I have just been sent a PR statement about the numbers from this years BETT.
BETT had 30,372* visitors over the 4 days which made it the highest attended BETT so far. This was an increase of 3.84% from last year.
Next years BETT is at the ExCel exhibition centre which I am told provides extra space and also is now at the end of January (30th - 2nd Feb) which hopefully will mean more can attend rather than having it in the first week of term for many. They also say current bookings for next years show are at 104% percent of Olympia's capacity already.
As usual EduGeek will be attending so make sure you come along to the new stand. ...

Well, it's the end of another year and this one certainly seems to have flown by!
Everyone here at EduGeek would like to wish you a merry Christmas and a happy New Year and thank you all for your continued support.
So, before you all disappear to enjoy (in no particular order), vast quantities of food, chocolate, beer/wine/spirits, gadgets, games and, oh yes! families, let us here at Edugeek pass on our best wishes to our members, sponsors and those companies who help us out in the background and never ask for any thanks.​ ...

Windows Live SkyDrive gets a huge update to addresskey feedback, You should expect to see the first NEW SkyDrive release in a few hours. Follow SkyDrive on Twitter so that you can be one of the first people to know when it is live.
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I know some of you might already recognise the phrase including in the title, as it is a central tenet of the ICT Register, but the same ethos is wide spread within the education community. It doesn't matter whether you are talking about school staff getting together at TeachMeets, having in-depth discussions via twitter through things like #ukedchat, online communities such as EduGeek.net or more local groups such as NorthantsBLT, the growing role of schools taking ownership of their advice and guidance and how they share it with others is a very important part of how schools need to react to recent changes which have come out of DfE. ...

What this hotfix basically does is add support for IE9 to Group Policy Preferences in a Windows Server 2008 R2 domain. For further details, please see this post on the Group Policy Center blog or the Microsoft KB article linked below.
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Microsoft are hosting their annual IT Academy Summit at their Reading HQ Offices today. A thread is available here for questions to ask at the event.

Update: Slides from the event are available here http://www.microsoft.com/uk/educatio...11-slides.aspx

Myself (@TheScarfedOne), and James (@EduTech) are attending - and keeping the Twitter feed up to date. If you want to see what is going on anf get involved - the hash tag to follow is #ITASUM11. We are keeping an eye on the feed - so if you have any questions, please send them across. Our direct twitter names are @TheScarfedOne and @EduTech90.

The agenda is as follows... ...

Dennis Ritchie, the creator of the C programming language and co-founder of the Unix operating system, has died at the age of 70.

Mr Ritchie was arguably one of the most influential figures in the early days of computing and laid the foundations for many of today's technologies before they were even conceived. If you use a computer today, chances are you are using something built on his ideas from decades ago.

Visit our Dennis Ritchie thread here.
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Steve Jobs, co-founder and former CEO of the highly succesful technology firm Apple, has died aged 56. News broke in the early hours of the morning with a statement on Apple's website describing him as "a visionary and creative genius." The cause of death is believed to be the end of a long running battle with cancer.

A thread regarding Mr Jobs' passing is available here. ...

Mashwork has produced an infographic of tweets about Windows 8. Based on 65,968 tweets between June 15th and September 22nd they produced the following image which is quite interesting reading. Overall feedback seems good but its early days with the dev beta.
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Mozilla appears to have pushed the final build of Firefox 7 although autoupdate and the website have not been updated yet.
Initial Changelog:

• Vastly improved memory usage (up to 50% better) and increased speed
• Added a new rendering backend to speed up Canvas operations on Windows systems
• Bookmark and password changes now sync almost instantly when using Firefox Sync

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Because I have a background of being involved in discussions around data protection I sometimes get a prod about online storage and web 2.0 tools. Over the last 6 months I have had quite a few over online storage options, but I have never really stuck down on (electronic) paper what my concerns are and why I have them. There are a few concerns I have, some centre around ownership of files and data, some around data protection and some around management of the tools. ...

Schools have come a long way since 1999 when the first roll out of the NGfL (National Grid for Learning) funded networks began to hit schools. Mainly provided by the likes of Research Machines and Viglen these often consisted of 1 server and a classroom’s worth of desktop computers. ...