Backstage are really pleased and excited to announce our logo design competition to the community!
You may remember the excellent cloud-tag design that we've been using over the last couple of years was an idea from the Backstage community and we'd love it if you put your thinking caps on again and came up with a stunning, geeky new logo to represent us. The reward will be the kudos of having your design on our next run of t-shirts and possibly some stickers and other schwag too!
The competition is going to be open for a month and our criteria for judging entries is:
A strong, imaginative design which:
· is modern
· embodies the spirit of backstage: geeky, open, fun and cool
· is simple and can be reproduced easily on print/TV/online
· is in CMYK or B/W and should not be more than two block colours
· is in 300dpi print resolution and in 72dpi screen resolution
The deadline for entries is Sunday 30th November and we're aiming to announce the result by Friday 5th December.
Please read the full before sending us your design.
Go forth and get creative - the geekier and cooler the better - good luck everyone!
We truly believe the UK is a hot bed for development and ideas but we're maybe not doing enough to promote the creativity and talent within the UK. So to aid with this, we started recording conferences backstage attends so they can be placed online for others to hear in the future. We have also partnered up with the non-profit and highly listen to , to get the recordings out further that our fair shores. The lot of records we did were from the , which we sponsored in Newcastle/Gateshead earlier in the year. The first recording went up last week involving .
You can also subscribe to future podcasts from using
Infused is a concept paper by Richard, who combines Flickr photos with Youtube videos and ´óÏó´«Ã½ articles. Its a mashup for papers.
Infused Entertainment brings the News idea and recreates it for the ´óÏó´«Ã½ entertainment feeds. It actually works slightly better as the music and media is more likely to be found on the sources I use. The idea behind it is the supplements you now get in most newspapers - this is .
Andy explains what iplayerlist is and how it works.
I scrape bbc.co.uk/iplayer for all the current TV shows (a-z atom feeds help).Then I extract the synopsis from /programmes for each episode.
I then throw the episode synopsis at the Beta Open Calais API. This API will extract a ton of concepts, including some geographical information that it thinks the synopsis relates to (don't ask me how, I assume some sort of magic elf reads it).This geographical information (states, countries, towns etc) now includes longitudes and latitude info thanks to Open Calais chatting to Freebase. It works best with the larger synopsis.
I'm still questioning if this is any use to an non techy user. Would my dad like to see a map showing TV shows which relate to them? Anyway, in the future I might add a bit of colour coding on the markers for program type
(childrens, factual, comedy etc).
Because you can do it doesn't always make it useful but its the point of Backstage. To explorer the useful, artistic, clever, serious, etc. Keep on submitting...
Brandon Butterworth is Principal Technologist and one of those famous names you hear in the air of corridors all over the ´óÏó´«Ã½. In his post for the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Internet Blog he spills the full beans on what the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Redux project is and why it came about. All in his own words, there's some choice quotes such as...
In the summer of 2007, freetards (me too), the OSC and others were calling for the ´óÏó´«Ã½ to make iPlayer cross-platform, and the Trust had committed the ´óÏó´«Ã½ to doing this.
At Mashed08, we let the public see and use one of our development front ends for the first time with the freshly-hacked that week subtitle support - so new it was still being worked on through the Saturday.
Redux consists of three racks of equipment - two are storage nodes - 342TB according to the disk manufacturers, 297TB of usable space with 152K programme files so far.
You can read the
whole thing on the internet blog...
Only a week away, the head conference is a conference which allows anyone around the world to participate in a global conference. Here's the blurb from the site...
is a web conference that brings together some of the most interesting and exciting developers, designers, creatives, and thought leaders from around the web to share with you their passions and expertise.
The sessions cover a wide range of timely topics including web standards, accessibility, web application development, Flash, Flex, and scalability.
The premise for is simple: instead of making you come to the web conference, let's make the web conference come to you.
is a web conference with all of the traditional elements. We have live speakers, presentations, question and answer sections, and networking opportunities. The twist is that the conference takes place everywhere -- all over the world -- and at real-world gatherings called local conference hubs.
And we use the Internet to tie it all together.
´óÏó´«Ã½ Backstage are one of the sponsors and were running . This means you can come into the ´óÏó´«Ã½, bring your laptop and share the conference experience with others in real life while joining up with the rest of the world via the online connections..We will provide some wifi, food and drink but there's a 24hour spar across the road.
So sign up now if your interested in taking part in the conference and want to at . And of course there is hosted by Yahoo and Oreilly if you can't make it to Manchester.
Backstage had a great time at , we had exclusive access to Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht from - here's a special message from them!
On Monday I was at Google's London offices to see the European regional finals of . In cities across Europe developers were given mind-bending algorithmic problems to solve over an intense period of two hours. As the tension mounted they sat waiting in front of laptops watching the countdown, meanwhile webcams beamed live images of competitors in Munich, Krakow, Zurich and St Petersburg. Competitors came from Lithuania, Russian Federation, Krakow, London, Netherlands, Denmark, Spain, Portugal, France and Malaysia to take part.
The finalists were given 30 minutes to access any tools they required before having the internet disabled from their machines, also no speaking or communication tools were allowed. At the sound of a gong the problems flashed up on the screens and battle commenced! It was a serious business as around 40 guys had their hearts set on winning a trip to Mountain View, CA for the world finals on the 14th of November, the possibility of a very nice cash prize and recruitment opportunities.
Google say it's all about giving something back to the community and also talent spotting to recruit new developers into the Google fold. Code Jam has been running for 5 years and last year's winner, who now works in Google's Moscow office, designed this year's competition tool. The platform for the competition is not presently open source, but is being reviewed for open source release. Although no female developers made it into this round, Google say they have seen a significant increase in female registration from Code Jam 2006.
There were seven successful Code Jammers who will going through, good luck to them for the final in Mountain View in November!
Last week, Backstage was at , Imperial College, London. It was a one-day conference looking at trends, technologies and core drivers that will impact on the academic sector over the next 18 months to 3 years. It was an interesting day and a real mixed bag of insights coming from various angles, such a social media, virtual worlds, cloud computing, internet video and skills for the 21st century learner.
Read on for a few snippets of the talks...
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We were able to grab a quick interview with Jonathan Schwartz CEO of Sun Microsystems a little while ago. Taking questions from the ´óÏó´«Ã½ tech community, we were able to put to him questions which don't normally get heard in interviews. Its all licensed creative commons so feel free to share and take apart the high resolution wav version for summaries, quotes, etc.
On Monday, held an event to reveal and discuss the results of their report. They’ve been looking at how fine arts graduates contribute to innovation throughout their working lives. The research was conducted via a survey and one-to-one interviews with over 500 graduates from the University of Arts London, from the 1950s to the present. The study looked into what happens to fine arts graduates when they leave university and how this disseminates into the wider realm of innovation.
They were investigating 3 hypotheses
1. Fine arts graduates are highly skilled in innovation: there are two approaches to innovation - one is a rational approach and other is willingness to take risks. They say that the second approach is highly developed in artists.
2. There’s an argument that the way artists work and cultural innovation is the way we’re presently heading: there’s more casualisation of work, more project or portfolio work. Question: do the way artists’ work resemble other ways of working?
3. Notion of aesthetics is now everywhere: lots of products have a high aesthetic component, from running shoes to what you drink. For example, people buy a particular brand of shoe because of their aesthetic taste.
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