Second look: Weekly tech round-up

EPG me
First it was on, then it was off again, and then it was off for even longer. Now though it seems, Sky’s new HD EPG is ready to be beamed on to boxes up and down the land.

In the week of the broadcasting giant’s 20th anniversary (has it really been that long?), Sky's director of strategic product development, Gerry O'Sullivan, said that the company was “ramping up” for an “imminent” launch.

Of the new guide, which features greatly improved searching, picture-in-picture and series stacks: “We decided to get it as good as we possibly can, and what we've got now is really going to blow the audience away," he said.

Look who’s stalking
Stalkers around the world rejoiced this week, probably, with the news that Google has rolled out its new mobile tracking service, Google Latitude.

Latitude lets users who have signed up share their location with others, which is worked out either by GPS or working out your position from the nearest phone mast, with the user’s position is then overlaid onto a Google Map.

So, what do you think? Is Latitude a fun, harmless app for finding out where your mates are at before arriving at the pub on your own, or an ever-so-slightly creepy privacy invader? You decide.

Ring of ire
In a week where Bill Gates released a swarm of mosquitoes into the crowd at a tech conference to highlight the need for malaria vaccines, there are reports that Microsoft may have released a bug or two of their own into the wild after many people reported that a new software update had borked their Xbox 360s.

Several forum users suggested that the update for the New Xbox Experience had caused the dreaded Red Ring of Death (RROD) on their systems shortly after downloading. Microsoft advised those affected to contact customer support. Great.

Flash! Aha!
Adobe has confirmed that Flash may finally be on the way to the iPhone after confirming that it is working with Apple on a dedicated version of the software.

Flash has so far been missing from iPhone browsers because of conflicts with Apple’s strict application framework, and also because it runs too damn slowly on the phone’s processor. No word on timescales as yet, but we wouldn’t bet against it appearing in the (rumoured) new iPhone this summer.