Art, Copy & Code has partnered with artist Zach Lieberman, Google, and interactive collective YesYesNo to create what it calls a smart talking sneaker with personality.

The Talking Shoe, which Google has been showing at the South by Southwest (SXSW) tech conference in Austin, Texas, includes an accelerometer, gyroscope, Bluetooth and other everyday technologies, that combine to “translate the wearer’s movements into funny, motivating and timely commentary”. In the video that shows off the sneakers, example phrases include “This is super boring” (when you’re just sitting around), “I love the feeling of wind in my laces”, “Are you a statue? Let’s do this already” and “Call 911 because you’re on fire”.

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Third in a series. Two weeks have passed since we last visited this topic, but I wanted to be fair with this next part before writing it. As you will recall from part one, I decided to replace my Windows Media Center HTPC and the NetGear NeoTV 550, because both are so old and slow. While I wanted to do so with one box, there was a major stumbling block -- most of our movies are ripped to ISO images. I would prefer a Google TV to replace both, but in the end got a Micca box to take the place of the HTPC and then still ordered a Vizio Co-Star because I simply could not resist.

Things have not gone entirely as I planned. In fact, as you may recall from part two of this series, nothing has really gone the way I had hoped.

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Developers must make hard choices when choosing what platforms to support. In mobile, popular convention is iPhone first. But does that approach, in the real world of smartphone ownership, really make sense in 2013? Let us take a look at the hard numbers that were recently published by comScore and see what they can tell us.

This may be a self-perpetuating problem for Apple; according to ComScore, the Google platform simply offers more opportunity because of its larger user base, though that is far from the only consideration for developers. Granted, both mobile operating systems are wildly popular, despite the best efforts of Microsoft to get Windows Phone OS into contention (OK, maybe "best efforts" is going a bit far) -- Android and Apple combine for nearly 90 percent of the smartphone market -- 53 and 36 percent respectively.

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There are surveys covering all manner of topics, many of which have been commissioned purely by companies hoping to grab some headlines for their products and services. Take this new survey from MobileInsurance, some UK mobile phone insurer I’ve never heard of (since I've never insured a phone in my life -- that's partly what my home contents insurance is for).

The firm apparently asked 2,314 mobile phone users aged 18 or over from around the UK just how long they spend on their phones every day. That’s phoning people, sending texts, using apps and playing games. And they received an answer of 90 minutes a day, which works out to 32,850 minutes a year, or 22.8 days, or -- if you want the ultimate figure -- 3.9 years of your entire average adult lifespan. That’s a lot of time spent playing with your phone. And all complete rubbish of course.

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I knew this would happen. After battling to decide between Roku and Google TV and opting to buy the Vizio Co Star, Roku has gone and released its brand new Roku 3 box this morning, and also made me jealous of all the cool stuff the company has added into its latest set top box.

Roku's vice president of business development, Jim Funk, made the announcement this morning that the company is "excited to introduce the new, fully loaded Roku 3 -- our fastest, most powerful streaming player to-date".

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Apple has offered its iTunes gift cards through various UK high street retailers and supermarkets  for years now. It’s taken a long while, but Google is finally following suit.

Google Play gift cards, in £10, £25 and £50 denominations will be available from today in Tesco and Morrisons stores. The roll out is happening slowly so they might take a few weeks to reach every location.

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The BBC’s excellent on-demand and catchup TV service iPlayer is available for both iOS and Android devices, although owners of phones and tablets running Google’s mobile OS remain slightly short-changed when it comes to features compared to their Apple OS counterparts.

Windows Phone users must feel perpetually short-changed at the moment I’m sure, but they too will soon be able to get iPlayer. There’s just one catch. Instead of releasing a dedicated app for Microsoft’s mobile OS, the BBC will be rolling out a shortcut application that will give users with a Windows Phone 7.5 or Windows Phone 8 handset access to the BBC iPlayer website via a live tile. According to Cyrus Saihan, Head of Business Development, BBC Future Media, "This shortcut will wrap the BBC iPlayer mobile website together with our media player.

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This year is certainly going to be a big one for games consoles, with a new PlayStation and a new Xbox (rumored) to be arriving before Christmas. But it’s Android-based gaming systems that’s the big trend at the moment, with the likes of OUYA and GameStick grabbing their fair share of the headlines.

Green Throttle is another Android games system, but it’s one that doesn’t require you to make space for a dedicated console under the TV. Instead you just need to buy one or more Green Throttle Atlas controllers, download the free Green Throttle Arena app from the Amazon Appstore, and hook up your Android tablet to a TV using a micro HDMI cable.

