Historical models of media creation, delivery and experience are breaking down and being remade in a dizzying variety of combinations, as the convergence of broadcast, online and physical media meets the referral, distribution and value models of a completely online, socially networked world. Richard helps Two Worlds' clients to plot a path through this maze of possibilities, identifying and defining the business models, technology architectures and service environments that create viable, flexible and scaleable businesses.

Richard has a history of combining his business, creative and technical experience to create successful, innovative and award-winning products and online services for corporate environments, in consumer entertainment and in public social networks. He works with other entrepreneurs, think tanks and strategic consultancies in the area of disruptive thinking and organisational transformation, bringing to bear his particular focus on combining innovative thought models with ubiquitous technologies.

Richard helped instigate and develop the first major online presence for Comic Relief’s Red Nose Day in 1999 (which took £500,000 in online donations) and was one of the organisers of the second of the seminal Digital Biota conferences on emergence, artificial life and social organisation. He developed the Ubiquity model of identity, trust, value and interaction in connected communities – Two Worlds is now turning that model into a tool for the rapid development of integrated online content and collaboration services. In Rwanda, DR Congo and Uganda, Richard has created technology and media services and training for the conservation of the endangered Mountain Gorilla population. For the EU, Richard has consulted on Research programmes in Emotional Computing, Ubiquitous Systems and Information Ecologies. He has also developed an intelligent news aggregator, whose first beta application is in the news element of the BlueGlo.be Climate Change awareness site.

Most recently, RIchard has been working with Russia's leading film and television distributor to design a integrated media distribution service that addresses the very specific needs and demands of the Russian market and to build the technology and service relationships needed to deliver the initial service.

Since late 2007, he has worked with BIOSS, the global management consultancy, designing the overall knowledge architecture, business intelligence and service extension models that will help position and support BIOSS as it extends and enhances its unique intellectual capital in organisational and personal flow.

In March 2008, he submitted his ideas on the future of media delivery and interaction to the BBC's 2008 Innovation Labs competition. This emerged as winner of the Labs and has evolved into SlipStream, an architecture for Social Media. SlipStream facilitates the integration, delivery and sharing of broadcast and online programming with social network services. SlipStream was presented at IBC 2008, with the BBC now funding prototype development.

Richard is also a an award-winning photographer and writer, traveller and conservationist. He is a qualified advanced motorcycling instructor, a keen cyclist and a very former ski racer. He is an amateur Egyptologist and is jointly owned by several Maine Coon cats. He and his partner are currently renovating their 200-year-old farmhouse in the Scottish Highlands, working to combine (hopefully without too much loss of hair) the conservation of a historic building with the creation of a modern, inspirational and energy-efficient home.

If you are a member of LinkedIn, view his full profile here.

After studying at the University of Strathclyde, Jon worked with Glasgow-based consultancy Neil Baxter Associates from the early 1990s as a graphic, multimedia and web designer. His work included designs for many major clients, including Glasgow City Council, Greater Glasgow Health Board, Glasgow Building Preservation Trust, The Lighthouse, Scottish Enterprise and Sunderland Arc. The range of projects included major exhibitions, interactive touchscreen kiosks, promotional material and trail guides for festivals and events, books, websites and feasibility studies.

Most recently, Jon has taken the ideas of Ubiquity and turned them into a social media development system, also called Ubiquity, which now forms the basis of Two Worlds' development services. He is responsible for the interfaces and core development of the architecture for SlipStream.

Jon lives at the heart of Europe in Berlin, where the beer is good, plentiful and cheap!

We now have some major, and majorly innovative, developments under way, in both business and technology. Watch this space – there's more to come.

And that's now triggered another change: since 1999, Two Worlds has been my personal vehicle, and both the company and this web site have reflected that. The latter has been a news site, intermittent blog, occasional soapbox and generally reflective of my personal interests and opinions. Two Worlds is now expanding, enhancing our strategic consultancy and product and service design with the capability to prototype and develop the ideas that emerge from these exercises. More soon.

Jonathan rejoined the BBC in 1996, working firstly on DAB and then Digital Television for the Research and Development department at Kingswood Warren. It was here that he developed the world's first interactive TV broadcasts in MHEG. In 1999 he joined the newly-created BBC Interactive TV department at Bush House, where he worked with the technical team to deliver a whole raft of services, including the ground-breaking Wimbledon Interactive service and Digital Text (the first version of the BBC's 24/7 services) on the Sky platform. This work cemented his reputation as one of the key technical strategists in the interactive TV field. Jonathan went on to become BBC Interactive TV's technical liaison for all third party software providers, testing and appraising their products, and giving him an unrivaled knowledge of the interactive TV tools market.

