idiomag is the point where the Web 2.0 and print publishing worlds collide. It describes itself as "a virtual magazine personalised to your interests", which you might think was just a website. Instead, it really is a virtual magazine, complete with proper page-turning, adverts and a sticky bit on the front where the free CD fell off. Oh alright, maybe not that last one.

Anyway, the big deal about idio is that you personalise it to your specific interests, telling it what subjects you're interested in, ensuring that when you load up the digital mag, it's just got articles that, in theory, you want to read. It's currently in its beta stage, focusing on digital design and music.

"It really came out of my personal experience," says founder Edward Barrow. "I'd find I wanted to buy four or five different magazines, but only wanted a few parts from each of those. So why should I buy them all?"

When you play Pro Evolution 6, you're probably thinking about working the ball out to your nippy winger, trying to organise your flat-footed back four, or wondering how much your friendship will be damaged if you slap the joypad out of your mate's hands just as he's lining up that 91st-minute penalty. Actually, that's probably just me and Jose Mourinho...

Anyway, chances are you aren't thinking about advertising. Yet Pro Evolution 6 is one of the increasing number of console games to feature proper, paid-for ads – in this case from Reebok, which is featured throughout the game, and Canon, which has pitch-side ads and sponsors the replays.

The ads are the work of New Street Media, a London-based game advertising agency, which has also placed ads within games like The Getaway, as well as interactive TV and mobile games. The company was set up four and a half years ago, and was one of the first firms to focus on in-game ads. MD Maryam Bazargan says it's going to become more and more common.

With all the hoo-ha over the dangers posed for kids by sites like MySpace and Bebo – you know, cyber-bullying, paedophiles lurking on every virtual corner, etc – it’s easy to forget the positive aspects of social networking for children. One company that hasn’t is Intuitive Media, which is trying to bring the benefits without some of the risks feared by many parents.

Intuitive Media is an education firm providing what it describes as protected online learning communities for children. It currently runs two main communities: SuperClubsPLUS for kids aged 6-12, and GoldStar Cafe, for ages 11-14. They’ve signed up over 120,000 children so far in the UK, along with over 12,000 teachers.

“Our aim is that kids talk to kids, work together and learn from each other,” says founder Robert Hart. “It’s about understanding kids from other backgrounds, whether they’re round the corner or on the other side of the world.”

Sky has a new show TV show under the name of The Big Idea, claimed to be the UK's largest-ever search to discover the next great British invention or business idea (with the winner pocketing £100,000 to carry it off). Vodafone is sponsoring it - and has taken this ideal marketing opportunity to launch new small business tariffs, starting from £22 per month.

Vodafone has research claiming just under 33 per cent of the population is considering setting up a company in the next five years - which makes you wonder where the staff will come from. But it also shows you the market for business-friendly tariffs. Vodafone's Small Business Plan starts at £22 per month and offers inclusive free calls between company handsets, mobile email for £5 per month, price plan reviews and the option to switch plans regularly. There's also 'same advisor' business support.

The company is also offering mobile access to a range of tools helpful to anyone starting up a business. For more information, check out the Vodafone business pages.

I speak to John Starkweather at Microsoft about the future of Xbox gaming, and how it's being developed to work with Windows Mobile. Hear about gaming on the move, and beaming your gaming creds to all and sundry when you're out and about.

When researching my post last week on mobile social networking, I canvassed several industry bigwigs to get their views on how well the likes of MySpace and Bebo would translate to mobile. Helpfully, Gmail chose to file the response from Angel Gambino, VP of commercial strategy and digital media at MTV Networks UK & Ireland, in the spam folder. It's not as if she mentioned viagra or offered to transfer a huge sum of money from a deposed dicator into my account either.

Anyway, her answers are interesting, so I wanted to put them up. MTV recently launched its own user-generated service, MTV Flux, so the company has a direct interest in the evolution of social networking, including its transition to mobile. Read on to see what Angel had to say.

The world of domain names has seen its fair share of controversy, and one of the hottest recent debates concerns the new .mobi domain, which covers mobile internet sites. It's run by mobile Top Level Domain Ltd (mTLD, or dotMobi informally), whose investors include the likes of Ericsson, Google, Microsoft, Nokia, Samsung, T-Mobile and Vodafone. dotMobi opened up registrations to companies in June, before allowing everyone else to sign up last week.

Controversy? There's been plenty, including claims that .mobi is unnecessary, risks splitting the internet in two, and even accusations that it is purely for squeezing more cash out of companies frightened that someone else may register 'their' domain. Many of these criticisms have been made online, and dotMobi CEO Neil Edwards doesn't mince his words when responding to them.

