PKR.com has been described as a mixture of online poker and The Sims, which is as good a reference point as any. It’s a real-money online poker site, except instead of a top-down view with thumbnail cartoons to represent the players, PKR has fully 3D avatars who wouldn’t look out of place on an Xbox 360 game.

That’s not surprising, considering the site was founded by games industry luminary Jez San, who previously headed up developer Argonaut Software. The idea came from playing on a bunch of online poker sites, and realising the experience was lacking something.

“Although it was fun to play online, it was nowhere near as much fun as playing in real life,” he says. “They used a clinical top-down vewpoint which was very diagrammatic, without the social aspects, the body language, the people and table banter. They were just a technical version of the game, rather than the actual experience of playing.”

A few years ago, I was lucky enough to spend a week in Japan interviewing the likes of Sony and Panasonic about their visions of the connected homes of the future, where all your content (TV, music, internet data etc) would come into your house through a fat broadband pipe, into a media gateway device, which would then distribute it around the house.

It sounded ace. It also sounded about as far off actually happening as the whizzy robots that some of those companies were also showing off. Yet now, a few years later, it’s not such a far-fetched vision. We’re not all living with robots yet, but media adapters capable of streaming content around the home are popping up in increasing numbers.

One such device is Linksys’ KiSS 1600 wireless media player, which was announced at CeBIT this week. I had a chat to Tunji Akintokun, Linksys’ country manager for the UK and Ireland, to find out more, and discuss the wider implications of media sharing.

Piczo might not be the biggest social network in the world, but it's growing fast (4.5 million unique monthly users in the UK) and has had some people suggesting it's the latest destination for the cooler teenagers who previously hung out on MySpace and Bebo.

UK MD Chris Seth says the site's success has come from giving its members more creative freedom to build their own mini-sites, as well as an invitation-only culture that shuns the friend-collecting aspects of MySpace in favour of deeper interaction.

He also hints that Piczo may be making some announcements soon on its mobile strategy, saying "it’s a big opportunity to give our members the opportunity to communicate off the screen". For the full story, read Techscape's interview with Chris.

One of the themes at this year’s 3GSM show in Barcelona was mobile navigation, buoyed by the fact that GPS is making its way into mobile phones, along with the mapping and applications to make use of it. Naturally, every company in this area reckons mobile navigation’s going to be huge.

So where does this leave traditional Portable Navigation Devices (PNDs) of the sort made by Garmin, TomTom and Navman? I talked to Colin Holloway from Navman to find out, and to see what the next big developments in this area are likely to be.

Social lending is a concept that's easy to explain. Instead of borrowing from a bank, you borrow from another person. No, not Big Chris from round the corner who'll break your fingers with a baseball bat if you default on the 1200% interest. That's A Bad Idea.

Instead, Zopa.com is a social lending service, which matches borrowers and lenders in the same way eBay matches buyers and sellers. "Lending to someone to improve their house or buy a new car is much more grounded than investing in exotic shares or funds,” says co-founder Dave Nicholson, explaining why borrowers are keen on the model.

For the full interview, explaining how the service is evolving, head on over to Techscape.

At 3GSM this year, Microsoft launched PlayReady, its new ‘content access’ technology for mobile content, including music, video, games, ringtones and wallpapers. In essence, it’s extending Microsoft’s existing Windows Media DRM system to mobile, and expanding it beyond music and video.

I sat down with Microsoft’s Jim Alkove at 3GSM last week to find out more, starting with the basic overview.

What’s PlayReady about, in a nutshell?

Basically it’s a content access technology that supports different business models, like subscriptions, rentals, purchases, pay-per-view and preview, for a wide variety of content types well beyond music and video.

The technology will support an array of operator partners, including Bouygues Telecom, Telefonica, O2, Cingular and Verizon. And it’s available on a platform-agnostic basis, meaning it can be put in a wide range of devices, including operating systems other than Windows Mobile 6.

It will be available in the first half of this year for device implementations, and we expect we’ll start to see volumes of handsets coming through sometime in 2008. So that’s the high-level framing of what we’re announcing.

Us Brits will soon be able to access MySpace on our phones – well, we will if we're on Vodafone, anyway, as the two companies have signed an exclusive deal. But is it that important that MySpace launches a mobile version?

Apparently so. Alex Kummermann of mobile social networking firm Clicmobile reckons that it's essential to MySpace's continued survival. "Big social networks are like mushrooms: they grow very fast, but they die very fast too," he tells Techspace.