Jonathan now works in Scotland, where he works as a composer and Technical Development Producer, concentrating on technical developments that enable companies to deliver world class interactive services. Jonathan was a winner of the BBC Innovation Labs 2008 and has now joined forces with Two Worlds to develop the next generation of interactive TV platform.

Dear Mr Gunter,
I'm having a little trouble with this: you're part of a business where customer demand for your services is rising on the back of demand driven, in part, by a national broadcaster who is finally taking an enlightened and increasingly energetic view of their own relationship with their market. You're in the enviable position of being able to satisfy that demand and all you need to remember is that, if people want more, they'll pay more: surely an entrepreneur's dream?

It's also desperately predictable and desperately, desperately characteristic of most of the current crop of service businesses in the UK: investment appears to be a dirty word, as is quality of service: the outlook is relentlessly short-term, the strategy (for want of a better word) is invariably that of the lowest common denominator and the term customer service is treated as though its mere utterance were the ultimate blasphemy. Your initial market is saturating and, rather than differentiate your offerings on quality, you're running in fear of actually sticking your neck out and doing something.

It's not like this wasn't going to happen: media delivery has been converging on IP-based technology for more than a decade, and usually delivered over the public Internet: In 1997, part of a study I did for AT&T Labs was a research paper (The 3D Internet) which examined the impact of streamed audio and video services on internet capacity. My conclusion then was that, given the choice, I wouldn't start from here - packet-based systems being inherently inefficient carriers of streamed and broadcast data and all that – but that sufficient economies of scale would in time accrue to make the technology and backbone work tolerably well, as long as service providers accepted that they couldn't ever stand still.

We're already seeing a number of protocols being throttled if certain ISPs regard them as 'trivial' or undesireable – as someone who professionally works with P2P networks (to take one instance), I see this all the time - a transfer that runs at 20Kbps in the UK will instantly jump to 400Kbps when I switch on my machine in Moscow. All this in lieu of the continuous investment in backbone and switching that's needed at all levels in a technology-driven market. This is not, and likely never will be, a static market. If you or your investors don't understand that, go back to selling baked beans.

The British government is no better: Effective communications are one of the greatest single competitive resources a modern economy can have, and Britain is rapidly falling behind not just other European, North American and Far Eastern economies, but is being leapfrogged by emerging economies like Russia, whose ISPs are already running technologies whose existence UK providers barely acknowledge. In the UK, we've also seen the national backbone given away by the then government to BT, then a private monopoly (and which remains so in many areas) but, then as now, without any strategic foresight to effectively mandate and manage BT's Universal Service Obligations (USOs) and wholesale charges to ISPs. BT has spent every year since trying wriggle out of honouring its obligations rather than actually investing to create the services that people need. So we have the double whammy of underinvestment and lack of strategic thinking by both ISPs and the primary network provider (BT's 21CN network rollout completely ignores the nettle of investment in last mile services, where the UK is still largely dependent on 19th Century technology). Just one case in point: BT recently had to be brow-beaten into spending £150k to upgrade capacity into our glen. They did so with a copper cable, creating a minor improvement in capacity which is already taken up, when for about 1/3 of that, it could have provided high-speed wireless Wi-Max service to the entire glen.

So, Mr Gunter and your contemporaries, get out there, thank the BBC for creating demand for what you do, think of a real market strategy to satisfy that demand, (and by all means, keep kicking the government and OFCOM to restructure BT's wholesale offerings) invest against the strategy, provide the service that your customers want and stop whinging: are you really so determined to make a problem out of an opportunity?

When I was ten, I was taken by my father to see 2001 where, apart from the obligatory twenty-minute period of uncomprehending boredom during the infamous psychedelic transit sequence, I was utterly entranced by the scope of the unfolding vision and grand themes. I entered that Edinburgh cinema determined to be a fighter pilot and left it set on becoming – no, not an astronaut – but a designer of robots. Megalomania sets in early.

My teenage years were spent consuming every scrap of Sci-fi – good, bad and downright awful – that I could spend my meagre income on, with anything of Arthur C Clarke's being right at the top of the list. Having worked my way through the Clarke canon, I realised that, for me, his work fell into two great categories: the Big Ideas and the Big Passions. The former were the great epic space-centred novels, breathtaking in the imagination and somewhat detached in the characterisation. The latter were his books that described two parts of our own world – the world beneath the waves (The Deep Range) and the island of Sri Lanka, thinly disguised by its Sanskrit name of Taprobane in The Fountains of Paradise. It was in those books that his prose came alive and carried to his readers' hearts the beauty of what he saw and his awe of and love for his subjects.

