I didn’t even realise that earlier yesterday Apple announced the new iPod nano touch, and iPod Touch! Above is the new iPod nano advert, the new nano is fully multi touch operated, has a built in FM radio, and will no doubt be incredible, store a billion songs and movies, plus make you breakfast. The new iPod touch does the same but includes video calling over WiFi, HD video recording, plus it will take you for walks when you need some exercise, and make you breakfast, lunch, and supper, everyday, for life! The catchy music for the new iPod nano touch ad above is "Short Skirt, Long Jacket" by Cake. For more details go to http://www.apple.com

Facebook yesterday launched their latest much talked about competitor to location based app, to compete with the market leaders Foursquare. Places at present is only available on the iPhone via the Facebook app, and from touch.facebook.com if your mobile browser supports HTML 5 and your based in the USA, support for the rest of the world be be rolled out over the coming weeks / months. At present it is pretty basic so it seems they have rushed a stable release, and one would assume they will roll out more features as they move forward. Places as it stands now has the following features:

• Places is integrated into your Facebook profile
• Check in and your update will appear on the Place page, your friends’ News Feeds and your Wall (depending on privacy settings).
• Uses Google maps for locations
• Lets you see where your friends most recent “check ins” are (depending on privacy setting chosen by the user.
• Allows you to leave time stamped tips / comments about venues
• Will let you check in with friends from one phone (i.e. negating you all to have to check in individually)
• Allows you to find nearby places
• Check ins are only shared with your friends unless you select it to be made public
• Your location is worked out either via GPS or cell phone triangulation
• Places will provide you with a time stamped history of all the Places you have gone to.

As a basic app at present its lacking compared to the likes of Foursquare and Gowalla. It does not link to twitter yet, and there are no tools businesses can use for their locations to see traffic or reward / incentivise people checking in. There are also no badges to unlock for regular users, this may seems like a small thing but it makes foursquare almost like a game in some aspect and incentives users to use the app more often. At the Places launch conference yesterday in Paulo Alto, California, representatives from Foursquare and other existing competitors announced ways in which they’d be leveraging the Places API to allows their users to check in and publish their data through their Facebook feed and transfer their badges and pins. Overall though its early days for Facebook’s Places, more features will be rolled out over the coming months, also integrating their brilliant Facebook ads feature will no doubt allow marketers to target people even more precisely than ever before, as well as earn Facebook some more tidy revenue. Facebook now has well over 500 million users and continues to grow, providing a huge existing potential customer base. This is one Facebook app I would recommend to follow closely. To read more on Places from Facebook themselves click here or go to the places web page here

180 LA recently completed a great campaign for Sony Vaio Laptops. The idea was to take 8 clever teenage students and turn them in to rocket scientists and engineers and ultimately launch a real 2 stage rocket using the computing power from Sony Vaio laptops.  After seven months, an indefinite weather hold and several launch delays, the Rocket Project team successfully launched a 29-foot, 1,100-pound, two-stage rocket 147,000ft up in the air, reaching a top speed of Mach 2.8! The students progress was placed on YouTube and updated daily on Facebook and Twitter, after the successful launch the campaign is even being made into a Discovery TV series, not bad going for an ad campaign. To read more go to http://discover.sonystyle.com.

This morning I received an interesting email from a friend at McCann, London on a talk that Hatty Day attended. Chad Hurley the founder of YouTube was giving a brief talk on some YouTube stats and his views on a few related topics. Most people will have heard this already, but there were a couple of interesting insights so thought I would share it with you.

• YouTube was founded in 2005.
• It receives 2 billion views per day.
• It is in third place for site visits globally after Google and Facebook.
• 24 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute.
• Chad’s most admired brand is Apple for their ability to drive innovation in the category with polished, well focused ideas.
• Chad doesn’t plan to take on any hardware ventures (one of the questions was whether he planned to create a bespoke camera tool for uploading). He thinks it is easier to remain a platform, as a global website automatically has a worldwide audience whereas a product needs to be sold into a veritable host of people.
• HD and 3D have been incorporated into YouTube.
• Chad’s plan for the next 10 years is to focus on the basics (finding, watching and sharing videos).
• YouTube pays music labels directly.
• Chad feels that Google have struggled in the social space because they look past emotion and create something very rational and technical (unlike Apple and Facebook).
• Chad’s advice for doing well is to move and be visible with what you’re creating – this will ensure that you are recognised as a leader. Talk about the innovation you’ve been creating.

