To find out more about the Knowledge Exchange Programme and this event visit our blog at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/knowledgeexchange.

THE EVENT IS FREE but places are limited. Refreshments and a light lunch will be available. If you wish to reserve a place and find out more about the day please contact Louise Elliott at the AHRC (l.elliott at ahrc dot ac dot uk).

Cheers, Brendan

So what is R&DTV? It's a monthly technology programme made up of interviews from knowledgeable BBC developers, BBC project experts and external experts from around the world.

We're looking at how we can use off the shelf technology, various codecs and different methods of distribution to create and share content - it's a voyage of discovery, so watch out for news on how this project develops. This is our first pilot episode, we'll release another in May and hopefully (if you like it) we'll make some more! In Episode 1 we have interviews with The Digg guys, Nicholas Negroponte of OLPC as well as Graham Thomas, Ant Miller and George Auckland talking about their work for BBC R&D & Learning Innovation.

The content comes in 3 forms.

* A brief 5 minute video, containing all the very best bits
* A longer 30 minute video, containing deeper conversations
* The Asset Bundle, containing everything we used and didn't use to make the videos above

We're pleased to announce the launch of Homura, an Open Source Java game engine and IDE, developed by BBC Research and Development with Liverpool John Moores University. We've been waiting for this one for quite a while.

Homura produces natively 3d games that can be exported to Java WebStart for deployment over the internet. The IDE is a plugin for Eclipse, which provides the Homura libraries and tools for game development. The game engine code is derived from JME.

The whole project is being run in conjunction with Liverpool John Moores University and the British Broadcasting Corporation Research and Development. The full project is hosted on Google Code.

So what you wanting for????
Go and download it and start building...

As you might have noticed BBC Backstage was in Las Vegas for Microsoft's Mix 2009 conference. The experience of a conference on this scale was impressive, but the talks even more impressive. Luckily we didn't have to run around with a camera and tripod. Instead Microsoft filmed every talk and put it on-line for everyone to see a few days later.

He's our picks for videos which you shouldn't miss. You will need Silverlight to watch them on the site or you can download them in Windows Media and other formats.

Ask The Gu - Jeff Atwood (StackOverflow.com) and Jeff Sandquist (Microsoft DPE get down and intimate with a load of questions from Twitter.

Bill Buxton's keynote - Bill Buxton is Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research and has a 30 year involvement in research, design and commentary around human aspects of technology, and digital tools for creative endeavour, including music, film and industrial design, in particular.

Interaction Techniques Using the Wii Remote - Johnny Lee covers several interaction techniques enabled by the Wii remote and explains how you can develop your own applications

Designing the Windows 7 Desktop Experience - How Microsoft go about evolving pieces of UI that haven't seen major change since 1995? This video shows the design process and see the evolution of the design through sketches and prototypes

Standards for Aggregating Activity Feeds and Social Aggregation Services - panel discussion about aggregating social feeds and services from leading people and companies in this rapidly evolving area

The Way of the Whiteboard: Persuading with Pictures - Dan Roam talks about persuading people with pictures. Whether convincing leadership to back a project, getting a VC to fund a business, building consensus on a project team, or selling a new technology platform within an organization

Touch and Gesture Computing, What You Haven't Heard - early lessons from applied knowledge of touch applications, devices, and design methods

Overview of Windows Azure - about the essential concepts of Windows Azure, including what's new

Today 1600+ people will write about an influential woman in technology, thanks to Suw Charman-Anderson who setup the idea via pledge bank. But why? Well Suw explains why...

Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology.

Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised. We want you to tell the world about these unsung heroines. Entrepreneurs, innovators, sysadmins, programmers, designers, games developers, hardware experts, tech journalists, tech consultants. The list of tech-related careers is endless.

Recent research by psychologist Penelope Lockwood discovered that women need to see female role models more than men need to see male ones. That’s a relatively simple problem to begin to address. If women need female role models, let’s come together to highlight the women in technology that we look up to. Let’s create new role models and make sure that whenever the question “Who are the leading women in tech?” is asked, that we all have a list of candidates on the tips of our tongues.