It took a couple of decades, but I finally did become a designer of robots, albeit not in any form that remotely could have been predicted, when working on the robot characters for our game, Starship Titanic. It was also at that time that I was both fortunate to meet him through the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, of which he was a patron and to make my first visit to that most beautiful and troubled island of Sri Lanka. On arriving at our hotel in the heart of the country, I'd not even had a chance to rinse the red dust of travel from my face when the hotel manager handed me a fax: "Heard you were in the country. Would be delighted if you could visit in Colombo. Arthur Clarke.". An invitation not to refuse. We arrived at his compound in Colombo for afternoon tea, and spent the afternoon and much of the evening on an eclectic conversational tour of the galaxy, starting with the poor quality of his Internet connection (ironically, delivered via a geostationary satellite whose very notion he'd invented), ranging through his views on the Drake equation and ending up on our shared concern for the future of life on our planet, via multiple digressions and anecdotes. All this whilst attempting a guarded friendliness with his affable but mildly incontinent pug – showing willing whilst avoiding damp shoes. Since then, we'd had a intermittent e-mail correspondence, mainly around the work of his charitable Clarke Foundation – he always answered, was never worse than mildly and politely acerbic in the face of daft questions and was never less than pin-sharp and entertaining in equal measure.

In the remembering of the man and his work, I can't do any better than use exactly the same Rudyard Kipling quote that he used at the end of an article published only last month in Sri Lanka's Sunday Leader:

"If I have given you delight by aught that I have done, let me lie quiet in that night which shall be yours anon; And for the little, little span the dead are borne in mind, seek not to question other than, the books I leave behind.".

It's perhaps fitting that, as I write this late at night in the depths of the Scottish Highlands, to me he has still died tomorrow.

You also might just have noticed that the personal pronoun used has shifted from "I" to "We". One of the other projects at the Lab turned out to be completely complementary to mine, so I'm very pleased to say that I've joined forces with Jonathan Marshall, pioneer of digital interactive television and all-round person of multiple talents and interests. The third member of our team is Jon Jardine, computer scientist, graphic and UI designer extraordinaire and erstwhile owner of the finest pub in the Highlands.

Our initial pitch on Monday had been characterised by its length, ambition and a deal of incomprehension on the part of the audience. Although if certain members hadn't started the interruptions just as I got to, "Hello, I'm…" bit, we might have brought a tad more clarity from the chaos. The comments however were hugely useful in making us realise how and where we needed to pare, hone and polish.

Our second attempt, this afternoon, went from the computational equivalent of designing a Capability Brown landscape to that of growing a few nice vegetables in a cold frame, causing more confusion in the audience as they hurriedly ducked under our swinging conceptual pendulum. Tomorrow, we'll try aiming for somewhere in between.

All winners of the first round process of the 2008 BBC Innovation Labs, we're pitching a range of projects that cover pretty much everything from speech-synthesized news (of the undeserving, delivered by the unconscious to the uncaring) through collaborative drama and onwards to a concept design for a black hole-powered, Wi-Max enabled, social-networking soup tureen. It's just possible that one of those may not actually be on the list, but similar ideas abound.

The denouement comes at the end of the week, as the teams all gather in supplication to the Conclave of Commissioners, who perform their ancient Reithian rites (the local goat population is already looking decidedly nervous), before sending up either the white smoke of success or the black smoke of burning pitch documents. We've just had our introductory, "I want to be a tree" loosen-up-and-feel-foolish session, so where else can the week go save onwards and upwards?

I actually submitted two ideas to the Labs: the first was carefully considered, structured, drafted, honed, reviewed, re-written, polished and buffed – it of course vanished without trace. The second was the product of a bottle of wine, frustration with my Sky+ Box and the consequent resurrection of an idea I'd had for interactive TV about a decade ago, all written and dumped on the Labs web site in the last forty minutes before the deadline. That idea, for a semantic video system now called Slipstream, is what won the day.

To complement my arm-waving, I devised a simple model to help demonstrate and explain the accelerating curve of hype, bubble, bust and disillusion that typically accompanies the development of new technologies and services. With tongue only slightly in cheek, I called this the Hype Cycle, and it's proved a useful way of helping people understand the interplay between capability and perception in investment, marketing and strategic decision-making.

This isn't the place for a detailed description of the Hype Cycle, but suffice it to say that, at its most basic, it comprises two curves: the Hype Curve & the Reality Curve. The Hype Curve shows the market perception of a product or service over time, as it ramps up to a bubble of of market and media hype, slides into disillusion and retrenchment as the hype fails to match delivered capability and, if it survives, perception and capability align to generate sustainable growth.

