Unexpected Media

ITV Imagine: are they serious?

February 18, 2008 – 10:39 am
At a seminar that I chaired for Digital Horizons last week, a presenter from a department at ITV called Imagine presented their vision of the future. I hadn't heard of Imagine before but it now employs 15 people and exists to inform internal and external producers, commissioners and execs at ITV about the future of media, to create prototypes and inspire. It sounds a bit like the BBC's Imagineering unit, set up in 1999 and disbanded a couple of years ago to become Creative Research and Development. One of the prototypes shown was intended to demonstrate what Coronation Street might look like 50 years from now. Ignoring the production values, which were on a par with film student essays, the ideas proposed are all things which are feasible now and, in some cases, have been trialled and rejected. They included options to click on and purchase products featured in the show, ...

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In Memoriam: Andy Palacio

February 15, 2008 – 7:20 pm
Andy Palacio a musician and artist, who worked with me at the community media organisation Cultural Partnerships in the 1980s, died last month aged 47. A member of the Garifuna people in Belize, Andy was a talented musician and passionate about preserving and promoting Garifuna language and culture. Andy, whose musical career had taken off and stalled a couple of times, seemed finally to be on the brink of becoming very well known. He recorded and toured extensively; he was awarded BBC3's World Music Award following the release his last album Watina. Reviewing it in the Guardian last year, Charlie Gillett wrote: "whatever people mean by music being universal, surely this is the perfect demonstration of their argument".

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Paid Training Opportunity at 01Zero-One

February 15, 2008 – 7:07 pm
Do you work in Broadcast? In: • Multi purpose/format editing • Interactive producer/production • IT/Media Integration • Web meets Audio Visual • HD Engineering/Science • Live Events/Music Directing (Vision Mixing) • Broadcast Media Graphics • Presenting for Live Events • HD (5.1) Sound • Mutliplatform Writer/Project Creator 01Zero-One is building a pool of Industry trainers for 2012 – would you like to take up this unique opportunity to pass on your skills to the next generation of industry professionals. They will pay you £2000 incl. VAT to attend a 5 day “Train the Trainer Course” in Soho over 2 weeks in late April. If you would like to be considered for this project please send your cv or a short biog to pollyanna.lindley@westking.ac.uk or for more information call Polly on 020 7025 1987.

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InSync: Rise of the Post-Network Brandcasters 28/02/08

February 4, 2008 – 4:27 pm
Consumers ARE connected. The market IS a conversation Convergence HAS happened. Broadband is MASS market. Mobile finally works. …and everywhere we look we see rich content…. But where does all the content come from? The last two years has seen an explosion in user generated content and new channels but research is showing that as audiences mature so their expectations change and they want more and more professional quality content. One sector that is starting to move into filling this space is advertising and marketing. Brands and agencies are beginning to actively exploit all the new channels to reach consumers in highly targeted campaigns full of interactive, rich, quality content supported by user communities. But how far will they go? Will brands become the new Channel 4? Will ITV end up supplying brands with content for delivery away from their networks? Or will brands help create new models? Speakers include Joanna Lyall, Managing Partner, Mindshare Interaction Robin Jaffray, Director of ...

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Creative Industries – £10m Call for Collaborative Research

January 25, 2008 – 6:23 am
On 30th January details about the £10m call for collaborative research projects, targeted specifically at the creative industries, will be announced and the competition formally launched. Full details about the call and how to apply will be posted on the technology programme website. Objectives In recognition of the importance of technology to the sector, as both an enabler and potential disrupter, the aim of the call is to stimulate technology based or inspired innovation. The call is looking for projects that will lead to the development of new products, processes, capabilities and services or improve the competitive advantages of existing ones. Target Audience The call is open to collaborative projects between UK based companies; and companies and universities/ other research organisations.  The overall theme will centre on the exploitation of digital technologies and has been designed to appeal broadly across the creative industry sub sectors, and includes specific mechanisms to encourage participation of small ...

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Content 360: designing a lab for MipTV

January 11, 2008 – 10:54 am
We've been asked to run a 2 day 'innovation lab'  as part of the Content 360 pitching competition at this year's Mip TV in Cannes. It's an interesting development from last year when we worked with the BBC on their categories in the competition. This time we're working with Ogilvy (part of the WPP advertising empire) to run an intensive creative workshop developing ideas for 'cause-related marketing'.  It's quite a brave move by the Ogilvy team who, like the BBC, are realising that they need to find ways of working with external artists and creative professionals in order to innovate. As with all these projects, success will ultimately depend on the quality of the participants. So, if you're interested get an application in before the deadline. More about the competition here.

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The problem with innovation

January 7, 2008 – 2:30 pm
...is that the word doesn't really mean very much. The first person I heard make this case was Curt Carlson at SRI when I went there with the BBC. He preferred to use the the term 'value creation' but he was really just making a point in the context of his own institution's need to generate more tangible benefits from its R&D activity. Matt Cashmore, who is now directing the Innovation Labs for BBC Future Media and Technology, sent me a message this morning suggesting that we change the programme's name to: “The we want new ideas, want better ideas, want big changes and need to place big bets on new ideas Labs”. He'd read this post on Scott Berkun's blog.

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Buzz in Leicester

December 7, 2007 – 3:26 pm
Spoke yesterday at a conference on Creativity:Innovation and Industry, organised by the Insititute of Creative Technologies at De Montfort University in Leicester. The other contributors were two academics, Professor Margaret Boden and Dr Claudia Eckert, and Toby Moores of Sleepy Dog, the company that brought us Buzz. Annoyingly I managed to read 8:00 am as 7:00 am on my watch, missed my train and missed Maggie's opening talk. I'll post more when I get a transcript but I think she discussed three kinds of creativity: combinational, exploratory and historic. I know she told me that I was wrong when in my presentation I gave the Koestler definition of 'bisociation' as the heart of any creative act. Claudia Eckhart has been studying creativity and innovation processes at Cambridge University. She compared attitudes to creativity in art and scientific or technical domains, suggesting that the term is regarded with suspicion in engineering projects ...

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Big Apple

November 28, 2007 – 12:33 pm
Originally uploaded by FrankBoyd In New York to run a workshop at the World Congress of Science and Factual Producers. The brief is more or less: do Crossover (normally a five day lab) in four hours. I have a feeling that this crowd, who are all from television, are going to be very sceptical.

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Muddy Boots: prototype from the 2007 Innovation Labs

November 23, 2007 – 7:56 pm
One of the projects commissioned from last year's northern Innovation Lab at Swinton Park has gone up on Rattle Research's site. "Muddy Boots is a project prototype commisioned by the BBC to investigate the ways in which social metadata can be utilised within the BBC. It's called Muddy Boots because we imagined the boots (URLs) of the great unwashed trampling over the pristine BBC carpet (News pages) :) "

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