The best way to get a feel for all the blog posts currently is via a the Mash-Up - The Ada Lovelace Day Collection

Internet was launched today at Mix09. There was much talk about webstandards and some debunking about noticeable speed difference to the end user. Then all the other features which have been seen in the previous betas such as per window crash handling (as Chrome made a big deal about too) But then there was some brand new features too. Webslices seemed to use specially formatted tags (aka simular format to microformats) to build special features in the new browser. Accelerators also take the ability to use specially formatted html tags to identify parts of the data on the page and offer context sensitive features. So its like the operator plugin for Firefox, but built directly into IE8. Interestingly enough 10 years ago Internet Explorer 5 was launched and you can now get IE8 from the usual places.

Since the keynote there has been lots of talk about the general experience of Internet Explorer, for example when users upgrade from IE6 - IE8, will there toolbars and activex extras drag down the experience of the new browser? There was also a lot of people asking why Silverlight was not bundled with IE8? The response was to talk about the EU anti-trust case which it seemed most of the developers were almost unaware of.

You meet all types of people at conferences but meeting Mr Cashmore after his move down under was unexpected. Lonely Planet had been working on a translation tool for travelers which uses the new Microsoft Translator service and API.

There is the free online service, a MSN bot, some kind of widget and most useful to developers a real API which is invite only. Of course Backstage won't leave you hanging, we secured about 10 invite codes which you can ask for via the BBC Backstage mailing list.

All this week, we're at the Microsoft's enlighten conference Mix09. We're going to use the tag #mix09 when ever possible. We'll be twittering under the BBCBackstage account if your interested in following us.

I was at Rewired State last Saturday and Ian's asked me to write a quick post about it for Backstage. Developer-orientated days like this are about letting developers work on something that obsesses them. My obsessions lie in particular directions and this will be reflected in what I did and didn't notice in such a hectic day, so I hope you'll forgive my omissions. It's well worth watching all the two minute presentations.

Rewired State was a bar-camp style gathering - around 70 people attending, and more than three times oversubscribed according to the organisers. The aim was to 'hack the government' - to use a single day to create positive demonstrations showing reuse of government information. It culminated in a series of two-minute talks (superbly managed to minimise faffing) in front of government people and 4IP as well as the rest of the developers.

Jason Gorman kindly gave us an overview of the event.

“This is a conference about building it right.”

Apart from meeting some great programmers, I attended workshops on a variety of subjects, such as: Mapping Personal Practices, Ruby and Kata, Responsibility-driven Design with Mock Objects and My Defining Moments.

It was a really inspiring and very educational day, and attendees certainly seemed to get a lot out of it. When organiser Jason Gorman asked everyone at the close of conference if they would like to do it again next year, there was a resounding ‘YES’!

As people arrived it was great to see kit such as a sewing machine, felt, beads and ribbon appearing alongside arduinos, resistors, servos and boxes of electronics. After introductions, we split up into groups with people we had just met and discussed our ideas, thinking about how we could collaborate.

Over the next 5 hours we consolidated our ideas and threw ourselves into making by hacking, sewing, soldering, gluing and bejeweling. At the end of our marathon session our creations were voted in two categories: public and expert.

BBC Backstage was proud to sponsor the pre-event to the Oreillys Makers Faire which happens next week in Newcastle. Makers and Hackers was a chance to experiment with ideas and prototypes before going to the main event.

We caught a range of people at the event and asked them what attracted them to the event and what they were building.

After all the making and hacking in the day, came the presentations of the work. As you'd expect not everything was totally working but there were some very interesting prototypes including the overall winner, a slip on leg warmer which gives you directions on where to move your foot, a aid to dance to the music which is playing. Very cool and funky stuff. You can see the rest of the videos here.

Why is this?

