You may or may not have heard about a recent preview, so to speak, of Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit, a movie due in cinemas at the end of this year. This has created some concern and confusion over the film. Now before I continue, the aim of this blog isn’t to go into depth about these concerns specifically, because to be honest there are many websites already talking about it and I simply want to suggest some of the potential repercussions.

NASA's Kepler Mission has been running since 2009 and is currently searching our region of the Milky Way for habitable planets. So far, it has spotted about 2,300 and confirmed 61 planets. Data artist Jer Thorp and John Underkoffler, the designer who created the interfaces in Minority Report, have produced a user interface that lets us find out how these new planets look.

Responsible for producing a visually captivating film that unfolds the story of the re-construction of the World Trade Centre, VFX house Piranha were faced with the monstrous task of rendering data of epic proportions. For Piranha the solution came in the form of a BOXX workstation.

HP has partnered with DreamWorks since the beginning, helping the business mature into the well-oiled animation machine we know today. HP is responsible for the hardware platforms at the very heart of the company, with a storage infrastructure that allows the team to share data quickly and easily over a global network, as well as state of the art workstations and monitors for creating detailed and realistic effects. In the video above, the team at DreamWorks discuss how HP technology has contributed significantly to the company staying on the cutting edge and how this technology brought to life the 2011 production of Puss in Boots.

Many of you will recognise Boston Limited for their range of bespoke IT and server solutions - we have mentioned them on this blog on a number of occasions. Boxx workstations, Quattro nodes and Igloo servers are products that have made a significant impact in their relative markets. What’s great about Boston is that they pay attention to the changing world of technology, and have a knack for keeping ahead by introducing the latest and greatest bits of technology into their products. This is exactly what customers want and in so doing they make new technologies more accessible.

Last month we asked architects and designers to enter a competition to win an HP mobile workstation with V-Ray for 3ds Max software. The competition is now over, and we have to say we were really pleased with the response we had. It was great to see so many excited about the prospect of winning these two powerful technologies. A large number of you got all three answers correct but unfortunately there could be only one winner, and picked at random the winner is Simon Jennings of Jennings Designs, Nottinghamshire.

After an interesting last week in our Los Angeles studios, I have come back to what seems to have been a week dominated with announcements about the state of our education system. But my round up of news is not just about education news, and this week, there is news about what the London Olympic stadium is going to look like, details of Cinecite's internship program and lots more...

I have been a commuter for the past 20 years and I have had a lot of time to observe the small train eco-system. Over the years, it has been an incredible platform (excuse the pun!) to witness the general public's shifts in mentality and how technology has reached all areas of their lives.

The more obsevant among you will have noticed that I didn't publish my round up for a couple of weeks - apologies for this, but I decided it was time to take a well deserved holiday. Still, I am back now, and here is my usual Weekly Round-Up of News, with stories that I have picked up over the past week. If you have suggestions for stories I missed, just drop me a line or post a comment.

Here is my usual Weekly Round-Up of News, with stories that I have picked up over the past week. If you have suggestions for stories I missed, just drop me a line or post a comment.