Voice to text company Spinvox has been sending notices out to customers saying the service will be coming to a close. It's the end of what sounded a very promising idea initially - having voicemails translated direct to text so you could read them at leisure, have the number in front of you rather than scramble for a pen, and soforth.

The only thing was the controversy over whether it actually did any such thing. The BBC's technology correspondent, Rory Cellan-Jones, among others, doubted it, and dug out the patent - which included provision for portions of the work happening in call centres. Nuance bought it, the brand equity sunk without trace and now it appears it's vanishing completely.

Google and Intel are rumoured to be developing a "connected" television device, which would presumably offer social networking, Internet and similar webby applications to people watching TV at the time. This isn't a new thought: over a year ago I was watching media boxes from Toshiba being demonstrated which would have Facebook, Picasa and other networked bits on them.

And of course Panasonic and Sony have announced such devices, too. The reason this is interesting is that neither Google nor Intel have form in the television market, maybe in the same way Apple wasn't a portable music maker only a few years ago. OK, Google hasn't exactly set the smartphone market alight since January, but could this be the sign of an Apple-style change?

No, not at the point of purchase, don't be silly, we all know the Apple Macintosh costs a fortune, I paid over £1000 for my laptop last year when I could have got a reasonable PC notebook for half the price. But the total cost of ownership, including maintenance, training and other issues, is less.

At least that's what a survey from the Enterprise Desktop Alliance says. And the problem for many will be that the total cost of ownership - TCO to use the jargon - only becomes apparent when you're deploying computers in large numbers, paying staff to support them and tracking every penny. For the rest of us using one of Steve Job (pictured)'s shiny machines, it's not an issue.

Palm, once the darling of the handheld computer market, has posted financials that suggest it performed half as well as analysts had expected. This is partly because although it had boasted of shipping 960,000 smartphones to the shops - wait for it - only 408,000 of them have actually been bought by customers.

That's a reduction of 29% on the previous quarter which, OK, probably included Christmas presents - but more importantly it's a reduction of 15% on the same quarter the year before. Given the relatively high-profile launch of the Palm Pre mobile phone (pictured), that's a bit embarrassing.

Viacom, the American company suing YouTube for infringement of copyright, is facing a most peculiar charge - as the documents in the case became public YouTube accused the company of paying other parties to upload its property. YouTube alleges that Viacom paid some 19 agencies to upload materials.

The company also quotes mails from Viacom executives who say they believe, quite passionately, that the materials in question should be available on YouTube for free viewing. Many British properties are there for anyone to see, quite legitimately, including all of the Monty Python sketches. It is, in short, a bit of a mess.

Games specialist Nintendo is looking to social gaming as the next big thing that's going to push sales of the new hand held console, the DSi XL. Social gaming, like Farmville on Facebook and other applications adults and kids play, tends to happen on phones more than dedicated consoles but it's growing quickly.

Two things spring to mind about this. First, with game site Gamastura quoting analysts claiming the social gaming market will reach $1.3bn this year, everyone's bound to want to be in it. Second, the only real upgrade to the Nintendo in the new console is a bigger screen, so yes, they'd better do something to make it look a bit interesting.

Many apologies to those of you who aren't fans of headlines with loads of initials in them. What's happening is that Microsoft has announced that the next version of Internet Explorer, its market leading Internet browser, won't work with its last-but-one version of Windows, Windows XP.

All of which sounds reasonable enough until you consider how many Microsoft customers decided not to upgrade from Windows XP to Windows Vista when it came out, as the replacement system was widely regarded as a bit of a dog's breakfast. So in practice this is going to mean upgrading to Windows 7, like now, if you want the new IE to work.

Online finance transfer specialist Paypal has gone a step further than any competition by introducing a system that works by phone.

Called Send Money for iPhone, version 2.0, it allows two iPhone users to "bump" phones to exchange cash and using a function called "split cheque" you can split the cost of a restaurant bill really easily.

The House of Lords has passed the Digital Economy Bill intact in the UK, which means people breaching Internet piracy rules will be subject to exclusion from the Internet. There had been - and no doubt will be - a lot of controversy over the provision to cut people off.

It should be interesting to watch the test cases as someone is bound to infringe and upload music or video they don't own, and then claim - as some authorities are already stating - that the Internet is a fundamental human right therefore they can't be chucked off. It's drivel of course, but someone will try it.

Chairing the Social Media World Forum day one on Monday I was quite struck by how biased we all were towards Twitter - it's been the highest profile social network recently even if Facebook does have the figures, and oddly nobody minds that its numbers fell off a bit in January (there was always going to be some fall-off after the initial fascination).

This is no doubt why there's such a perceived opportunity for the new service, @anywhere, which allows people to embed Twitter onto their website. So you can follow a journalist straight from their column (anyone wanting to follow me is welcome, although you might feel three blog entries a day is all you want, thanks), authors from their books, whatever. But why would you?