Backstage competition winners anounced
A while back now we asked you to .
The response was magnificent and thanks again to everyone who took the time and effort to submit entries. But on to the bit you really want:
The winners of the first Backstage competition are...
Leon Brocard and Leo Lapworth for
We all loved this.
It’s a fantastically impressive prototype with a wealth of features and innovative ideas already implemented that we were almost overwhelmed. That said the simplicity of the user experience meant that it was easy to use out of the box. There is a lot of different findability here; tagging, ratings, recommendations as well as the basic grid format with innovative and different ways of navigating your way through thousands of hours of TV and radio.
There was a real effort to integrate non ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ feeds (imdb, bleb) and the TV Anytime metadata was neatly exploited via the accessibility search tool as well as genre lists such as films and comedy. I haven't mentioned the personalisation (but you can sign up for your preferred channels) and some real heavy lifting behind the scenes plumbing like an open source PERL TV-anytime parser which the team have made available to CPAN. We were itching to use this and show it around as soon as it was submitted which is a sure sign that Leo and Leon had come up with something special...
This is fantastic prototype which thoroughly deserves to win the first Backstage competition.
Leon and Leo win some "Geek Bling", ie: a rackmount server to the cost of £1K and a trip to the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ to talk further.
Runners Up:
Thomas Scott for the TV Map
It was the lateral approach to the brief that we liked here. The idea that TV metadata descriptions could be versioned as a google map mash up sounds odd but, in fact, works very well.
This is a very simple prototype with only a weeks sample data but we can see the opportunities for introducing viewers to programmes they would have never considered viewing.
It’s rough and ready but does the job of suggesting that there are different ways to visualise those hundreds of tv and radio programmes per week. Thanks Thomas.
Fraser Nevett for the Programme Similarity Visualiser
The complete departure from the grid was what made this stand out. There's a simple algorithm there combined with a compact visualisation tool and Fraser has done a fine job of representing a weeks broadcasts in a vastly different way to the time/channel axis. There were plenty of ways in which we could think how this could be built on with plenty of different features but it was again another easy to use prototype with an extremely intuitive interface. More importantly it set us thinking about what might be possible.
We'll be dropping a note to the winners/runners up to arrange prizes/delivery and meet ups as soon as this mail has arrived
Please don't think that because your prototype wasn't shortlisted that we weren't impressed. There was some great use of phones/sms, avatars, automated speech, some traditional but keeping it simple listings layouts, some fine personalised epgs and a Radio 4 clock!. Thanks for putting the effort in.
Watch out for further competitions...
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