O2 is going to offer the Palm Pre smartphone exclusively in the UK, and it'll be here by Christmas.

Nothing else has been revealed, but there are still a few months before we need to hear about a price and tariffs.

Exciting news that the iPhone will be up against the Pre on the same network, as O2 have confirmed to us that the Pre will not affect how they sell the iPhone.

They've got a video of the device here.

Netscape and Ning founder, and boardmember for eBay and Facebook Marc Andreessen has just launched a new venture capital fund for technology companies with Ben Horowitz that packs a $300 million initial size.

That's a staggering sum for a fund that only involves the two of them, but it does give them the flexibility to invest anything from $50,000 to $50m in the startups they choose.

From the initial mandate of the fund, it seems that they are offering entrepreneurs freedom by not even taking a board seat where they've invested less than $5m (obviously it depends on the case).

More details here.

It seems that Twitter is running about 20 minutes behind real-time, so you might experience some problems with clients or the web page.

Twitter does sometimes go through bouts of slowness, so bear with it and play Die Fail Whale.

UPDATE 1: It seems to have caught up to about 5 minutes slow at the moment.

UPDATE 2: Looks to have caught up now. Phew.

comScore is reporting that the number of online videos viewed in the UK in April 2009 approached 5 billion, up 47% from the same period in 2008.

Videos from Google (of which Youtube accounts for 99%) accounted for 2.4 billion of those, with the BBC (most likely from iPlayer) coming second with nearly 80,000 played videos.

What these stats underline is Youtube's dominance in the UK online video market (although that doesn't mean they make money).

These stats exclude visits from internet cafes, mobile phones and from PDA's, but they do give us a good indication at the explosive growth of the medium.

[Source]

If you frequent this website, you may very well be involved in the world of online application/web development, and may even have founded or be employed by a web startup.

With this in mind, we're bringing you more information, news, tools and code to help you survive out there, and kicking it off are details of Sun's Startup Essentials programme.

Click the title for more.

The eponymous whale that springs up whenever Twitter is down has become something of an internet legend in the past few years. You may not experience much downtime on the service, but in its early years, the microblogging platform was renowned for being unstable, and when it was down, the picture of what was dubbed the "Fail Whale" was posted as a placeholder.

Now, a developer has produced an internet flash game to piggybacks on users' love-hate relationship with the whale in the form of a shooting-alley style game; Die Fail Whale.

Click the title for more.

We just caught wind of a new start-up website being launched in the UK that lets you see what you can cook with certain ingredients that are in your cupboard.

Say you have some aubergines and some chickpeas in your cupboard. Did you know there is a dish out there that uses both? Well, there is, and whilst I like experimenting with cooking, for people who like to stick to the tried and tested stuff, you can follow the recipe that uses both.

Click the title for more.