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On Monday 27th April the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the BBC are jointly hosting an event to showcase the outcomes of projects from our co-funded Knowledge Exchange Programme. We will also be exploring the wider implications of the projects' findings and their recommendations for our respective communities as well as the future of the partnership itself. The event is being held at Wallacespace in St Pancras, London.
To find out more about the Knowledge Exchange Programme and this event visit our blog at: 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
We're very excited to announce that today we are launching R&DTV, a pilot project that we've been working on with our colleagues in RAD. I've been working on this as producer, with co-producer Hemmy Cho, as well as Ian Forrester and George Wright.
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
Continue reading "R&DTV: a collaborative project between BBC Backstage & RAD"
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 (March 24th) is Ade Lovelace day.
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
Continue reading "AdaLovelaceDay09: 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.
Although Backstage really wanted to attend Rewired State, we couldn't get there, so we asked Libby Miller to guest blog her thoughts and experiences - thanks Libby!
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.
Continue reading "Rewired State"
On the 26th February, Backstage sponsored of the Software Craftsmanship Conference 2009 at BBC Media Village, London. It was a day of workshops for programmers, looking specifically at how to develop good working practices, through discipline and good habits.
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’!