This has been one hell of a start to the new year.

OK. Confession time. My contributions to this part of the site are in direct proportion to the amount of spare room I have on my desk which more or less sums up the atmosphere over at Acer HQ. Today I got a sneak preview of the Gartner results for 1Q 2010 and there’s very little between the top two brands (Acer and HP) and also I’ve seen what’s coming (and named most of it too) and can actually say that after a long stretch of CPU brags and first to market technologies, the PC market is about to become very interesting. It’s a battle and we’re definitely closing in which explains why I feel like I’ve aged 5 years this year alone!

And then you stumble across articles like this from the Inquirer that I posted a few days ago over on Facebook and you realize that the real advancements are being made much closer to home. It’s an exciting place to be (admit it – you never thought you’d hear Acer and exciting in the same sentence did you?).

It’s also significant to note that the Acer Guy’s Facebook page has been getting all the attention, as it’s the easiest thing in the world to copy and paste a link into the Facebook share system and have any of you been over to the Acer Guy YouTube channel recently? I’m going to putting a lot of effort into making it an Acer video platform as I’ve stumbled across a skill I didn’t know I had. To see what it is, Google “How to recover an Aspire One” and tell me what you find in the #1 spot…

Anyway, as far as The Acer Guy itself is concerned, it’s no secret that this site’s about to get a much needed update. But what I’ve asked for will hopefully blow you away and hopefully help us pass the 1 million visits mark this year (we’re at 230k so far)

You asked for a better forum layout so the forum is going to switch over to vbulletin which should make things easier to file and search through.

OK, that’s you happy. No it’s my turn.

I’m finally going to be able to launch what for me personally will be the biggest success story of my life through the Causes page which I’ve mentioned in previous posts. Only what I’ve asked is for a master widget to take care of master collections and a mini widget you’ll be able to use on your own sites and social networking sites for your own initiatives. Let’s say you liked the cause we were supporting and decided to do a sponsored marathon to help out. You would use your own mini collection widget which would then deposit your contributions into the master collection widget. Cool eh? That way we can extend the reach of anything we decide to support almost exponentially.

I’m considering a smartphone app from these guys so that you can keep up with your own RSS feeds, forum posts and other stuff on your Android phones and Blackberries (and iPhones for those of you still there)…

I’ve also come to the decision that this place needs more commercial interactivity so am going to be opening up a classifieds section with a plug in from wpclassipress where shops like Staples (where did that come from I wonder?) can advertise the offer of the week or people like Morris can actually sell their expertise and become overnight millionaires (thoroughly deservedly too!) for an extremely reasonable fee.

One more thing: There is a very real possibility of us publishing a paper-based magazine through MagCloud and here we could share some of the spoils. The actual business model isn’t fully laid out yet but I know there’s unpublished talent in a lot of you so stand up and get noticed!

Sound good? Then stay tuned. There’s a LOT more in store.