouldn’t be worth doing.