DS is always interested in current technologies and their use in commercial and public life. But we also thrill at brilliant and thoroughly groundbreaking technology developments as this gives us an insight into what will be mainstream in the future.

So props to our friend Paul Schütze for pointing out this fabulous TED India talk by genius MIT-based inventor Pranav Mistry about his work in gesture-based, haptic computing and augmented reality. Can't really say much more than that, really. Just watch it, and marvel. The spontaneous standing ovation at the end of the talk speak volumes.

Double Shot co-founder Sarah Turner will be working with us 2 days a week from November. The rest of the time she will continue as a digital media specialist with UK Trade and Investment (UKTI). Sarah's areas of expertise include R&D, technology collaboration, business development and consulting. 

In her own words, "My UKTI clients are some of the biggest names globally in media and entertainment. I help their technologists and researchers address current and future challenges by helping them collaborate with the best UK innovators from both industry and academia. I plan to bring some of this emerging technology, from large and small companies, as well as international knowledge to Double Shot."
Sarah

Somewhat of a belated post this. In September, Save the Children launched a ground-breaking campaign, EVERY ONE. A global campaign working across the STC alliance, the five year campaign is aimed at bringing about UN Millennium Development Goal 4: the reduction of child and infant mortality by 2/3 from 2000 to 2015. 

We've been working with Save the Children all Summer, and helped them conceive and scope a (hopefully) critical component of the site: a website specifically aimed at addressing some of the thorny and challenging questions a the heart of such a campaign.

In the early stages of thinking about the project, we came to realise that while the central thrust of the campaign was surely unarguable, nonetheless serious questions do arise when considering it both on a personal level and within a global, practical political context. The key word there is questions. We decided that in order to grapple with the issues thrown up by difficult questions, we'd tackle 'em head on, building a website which begins by asking questions and compares the user's answers to those of others around the world. 

Additionally, users can express their own views by adding them to a dynamic global map which will then tag them against their country of origin.

Over the coming months we'll be adding more questions to the site, releasing a very interesting facebook app and introducing a widget for bloggers. It's early days yet, and the site is going through a number of improvements right now, but our hope is that by the spring of next year something of a genuine global conversation will have been kicked off by the process and that child survival as a pressing issue has a greater visibility across the web. 

Many thanks to our clients at Save the Children UK for their support of us in this project, and props to London-based agency Airlock for all their excellent work on the design, clever thinking and underlying technology.

Simon

We've said it here before: it's incredibly tough to keep on top of all the new online music services out there. And that's us. We're paid to do this; we can only imagine what it's like for, well, people with lives...

So here's MOG. Looks to us a little more like Last than Spotify, in that it's all about sharing playlists, but that said, the excellent music 'n' tech blog Hypebot suggest Spotify's delayed US launch might help MOG out. 

Anyway, we haven't had chance to play with it yet. We'll endeavour to soon, but until then, here's a little promo/demo film showing how to build and share a playlist  using the service. Certainly looks elegantly simple...

Look at that. Pretty nasty, isn't it? I have to tell you, I don't need that kind of thing in my inbox first thing in the morning. But this little email from Spotify did assault my senses yesterday morning. It prompted a couple of thoughts...

Firstly, I became a premium subscriber to Spotify precisely to avoid being advertised to/at. Yes, I know, it's specifically to avoid audio ads in their streaming service, but still, doesn't that entitle me not to be spammed?

And secondly, in the age of highly-targeted advertising just how dumb is this? I mean, just what in my entire history of digital music consumption would lead anyone to try to flog me this piece of excrescence? We hear a lot about Ek and crew's business genius; it's surely not on display here.

Let me be really clear: this really p***es me off. Properly. Much more of this and I'll have my tenner a month back, thank you very much. There are other ways to get hold of music, I gather.

(As an aside, I mentioned this to J last night and he pointed out that when he hires a movie on demand from Virgin Media, it comes with ads! Yes, he's paying for the Virgin subscription, he's renting the film - and still being advertised to. It's truly not good enough... )
Simon

Is Amazon's collaborative filtering social? Is democracy social? Is the BBC iPlayer a piece of social media?

We recently had an interesting debate at one of our BBC training sessions about whether what Amazon does with its website could really be considered "social media". We certainly define it thus, but one of our session attendees asked whether its maths-driven recommendations could be considered this way. Isn't it just good sales analysis (albeit on steroids)? Is it "social" to use the combined knowledge of the activity of all one's customers to make better recommendations for each customer in particular? Our debate hinged on whether a customer or user needed to be conscious of their involvement, or active in their participation to make something "social".

In many ways this could be thought of as really just a semantic debate, a quarrel about the term social, but it did get me thinking about what it means to know something about large numbers of people. Marketing people obsess about this kind of knowledge, hoping it will strengthen the effectiveness of their message. But marketing rarely feels social. National scale democracy polls as many as possible to form a picture of opinions across society, but to me often doesn't feel particularly social. Oddly, it often feels utterly disconnected from the place I live, the people I know and the things I think about.

We were asked whether we thought the BBC's iPlayer was a piece of social media. Our off the cuff answer was that it isn't, primarily because it makes no attempt to learn from its users.

So maybe being social is about intent: that knowledge about the group which benefits members of the group can be a social good. That learning about users and trying to improve a service with that knowledge is as social as having comments on page or shared interest forums. To be frank, we haven't come to any hard and fast answers on this one; maybe there aren't any. But thoughts on the matter are welcome...

Justin and Simon

This book is fabulous. Firstly, it's fabulous because it lays bare some of the ways in which we all learn, the ways we use different personal identities to connect to different learning environments. And it's about the very specific role language plays in each learning domain.

Secondly, it's about video games, an area I freely admit I'm still fascinated by.

James Paul Gee writes as an academic, but also a person in love with the experience that games offer. Consequently each chapter, which focuses on a different game type and specific example of the genre, is highly inspiring. I had that wonderful feeling when reading it of having things articulated aloud that I had previously only half buried instinctive notions.

Anyway I recommend it, as I am sure you can tell.

Justin