Surely Backstage only deals with data, apis, feeds not video and audio right? We still do but were also here to inspire people to try new things. Maybe try building a prototype, build your next app into a little business or just go out and meet other interesting people. This is part of the reason why we use to put on big events like Mashed and Over the Air. However everyone is doing events now which is great but we're moving onwards and upwards.

We would like to reach the people who don't go to events like Mashed and Over the Air. And what's even better, you guys are going to help us. Your enthusiasm for what you do and love is very infectious. So if we can capture even a part of your enthusiasm and show it to others across the world, that would be a good thing for you, us and the others trying to make the UK dev landscape exciting and special.

Because this is backstage, sharing the video by putting it under a creative commons licence is a no brainier. We're not duplicating the creative archive, just doing what comes natural to the Backstage team. Actually we've been doing this for some time via blip.tv now but are planning to do a lot more with our video in the very near future.

Keep an eye out for much more video including exclusive interviews with people you know, met and would love to meet. Fear not, we are working on more data and apis

To get you all warmed up, here's a selection of videos from Northern Startup 2.0 which took place in Manchester on Tuesday 24th February. There under a creative commons licence so sharable and most of time re-mixable.

Enjoy...

This was one of the sessions from BeebCamp which happened recently within the BBC. It was announced that we now own the account on twitter.com, BBC but there's a real dilemma about what exactly we do with it?

We are very interested in what ideas you may have for the dilemma and so have setup the idea on ideastore. We look forward to seeing your solutions soon.

We aren't planning to run large scale events at this time for a couple of reasons.

In 2009 we are looking at the entire Research & Development function in addition to using this period to consider fresh ideas. Also events like Mashed are extremely costly so this decision has been taken in part as one of the BBC's Future Media & Technology division's contributions to the efficiencies effort that is being undertaken across the entire corporation.

We are also looking to better support smaller grass-root events such as BarCamps and Geek Events across the country. We actually have a calendar which you can follow in iCal format here or RSS here. There's a calendar here too.

• Submitted by: Fraser Murrell
• Link: http://www.dailysnooze-gadgets.com/

The BBC News Sidebar Gadget and BBC Weather Sidebar Gadget are hopefully the last ever gadgets that you will need to view news and weather on your desktop, according to Fraser who created these great looking Vista gadgets.

• Submitted by: Ben Smith
• Link: http://uktrains.pbwiki.com/

Inspired by this tweet from MP Tom Watson and enabled by the excellent BBC Backstage's travel feeds, this prototype service tweets disruption alerts for 25 UK train operators.  The original data is processed and shortened to less than 140 characters (in most cases) by Yahoo Pipes and tweeted via Twitterfeed which also adds a short-link back to the original BBC report.  Tweetlater provides the automated welcome DM.

• Submitted by: Duncan Robertson
• Link: http://whomwah.com/2008/11/02/bbc-programmes-via-instant-messenger/

This IM bot comes from a BBC member of staff Duncan Robertson...

I have been playing with ejabberd, Jabber, XMPP and the various client libraries, specifically the rather wonderfully simple Jabber::Simple and Jabber:Bot.

It all started because I was doing a Fireeagle integration job with a product at work, and was getting frustrated with the fact that it is still not super simple to update my location. It struck me as I stared at my desktop, that I always have Adium running. Wouldn’t it be great if I had a Fireeagle contact that I could just tell my location, and it would go off and update, letting me know when they’re done. Now that part is midway done (post to come), but before I started that, I wanted to research more the workings of a Chatterbot, a computer program that pretends to be a human and can answer basic commands. They have been around for a long time, I remember playing with an IRC bot a while back, getting it to display the last commit messages from Subversion.

So that research turned into a BBC Programmes bot. As I worked on BBC Programmes, I have good knowledge of the site and the data within, and building a bot that integrated with that data seemed a good example of using the restful API available.

If you just want to try this thing out, here are the details of what you need to do.

