Richard Harris' Bio

June 06, 2008

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

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.