Two Worlds

Richard Harris' Bio

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 14:08:46 +0000

Richard is the principal of Two Worlds, with an early background in Behavioural Ecology and Computer Science followed by more than twenty years experience as a visionary, strategy and technology consultant, writer and architect and developer of online and interactive services. He is a serial entrepreneur and co-founded The Digital Village (later h2g2), with the author Douglas Adams and others from the media, technology and financial sectors and was its CTO and Research Director. TDV's products included the Codie award-winning interactive game Starship Titanic and for the online Hitch-hiker’s guide to the Galaxy, one of the UK’s most successful knowledge-based online communities, in both its web-based and mobile delivery formats. h2g2 is now part of the BBC, where its technology architecture underpins the BBC’s online communities.

With historical models of organisation, communication and collaboration breaking down, enterprises are looking to create ever more flexible and adaptive environments to create and sustain relationships with their stakeholder communities. Richard helps clients create the thought models, strategies, culture and processes that support flexible and intelligent relationships. He then helps develop, design, demonstrate and select the intelligence systems and collaborative, social and ubiquitous technology architectures that support client needs, from proof-of-concept to full commercial service.

Richard has a history of combining business, creative and technical acumen 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. For the EU, Richard has consulted on Research programmes in Emotional Computing, Ubiquitous Systems and Information Ecologies.

The Ubiquity model is also being used to create a service that seeks to engage with people, communities and organisations to share, learn, inspire and enable action on Climate Change. It's called BlueGlobe (http://blueglo.be/) and the first element, an intelligent news aggregator is now in beta.

In March 2008, Two Worlds was winner of the 2008 BBC Innovation Labs competition, with the BBC now funding prototype development of our next-generation platform for Interactive TV.

Jonathan Marshall's Bio

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 14:04:53 +0000

Jonathan is a leading technical strategist in the field of interactive TV, having led the development of the BBC's first ground-breaking services on DTT and Digital Satellite broadcasting. Jonathan started his career at the BBC in 1991 as a recording engineer for BBC Scotland. He then left to complete a degree in Electronics and Music followed by a Masters in French and Management. He then combined these skills working in Paris for IRCAM designing and implementing Digital Music Workstations aimed at contemporary composers and performers.

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.

BBC vs ISP: The Irresistible Force vs The Immovable Abject

Wed, 09 Apr 2008 23:30:34 +0000

One news headline in particular caught my eye today, and it wasn't the usual "Man Weds Goat" stuff, but one headed, "BBC and ISPs Clash Over iPlayer", wherein I read with increasing disbelief the words of Simon Gunter of Tiscali, a well-known and largely unremarkable trans-national ISP. After reading same, I found myself provoked, stirred and in a state of generalised arghness. So the following may contain traces of rant.

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?

Sir Arthur C Clarke. 12 December 1917-19 March 2008

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 23:42:06 +0000

That's two in one day: Anthony Minghella this morning and Sir Arthur C Clarke this evening. Two great people whose respective talents have entertained and inspired different but overlapping generations, with Anthony Minghella leaving us, far far too soon and Sir Arthur after a good innings and a long life. The quality of the rest of our lives has just dropped a tad.

Day Two of One Fewer: Divergence

Tue, 11 Mar 2008 23:25:47 +0000

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

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 12:10:22 +0000

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…

Mon, 11 Feb 2008 11:21:02 +0000

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.

Hype, Reality and Expectation

Tue, 30 Oct 2007 23:07:03 +0000

Here's a little history: in the early nineties, much of my consultancy work orbited (often eccentrically) around a binary model: the development of new technologies and helping clients to understand how those technologies could help their businesses and to work out how and when to jump in. It still does.

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.

The Fifth Douglas Adams Memorial Lecture

Sun, 11 Feb 2007 22:59:19 +0000

"Wildlife Management in East Africa – Is There a Future?" by Dr Richard Leakey

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.

First Impressions: Apple iPhone

Wed, 10 Jan 2007 00:50:12 +0000

I've been waiting for this. I've been waiting a long, long time. In fact ever since I first cabled my Apple Newton to my Nokia phone and managed to get a feeble-but-exciting GSM data signal from within the bunker of the Palais de Congres in Cannes (it was a very very tedious conference session). And that was fifteen years after my first mobile computing experience – an only approximately luggable Texas Instruments thermal printer terminal with a built-in acoustic coupler: the first mobile combo device. Since then, I've been through the mobile mill: I've carried around every 'mobile' device Apple ever made (if you've ever played with a Newton, you'll understand the quotification of 'mobile'), helped design a couple of them and, when Steve The Revenant canned the Newton in a Learish fit of Alpha Male pique, I reluctantly went over to and through various incarnations of the Palm. Compared to the Newton, it was but a nursery toy but it did have the major advantage of being truly pocketable, unlike the dear old Newt. Along the way I dallied with an early incarnation of the iPaq - for about three days, after which I returned it as "unfit for purpose" - to say that I was disenchanted with PocketPC (as it then was) was a galactic level understatement.