1. You need a Gmail or Jabber compatible IM account
2. You need a Jabber enabled client, I’ve listed a few:
   • Linx: Pidgin, GTalk
   • Mac: iChat, Adium, Psi
   • Win: Psi, Trillian, GTalk
3. You need to add a new contact: im.bbcprogrammes@gmail.com

This should be it. You should have a new contact appear in your list (They have a BBC logo as an avatar). You can now begin a conversation with this contact. It’s probably best to start with: HELP

• Submitted by: richard skew
• Link: http://www.richardaskew.co.uk/infusednews

Infused Entertainment brings the News idea and recreates it for the BBC entertainment feeds. It actually works slightly better as the music and media is more likely to be found on the sources I use. The idea behind it is the supplements you now get in most newspapers - this is the entertainment section.

• Submitted by: Andy Shearer
• Link: http://iplayerlist.mibly.com/map/

Andy explains what iplayerlist is and how it works.

I scrape bbc.co.uk/iplayer for all the current TV shows (a-z atom feeds help).Then I extract the synopsis from /programmes for each episode.

I then throw the episode synopsis at the Beta Open Calais API. This API will extract a ton of concepts, including some geographical information that it thinks the synopsis relates to (don't ask me how, I assume some sort of magic elf reads it).This geographical information (states, countries, towns etc) now includes longitudes and latitude info thanks to Open Calais chatting to Freebase. It works best with the larger synopsis.

I'm still questioning if this is any use to an non techy user. Would my dad like to see a map showing TV shows which relate to them? Anyway, in the future I might add a bit of colour coding on the markers for program type
(childrens, factual, comedy etc).

Because you can do it doesn't always make it useful but its the point of Backstage. To explorer the useful, artistic, clever, serious, etc. Keep on submitting...

• Submitted by: Chris Riley
• Link: http://www.trackplaying.com

Chris has been hacking about with the code for his previous prototype trackplaying recently.

Now there's a few different interfaces/stylesheet changes per machine type,

iPhone , mobiles , Wii and iGoogle . This is on top of existing changes to the interface.

But thats only the start, in response to feedback. Chris has added integration with the BBC's Radio Pop beta, using the Radio Pop API. So now you can Pop your trackplaying habits to Radiopop. Chris is using OAuth to pass the users information back and forth smoothly.

Chris evening are pretty full because he's also trying to add Last.FM support, so like Radiopop, you can add tracksplaying to your audio-scobbling and Instant messenger support via imified.com.

Chris is still welcoming feedback.

• Submitted by: Adam Lindsay
• Link: http://twitter.com/recomme

Following from the previous prototype Adam has launched his twitter bot which will recommend you other artists based on one you send it. It was first demoed at Mashed 08 but has now gone live for anyone using twitter to use. Just send a message using @recomme or direct message recomme with a single artist name and it will search through last.fm and other sources like /programmes for other artists it thinks you might like. Simple but clever.

• Submitted by: Chris Riley
• Link: http://www.trackplaying.com/

A new Mashup from Chris Riley, this time it shows as much information about a playing track as it can on one screen and updates in real time with the last.fm feed. The interesting part is, where you can put in your last.fm username and it will look and see if you will like the current track. Awesome stuff

I've written a new mashup - http://www.trackplaying.com - it displays information about the track currently playing on the radio. It takes data from BBC Music (beta), Last.fm and Amazon, and is hosted on Google App Engine. Mashup heaven! It is based on my previous attempt that some of you may recall.

• Submitted by: Fraser
• Link: http://www.dailysnooze.com

For the past 6 or 7 years I have run http://www.dailysnooze.com - mainly because I wanted a quick loading simple homepage for my browser, which included the BBC headlines and weather. Long gone are the days of screen scraping the bbc news pages and now luckily we have access to some nice feeds!

Things have moved on a little and we now have a few extras based on backstage feeds:

• dailysnooze.com browser homepage (BBC News and Weather)
• BBC News Vista Sidebar Gadget
• BBC Weather Vista Sidebar Gadget

I only just released the gadgets so thought I should share them a bit further. They are also available from the website itself.For the homepage the brief I have always stuck to is "quick loading and simple", and I like to think I have a good balance in my slightly biased opinion.