"It's the most juvenile argument," he says. "We have companies like Microsoft, Business Week and BMW who all spend a lot of money doing proper development of their systems, so it's insulting that guys who write free blogs are passing judgement on how the best minds in the world should do their development."

Relationships, eh? When they start, it's about establishing a connection and getting on well. But at some point, they always become more about money. Which is an only slightly contrived way of introducing Weblo, a new virtual world where the networking is more financial than social.

Members can buy and sell property and virtual domain names, as well as become the online publicity manager for a celebrity of their choice. All this based on real-world assets too, from buildings to celebs, while the domain names are the sames as ones owned out on the 'real' Web.

Confused? Founder Rocky Mirza says the service is already a roaring success, having launched last week. I asked him what Weblo is aiming to do, why he thinks it'll be a success, and whether there are legal issues around creating and selling virtual versions of real-world places and celebrities.

Mobile advertising is going to be increasingly high-profile in the next few years. And I don't mean Crazy Frog or those baffling Phones 4 U TV commercials. Advertising on your mobile has so far been largely restricted to annoying spam text messages – the sort that often arrive at 3am. But that's going to change, with mobile operators and content companies keen to make extra revenue, and big brands eager to find a way of reaching the young consumes who've been deserting print and TV in their droves.

One company that's already doing rather well from mobile advertising – without a spam SMS in sight – is AdMob. The company places simple text adverts on WAP sites, and is picking up some big clients. The company recently appointed Russell Buckley to be its managing director in Europe.

Buckley is something of a mobile advertising expert, being one half of the team behind the respected MobHappy blog, which covers all aspects of mobile technology. I talked to him about the new job, and how he sees mobile advertising developing.

Could the next killer app for mobile phones be satellite navigation? ALK certainly hopes so. The company has been selling its CoPilot Live application for PDAs and smartphones for some time now, but in the latter case it's always been dependent on a separate GPS receiver, which connects to your phone using Bluetooth.

However, developments like GPS-enabled phones and HSDPA networks point to a bright future for mobile satnav, and other location-based services. ALK has certainly come a long way since the 1970s, when it was working with the US government computing routes from Earth to Mars.

"From the start, we've been providing consulting, services or applications that help people get from A to B," says managing director Michael Kornhauser. "Now it's happening on mobiles."

It's part two of Tech Digest's interview with Bruce Renny from ROK. Following Wednesday's focus on FreeBeTV, the company's new mobile TV service, today it's time to talk about Viper, which ROK launched a couple of weeks ago touting it as a "free mobile VoIP" service.

However, it's since come in for some criticism online, for not being the over-the-air VoIP solution that you might expect, but instead letting you make calls from your mobile phone via Bluetooth to an internet-connected computer.

"All the system turns out to be is software that makes certain mobile phones glorified Bluetooth headsets for a PC-based VoIP network. So yeah, it’s mobile, as long as you’re within Bluetooth range of a PC that’s within range of a broadband connection," said MobHappy, while The Inquirer pointed out that the service doesn't yet support that many Bluetooth phones. Still, Renny is bullish about the potential of Viper, and its implications for the mobile industry.

I've seen the future, and it's monkeys reading the news. Honest. I saw it on FreeBeTV, a new mobile TV service from ROK which launched last week. Monkey News Network (MNN for short) is one of the five launch channels on the service – the others have less monkeys but more extreme sports, comedy, cartoons and movies.

It capped a busy period for ROK, which launched its Viper mobile Voice-over-IP service the week before, taking aim at operator call charges by allowing people to make internet calls if they're in range of a computer with Bluetooth.

ROK's marketing director Bruce Renny has plenty to say on both subjects, so I'm splitting the interview into two parts. Today deals with the mobile TV side, while on Friday I'll follow up with the VoIP area.

For many people, mobile search is what they do when they're about to leave the house, and suddenly realise they've left their Nokia down the back of the sofa. Yet in the mobile industry, it means something different. It's about internet-type search engines on your phone, allowing you to search for content either directly from your  handset, or on your mobile operator's portal (think Vodafone Live or O2 Active).

Some big names from the Web world are piling into mobile search, for example Google and Yahoo. But there are also several mobile-only search companies working with operators in this area. One such is U.S. firm JumpTap. I chatted to VP of marketing Eric McCabe to find out more about what people are searching for on their mobiles, and why he thinks his company can compete with the goliaths of the Internet world.

"Join our happy hivemind," invites the homepage of Cambrian House. "We're growing a collective to help decide the fate of sticky ideas. Resistance is - oh, you know."

This is open-source software, Jim, but not as we know it. It's got a sense of humour, for a start. Cambrian House is the company behind 'crowdsourcing'. In a nutshell, this involves soliciting cool software ideas, getting its community to vote on which are the best, then getting a collective of developers to actually build them, before sharing out any profits.

