Day Two of One Fewer: Divergence

March 11, 2008

So what happened today? Dinner is only just over, yet the day seems to be fading into the mists of time, so perhaps a brief backtrack will serve to resurface the highs, lows and interestingly corrugated bits of the day…

BBC Innovation Labs 2008: Day One of Several

March 10, 2008

So here we are: a bunch of determinedly eclectic geeks, noo meeja types, artists, mathematicians, drama bods and other assorted hopefuls, gathered together in the name of innovation and the hope of a commission, at the enlightened behest of the dear old BBC, and in Aberfoyle, in the heart of the Scottish Highlands.

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 Power of Spontaneity…

February 11, 2008

I'm very pleased to announce that Two Worlds is one of the winners of the 2008 BBC Innovation Labs competition. This is the BBC's now annual round of looking to the outside world to solicit new technology and service ideas that will help it fulfill its multiple media brief, to engage more effectively with its audiences and to extend the reach of that engagement into a wider demographic. Or something like that.

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.