From the tech side of things the gadgets/homepage get their data from my
hosted DB and associated web services. I have an app running at home which
updates the server DB regularly with the feed information.

• Submitted by: Richard Askew
• Link: http://www.richardaskew.co.uk/infusednews

The application takes an rss feed of BBC data provided at http://dev.barnesdmd.co.uk/ff/?ffid=2. Keywords are extracted using the Yahoo Term extractor and these are used to retrive data from YouTube and Flickr, the phpFlickr classes were used to acheive this (http://phpflickr.com/).

The mix of media (Imagery, Sound and Video) often enhanced the story being presented. The keywords used often return media isn't relevant due to keywords not being given enough context, or media being tagged incorrectly. If more time or the funding was made available I would look further into utilising Ambient Interface technology so that the application could deliver the information in an engaing way.

• Submitted by: daniel nethersole
• Link: http://mugamail.com/bbc/

The script uses several external APIs from blogging communities, search engines and social networking sites to work out what people are talking about. Then using the last 50 Data from the BBC it compiles a list in order of the interest the British public has on the subject. At the time of writing this Lock keepers' cottage sale halted is the least interesting story, and Oil price up despite Saudi pledge the most. It’s not 100%, and sometimes odd results show. The system works like a automated Digg.com.

• Submitted by: Tom Scott
• Link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/radiolabs/2008/05/helping_machines_play_with_pro.shtml#comments

The guys at the BBC Radio Labs have been up late again. This time while at Xtech, they have transformed the BBC Radio's programme schedule into RDF and many other types of data. Of course this is all RESTful using a API but they have taken it one step further and decided to play with XMPP (jabber) so they can create notifications of things your interested in complete with data from DBpedia.

• Submitted by: Simon Cross
• Link: http://www.simoncross.com/music/radio1/

A new prototype based on Radio 1's now playing data but this time from a BBC member of staff working in their 10% project. Simon goes into details.

We're working on a new 10% time project over here at FM&T Audio and Music - and we thought we'd give you guys a super sneak preview. There's a few of us involved here, including Yasser Rashid, Cathy Bartlet and Ramon Dodd.Its around visualizing now playing information by pulling in data from across the web.

The plan for this is to eventually build a flash version which is full-screenable to provide a visual companion while listening in the office, or on the web etc. Future data sources we hope to build on include Musicbrainz, Wikipedia, YouTube, song lyrics,Yahoo Music and loads more. At the moment, we've just got as far as last.fm, flickr and the webcam, but its a start!

• Submitted by:

New Prototype from Chris Riley, instead of rating how in touch is the BBC, he's scratching his own itch about the music playing over Radio 1, Radio 2, 1Xtra and 6 Music.

I've coded a hopefully useful, if not idea stimulating web page. It is called Now Playing http://cgriley.com/nowplaying/ and shows you information about the artist currently being played on BBC Radio 1, BBC 1xtra, BBC Radio 2 and BBC 6 Music. It is based on some BBC data released at hack day, with Yahoo Pipes and JQuery thrown in.

I made it because when I'm listening to the radio I like to know a bit more about the artist. Have I heard some of their tracks or albums before? If I've no idea who they are what have they done in the past? How much can I buy their albums for, what has been released? What is on their website, do they have a website? Which artists are they like?

All those questions are answered by this new page. It is designed to update itself in real time with the current artist being played, and seems to work quite well. As always the best way to see what it does is to give it a go, and if you want more info about how it works, data sources, known issues etc. then there is an obligatory about page. http://cgriley.com/nowplaying/about.aspx

• Submitted by: Ben Smith
• Link: http://apps.facebook.com/bbcfriendsontv/

Find friends (or, currently, name-sakes of your friends) that have been on BBC TV, what programmes and when they were aired. Currently, this finds the first TV programme's 'contributor' to match your friend's name, through the BBC Programme Catalogue (http://catalogue.bbc.co.uk).Future developments will involve giving you the choice of all possible matches to identify from and integration with IMDB (http://www.imdb.com).