So far, Cambrian House has launched two market tests, with another to follow that's the coolest Web 2.0 idea Tech Digest has heard in a long time. More of that later. I talked to the company's MD Michael J. Sikorsky to find out more.

We spent the evening with BoysStuff.co.uk, not only speaking to Dr Mark Tilden, but also getting their Christmas predictions for the year ahead. There's also some random footage of the next generation Robosapien shaking this thang.

Tech Digest first wrote about HP’s Memory Spot technology in July, when it was announced. It’s basically a tiny piece of silicon that holds megabytes of data, and can be wirelessly interacted with using a special read-write device. It’s like a turbocharged RFID chip - although if RFID means nothing to you, just go with the ‘computer the size of a grain of rice’ metaphor.

Anyway, it’s got many applications, including medical (embedding Memory Spots into patient’s wrist-bands with full medical and drug records), business (attaching Memory Spots to paper documents with a full record of all the corrections and additions made to the text) and consumer (stick them on your photo prints to add music, commentary or ambient sound when touched with the right device).

I talked to Huw Robson, director of the Media Technologies Lab at HP Labs in Bristol, to find out more about what the Memory Spots could be used for, how long until they’re actually available, and some of the issues around them.

OK, admittedly this one is *slightly* longer than one minute, but it's the amazing Dr Mark Tilden, creator of Robosapien and the like. Catch him explaining the evolution, and discussing missing the toilet bowl when going for a wee.

In some ways, YouTube is just a big melting pot of stuff you've already seen on normal TV. I spent 20 minutes in tears of laughter at a succession of 'animal falls off furniture' clips last week (yes, I know I need to get out more), while there's enough ageing soft-rock vids to fill a week's worth of VH1. But plenty of it is original too, from bonkers lip-synchers through to worryingly-honest videobloggers.

Many of us could happily fill a whole evening surfing YouTube rather than settling down onto the sofa to watch proper TV. But why can't we have the best of both worlds, and watch a few hours of hilarious web clips from our sofas, on the telly rather than on a computer monitor? It'd be like Home Entertainment 2.0 (and I'm claiming that term if it ever takes off).

An announcement today from IPTV firm Amino seems to answer this request. The company is launching a device called the AmiNET125i, which is a set-top box "which allows consumers to browse and access video content from the Internet on their television". Great, YouTube on the telly! Well, not quite. But Amino's Mike Leigh explains what it's about, and how the company expects it to change web-heads' viewing habits. 

It's early days for our Tech Digest interviews, but they've already covered a range of subjects, from blogging and smart clothing through to super-fast mobile downloads, motion capture and, er, how Cud fans are getting into social bookmarking. See below for August's highlights.

• Six Apart co-founder Mena Trott on taking blogging to the masses with their new Vox platform, and why personal blogging isn't a dirty phrase.
  
• Ex-Egg founder Tom Ilube on how his new company garlik plans to tackle issues of personal information and digital identity.
  
• Eleksen CEO Robin Shephard on why the smart fabrics market is taking off, and how you'll soon be able to read text messages on your coat sleeves.
  
• Former Bang & Olufsen chief Anders Knutsen on why 3D mobile audio is going to be big, and what he thinks of B&O's first mobile phone.
  
• Fanpop CEO Dave Lu on bringing fans together through social-bookmarking communities – from The Simpsons to the Kaiser Chiefs.
  
• 3 UK's technical solutions director Graham Baxter on how HSDPA will speed up your mobile life, from downloading whole albums to streaming films.
  
• Rawflow's Mikkel Dissing and Ian Keeling on why P2P technology could revolutionise webcasting as we know it.
  
• OMG deputy chairman Julian Morris on the latest advances in motion-capture technology, and the link between Gollum and UK road signs.
  
• LUUP UK director Robert Perkins on why mobile payments are due a resurgence, and how his company will take on the might of PayPal Mobile.
  
• Roxio VP of European operations John Newman on DVD on Demand, and how we'll all be downloading and burning our own DVDs in the future.

Heaven knows, the Web is full of marvellous ways to kill an hour or two when you should be working, but Fanpop may be one of the most addictive. It launched in early August, and describes itself as a "social portal".

The idea is simple: if you're a fan of something - whether it's The Simpsons, viral videos, tea or 80s fashion - you can create a 'spot' which collects together links to news stories, video clips, blogs, photos, forums and other online resources. All these links are submitted by Fanpop users, who can vote on each other's links to highlight the best.

Several members of the Shiny Media team have been lost in niche Fanpop spots since discovering it, and the site already has more than 1,000 spots on it. So we thought we'd chat to CEO and co-founder Dave Lu to find out more about it.