Twitter has announced plans to put Promoted Tweets into its users' timelines via third-party client HootSuite, as a prelude to a wider rollout. Promoted Tweets launched in April this year, allowing brands to pay to have their sponsored tweets 'promoted' on Twitter.com. Now they'll be appearing in the actual streams of people using HootSuite, which is a desktop and mobile application for accessing Twitter.

Film4oD will house a large selection of films available to rent online, with many available on the same day as their DVD release. There will be more than 500 films available at launch, available to rent from between 50p and £3.99. The move signals part of the broadcaster’s strategy to broaden its VOD service and experiment with alternative payment models.

If you fancy a cheap - 2GB of storage, resistive touchscreen, poor battery life - Chinese Android-based 7in tablet, Asda has begun selling the Elonex e-Touch. Yours for 97 quid - plus a fiver more if you want it delivered - the gadget has a Micro SD card slot for more storage and 802.11b/g Wi-Fi for network connectivity. It runs Android 1.6. The device weighs just 350g and measures 203 x 137 x 15mm. It's essentially the same machine as all the other cheap-as-chips Android tablets popping up.

There have been all sorts of predictions about the exact moment whennewspapers will vanish. Anyone who has dared to put a date to the disappearance of newsprint has, naturally enough, suffered from much scorn. But an Australian-based futurist, Ross Dawson, is clearly unworried by the inevitable brickbats that will strike him. So here are his predictions: newspapers will cease to exist in the US within seven years. They will die in Britain and Iceland in 2019, in Canada and Norway in 2020 and in Australia in 2022.

The Guardian 

Google has come under fire from numerous detractors for its Google Books mass book digitisation programme. Publishers and writers are cautious about Google's objectives with Google Books, with the more extreme antagonists seeing the longer term outcome as little less than mass piracy. Numerous authors have already opted out of the service.

A new search engine currently in open beta is promising to cut through many of the extraneous web pages set up by search engine optimisation (SEO) operators. Blekkowas set up by Mike Markson and Rich Skrenta with the aim of cutting out duplications and unreliable web pages from search results. The site uses slashtags - such as /conservative or /youtube - to refine the results.

Smartphone users are generating two-thirds of total mobile cellular traffic worldwide despite the fact that only 13% of mobile subscribers use smartphones, according to the latest research from Informa Telecoms & Media. And as these smartphone users spend more time on the Internet, the traffic that each one generates – their average traffic per user (ATPU) - will increase by 700% over the next five years, it says.

European Communications 

Keys may become a thing of the past, as Nordic and Baltic network TeliaSonera has started an NFC trial with Stockholm’s Clarion Hotel to test out using mobiles as a way of unlocking hotel room doors. A group of selected hotel guests are given a Samsung handset with NFC and the new software. They then book hotel rooms as they normally would, receiving confirmation on their mobile phone. Check-in is then done before arriving at the hotel, and instead of waiting in a queue for the key, you hold your mobile close to the door, and voila, you're in.

You can now buy a brand new 3D TV set for as little as £772.49 including delivery; Amazon has chopped another hundred pounds or so from the list price of the Samsung LE40C750 and threw in some goodies as well. The 40-inch 3D TV set also comes with a free 3D Blu-ray player and two pairs of active 3D glasses. The Samsung LE40C750 might be affordable but it doesn't mean that corners have been cut.

ABI Research says smartphone 'envy' is responsible for the growth in otherwise challenging economic conditions. It found that smartphone specialists like RIM, Apple, HTC and Motorola outperformed the market in terms of market share. Apple and RIM increased their market-shares to 4.1 per cent and 4 per cent respectively.