To Amsterdam for IBC

OK, just a quicky this one- for the next week or so I'm in Amsterdam attending the largest broadcast technology show in Europe, IBC. I'll be attending as many conference sessions as I humanly can, visiting as much of the show as I can (it's colossal!) and also supporting the Avatar-M stand in Hall 7, stand A08e. This trip marks a sort of a transition- unlike NAB my responsibilities this time are not just to the one project, but to the whole of R&D in the BBC, and I'm going to try my best to find the most interesting, most transformational technologies and companies there to take the knowledge back to colleagues in the UK.

The number of BBC personnel at IBC is a sensitive subject, and I'm not going to state numbers here. However I can say that this year everyone who is going has had to fully justify their attendance, and many, like me, are doing several jobs out there. Plus, most of us are still doing the day job via the internets (I'm typing this on the train from Brussels to Amsterdam!).

Each day as and when I find cool stuff I'll be posting a few links, and hopefully images, on this blog. I'll also tweet from the various conference sessions- possibly as Meeware, or potentially as a new Twitter account I may be setting up for this sort of job- "Ant Miller BBC R&D" or "BBCResearch&Development"- tbc. All part of the KM job you see.

Through this marathon geekout I shall do my best to avoid dwelling on the fact that I am missing out on probably the best festival of the summer- The End of the Road. Terrific line up, perfect size, and it looks like the weather will be spot on too! At least Rowan's going- look out for her updates as @Rowstar and for a full review on Breakfast in Bed.

P.S. If you too are in Amsterdam for IBC (or even just chilling out in what is a superb city), direct message me on twitter or drop me an email, or even comment here, and I'd be glad to catch up.

The Monday after Mashed

This is a tough blog to write- for the last two days I have been immersed in yet another epic hacking fest, and this time I took rockets! Sadly I don't have very many great photo's, you can find hundreds here though.

Highlights:

• Social Flight Simulator- a tremendous, multi hack team effort, given inspirational leadership by Ewan Spence, a man for whom the word eccentric might have been invented (though if it had, it'd be spelt with at least half a dozen markup characters!). I had a brilliant flight up from Darwin to Tokyo with the very excellent Michael Sparkes. Michael turns out to be an exceptionally good pilot an gave us a tremendous flypast of Mt Fuji!
• Meatspace GPS Tron Bikes- Tristan Roddis of Cog Apps (a brighton outfit i've been aware of, and slightly in awe of for a while) had a great game with GPS phones, google earth and walky talkies. It was a hoot, exhausting and buggy- just what Mashed is all about!
  
• IBM Power managment games things- can't remember what they were actually calling this, but it was brilliant games driven approach to using data out of power usage monitors.
• BBC Subtitles- at last, after an unfortunate loss of access to the subtitles on our own shows (we outsourced this work, so now have to pay extra if we want to do anything with this utterly invaluable additional metadata- DOH!) someone hacked an OCR driven XML creator for these, then integrated it into REDUX (if you have to ask....). Out of the back of that dozens of hacks were started at around seven on Saturday night, and a fair few, including an amazing translator, made it though to final submission.
• Pie. Great pie. Thankyou Matt Locke and Channel Four for great pie.

Not only all this great geekery, but I also got to catch up once more with Craig and Josette from o'Reilly, Glyn from ORG, and Nick Radlo. Pamela Clark from Nasa was a facinating person to meet, and we chatted for ages about research analogies, institutional cultures of innovation and cuttlefish skin. Thanks to Matt Locke not only for the pies but also for the lift back to Brighton- Matt is a luminary in this world- franky if he offered me a couple of hours to chat about the BBC, innovation culture and continental philosophy in a skip full of rubbish I'd take it in a femto second- to give a lift home too was generosity itself.