• Submitted by: Phil Wilson

Personally I'm waiting for the time when we can pause a program and scroll over the items on-screen and it'll tell us what they are and where we can buy them, like when Ed Norton describes his apartment at the beginning of Fight Club.

• Submitted by: Will Sheppard

• Submitted by: Ian Forrester

Anyone interested in building one?

• Submitted by: Ian Forrester
• Link: http://backstage.bbc.co.uk

We're considering changing the Fabulous but somewhat bland Backstage T-shirts. Yes they're great schwag but we can certainly do better.

So we thought it would be great if we'd ask you guys what you think is the best T-shirt schwag you've seen or owned and what witty slogan or design should be included to make a even better backstage T-shirt?

Let us know what you think...

• Submitted by: Kev Swindells

• Submitted by: Caterina

• Submitted by: Donal Mountain
• Link: http://www.dmountain.com/misc/radioschedule.html

Problem
------------------
My favourite programs are broadcast in BBC Radio 4's Monday-Friday 8pm slot. When I lived in Europe, all I had to do was tune in to Radio 4 at 8pm and chances are I'd hear something good. Super-easy. Now I live in a different time zone that doesn't let me tune in to Radio 4 at 8pm GMT. So I listen via the Radio 4 website. But the concept of 'slots' isn't reflected in the organisation of BBC Radio websites; nowhere on the Radio 4 website is there a link to "listen to the 8pm slot". The audio file is on the website somewhere, but I have to dig around to find it.

Solution
------------------
It envisage a simple search interface where you define your slots and are given a (bookmarkable) search results page that lists this week's programing for those slots, with links to the audio file when available. This would make me happy! I think it would make other people happy too, because radio stations have this concept of 'slots' that isn't replicated in the online world. It would make it easier for people to "tune in" to their favourite slot, at the time that suits them.

• Submitted by: Neil Good
• Link: http://widgets.yahoo.com/gallery/view.php?widget=38008

I have tried various RSS feeds in some RSS readers but it does not seem to work for me.

Some sort of ability to select the radio stations displayed would be a good feature.....

• Submitted by: Marco van Beek

• Submitted by: G. Wilkinson

Idea 2 - i'm sure there's been plenty of suggestions like this. But i would like radio shows available as podcasts across the board. i.e any show on any bbc network, The podcast would be signed up rss, bbc can promote email feedback on program as part of the package. This gives you detailed information about your programs and thier reception and the listeners and license payers : accessability to your archived radio content away from a computer! yes why not let the rest of the world have it too, for free?, it would promote your brand in all the right ways!
G.Wilkinson@Valence.kent.sch.uk
ICT Coordinator Valence school

• Submitted by: Simon Croak

• Submitted by: Ryan Morrison
• Link: http://www.upyourego.com/wordpress/

In principle every section of every BBC Where I Live site (specifically the England ones) could output an rss feed.

With masses of content on everything from faith events to band profiles would it be possible to combine this with geo positioning to create some kind of rich app giving you information on all sorts of things happening in your location on a map?

Or something along those lines?

Forgot to add (and improved on the idea within seconds of clicking submit).

I mentioned band profiles - one of the biggest parts of a Where I Live site is the Unsigned Band section.

If you could take an RSS feed of the band profiles, the gig reviews and gig previews you could create a really sexy rich app that takes a google map, overlays it with flickr images, the data from the unsigned bands section on the Where I Live site and info on gigs in the area from sites like Radio 1, 6music and other music services - could even take in audio clips of gigs recorded by radio one or the local station.

• Submitted by: Rich Sage

• Submitted by: hyke weir

• Submitted by: Enrico
• Link: msnbot@hotmail-ppe.com