Wi-Fi hotspots are mainly useful for business types, right? Great for catching up with emails over a Latte or seven, while barking out PowerCommands in a series of VoIP calls with your minions. But thanks to the pricing, not that useful to those of us who don't have a company credit card. That could be changing though.

"We're seeing a big swing in customers from niche business laptop users to people using Wi-Fi enabled consumer electronics devices," says Owen Geddes, director of business development at Wi-Fi hotspot network The Cloud.

"You've got Nintendo DS and Sony PSP, dual-mode handsets from people like Nokia, and we're expecting to see personal media players later this year, including Zune and Sony Mylo, as well as more Wi-Fi-enabled digital cameras and even car stereos."

We reported earlier today on Spin-my-Blog, a new service that lets users add entries to their blogs simply by calling their assigned telephone number and speaking the text they want added.

Daniel Doulton, co-founder and VP Marketing, Strategy and Development at SpinVox, was kind enough to answer a few of my questions about how the service works and what those testing it think of the service.

While at CES last week, I caught up with Mark Heinrich, chief technology officer and co-founder of Phanfare. It's an online photo and video sharing service that stands out through its use of a subscription model, charging $54.95 a year.

"We have the audacity to charge our customers money!" he told me. "That's why we call them customers, and not users. And because there's no advertising, we don't turn your private photo albums into some kind of billboard for adverts or print-ordering services."

Phanfare started in January 2005, and now has over 5,000 users, 80% of whom pay the annual subscription fee (as opposed to the monthly or lifetime options that are available). And Heinrich has strong views on the prospects - or lack of - for Phanfare's free competition.

Nokia has maintained a high profile at CES, announcing three new phones and deals with the likes of Skype, Yahoo and Six Apart. I sat down for a chat with Pekka Pohjakallio, VP of Nseries computers in Nokia's multimedia division.

Besides giving Nokia's initial response to the Apple iPhone, he also talked about the new N93i, N76 and N800, promised that Wi-Fi and 3.5mm headphone jacks will be standard in ALL Nseries handsets from now on, and hinted at a potentially-ace collaboration with guitar-maker Gibson. Read on for the full details.

Welcome to the third and final part of our transparent attempt to spend more time on the sofa after Christmas review of some of the best Tech Digest interviews of 2006. Today, it's some of the more whiz-bang futuristic ones, to show you where it's all going.

Huw Robson - HP Labs
Memory spots? Well, I do recall a few zits when I was a teenager... No no no, memory spots are HP Labs' latest invention, which have been compared to 'turbocharged RFID chips' and 'computers the size of a grain of rice'. Huw filled us in. Read more

Robin Shephard - Eleksen
For most people, wearable technology means they have a pocket set aside for their iPod. But to Eleksen, it means jackets and fabrics with the tech built in. Which often means a pocket for your iPod, yes, but also more imaginative features. Read more

Julian Morris - OMG
How did we get from ping-pong balls to Gollum in just a few years? Motion-capture firm OMG has the answers, with Julian explaining to us how the technology has moved on to pioneer new advances in movies, games and videos medical technology. Read more

Still feeling portly from the Christmas food splurge? Tsk, have another slice of going-slightly-green turkey and stop moaning. Then read three more Tech Digest interviews from 2006, all focused around the latest developments on mobile phones.

Neil Edwards - dotMobi
Have YOU bought yourself a .mobi domain name yet? You haven't? Well, that's understandable if you're not a big company. But Neil explained to us just what dotMobi's about, why brands are signing up to it, and where it's all heading in the future. Read more

Pete Russell - Player One
Okay, so at the time, doing all manner of cool mobile content based on the Ashes sounded like a great idea. Until England spooned it. But nevertheless, Player One's mix of video and games mobile cricket content is well worth a second read. That pic's not Pete, by the way. But you probably guessed that. Read more

Russell Buckley - AdMob
Mobile advertising is going to be huge in 2007. So we got in early and had a chat with Russell Buckley, who besides being an all-round guru on all things mobile, thanks to his MobHappy blog, had just taken a new job at mobile ads firm AdMob. Read more

It's been a great year for the tech-world. We would summarise what happened, but you can find it all podblogged on YouTube's MySpace profile. Something like that, anyway. Instead, how about a reminder of some of the key interviews this year on Tech Digest? Starting today with Yahoo, Garlik and MTV.