As regular readers will know I’m a big Microsoft fan, even if sometimes for no other reason than to annoy all my friends that use Macs. For the last month I have been testing out their new version of Microsoft Office 2010 and thought I would share what I think are the top ten new features. Office has more than 100 new and improved features, and has already been downloaded over 7.5 million times for the beta version alone. Office 2010 is now on general release at all computer shops everywhere, click here for a price guide, or here to go the Office 2010 site and try it out yourself.
Top 10 Office 2010 New Features

There are a whole host of other upgrades and features, such as being able to preview copy and paste edits. To put it simply though, if you are looking for a full office suite then Microsoft office is still the only way to go and with 2010 they have just made it better and more user friendly. Click here for a video look at the new Office.

To find out more on Office 2010 click here.

I just found out more details on the new touch screen Sony Ericsson X8  Xperia handset coming out soon (approx late 3rd quarter 2010). As most readers will know I’m an avid Sony Ericsson fan and am currently lovingly taking care of the SE X10 touch phone.

The X8 is a going to be SE’s entry model into the Xperia Android market, and size wise it fits in between the X10 and X10 mini. At present Sony Ericsson are not sure if it will launch with Android 2.1 or 1.6 but either way it will be 2.1 eventually even if not at launch. The screen is a 3 inch capacitive touchscreen and will work in a similar manner to the X10 mini, in that the screen has four corner editable icons for easy one hand use and one touch access to applications.
Main Specs:

• 3.0 inch Capacitive touchscreen with 16,777,216 colour TFT
• 3.2 MP camera
• WiFi and Bluetooth™ stereo (A2DP)
• A-GPS with built in Navigation software and Google maps
• Sony Ericsson Timescape™ (aggregates and combines your contacts list with their relevant updated facebook and twitters accounts etc)
• Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync®
• 3.5 mm audio jack
• Micro USB connector
• 2 GB microSD™ card
• Processor: 600MHz
• Battery: 5 Hours Talk Time, 476 hours standby time
• Colours: White, Dark Blue, Aqua Blue, Pink, and Silver
• Price approx £180 sim free (Very good for an Android device)

Check out the short clip below to see the test phone in action. If you have an Android phone you should also check out this great new site Sony Ericsson made called mash-app.com. On the site you can save, share and search for your favourite android apps ! click here to check it out.

To read more about the X8 Click here

Yesterday Microsoft announced some seriously game changing news for the console industry. The launch announced that Kinect (formerly known as “Project Natal”) will be available worldwide on November 4th. Kinect (pictured right) is a gaming motion sensor device that is compatible with all Xbox 360’s, and allows you to use your body as the games controller ! see the video above for some examples. At release there will be at least 8 Kinect games available but expect that number to rise quickly as developers get to grips with the new technology. The new revamped Xbox 360 console (see pics) was also announced at the E3 expo at the Wiltern Theatre, Los Angeles. It’s now slimmer, virtually silent, and comes with built in WiFi for easy access to online functionality such as Xbox live, and has a 250GB hard drive as standard. The new Xbox 360 will be available this week at $299.99 RRP. Last but not least Microsoft also announced and previewed epic upcoming games launches of “Halo: Reach,” “Call of Duty: Black ops”(exclusive Xbox levels and maps) and “Gears of War 3”, and “Fable III”. Also if Xbox Live (now 25 million users strong) is your kind of thing, and you currently live outside of the official supported zones, good news, it will be coming to South Africa, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary, Poland, and Russia by Christmas 2010. Cant Wait to give Kinect a go and get my hands of some of those epic games later this year.     P.S. To read the full press release click here, and hat tip Steve Clayton, for reminding me about this and to MajorNelson’s Flickr site for the pics.

Heat, San Francisco have just released this fun ad for the launch of the new EA sports Tiger Woods PGA Tour Golf 2011 game. Above is the full 60 seconds spot, but four more have been made that feature golf mash ups with curling, hockey, basketball, soccer, and one which mixes up those four with football. Nice idea, click here to see the “Curling meet Golf” clip. Tiger Woods PGA Tour 11 will be released tomorrow (8th June), to read more and see some in game footage click here. P.S. Congrats to fellow Englishman Justin Rose on capturing his first U.S. PGA Tour title with a three-shot victory over Rickie Fowler at the PGA Memorial Tournament in Ohio yesterday.