A new group of companies including Siemens, Honeywell and Osram has recently announced an alliance which plans to develop and market a large range of interoperable products targeting at home automation applications...

Plogg is a plug that's an energy meter, logger and switch that can talk to your PC, PDA or Smart Phone.  Available in ZigBee and Bluetooth versions, Plogg can communicate wirelessly with a range of devices while monitoring, reporting and being switching On and Off remotely...

The Smart Home Show opens its doors today at the NEC in Birmingham.  The show runs until Sunday 13 April and opens from 10.00am to 5.00pm daily and is attached to the National Homebuilding & Renovating Show.  We'll be at the show as usual and will publish our review and videos next week...

A few minutes ago the BBC announced that it's done a deal with Nintendo to allow its Wii games console to stream iPlayer programing to TVs across the UK!  A basic version of the player is available TODAY with a more polished version to follow.

UPDATE Instructions for enabling the iPlayer on the Wii have now been published on the BBC site.  It appears this involves paying £3.50 to add the Internet Channel, although the BBC hope to find a way around this in the future...

Schneider Electric have announce a new black and white C-Bus touchscreen panel.  We've heard on the grapevine there are some other new products just around the corner too so stay tuned for some more news in the coming days...

In his latest blog post, our Masked Installer reveals his inner thoughts on hard drive HiDef video media servers and what it's like to regularly work with 15 to 20 TB of his customers data...

We've just got some details through from Pulse Living on their new smart home system.  We're being teased with some beautiful publicity shots of their new kit.  Three touchscreen options are available for example, two in-wall and 1 stand alone.  Features include widescreen and potrait options, LED backlighting, Wi-Fi and some models can be powered over CAT5.  The system controller runs on embedded Windows CE 5 and includes Z-Wave / KNX/EIB, 2 ethernet ports and RS232...

Ozzy smart home company Future Touch have released v3.0 of their MyServant system. The windows software is an add-on for HAL and provides touchscreen support complete with floor plan style graphics as well as occupancy tracking, security system control and weather display...

A couple of months ago Dan McGrath wow'd us with his Home Brew DMX lighting system.  Now he's documented his retro-fit central vacuum project complete lots of photos, parts list and costs...

Belfast based company - RipFactory - have always offered a CD ripping service.  But now they are selling their standalone RipServer box so you can do it yourself.  The Linux based unit combines ripping software with a NAS and is available in 0.5TB and 1.0TB versions.  Prices start at £599...