Northern Lights

Wed, 06 Dec 2006 17:07:19 +0000

When you're in the business of developing and promoting ubiquitous communications and interaction, it's something of an axiom that, as long as there are good virtual and physical communication links, it should be possible to live and work pretty much anywhere you choose. There's also a time to put your own money where your mouth is. So that's what we've done: after a couple of years of hunting high and low in and around some rather wonderful parts of the world, we've now moved both selves and Two Worlds to a 200-year-old farmhouse in the unbelievably beautiful Loch Lomond & The Trossachs National Park. Said farmhouse is now at the start of the process of being thoughtfully turned into a thoroughly modern living and working environment with minimal net ecological footprint. So far, so good, with one major exception – the elephant in our particular bathtub ("fly in the ointment" simply doesn't cut it here) is British Telecom, who are displaying a truly and staggeringly vicious incompetence and disregard for timescales in providing our basic network infrastructure – the sort of attitude that can only be achieved in an environment where they are both the monopoly provider and where there is no effective regulation of that monopoly. As soon as we've passed that particular shibboleth, we'll be fully back online. In the meantime, taking one's breakfast coffee on the shore of the Loch as the Winter sun rises over the hills is a more than adequate substitute for the morning scrum at Waterloo.

Russian Leapfrog

Tue, 31 Oct 2006 15:08:39 +0000

Russia is a fascinating market: The "triple whammy" of rapidly rising wealth, a high degree of urbanisation (73% of the population live in cities) and the rapid rollout of next-generation network technologies means that the market for broadband delivery of digital media is set to explode (and that's before factoring in those long Russian Winter nights). The late – relative to Western Europe and North America – ramp-up of the infrastructure investment curve means that Russian service providers are leapfrogging the technologies which most of us regard as state-of-the-art and which Western operators are still having to amortise: so rather than DSL, Russia is going Metro Ethernet; instead of Wi-Fi hotspots, Russian cities are getting WiMax networks and DVB-H services and the likelihood is that, when Russia's first 3G licenses are let in early 2007, Russian operators will go straight to fast 3.5G technologies such as HSDPA.

All of which makes for a very interesting environment, which is why I'm very pleased indeed to be working with Russia's largest film and TV distributor, the Cascade/BUR Media group, to help them plan their way through the myriad opportunities that are becoming available to them as digital delivery becomes a natural extension of their presence in physical and broadcast media.

thames sky view

Wed, 02 Aug 2006 10:30:11 +0000

The view from the top of the Swisshotel Howard is perhaps not the worst in London… --

Sustainable Arm-Waving

Tue, 25 Jul 2006 09:27:30 +0000

I can bore for Europe on the subject of sustainability in modern living. Which doesn't mean I'm especially good at it (yet), simply that I talk and write about it a deal whilst slowly changing my own lifestyle to something a little more exemplary. So I'm pleased to say that I've been invited by the UK's Sustainable Development Commission (The government's sustainable development watchdog) to join the Sustainable Development Panel, providing debate and feedback on the need and/or effectiveness of policies that affect the environment and our part in it.

BlueGlobe: Making a Difference

Wed, 10 May 2006 23:10:15 +0000

I've spent most of the last few years consulting, roughly in the area of dynamic and emergent knowledge systems, interaction and communication. That encompasses everything from arm-waving vision generation through strategy development to procurement, configuration and training. And, where I couldn't persuade someone else to do it, the coding too: le Monty complet, in fact. Much of the work has been based around the Ubiquity model of trusted collaborative interaction mediated by the core tetrad of association, value, knowledge and identity. That's a very useful model, but one that is oft easier to communicate when a specific example is used: starting with the original architecture and roadmap for h2g2, I've also been using a slightly hypothetical scenario of creating a collaborative knowledge-centred community around communicating a global issue, one which brought together organisations, communities and individuals of many different types around knowledge related to a need that had a universal context: in subject, location, time and intent. That's generally worked well for me and my clients.

But now it's time to put my money (what there is of it) where my mouth is: to create just such a service, in an area I feel passionately about – maintaining the richness and diversity of culture and life on our planet in the face of human activity driving fundamental changes to the world's climate, at a rate which looks to exceed the ability of ourselves and other species to adapt. It's also one which brings together my alternate lives as biologist, computer scientist and social entrepreneur: Full circle into the future.

So here's BlueGlobe (http://www.blueglo.be/) – a placeholder for the start of an intelligent, emergent online service designed to bring together the core constituencies of Climate Change: Businesses, governments, scientists, the media, educators and individuals and communities. It's very early days yet - I've managed to accumulate a wonderful team of thinker-doers and we're getting stuff together as fast as resources permit. Although if I have to spend very much longer training a Bayesian RSS filter NOT to tag anything that mentions Al Gore as Irrelevant, I may live to regret it. So please take a wander over there and sign yourself up for news of developments as they happen – it won't be long.

Richard