One day after Netflix made its debut in the UK and Ireland, Roku has announced that two of its streaming players, the Roku LT and the Roku 2 XS, are heading to Britain too and are already available for pre-order on Amazon.

The Roku LT, which is billed as the lowest-cost option for streaming video and music directly to a TV, over Wi-Fi and without a PC, retails at £49.99. The Roku 2 XS, which adds casual games like Angry Birds to the offering and also sports an Ethernet, a MicroSD and a USB port, costs £99.99.

Personally, I’ve been waiting for a laptop which just folds right over hinges and turns into a full-blown touchscreen tablet for a while. Like, why did Apple not do this with the Mac Air? Ah – because it wants us to wait for the next iteration no doubt. No matter, it looks like Lenovo might have cracked the first version of this form factor with its Windows 8 powered IdeaPad Yoga.

Since Windows 8 is supposed to work on both PCs and tablets, the Yoga’s 17mm thick Ultrabook could be an ideal showcase for this OS. The 13.3-inch laptop feels heavier than the average tablet, but the laptop+tablet combination could find enthusiastic buyers amongst professionals and home users.

Aurasma, a startup with a new kind of augmented reality visual browser, is part of the mobile apps showdown at CES, and I got a taste of their technology in the somewhat unlikely setting of the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas, courtesy of the company’s Matt Mills. Luckily this proves no object as, presented with an image that’s been tagged with content, it can bring that image to life with a video or animation, as you’ll see.

At CES the company has launched its new 3D engine, which enables, for instance, a children’s pop-up book to come to life with animated 3D dinosaurs which move around and roar. While there are other apps doing a similar thing, such as Blippar, Aurasma is banking on its user-generated content features to allow it to proliferate more virally.

Netflix has made its debut in the UK and Ireland in early 2012, just like they promised, having worked out video content licensing deals with the likes of BBC Worldwide and MGM.

Users in the UK and Ireland can now subscribe to Netflix to watch available content on their connected TVs, computers, tablets, game consoles and mobile devices. In the UK, Netflix will be bumping heads with Amazon-owned LOVEFiLM, the well-established movie and TV series streaming service.

CBS Interactive is exiting the German IT publishing market, selling its stable of local sites – ZDNet.de, Silicon.de and CNET.de – to NetMediaEurope (which also owns Gizmodo.de, ITespresso.de and Channelbiz.de).

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Some 24 hours after we broke the news that Facebook had engaged Moo to be the sole creator of its new ‘social’ business cards service we have some exclusive numbers on what that deal is translating into.

The promotion of 200,000 free packs of 50 cards is on a first come, first served basis. However the offer is capped at 5,000 orders per day (that’s 250,000 cards per day) in order, Moo says, to ensure a “strong ethos of customer service and to make it fair.”

In a move which is likely to catapult UK startup Moo onto a new international stage, the company has become the only one to deeply integrate its ‘social business cards’ with the Facebook platform today. Taking pictures from users’ Facebook Timeline information and photography, users will now be able to create 50 personalised business cards for £10/$15. But in a promotion from today Moo is giving away cards to the first 200,000 users, equivalent to 10 million cards.

The cards can feature a different photo image on the front of the cards together with a favourite quote or saying on the reverse. This will doubly act as a promo for Facebook’s Timelime as people will be able to take snapshots of their lives from their Timelines and put them onto the cards.

The Financial Times has acquired London-based application development firm Assanka, which built a nifty HTML5 web app – and other applications – for the publisher.

(Hat tip to Benedict Evans)

FT staffers such as Katie Morley and Jonathan Wheatley started spreading the news on Twitter, garnering retweets from FT.com managing director Rob Grimshaw and PR rep Tom Glover, who confirmed the acquisition to me but declined to share more details.

Back in July last year we came across Arachnys, a startup part of the Springboard accelerator programme. A cross between Control Risks and a project to analyse ‘big data’ about Brazil, India, China, and Russia, we described it as ‘Google for emerging markets’. Well clearly it’s caught the imagination of some as it’s now raised a seed round led by Peter Cowley of Martlet which was participated in by Cambridge and London-based angels including Cambridge Capital Group and Cambridge Angels.

Unruly, the social video advertising company based out of London, has inked a $25 million Series A investment from Amadeus Capital Partners, Van den Ende & Deitmers and the new UK Business Growth Fund. This is the largest ever funding for a private company in the social video space and will be used to grow the company internationally. Unruly was this week caught up in a controversy surrounding Google’s campaign for Chrome, where, in paying bloggers to run videos about Chrome it was accused of being a party to influencing Chrome’s search engine rankings, in violation of Google’s own policies. Unruly has denied the charges saying the video players are wrapped in Javascript and don’t influence search engine rankings. However, one site was caught linking back to Chrome, hence the accusations.