I (and the other team members) found the labs to be a very valuable experience even though our idea was not taken forward. Most of the people on our team are technical developers and although we do get to talk to clients we never do any pitching or developing of our own ideas. To be given the chance to get away from the office to develop and pitch our ideas was a great learning experience.

Personally I feel I have grown more confidence when speaking publicly and have learnt some useful principles to use if I ever need to pitch again.

In terms of advice to other teams I think ShareView below has summed up very nicely. If I were to add to the advice I would say that you should take full advantage of the mentors whenever you can. The most useful question I kept asking to them was “what are the main weaknesses of our project/ideas”. If you ask this after you explain your idea or do a pitch you can strengthen your projects. Often you will find that you did not articulate your project well enough to the mentors and you need to amend your pitch.

many thanks to Frank and the BBC, Ben Aldred

Watch this space!

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 ;)