mypipeline

Touchscreen displays have been to good effect for advertisers. Why not explore the 'outdoor' options?

I had a few ideas about 4IP again today, and there’s one I’d like to share here to see if anyone had any feedback:

If you want public-service new media to serve the public, put it where the public can see it and engage with it: outdoors.

What could this mean? How about an ambient network of public touch-screen interfaces that:

1. Showcase 4iP projects
2. Allow the foot-fall to interact with the concepts and data inside those projects and
3. Take feedback from the public as to what’s working and what’s not.

There are several reasons why this would work well for 4IP:

1. we have a pedigree in public art and displays, and people associate the brand with this activity
2. we are being encouraged to think of a future in which broadcasting is not limited to the front-room, even though that is where our strength lies (linear TV output)
3. The data that could be collected from these public media centres is HUGE: and could be used in so many ways that would not be immediately obvious to the commissioners of the 4iP projects.

An example of what I mean..

Suppose Channel4 commissions a project that employs the publicly available data here at TheyWorkForYou.org and also through ideas such as the Met Police Crime Map. It’s not so hard to imagine a scenario where a large screen interface is displayed in some of the city’s hot spots that aims to solicit both ideas on crime prevention, and also allow members of the local area who wouldn’t normally go to one of these sites online to see relevant data about their area broadcast on the streetcorner. You could make a short clip of yourself (maybe using an API from a video service such as 12seconds) campaigning for a specific action in the area, and other passersby could have the chance to react to what you’d said. It’d be a living document of their area with the ability to showcase the stuff they’re proud of in the area as well as a chance to give direct feedback to their government officials.

How about another initiative that uses the public displays for expanding cultural awareness? Maybe using the terminals to broadcast historical televisual content about an area? I would love to be able to pour through some local footage of interesting events whilst waiting for a bus in Berkhamsted; I would also like the opportunity to feedback on what kind of local media content would interest me more…

How about using the terminals to display where to buy the lowest cost goods available in the area, with directions to find them?

Yes, I realise that this kind of project is a) expensive and b) not about to happen overnight. But it’s not beyond the realms of possibility given the right partnerships: a hardware company keen to get its brand out there and convince people of their touchscreen’s functionality, a software company keen to flex its muscles in the burgeoning gestural programming market, some production companies keen to get into new media in the right ways…you get the picture.

I wrote a little while back about how 4iP might employ the thinking that allows open-source models to succeed. I think this may be another way to actually harness the public to create value in public service digital media.

What do you think?

1 Comment | In: Data Visualization, Digital Life, Future Telly, Ideas | tags: 4ip channel4. | #

A colleague pointed me to the excellent iplayerlist a while back, and it inspired me to hack up this Channel4 CatchUpList because I find the current Catch Up interface a little over egged at the moment (don’t worry, we’re working on that).

Anyway, here it is, a list of the TV shows currently available in Catch Up, with links straight to their player and the time left to watch them. There’s also a breakdown of what genre of programming makes up the Catch Up service.

This still doesn’t work out the can’t-view-on-a-mac dilemma, which I too suffer from.

We’re working on that too…

NB: this service is cached every hour.

No Comments | In: Ideas, Projects | tags: channel4, on-demand, video. | #

Updated Aug 20 ‘08

Albumaniac: Lyrics.com + Last.fm mashup: game that pulls a random lyric or verse from the lyrics database, and four album images from the Last.fm REST service. The user has to guess which album the lyric is from. If they get it wrong, the albums disappear. If they get it right, the album art is automatically added to their knowledge base and that information is stored for later. The information could, for instance, be used to allow that user to act as an expert on that band or album, or whatever. Or it could just accumulate on that player’s profile as a ‘badge’ of their knowledge/skill, and therefore be matched against other players who share their knowledge etc.

Band-aid: Tour dates map mashup with Yahoo! Maps and Upcoming.org. Visualisation exercise for traditional calendar-based information. User searches for a particular band, and the map is populated with their tour dates and locations, with a 1-2-3-4-5 dot-connection to indicate the sequence of the tour. Then the user can form a group that campaigns to get their favourite bands to play in their hometown by pledges for ticket sales. The user could use a ticketmaster purchasing client to buy tickets for the tour. This would be even better if the unsigned bands could add their gig locations and dates to the map itself.

Twitter + 43People.com mash: user  tweets goal progress notes to their 43things.com goal list. This would then appear as a mini-blog that gradually builds a graphical progress report for all of their goals/travel spots/etc. They could set milestones as well (I’ve raised £300 of £1000 to do my Mt Kilamanjaro trip) or set themselves challenges with the new API call on 43things.

Caveat: I haven’t checked whether any of these actually exist..some probably do. It’s just a brain dump, so I can start thinking about something else.

