Two Worlds Two Worlds News Feed

Two Worlds Expands: an Encore

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 14:49:41 +0000

More good news: we're delighted to welcome Jonathan Marshall to Two Worlds as director of Interactive TV and development services. We've been working with Jonathan since March, combining his experience as a leading pioneer of interactive TV services together with our existing Social media, strategy and architecture skills to create our new SlipStream Social TV/media platform. Jonathan's skills and experience greatly extend our ability to create and deliver truly ubiquitous media tools and services that combine content and community across the broadcast, online and mobile worlds.

Two Worlds Expands

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 01:00:01 +0000

All things in time change, and Two Worlds is no exception: After eight years as the vehicle for my own consultancy, it is no longer a "me" but an "us": I'm very pleased to welcome Jon Jardine to Two Worlds, as lead developer and designer. With many years experience as computer scientist, developer and interface designer, and after a stint as owner of one of the Highland's finest hostelries, Jon and his partner are now based in Berlin. So, in a single action, Two Worlds has expanded both numerically and geographically.

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

A Time for Change

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 11:31:56 +0000

Two years ago, my partner and I took a deep breath and moved ourselves and our respective businesses to the centre of Scotland's Southern Highlands – to the heart of the Loch Lomond and the Trossachs National Park. We're very pleased to say that, despite the difficulties inherent in being small, entrepreneurial businesses in a society as hidebound, bureaucratic and institutionally cynical as the UK, it all seems to be turning out very well: we're living in inspirational surroundings, in a friendly and welcoming community and we've discovered that this area seems to be a magnet for others of similar background and disposition to ourselves.

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.

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.

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.

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

Two Worlds Web

Wed, 23 Feb 2005 15:00:06 +0000

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.