April 09, 2008
BBC vs ISP: The Irresistible Force vs The Immovable Abject
Categories: Industry News News
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?
March 18, 2008
Sir Arthur C Clarke. 12 December 1917-19 March 2008
Categories: News
February 11, 2008
The Power of Spontaneity…
Categories: BBC Labs 2008 News Two Worlds News
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.
Continue reading "The Power of Spontaneity…"October 30, 2007
Hype, Reality and Expectation
Categories: News Say
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.
Continue reading "Hype, Reality and Expectation"February 11, 2007
The Fifth Douglas Adams Memorial Lecture
Categories: Douglas Adams Events News News
"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.
January 10, 2007
First Impressions: Apple iPhone
Categories: Industry News News TechnoGear
December 06, 2006
Northern Lights
Categories: News Two Worlds News
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.
October 31, 2006
Russian Leapfrog
Categories: News Two Worlds News
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.
July 25, 2006
Sustainable Arm-Waving
Categories: News Two Worlds News
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.
May 10, 2006
BlueGlobe: Making a Difference
Categories: Clients & Projects Two Worlds News
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
February 17, 2006
The Fourth Douglas Adams Memorial Lecture
Categories: Douglas Adams Events News News
"Is the Human an Endangered Species?" by Professor Robert Winston
Date: Thursday 23 March 2006, 7:30pm
Venue: The Royal Geographic Society, 1 Kensington Gore, London SW7 2AR
Price: £10.00 - Purchase tickets here.
Save the Rhino International and the Environmental Investigation Agency are co-hosting the Fourth Douglas Adams Memorial Lecture with a talk by Professor Robert Winston, on Thursday 23 March at the Royal Geographic Society in London SW7. In this talk, he will combine some of the apparently threatening aspects of technology and the trust, or lack of it, in science.
January 23, 2006
Bridging the Divide: Connected Communities and the Enabled Society
Categories: Events News The Ubiquity Papers
I've been invited to give the fourth in the Urban Learning Space's Learning Seminars series, on the seamless integration (or lack thereof) between our physical existence and our increasingly important virtual identities:
The When: Thursday 26th January 2006
11.30am - 2.00pm (includes lunch)
The Where: The Lighthouse, Mitchell Lane, Glasgow, G1 3NU
Gallery, Level 5.
Contact: Alison, or on 0141 225 0107.
As we individually and collectively communicate and interact, moving between our physical and virtual worlds, we need to refine and integrate our knowledge of both into our lives, to create and maintain who we are, beyond just our physical selves and our immediate communities. So how do we bridge the divide between the two, and what tools are around to help us do this? Who are we and how do we prove who we are, beyond our physical presence? How do we connect with virtual communities and knowledge networks and how do we ensure that these are integrated into our physical lives, and vice versa?
Continue reading "Bridging the Divide: Connected Communities and the Enabled Society"June 07, 2005
Four Legs Good, Two Legs Better
Categories: Industry News Mac and Back News Say
In George Orwell's Animal Farm, when the pigs take over the farm, and set up their workers' paradise, the mantra of the revolution, repeated ad infinitum by a Greek chorus of bleating sheep, is "Two Legs Bad, Four Legs Good". Which pretty much sums up the level of debate we've had in the camps of the Motorola/Macintosh and Intel/Microsoft alliances for the last two decades. It's also a war that's been fought on two fronts – from the mud-bogged trenches of the Mac/Windows jihadists to the free-flowing desert warfare of the Intel/Motorola skirmishes. And, as any general will tell you, a war fought on two fronts is bloody hard work, with the principal sufferers along the way being the confused and shell-shocked civilian population.
