• Hull city council has joined forces with a cryptocurrency developer to launch a bitcoin spinoff designed solely for use in the city. HullCoin is being "mined" by the council, and will be awarded as a reward for voluntary work, as well as given out by food banks with aid packages. The aim is to spark the creation of a local economy, similar in scope to the Brixton Pound in south London.

• Britain's copyright laws are being tweaked to legalise copying music from a CD to an MP3 player. Despite the widespread use of iPods and their ilk, it has always been illegal in the UK to "rip" a CD on to them. The law has remained largely unenforced, but a new advisory from the Intellectual Property Office finally recommends the practice be legalised.

• The days of trying to plug in a USB cable, failing, turning it the other way up, trying again, failing again, turning it back over to the other side, trying a third time, and succeeding, may be coming to an end. The consortium behind the connector standard has revealed the next type of USB plug, Type-C, will be symmetric and reversible: the orientation will no longer matter.

• Amazon's Fire TV becomes the retailer's first entry into the living room. The $99 (£60) box plugs into users' TVs through an HDMI cable and lets them stream anything available through its Prime Instant Video service. With a voice-controlled remote and video gaming functionality, the Fire TV promises to be tough competition for the likes of the Apple TV and Google's Chromecast

• Video service Vine has introduced direct video messaging, in the biggest update since launching more than a year ago. The service, which is owned by Twitter, allows users to send its distinctive six-second videos to each other in private – and even to send it to friends who aren't on the service at all.