Backstage is in Dublin this week for the Xtech 2008 conference. As usual I'll be filming as much as possible from the conference including talks and interviews from people. Just keep an eye on http://cubicgarden.blip.tv for videos everyday.
David Johnson the man behind the BBC iplayer Xbox media centre script was invited into the BBC to give a talk about his work by BBC Backstage recently. There are a few snaps of David Johnson showing the experience on Flickr. The internal session was well received and lots of questions were answered by David, myself (Ian Forrester) and (Anthony Rose). There was also lots of talk about the ipod Touch, Wii and Playstation3 offering too.
Over the Air promised to be a festival of fun centered around Mobile and Wireless development, and delivered so much more.
The eager crowd surprised us all with their competition prototypes. But the winners panned out to the following list.
* Audience Favorite - Capture the Flag by the Pink Pirates
* Overall Best Prototype - Mr. Tomm (Future Platforms)
* Best Mobile Widget - Auto Widget Configurator (Owen)
* Best Hardware hack - Phone Fight (lastminute.com labs)
* Best Use of Multimedia - 21st Century Fridge Door (Orange Pirate)
* Best Use of Wireless, Bluetooth or RFID - Bluetooth FOAF (Owend)
* Most elegant solution - Twitter Client for Windows (Dale Lane)
* Most over engineered - Clever Social Tool (Alex squared)
* Most practical / ready for market - Social Network Open Butler (SNOB)
* Best mobile web application - Browser Sync
* Best design / user experience prototype - Phone Fight (lastminute.com labs)
* Best Location Aware Award - Capture the Flag (Location based games)
And the winners in the unofficial categories were:
* Fun Award - Phone Fight (lastminute.com labs)
* Most likely the succeed with the CIA - (Social Tracker)
One of the weirdest ummm... prototypes/sweeds was that of Torchwood Sweded by a group at Over the Air. The whole thing was done recorded in HD and took less that 24hours to make.
The coverage of Over the Air was great, with online stories from The Guardian and many bloggers.Some of the best coverage however came from Mark Kramer with his videos on the popular video site Qik. There were also plenty of photos on flickr which are still being added.
There has been a range of comments and blog posts about Over the Air including,
Then there was the hacking in the evening. I wasn’t as hardcore as some, and did have a nap for an hour or two at about 5am before finishing my stuff off after breakfast. Most of what I wrote was in C++ but I also got to hack together a little Javascript - not a language I often use.- Dale
What did I learn there and was it relevant for my project? Well, first, it was an opportunity for me to get a brief overview of current developing technology for the mobile platform.There are many and a lot of different technology to learn which I am not familiar with. Of particular interest was a presentation by Brian Fling from flingmedia.com on developing web apps and native apps for the iPhone and mobile applications.- faycalproject
Alex Craxton of Mobile Monday created a slideshare
- Lastminute Labs
We went to the excellent overtheair event over the weekend, with an amazing concentration of mobile developers (and gadgets). Our entry to the 24-hour hack development contest was a bit of fun dreamt up by Richard Jones and Russ Anderson. Disappointed that someone had beaten them to it by working out how to connect a Wiimote to a phone handset via bluetooth, they decided to go one better and do away with the need for the Wiimote at all.
Everyone enjoyed the event and is now looking forward to Mashed which had its dates officially announced - June Saturday 21st - Sunday 22nd.
Over the Air is a special event being organised by Mobile Monday London, hosted by Imperial College and supported by the BBC. 48 hours of mobile and wireless development by and for the leading lights in the industry. At the core its a mobile development event that is part conference, part un-conference all in a 48 hour open hackathon format. It will be the world’s largest non vendor specific mobile developer event to date and aims to embrace all aspects of mobile/wireless development and design.
This is one that you won't want to miss, so signup now, and watch out for the big announcements that will be coming soon. To get the latest news on Over the Air developments as they roll out hot off the press, simply subscribe to our over the air feed at www.overtheair.org, which also has lots more information about the event.
They say a picture is equal to a thousand words, well seeing Ashley join the Uk's 600 Linux users was priceless and he was very willing to learn more. More photos here and other blog posts here. Who knows maybe Ashley might join the growing open source movement and dump his windows install in the future...
So last year the BBC and Yahoo! ran the stunningly cool Hack Day London. It was a brilliant success, and frankly I’ve been biting at the bit to organise another one. Last week I got the nod from Ashley Highfield that the budget had been cleared and we could run another one!