But one part of that war is heading for a conclusion: Apple is switching to Intel. Let me say that again: Apple. Is. Switching. To. Intel. It's like watching Martin Luther walk up to the church door in Wittenberg and nail a piece of paper to the door only to find that, rather than the 95 Theses of Contention, it's an advert for a lap-dancing club. So it's probably time for a little reflection, not to mention eating of crow. I'll have ketchup with mine…
Continue reading "Four Legs Good, Two Legs Better"March 17, 2005
Creative Commons reaches the UK
Categories: Industry News News
At a wine and conversation-fuelled bash at The October Gallery in London's Holborn last night, the Creative Commons licenses for England and Wales were launched. These are a set of legally-enforceable licenses for digital content that allow the originator to specify their requirements for attribution and to place limits on consequential use of their content. If you believe as I do, that the currency of knowledge is attribution, then this model of encouraging distribution and meme-building without losing that acknowledgement is both flexible and necessary.
March 03, 2005
Now Ain't That Something…
Categories: Events News News The Game
Last night, and a mere twenty years after its original release, the Twentieth Anniversary edition of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy took the impressively heavy 2005 BAFTA Interactive award for Online Entertainment. For a computer game – a genre reknowned for having a shelf life of weeks rather than years, this is a unique achievement. It's also a tribute to the principle that intelligent and engaging entertainment is timeless, no matter what the medium, and to the imagination, wit and humour of its authors. So congratulations are very much in order to the memory of Douglas Adams, to Steve Meretzky and to the BBC, Sean Sollé, Shimon Young and Rod Lord, who between them created the Twentieth Anniversary edition. The award itself is lovingly photographed here in the exotic surroundings of a Holborn Pizza restaurant, whose staff created an impromptu homage to the occasion by taking 7.5 million years to serve dinner.
March 01, 2005
Last Chance to See… …Just a bit more
Categories: Douglas Adams Events News News
Date: Thursday 10 March 2005
For information including how to buy tickets please see www.savetherhino.org.
Lecture synopsis: Zoologist Mark Carwardine (co-author of Last Chance to See with Douglas Adams) spends more than half the year travelling the world in search of wildlife and exploring wild places.
In this highly entertaining lecture Mark describes some of his experiences and encounters with wild animals and even wilder people around the world - including some hilarious behind-the-scenes stories from Last Chance to See. And, inevitably, he has a thing or two to say about the state of the world.
The lecture will be followed by a fundraising auction, lots will include signed film memorabilia, VIP tickets to the film premier and signed copies of the Quintessential Phase: Mostly Harmless radio script.
The Third Douglas Adams Memorial Lecture, in celebration of the life and universe of Douglas Adams.
Venue: The Royal Institution, Albemarle Street, London W1
Time: Lecture begins at 7.30pm
Speaker: Mark Carwardine
Price: £20 for main auditorium with a drink beforehand £12 for gallery seating without a drink
BAFTA Interactive Awards 2005
Categories: Hitchhiker's Guide Industry News News The Game
The 2nd March 2005 sees the BAFTA Interactive Awards ceremony, in which the BBC's Twentieth Anniversary presentation of the original Infocom Interactive Fiction game of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is nominated in the Online Entertainment section. Having been responsible for the simple original online presentation of the game and been a past BAFTA juror, I'm keeping various bits of anatomy crossed for its success. Here's hoping…
If you've arrived here from the BBC site, there's a potted history of the Infocom game here, which includes never before seen scans of some of Douglas Adams and Steve Meretzky's original notes and designs, photos taken during development of the game, the original ZIL code from the game development (of historical interest only unless you happen have a spare 1980s vintage DEC-10 computer lying around, but may contain some game spoilers) and extracts from various interviews that Steve has given about life, the game and working with Douglas.
February 23, 2005
Two Worlds Web
Categories: News Two Worlds News
Well, it's here: after far too long an embarrassing silence, I've finally taken the Two Worlds web site into the technology and presentation that matches my thinking and working practice – while I can argue that I've been too busy with vision, engagement and strategy for clients to have time to address my own, that would be but a small part of the truth. Finally though, pragma and need have coincided, so here is the first public iteration of the Two Worlds site. It's new, it's but as yet sparsely populated, so please do come back regularly as I develop the social, commercial and technological thought themes behind my business, add current and historical information around the Ubiquity model of the enabled society and then leaven the whole with a little humour, technocracy and random digression. Alternatively, subscribe to any of the site's XML feeds (see pretty buttons to the right) to be kept informed of changes and updates.
Continue reading "Two Worlds Web"
