Justin & Simon's old (ultimate) BBC boss Ashley Highfield has moved on from the UK cross-industry Video On Demand project Kangaroo, after just a few months there. Seems he's taking up a new post at Microsoft. At the time of writing, the only report we can find on it is from ultra-scoopers PaidContent. More news as we get it.
We're big fans of what Manchester-based specialist music etailers Boomkat are doing with their 14 Track "imprint". It's worth a mention here because amongst the plethora of business models being tried out in the record industry, they've got a pretty convincing one.
Each 14 Tracks edition is to all intents and purposes a compilation album - but available only online. Each one is based on a specific theme, genre, label etc. All tracks stream for free from the site, are available as DRM-free downloads individually or as an album.
Now we weren't sure about the pricing structure initially, and we still feel - instinctively - that 99p is a bit steep for a single track, although the DRM-lack is a big plus. But with the bundled "album" price they're on to a winner: £6.99 is a killer price for any 14 track compilation, and especially so for one as likely as not chock full of rarities. Sure, you'll be able to track these down for free somewhere... but with no guarantee of quality, and certainly not with such ease.
So hats off to them in general... and in particular for their latest edition, which delves into the archives of (another Double Shot favourite) and Mark Ernestus and Moritz Von Oswald's Berlin-based techno-dub pioneers Basic Channel.
Not of strict relevance here, but we're immensely fond of scientists and technologists who say the unsayable. No-one falls into that category more consistently than Gaia theorist and radical environmental scientist James Lovelock. His last book, Gaia's Revenge laid out his hypothesis that climate change has passed some kind of tipping point and that environmental cataclysm will result. In this Guardian interview he rams the point home: the mainstreaming of green issues is at best irrelevance and at worse takes our eye off the real ball here, that is, to figure out how the hell to deal with the consequences of the inevitable.
And how to deal with this on a personal level? "Enjoy life while you can. Because if you're lucky it's going to be 20 years before it hits the fan."
Obama's use of comms tech to help win the White house have been well-documented. The BBC report that he's now using the web to help with the transition, not least in soliciting views from the public about their wants of the new administration.
Just wanted to draw attention to a lovely lecture by Luis Von Ahn from a couple of years ago.
He takes us through a particularly entertaining look at what humans can do better than computers, and ironically, how to use computers to make use of this resource.
He himself has devised a game that allows players, unbenknownst to themselves, to usefully describe and tag images from the internet. Two random players somewhere in the world are presented with exactly the same image at the same time - the idea of the game is for the two users is to type in the same word to sum up the image in as few trys as possible, without any other way of communicating with each other. When the two players reach the same word they receive a score based on how long it took them to come to agree. Of course in attempting to arrive at the same word they build up a very useful set of descriptors around the image they are looking at.
The image tagging by-product of the game could, if used in conjunction with something like Google Image Labeler, swiftly provide rich textual descriptions for most of the images on the internet and therefore much improve visually impaired people's experience of using the web pretty much without anyone actually working to make it happen.
The rather excellent Paid Content website writes today that Senator Obama is already appointing technology experts to his transition team. In particular they think that the appointment of Julius Genachowski "could signal the prominence of high-tech policy in the new administration." Add that to the lists of high hopes.
It seems like Web 2.0 console gaming is now fully upon us. Recently we have seen Blast Works 'Build, Fuse and Destroy' for the Wii, a shoot'em up which asked its users to build and share their own levels.
But by far the biggest critical success so far is Little BIG Planet which the Guardian has said is the reason anyone should buy a PS3 right now. The game has sumptuous imagery, an amazing physics engine and looks a lot of fun but like Build, Fuse and Destroy much work has been put in by the developers to create a user toolkit to create new levels, that will in theory give the game a much longer lease of life, as users design, share and play each other's new creations.
Having seen the toolkit in action it looks like making new stuff in the game is pretty hard and will likely reduce the active audience considerably, but like the rest of the user generated world, maybe it only needs a few percent of super users to allow this game to keep on delightfully growing.
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