It’s very early days yet, but so far we know that it’s going to be late June, venue to be decided and we’re looking for other people to work with. Obviously we worked with Yahoo! last year (who’s idea Hack Day is) - and this year we want to work with as many people as possible.
I think the only major change will be that we plan to run some kind of conference on the Friday before the weekend event and that we wont be having a massive band on the Sunday night - rather we’ll be doing something (and this is soooo cool) on the Saturday night.
Oh… one last thing… we’re changing the name this year to avoid any confusion… henceforth it’ll be called Mashed.
More news as the planning progresses.
One of last year's Innovation Lab commissions was a small R&D project
to make a visual filter for news stories. The result so far is a pair
of sliders which filter four news feeds into a single list.
The focus is on the BBC website's 'Where I Live' section, and the aim
is to allow users to choose a balance of News and Local Features, as
well as varying the geographical mix. The slider may have wider
applicability depending on how useful and intuitive it proves to be.
We'd like your feedback.
Two sliders are used, the first to mix two pairs of feeds into two
lists, and the second to mix the two lists together. Stories are
given a value based on their order within the feed, and as the slider
moves across, low value stories from one list drop off, to be
replaced by high value stories from the new list.
The application is in two parts:
* a Perl script which consumes RSS feeds (using XML::FeedPP) and
generates an embedded JSON array containing the stories from all four
sources and their rank.
* a Javascript function which combines and generates the list(s)
visible on the page.
Since the timescales of 'News' and 'Local Features' differ so widely
(news changing by the minute, features dating back weeks) it was not
possible to elegantly rank the lists strictly on their publication
date -- instead we chose to simply score them according to their rank
position in the original feed.
In this prototype the source feeds are hard-coded into the script,
but this could easily be changed. Unfortunately the BBC does not have
a very RESTful interface to their 'Local Features' XML, and with no
consistency in the URL format there is no simple programatic way to
access all the BBC regions.
The slider is very basically styled, but is it intuitive? Does the
data shift as you might expect? Are two sliders too complex? Is a
slider appropriate here, or should something else be used? Is the
sorting algorithm right? What should we do about duplicate entries?
We're interested to know what you think.
http://projects.hinterland.nu/bbc/sliders
The BBC Backstage Christmas Party this year kicked off in fine style to the sound of 650 Charity Santa's partying.
Later in the night, once the Santa's had left by the front door instead of the Chimney it was time for the Free bar which was sponsored by our partners Dopplr.com and Moo.com.
During this time, our other partners for the night the Open Rights Group setup their now famous mini-step ladder to recreate the speakers corner event, copyfighters.
Matthew kicked it off with a discussion about DRM followed by Cory Doctorow who gave a very good talk.
Many others joined and everyone enjoyed the slighly drunken talks. To finish off the already impressive night, on the very top floor Ryan kicked off two games of Werewolf. Some people prefer to watch or go downstairs and socialise. By 1:30am, there were a hardcore who just hung around till about 2:30am. But at 3am it was time to call it a night.
Thanks to everyone who turned up and enjoyed the night, we had a great time! And of course we at Backstage wish you all a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year in 2008. There are many exciting things being planned for the next year but I think you will agree with us that 2007 between the barcamps, hackday and other events was great.
Seriously you think this would have been easy here at beeb towers... But no... We’ve been having a bit of an internal bun fight over getting the new site (which contains a proper solution for the podcasts) live.
So..... What we’ve done is create a dedicated blip.tv channel for the backstage podcasts (and other associated media).
You can subscribe to the podcasts via this RSS feed
http://bbcbackstage.blip.tv/rss
Alternatively you can subscribe to it via iTunes
itpc://bbcbackstage.blip.tv/rss/itunes/
(yes I know that wont work for everyone)
I hope this will make things easier for everyone :-)
Well it’s podcast time again and yesterday I got the opportunity to speak to Anthony Rose - head of all things iPlayer here at the beeb.
We managed to talk for several minutes before DRM was mentioned, but this is a great listen if you want to know a little about the man behind the future strategy and tech delivery of the BBC's iPlayer project.
Or direct download at
http://blip.tv/file/get/Matthewcashmore-backstagebbccoukPodcastWithAnthonyRose192.mp3