The Reality Curve shows the development of measurable capability and benefit over time – accelerating somewhat as the growth of perception generates additional investment, and slowing as post-crash disillusion reduces available resources, before ramping up again as perception and capability align, often driven by the convergent maturation of multiple complementary technologies. When the capability of the Reality Curve rises above the perception of the Hype Curve, we're into that "gap into reality" where a a product or service is effectively under-valued in the marketplace – a typical post-crash situation.

I developed this model in 1992/1993, while working on the beta program for the Apple Newton and consulting on the likely impact of the public Internet. And rather helpful it proved too - one or two intersecting curves that could be trivially sketched on a lunchtime napkin. Which is exactly what I did at Fourth International World Wide Web Conference in Boston in December 1995 – drawing the basic Hype Curve for the benefit of a table full of analysts and consultants with whom I was having lunch. And thought no more of it.

It was some years later that I came across the Gartner Group's version of the Hype Cycle, which could best be described as an "interesting" experience. Now fast forward to last week, and the very good talk I went to at the LSE on Synthetic Biology. In his presentation, Professor Chris Mason used the Hype Cycle to illustrate his excellent talk on the rise of technology driven by Genomics. So, with the model becoming ubiquitous in its application, I thought it time to add my not uninterested contribution to the public record.

So let's consider two possibilities: firstly, that the Hype Cycle was an idea whose time had come, where demand stimulated parallel and independent exercises in imagination. I'm happy to accept that that may indeed be the case. The other possibility may be considered a tad less generous. Now I'd always intended this to be a model for the public domain – in matters such as this, I regard the currency of knowledge to be attribution. Right now however, I'm feeling a little short changed.

Date: Thursday 15 March 2007, 7:30pm
Venue: The Royal Geographic Society, 1 Kensington Gore, London SW7 2AR
Price: £12.00 - You'll find more information and ticket information here.

Richard Leakey is a paleontologist, archaeologist, conservationist an author of several books including the acclaimed wildlife management book Wildlife Wars: My Battle to Save Kenya's Elephants. In this talk Dr Leakey will draw on his own experiences in Kenya as founder and Director of the Kenya Wildlife Service and as the Head of Kenya's Civil Service to reflect on the successes, current problems and future challenges facing wildlife management in East Africa.

Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a Founder Patron of Save the Rhino International, actively involved in conservation and interested in exploration, science, comedy and music. Douglas developed his deep-seated interest in wildlife conservation during a 1985 visit to Madagascar, which eventually resulted in a book (Last Chance to See) about the plight of species facing extinction. Douglas Adams died unexpectedly in 2001 at the age of 49. These Memorial Lectures continue to explore the themes in which Douglas was so interested.

The proceeds of the evening will be split between Save the Rhino International and the Environmental Investigation Agency, two charities supported by Douglas Adams.

Now they're here. The cavalry, whilst not exactly charging over the hill, can at least be heard trumpeting in the distance. The long-rumoured iPhone is now a reality and, for once, even the wilder rumours seem to have been far short of the mark: Like the mythical number 27 bus, we've been waiting since the far side of forever for a widescreen iPod, for the phone itself and for a generically useful and useable data comms device. Now all three come along at once. In one device.

Which takes us straight back to the Jack'O'Trades experience of all-in-one devices – have Apple tried to do too much in one object and are they about to fall spectacularly flat on their minimalist designer faces? On the basis of first description, and trying to disentangle fact from hype when removed from the proximity of Steve's Reality Distortion Field, it looks like this might just be the coming of age of the ubiquitous device: it does appear to have the trademark simplicity of interface and functional clarity that marks genuinely iconic tools, rather many of which have come from this same company.

So let's recap what we now know to be on offer: Firstly, the screen - it's a 3.5" widescreen format display, pretty much de rigeur for the size of device. But it's a 160dpi resolution. Which matters: Given that it's generally accepted that print becomes untiring to read at 600dpi, I used to assume that we'd need to pretty much get to that level with our displays before the electronic interface stood a chance of supplanting paper as a long-form reading tool. An conversation with Alan Kay about eight years ago disabused me of that notion – he pointed out that, because of the way in which we perceive the self-illuminated nature of the computer display, we perceive similar levels of resolutions at about 200dpi. Which isn't far off the 160dpi of the iPhone. Just as long as the iconography is scaled to suit – one of the problems with Windows Mobile devices is that that doesn't happen – everything is just too damn small and too poorly smoothed.

