BT has just announced the details of its plan to roll out its new fibreoptic broadband network across select parts of the country.

By early summer next year, users in select areas should have access to speeds of at least 40Mbps initially (theoretically rising to 1000Mbps if you have the cabled wired straight into your house) and rising to 60Mbps at some point in the future (dependant on distance from the street cabinet and other factors if the cable isn't routed directly to you).

Click the title for the list of locations where you'll be able to access this.

CoTweet, the online Twitter client for business, has secured $1.1m in funding from Baseline Ventures, Founders Fund, First Round Capital, SV Angel, Maples Investments and Freestyle Capital whose investments include Digg, Twitter, Google and Facebook.

This ties in with the client's launch into public beta phase, so you can head over there and sign up now.

We've been playing with it on and off on the sideline for about a month, and were very impressed with it as a web client. It works well compared to the other full-featured web clients like HootSuite, and we can see why major companies like Ford use it for the corporate use.

[CoTweet]

Twitter stock-market tool, StockTwits, is currently teasing a new "Premium" offering to their followers.
They sent a message on the microblogging platform a few minutes ago just saying "hi twitter", where the API tag reads: StockTwits Premium.

This could be related to a content offering, but this landing page might indicate something more substantial.

Are we going to see another tool for trading via Twitter?

Packard Bell has been going through the rebranding motions of late, so it's not really a surprise that they've overhauled the ixtreme desktop.

The new model now has an understated chassis, but the insides should deliver a killer punch.
You can spec it with an Intel Core i7, Core 2 Quad or AMD Phenom II X4 quad-core processors with up to 12GB of DDR3 RAM.

There's also options for a 1GB NVIDIA GTS250 option, Blu-Ray player and DVB-T tuner, as well as 3TB of HDD space and 10 USB ports.

Prices will start at £599 in July, but we'd imagine that c.£1k will get you a well specced unit (and a chunk higher with every option ticked).

We called it pretty well a few weeks back, but the ROCCAT Apuri has only just been officially announced.
The 4 port, powered USB Hub which is the first product in the company's Smart Desktop Management System range, should be available from retailers now for an RRP of €39.99

The unit "casts an atmospheric aura onto any desktop with its ice blue under lighting", and sits atop a unique tripod stand, and also sports a mouse bungee to keep control of the wires that criss-cross your desktop.

We'll try and give it the what-for soon, but in the meantime, check out its product page.

Google has set-about to clear up any confusion it caused people with the announcement of their Chrome OS yesterday, so they've gone on record with a few questions that a number of people have raised.

Firstly, Chrome will be free. We assumed it would be as it'll be open source, and it also follows in the footsteps of Android down this route.

Acer, Adobe, ASUS, Freescale, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, and Toshiba have all been named as hardware partners for the OS, although much like the OHA, that doesn't mean they will actually make hardware running Chrome OS.

[Google Chrome Blog]

It was only a few weeks ago that we recommended you use Bit.ly for your URL shortening duties, but we've decided to test out another of the major players out there; Su.pr

Su.pr is provided by the popular link sharing site Stumbleupon, and provides short URLs that also come with one of those annoying toolbars when you click on them.

Click the title for more.