BT Openreach is rolling out faster fibre to the cabinet (FTTC) broadband to ISPs from early April, which it claims will increase downstream speed from 40Mbps to 80Mbps.

The upgrade is part of BT’s £2.5bn commercial roll-out of superfast fibre broadband in the UK. The telecoms firm said the infrastructure currently delivers up to 40Mbps downloads and up to 10Mbps uploads. It claims the upgrade marks a significant milestone in its development of the technology, and is expected to deliver a significant boost to households and businesses where the service is available…

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Apple has announced that it will invest more than $10bn in a stock buyback scheme over the course of three years, and will spend around $10bn per year on paying out stock dividends.

Tim Cook, chief executive of Apple, said that the scheme would begin in the company’s next financial year, which starts in September. He cited the plans during a conference call on Monday in which Cook outlined Apple’s plans to do with its $100bn (£63bn) cash reserves.

In addition to launching the share repurchase program, Apple also said it would launch a dividend scheme for shareholders to reward their investment. It expects the first dividend payments of $2.65 per share to begin in the fourth quarter of its fiscal 2012 year…

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London Underground passengers will be able to tap into Wi-Fi networks at 80 of the 217 tube stations within a few months and 127 stations by the end of the year.

However it remains unclear when or whether the WiFi coverage to be provided by Virgin Media will be extended to the whole of the London Underground network, according to the Telegraph.

Commuters will be able to connect to the internet at stations which are Wi-Fi enabled, but not while travelling between stations…

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You may already know that IBM invented the hard disk in 1956 with RAMAC, a wardrobe-sized 5MB behemoth. You may not know that this was the start of a search that IBM vowed to continue “so long as men need ever more powerful machines to extend the farthest reaches of the human mind”. But it was, and here’s the proof.

Get your own farthest reaches extended now by watching this truly stirring promotional film made by Big Blue to help sell the revolutionary idea of revolving data.

It’s got the lot — stentorian voice-over, serious men in serious suits, laboratories full of Hollywood-grade equipment and central-casting researchers, and a March of Progress under the Banner of Science vibe that will get you jonesing for a buzz-cut hairstyle, Baudot paper tape and chrome fins on your Ford…

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Eye-tracking specialist Tobii released a new version of its eye tracking technology — the Tobii IS-2 Eye Tracker module — recently at CeBIT.

The company says its technology is now more responsive and can fit in a wider range of hardware, including gaming machines.

The technology uses two infrared projectors to illuminate the users’ pupils and two small cameras to record their positions as they change, then feed this data to the onboard processors, which then output the person’s eye position, pupil size and gaze position…

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