Although there's still a few weeks to go before we release the Public Beta of PCM.daily's 2012 DB, we figured it'd be a good idea to give you a little preview.

This Pre-Beta Version contains the updated teams and rosters, 2012 graphics for about 33 teams along with palmares for all World Tour and HC races of 2011. It also contains the 2012 profiles of 11 races, including the Giro d'Italia and World Championship, and compared to the PCM.daily Expansion Pack, it also contains lots of new real profiles (rather than the usual Cyanide recycled stages). There's also a bunch of new variants - now 8 Tour de France variants in total, 6 Vuelta variants and 10 World Championship variants.

So what's missing? Well, first of all, the stats have hardly been updated yet. We have imported the equipment from Fenian's Add-On, but other than those changes, it's left pretty much unchanged. Lastly, the team rosters were updated between December and January, meaning that some rosters are not fully updated. Obviously, they will be before the release of the Public Beta. Also, new team shirts are being released daily, so this release will be outdated almost instantly - which is also why we're withholding the final release until end January, start February.

With the release, we hope we can get some general feedback - are there any teams you'd like to be included, any specific races etc. Also, while the World Tour teams will be updated stats-wise, it's less likely that we will spend a lot of time on the teams below World Tour level. Knowing that we have a lot of experts out there, don't hesistate to send us your stat suggestions - preferably by e-mail (admin@pcmdaily.com). If you do, please be specific and argue for the changes you'd like to be implemented.

With that said, let's go straight to the download. Since it's a Pre-Beta, it's only available through this thread and not through the download section. Also note that the Pre-Beta requires that the PCM.daily Expansion Pack V1 is installed.

Site owners: Please note that this is not intended for widespread release. If you wish to promote this release, please refer to this news article or the forum thread. We can't prevent you from uploading it whereever you live, but we kindly ask you not to.

These short news bring the memories back to the Weekly News the site used to have long ago - but it's not ;-)

First screenshots of 2012 DB released
As we said in the beginning of this week, the PCM.daily DB is progressing really well. We can't eloborate too much on the features right now, but it's basically what you'd expect: 2012 shirts, equipment and routes, more races in general, more variants, 2011 palmares - and so on.

Anyway, if you'd like to have a sneak peak, we have uploaded the first couple of screenshots of the database in action here.

Voting ends today
The 2011 PCM.daily Awards are ending at 23:59 CET today, so don't forget to vote while you can. There's 27 different categories, so it can take quite a while to get through them all.

Winners will be announced next week.

Fantasy Betting restarted
Lastly, as some of you have noticed, a new season of the Fantasy Betting has started with the 2012 Australia Road Championship. This also means it's time to honour the champion of 2011 who is ... pjuskepels!

2nd was Rauling (making it a 1-2 for Denmark) with Portuguese p3druh in 3rd.

You can see the full ranking here.

With the calendar having been turned to 2012, the attention is now on the many 2012 databases for PCM which are bound to be released at one point or another during the year.

The good news are that some databases are already available. The most well-known of them is Altehacke's dB(a) 2012 which was first released in December and since has been regularly updated with the latest one being from yesterday. It's still work in progress, but it contains most of the new teams and transfers, including the new teams' graphics, three 2012 races and other fine features.

The DB is not available in PCM.daily's download section (because of the size), but clear instructions are available in Altehacke's thread.

Some of you may also have used the abnormally large DB called Full Cycling Manager. The team behind it is also working on a 2012 DB, but while you're waiting for that, a member has released an unofficial transfers update, last updated in December. You can get all the files on the Cyanide forum.

Several other databases are in the works - and I suppose it's also time to confirm that PCM.daily is releasing a 2012 DB. I've been reluctant about confirming this due to lack of time, but thanks to amazing help from several PCM.daily members, we've been progressing well.

The team currently consists of myself, Luigi, Alakagom, felix_29, KenL, Sykkel_Freak and Siwi while PCM.daily admins roturn and fenian_1234 are also helping out.

I'm not a fan of setting deadlines too early in the process, but we're aiming at getting a version ready by the end of this month / start of February.

Members, suit up!

A week ago you sent in your nominations for 27 different categories, and now we have picked the final nominees for the 2011 PCM.daily Awards. Therefore, it's now up to you to decide the winners.

The rules are pretty simple: You can vote for one nominee in each of the 27 categories - but only once. You have a week to do this which means that the voting will end on Sunday the 8th of January 2012 23:59 CET.

So what are you waiting for? Go vote!

There's no reason to stay up for the awards to begin - they won't until tomorrow - so instead, here's a huge Happy New Year - both for those of you who have already jumped into 2012 and for those of you who are about to.

See you on the other side ;-)