• Submitted by: Brendan

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

• Submitted by: Rain Ashford

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

• Submitted by:

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...

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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

• Submitted by:

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

• Submitted by:

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.

• Submitted by:

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.

• Submitted by:

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.

• Submitted by: Libby Miller

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.

• Submitted by: Rain Ashford

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’!

• Submitted by: Rain Ashford

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.

• Submitted by:

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.

• Submitted by: Ian Forrester

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...

• Submitted by:

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.

• Submitted by:

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.