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Last week at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, Nokia unveiled an upcoming mobile app that teams the handset maker with snowboard legend Burton. The app comes exclusively to Lumia devices. A brief hands-on was shown off by the folks over at Windows Phone Central, but today Nokia released a full-blown teaser video, complete with some spectacular filming of the extreme winter sport.

While some of the functionality here is similar to what Google Now can do for Android -- weather, information and maps -- the Burton app also contains a video sequencer that allows the user to shoot short bursts of video and then edit and chop them on the fly. It also comes with a feature called "Tune up" that provides playlists that customers can enjoy on the way down the slopes. Finally, users can watch Burton Open Events on their Lumia handsets.

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In tough economic times, raising the money and getting a movie made without any major stars in it can be more than a little challenging for independent film makers. Getting it distributed is even harder.

So instead of trying to get their movie into cinemas, releasing it straight to DVD, or even putting it out on YouTube, the makers of Pulp are distributing their low-budget British comedy via an alternative method -- Xbox Live.

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I’m a huge fan of Zombies, Run! The original immersive app, which basically turns a real-world run into a journey through the zombie apocalypse, and helped me get fit and lose weight when it first came out last year.

I’ve been really looking forward to Zombies, Run! 2 since it was announced, and the great news is it’s nearly here. The updated version, which comes as a free upgrade for current players of the game, will arrive on both iOS and Android on 16 April.

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Today at Mobile World Congress, Nielsen offered a snapshot of the global mobile consumer based on a report released this month. Some of the findings are quite startling. For example, mobile phone usage is highest in South Korea -- get this, 99 percent among consumers older than 16. Same goes for smartphones (67 percent). By comparison, the United States has the lowest smartphone adoption among developed markets (53 percent). Now contrast that to China, where two-thirds of handset owners have smartphones, while in India 80 percent have feature phones. In Brazil, feature phones and multimedia handsets combined: 65 percent.

Mobile phone usage is high in many countries, but infrastructure is not. For example, 98 percent of Russians have mobiles, as do 84 percent in Brazil and 81 percent in India. Problem, according to Nielsen: "The network infrastructure required for smartphones and next generation mobile devices has yet to appear outside of large, urban centers". Lacking infrastructure explains some of this week's MWC announcements, such as Firefox OS phones or new Nokia Lumias with fewer smartphone features for lower selling prices going to emerging markets first.

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Google's first computer isn't about sales but status. Critics who lambast Chromebook Pixel as an over-priced web browser wrapped in pretty hardware miss the point. Badly. The laptop will sell, but not in mass-volume because it's not meant to. Is Lamborghini about sales or style? I ask not seeing much commentary about how the Italian sports car is a failure because Ford sells millions more Explorers.

Chromebook Pixel is the luxury car of computers running Chrome OS and perpetually connected to the cloud. Google's beauty is a status symbol for people willing to plunk down $1,299 or $1,449 and makes, along with newer Nexus devices, a bold brand statement: Google is a premium brand and the company a real innovator. For the people who love the brand and want to identify with it, like all those fanboys adoring Apple with their cash, Chromebook Pixel is an easy sell.

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Let us get a bit geeky. This was not my original intention, but it is how things turned out in the end. First, I believe I misspoke twice in part one of this series -- one time was unintentional, the other was apparently my wishful thinking. The first was when I called my recent used server purchase a Dell Optiplex. It is actually a Dell Poweredge. The second involved my new operating system and I'll get to that in a second.

To begin with, the server was running Windows Server 2003 and the small business I purchased it from had failed to wipe the data, but did leave it password protected -- something a tool like Ophcrack may have been able to breach, though I had no desire to try. The server also contained a CD-ROM drive which I needed to replace with a DVD drive in order to install Windows Server 2012 Essentials. Fortunately I had one laying around -- yes, I know that is not normal. You should see our storage room. There are boxes of computer parts and a stack of old towers filling a corner. At least this time the "it will be useful someday" statement worked out for me.

However, the 32-bit server architecture did not support 2012, meaning I moved on to Home Server -- that required 512 MB of RAM, and the server, woefully older than I had thought, only had 256 -- an easy upgrade, but expenses and wife-acceptance-factor for this project were mounting up.

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Could it be possible that Microsoft has become cool again? A BetaNews poll seemed to indicate Windows 8 was popular and there have been recent reports that the Surface tablet is "cool" to teens. Now there is this -- a poll conducted by Reuters indicates that young people may actually think the computer company from Redmond, Wash. is cool again.

Reuters reports that "just under half of 853 respondents between the ages of 18 and 29 thought Microsoft is cooler now than it was a year or two ago". If this this is representative of the larger sentiment then it ties in very neatly with recent Apple problems.

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