Innovation Labs

Idaho Podstitch in shock U turn!

Yea, that post I put up earlier, well the idea has totally evolved over the course of the day into a different beast. The meeting with the commissioner Jem has proved to be very useful. We trimmed the excess fat from the idea, Podstitch now looks more like Kate Moss rather than Vanessa Feltz

Watch this space!

Not just a jolly to a walled town in the South of France

You don't need women when you have the warm embrace of a glass of brandy and German style board games like Carcassonne!

Day 2 was very useful for us and really narrowed and focused the idea in our heads. Gill and "Haddock" were really helpful mentors, pointing out seemingly obvious questions like "What's the hook? How does the user find out about the service?". We felt our pitch went pretty well, and we didn't feel we had any huge spectres lurking behind the curtain. While the extremely detailed back stories for our users Stephen and Sam seemed superfluous at first, later on the value of the detailed texture the characters had became apparent as difficult questions became easier to answer.

We meet Jem for the first time this afternoon - Matt and Frank have been talking this morning about our pitch to him, and helped build up the fearful illusion among the groups that the man who holds the purse strings may be some kind of gigantic tentacled ghost, just waiting to destroy our ideas and devour our souls.

If we don't make another blog post, maybe someone should call Mulder, Scully and the GhostBusters...

Podstitch: a basic project outline

I thought I would give you a basic outline of the project. Its essentially a community website that allows audio files, usually mp3’s, to be searched, shared and personalised.

Search
A transcript of the audio file is used to allow more precise searching for audio. Audio would have a transcript attached by a speech to text system which would be used in a search. Podstitch would also allow users to attach keywords, or tags, to a created stitch. This would allow users to search for user created audio in different ways. The system would also offer subtle suggestions to audio files in a ’my suggestions’ section based on user preferences and the channels they are subscribed to.

Stitching
The user can grab audio from sources, be it BBC content, user created stitches or content from other sources and ’stitch’ it together to create their own programs. The audio files can be in three levels of building blocks.

1. The smallest is a segment or chapter. It’s a smaller snippet of audio, maybe a news story or feature.
2. The next level is a show or program. This is made from segments stitched together into larger audio files.
3. The top level block will be a channel. This will consist of shows stitched together. This channel could be pod cast to subscribers or be created as part of a social group i.e. Year 1 Law Lectures pod cast.

Social
As mentioned above there would be a community element to Podstitch. Users would be able to create groups containing people with similar hobbies or interests, share audio via a pod cast and blog or comment on particular audio files.

Of course this is all subject to change as part of the iterative design process.

Wow that was serious, we are having fun, honest ;)

** Girl News **

Yes - everyone at the lab (Except Gill, one of the mentors) is male. Good news though - we can all stop telling rowdy jokes and scratching the unmentionables (When Gills not looking) because we have taken the bold step of INVITING A GIRL. Well, a woman actually.

She'll be joining our happy throng of two, working on the ideas (such as they are) and helping us pull the presentation together. Apparently she'll also be giving us a 'female perspective'.

** Girl news ends **

Activities so far...

Day 1
We're finding it really therapeutic doing mini-presentations to one another, especially then having your pitch explained by another person. It was interesting hearing Neil (Reading Room) present back our approach and make more sense of it then we had.

Day 2
Matt Marsh - we've only been told off by him twice but, damn it, he's right. He was working hard to get us us all to understand the users need(s) and motivation to use a particular service in a much more formal and detailed way than we'd otherwise do. It's actually giving us some great in-points. Which is a good thing as we only have an area, an opportunity, to try to fill at the moment - rather than a nice grippable idea...

Later that evening: Gareth tries to show off a card trick. Top Tip: Never play cards with Matt Locke.

Food
Don't believe all the news on the food - it really was very good last night, although I have started to find myself humming 'downtown' quite a bit recently. Can it really be looped on 8 track casette.

Tuesday Homework

The homework for Tuesday/Wednesday is to try to write about your project at a number of levels: to communicate it effectively to potential users, a journalist, and to the BBC commissioners.