Huge news! By the end of 2008 "X" will be available and built into almost every electrical device!  Your home cinema AV amplifier will come with X.  It will ramp down the volume when the doorbell or phone rings, and its on-screen display will superimpose the phone callers details or live video from the front door X enabled wireless CCTV camera.  Of course every new display device you buy from now on will have the same abilities built in.  So whether you are near the digital photo frame in the kitchen, or the new flat screen TV in the bedroom, you'll see the same information instantly displayed...

In the second blog post from our Masked Installer , the Zorro of the CI world reveals the top technologies he couldn't have done without this year.  He also gives us his top rogues of 2007, and there are some rather large names in the casualty list!  Oh, and read on to see why you should really run 4 CAT5s to every TV in the house...

We've been asked by our readers to setup a forum specifically for the Idratek system.  We're glad to announce our new Idratek forum went online at the weekend.  Karam from Idratek has posted an introductory message and he'll be on hand to answer Idratek queries where he can... 

Here's anther great, inexpensive candidate for a home automation server.  The HP DX2250 features a 2.6GHz ATHLON 64 X2 5000+, has 2GB or RAM and a 250GB drive.  It even ships with Vista, although you may like to change that to Windows Home Server or your favourite flavour of Linux.  With the limited time offer of £50 cashback this is a true bargain PC at around £155+vat !

UPDATE - This deal has been extended until the 14th December now, and the max number of units allowed per customer has been up'd from 2 to 3.   Link to the Extended Deal HERE .

Here's a great tip-off from a post on our mailing list this morning.  Dell have the £99 +vat Server deal on again, for today only and limited to 1,000 machines.  The Dell PowerEdge SC440 is a dual core machine with 2 x 80gig SATA drives, a gig of RAM and comes with the Bronze 1 year Next Business Day Onsite Response.  We've just ordered our two (max of two per customer allowed). 

Click HERE for the deal 

It’s been a couple of years since I’ve done this, but a few days ago I decided to draw up a list of my favourite technology from the last 12 months.  As I asked myself what items I had been using on a daily basis, the ones I really couldn’t live without, I came to the realisation that the top ten or more technologies I was thinking of, came from just two companies!  It probably won’t be too much of a surprise to find out who they are, but here is my shortlist for “Top Tech” in 2007…

We all know that systems integration is the single biggest hurdle in building complex smart home systems today.  The Amigo Challenge is putting up thousand of Euro in prize money to encourage submissions to their project.  Watch the video after the jump for Amigos glimpse of an integrated, truly intelligent smart home future...

We've just updated our main news page RSS feed to include images.  You now get special low-bandwidth versions of the images from the intro text of each of our stories. Images are a great addition to news feed browsing, and we recommend Google Reader if you'd like to give it a try...

The iPhone is the best mobile browsing experience we’ve ever encountered, it’s the first phone where you really can navigate normal, proper, full graphical versions of your favourite websites.  However, for the times where you aren’t on Edge or Wi-Fi its also nice to have a fast loading easy to read iPhone formatted version of a site, which is why today we are launching the beta of our own iPhone formatted pages …