Then there's the stylus-free interface. This is a good thing in principle and will save much time groveling around under car seats, in aircraft and less salubrious places in search of small pointy bits of plastic. And it's got a button: just the one apparently, which will be a great advance over devices like the Tytn, which is nigh on impossible to pick up without pressing something and starting some unintended and possibly expensive process.

Its touch interface is gesture-driven, which will either work well or it won't, in the latter case inspiring gestures of another kind altogether. We can only hope that Apple have learnt their Newton lesson well - the handwriting system on that device was underpowered in its first iteration and, by the time of the Newton 2000, which did work, and very well, the world, or rather the world's media, had lost interest. It does use multi-finger gesturing, including a 'pinch' gesture to zoom images – if the two-finger stuff works as well for tapping, dragging and scrolling as it does on the current generation of MacBook trackpads, it'll be very good indeed.

And all that runs atop Mac OS X. Now this is a surprise: Along with many others, I was expecting the iPhone to feature an expanded iPod-style OS. Having a robust unix on a phone is a very very nice touch and should allow huge scope for creative hacking. This I like, a lot. With Mac OS X comes Core graphics, Dashboard-style Widgets for the interface and a usefully robust security and integrity architecture. It should also mean that application developers for the iPhone should be off to a flying start (but see Yoz's comment, left…). Update: I've now had it semi-officially confirmed that the iPhone is in fact a closed platform, so unless Apple are going to start licensing developers and providing the necessary toolkits, the iPhone will remain a task-specific device rather than a true soft platform. At this point the word, "Pillocks" is springing unbidden but irresistibly to mind.

And it's an iPod, with the no-brain addition of that high-res widescreen. On the 8GB model that gives the potential for 60ish movies (depending on how much of the 8GB is available for media use) at decent native resolution with H.264/AVC encoding (I'm easily getting a feature film into 128MB using this technique). What will make or break this device as an iPod however is whether or not Apple have managed to transfer the iPod's clarity and ease of use into the OS X-based iPhone, with all its additional functionality. Time will tell, but I'm not about to sell my Nano any time soon. It does look like the iPod interface on the iPhone is more akin to iTunes, using the Coverflow album browsing technology bought and introduced by Apple last year.

Other thoughtful (i.e. as long as they work) touches are a proximity sensor to switch off the touch screen and backlight when you hold it up to your ear, an accelerometer-based orientation sensor for landscape/portrait mode (which could also make it useful as a control device for other electronics) and the obligatory virtual keyboard for those who type stuff slowly. Another thing I don't yet know is whether handwriting recognition is built-in to the iPhone - if anyone sees Larry Yeager wearing a large smug grin, you'll know the answer to that.

Less thoughtful is the absence of a physical touch-type capable keyboard for those of us who type a lot and quickly, although as long as the iPhone supports the necessary Bluetooth profile, any Bluetooth keyboard should work with it. And, without wishing to seem (very) churlish, given what Apple has already packed into the device, a GPS unit would be a fine thing indeed. Again, of course, third party Bluetooth GPS systems should work with it, but there again we're starting to get away from the One-for-All model.

It does however have the now-obligatory camera – in this case a fairly bog-standard resolution 2MP job, with no other information currently available, so I don't yet know it if does autofocus, video or for that matter, decent image quality. What it doesn't appear to have however is any video calling functionality, a la iSight/iChat. Which is odd, but does however dovetail with the iPhone's one true piece of specification insanity – and this is desperately predictable for a device designed in the USA – the lack of support for UMTS/HSxPA. Now while most e-mails and static web content for mobile devices can (eventually) be downloaded over GPRS/EDGE (where the latter is available), the lack of 3G support effectively means that the iPhone is unusable for downloading or streaming media or to act as a modem for my MacBook. Now I'm sure that Apple will argue that this is exactly their point - that a Wi-Fi connection does all that and more. Get real, guys - outside North America, public Wi-Fi coverage is still very patchy and is usually usuriously expensive - this is very very true in the UK. And for those of us who spend much to most of our lives somewhere over the horizon from any Wi-Fi connection, this is a serious omission. And that's even before we start thinking about VOIP/Skype, which are effectively unusable over EDGE, even where this is deployed. This could well be the biggest inhibitor to the iPhone's uptake in some markets and market sectors.

Apple (and, as of today, they're Apple Computer, Inc no longer – it's now simply Apple, Inc) are claiming to be five years ahead of the opposition, such as it is. Given that most of them have spent the last few years going backwards in their UI, that's not too hard a trick. But we can take at least six months off that lead, and longer for those of us outside the US – I'm going to have to stagger along with the Tytn until at least June and I suspect that even then I'll have to sneak one out of the US – they're talking about Q4 for the UK and rest of Europe – let's hope that they're using the delay to include 3G support.