No Comments | In: Ideas, Projects, Social Media | tags: mashups, music, open APIs. | #

I have been meaning to write a little post about Starbucks’ most recent ‘innovation’. What the hell is MyStarbucksIdea? Basically, it’s a site where Starbucks customers can tell Starbucks about how they can make their shops and services better. On the face of it, some Starbucks marketer’s ’social media’ pet project, but really it’s just a crass exploitation of users’ ideas, and frankly their time too. Puh-lease. Asking your customers for ideas on how to change your product for the better is an age-old ploy, but this isn’t a feedback card stuck on the end of your happy meal. A handy message in the MyStarbucksIdea FAQ page says clearly: “we may give you credit on the site, but we won’t be compensating customers if their ideas are chosen.” That’s not a great way to care and share. It gets worse, though.

A closer inspection of the T&Cs reveals some altogether not-wholly-world-loving aspects of Starbucks’ corporate philosophy:

“The submission of your Idea to Starbucks is entirely voluntary, non-confidential, gratuitous, and non-committal. You understand that Starbucks may be working on the same or a similar Idea, that it may already know of such Idea from other sources, that it may simply wish to develop this (or a similar Idea) on its own or it may have taken/will take some other action. …[you also understand that] the Idea represents your own original work. You have all necessary rights to disclose the Idea to Starbucks.”

Hmm. Ok. So I have an original idea but Starbucks may already have thought of it, and may already be working on implementing it. So thank you anyway, and by the way, please visit us and buy one of our lattes because we’re short on cash [and ideas] at the moment…

I’m certainly not the first to point out this site’s obvious failings so I am not going to dwell on it. Instead, I would like to point to some choice ‘ideas’ that honest cutsomers have been kind enough to give them on the site. [For why this kind of suggestion-box-with-a-vote is a bad idea, Starbucks, surely your marketing team would have been aware of the Chevy Tahoe UGC ad distaster a couple years ago?]

Fairtrade

“My idea is that Starbucks compensate people fairly for their ideas and original thinking. ‘If we implement your idea, we may give you credit on the site, but we won’t be compensating customers if their ideas are chosen.’ reads like exploitation to me. But you can have this idea for free.”

Snots

“Cut your prices in half. Use Small, Medium, and Large as normal people do. Stop being such snots; it’s just coffee.”

Duplicate ideas (I get the distinct impression a programmer wrote this one)

The voting and popular ideas section [on this site] can’t possibly work correctly until you force users to conduct a brief search for existing similar ideas, before they add theirs. Too much duplication.

Ideas cards(from ‘nooooooo’ …)

Try to prevent people who look like they might log onto mystarbucksidea.com with the intention of posting ridiculous suggestions from getting hold of the ideas cards handed out at Starbucks branches. Thank you!

The list could go on and on. I have wasted too many minutes of my life already being mildly amused. As an aside, I would say 30-40% of the ideas are about the site’s poor functionality, usability and speed to load - which is the icing on this particular cake for Starbucks. For a sampling of these ‘ideas’, simply search for ‘this site‘ on the site and read one of the hundreds of complaints…

No Comments | In: Ideas, The Bug List | tags: marketing, starbucks. | #

One of those nights last night. Couldn’t settle. Random, mostly trivial ideas flitting through my head. Stuff like the following:

Video greeting cards… when are these going to be created? I am not talking about these. What I want is a slimline cardboard sheet with an embedded personal video greeting that I can create in iMovie, download onto the card, then send off to my significant other, for them to consume. It’s my wife’s birthday tomorrow, and I’d love to take a clip of our 9-month old son trying to eat grapes, then capture it forever in a card for her (from him). The point is that it’s still a physical object - it’s not going to get lost in a hard drive somewhere, or erased when file formats change in years to come. Nor would it be a cheesy e-card. I guess what we’d need is a flexible diode screen, but cheap enough to be mass-produced (although I’d happily shell out up to £10 for the vid-e-card, truth be told). You know what would be even better? That the card’s all networked up and connected to my family’s Vimeo sites, where they can upload video messages into the card remotely… that’s a social object I’d buy.

Twitter apps .. someone should extend the Very Short Stories idea for Twitter, and allow people to upload compact story nuggets, mash them up with some relevant Flickr et al photos, or have artists upload postcard comics that represent the best short stories.

Another thought crossed my mind the other night that Twitter could be quite fun as a Cryptic Crossword Clue exchange. You’d need to set up a bot that accepts both clues and answers to the clues, and determines which Twitterers are answering the most clues on a little leaderboard. Because it’s Twitter, you’d be able to ‘play’ from anywhere, on mobile or online. Once someone answered a clue, the bot wouldn’t accept any more answers to the clue, and would chalk up the answer on a searchable list, which could act as a nice databased resource for aspiring competitive cruciverbalists…

And a final thought… why haven’t file systems evolved with tagging features instead of/as well as recursive directories? I’d probably use a tagged file system more efficiently than a directory tree…

2 Comments | In: Digital Life, Ideas | tags: social objects. | #