Yahoo - Mecca Ibrahim
She's in charge of Yahoo 360 in Europe, and Mecca talked to us about the blogging / social networking crossover, mobility improvements, and how blogs might be surfaced in Yahoo's news output in the future. Read more

Garlik - Tom Ilube
Scared of having your identity nicked by online fraudsters? Garlik was a brand new Web 2.0 service set up by some of the founders of internet bank Egg, to reveal what's online about you, and what to do about it. Tom told us all. Read more

MTV - Angel Gambino
How will social networking evolve as it transfers to mobile devices? MTV Europe's Angel Gambino has plenty of ideas, and shared her thoughts on how Bebo and MySpace will translate to mobile, as well as MTV's early efforts in the space. Read more

It's been quite a year for blogosphere-baroness Mena Trott. In October, Six Apart commercially launched Vox, its blogging-cum-social networking service, following a successful beta. And since then, it's been picking up users at a rapid pace.

"People have really embraced it," she says. "They're saying they think blogging is fun again. A lot of people got burned out, because blogging had become a task rather than a pleasure. But we're winning those people back, along with some of the people who are usually more sceptical and cynical about Six Apart as a company."

Alongside that, there's been the launch of Vox's slick mobile application, several redesigns of the service's homepage, and more partners. While she was in London last week, I sat down with Mena to chat about those, as well as how she sees Vox competing if the big social networking services ever get their blogging features sorted, and why fostering communities is the next big step for Vox.

Forget inviting family and friends round to see 520 prints worth of skiing holiday photos. You know they'll find excuses after the last time anyway. Nowadays, the Web is where you should be sharing your holiday experiences with willing (and not so willing) observers.

Flickr is increasingly popular, of course, as are blogs – which can now even be updated while you sit on the beach sipping your Mojito. But some people are going beyond even that, on a site called Everytrail. It mashes up users' photos and words with GPS data, and Google Maps and Google Earth to create a record of their trips, from hiking and mountaineering through to sailing and biking.

Everyone's talking about mobile communities and viral content. It's just that not many of those people are actually doing it, and turning a profit. But the fact that the buzz around Web 2.0 is bleeding into the mobile industry is a healthy sign that there'll be some cool services ahead for mobile users.

One of those cool services is Zannel, which bills itself as "the easiest way to share content on mobile phones", albeit with a flying-pig logo that could make casual observers wonder whether they're entirely serious.

It's not just a mobile YouTube, although there are parallels in the way Zannel aims to make it easy for users to upload videos and then promote them to a potential audience of millions. The company is still officially in stealth mode, but I chatted to them to find out more.

Web 2.0 isn't just about groovy startups, y'know. The firms who rode the internet boom the first time around are coming out with their own attempts to keep pace with the user-generated content phenomenon.

Services like Microsoft's Windows Live Spaces and Yahoo 360 combine blogging, social networking, and tight integration with these companies' other web tools. Mecca Ibrahim is in charge of Yahoo 360 in Europe, overseeing its launch in Germany, France and the UK, with Spain and Italy planned for next year.

"It's very hard to say whether it's more of a social networking product, a blogging product, or just a place to collect things that are important to you," she says. "We do see it as a central place within Yahoo where people can publish what's important to them, and share it with their friends and the wider community if they want to do that."

Most pubs' dabblings with new technology extend to buying a shiny new plasma screen every four years for the World Cup. But that's changing, thanks to connected quizzers, broadband jukeboxes, and even digital fruit machines. All three are the work of Inspired Gaming Group, which has spent the last four years bringing boozers into the 21st century.

"Compare entertainment in pubs with your home," says co-CEO Norman Crowley. "In the last 15 to 20 years, your home's gone from having four TV channels, no internet and a basic Atari games console, to having broadband, iTunes, Sky+, hundreds of channels and a Sony PlayStation. What have pubs done in that time? They've got fruit machines, which they had 20 years ago, and very little else. That's what we've been trying to change."

Hurrah for England, we're going to stuff the Aussies in the Ashes. Well, I can hope. But the Ashes are significant this year not JUST because of England's imminent historic whitewashing of Ricky, Shane and chums (am I tempting fate yet?). It's also the first Ashes to have its own 'mobishow'.

What's that when it's at home? A made for mobile TV show called Ashes Down Under, which consists of three-minute episodes consisting of news, reports, banter and contributions from current England captain Andrew Flintoff AND his crocked predecessor Michael Vaughan.

"It's about taking something like the Ashes, which is going to be a massive event over here, and creating a suite of content around it," says Pete Russell from Player One, the firm behind the mobishow. "Sky have the live and highlights rights for the actual event, but there's a lot more you can do with it."