On Friday, Ian and I filmed day one of , a two day event looking at ways to make social software more accessible. Day one was a series of talks on barriers to accessibility and what needs to be done and day two was a hack-day with a mixture of developers, designers, advisors and interested folk working together to find solutions and build prototypes.
The event was born out of , where presented a prototype for accessibility, which gained so much interest that he decided that accessibility was an area that needed to be looked into a lot further. From this Christian came up with the idea for the Scripting Enabled event and said in his opening remarks: ‘Open your ears, hearts and minds – if we remove some of the barriers then we are on the way to win already!’
All in all, this was a great day and I heard a lot of passionate and enlightening stuff. The videos are presently being transcribed and I'll link to them as well as mentioning any updates from the Scripting Enabled event as soon as I have them. Details on the talks can be found in the extended entry...
On Tuesday, a few hundred geeks were crammed into Wembley Stadium, not the terraces of course, but in the conference centre for Google Developer Day 2008.
After the introductions we saw a demo of , the Google open source mobile phone OS /platform. We were shown a couple of interfaces and a little app that the developer speaking had made of a mysterious blue bouncy ball (see Ian's previous post for a link to a video), it had an accellerometer and he could do an amusing impression of pong with it. It'll be interesting to see how this develops and competes against the iphone - I certainly hope it gets Apple to open things up a bit more.
There followed a day full of presentations on subjects such as the Web Toolkit, Chrome, OpenSocial and AJAX, as well as some really interesting, fun and quirky lightning talks put on by anyone who had a project to show.
I really enjoyed Day 2 of the conference in Coventry. Although I couldn’t make it to day 1, Friday was an interesting day of talks about what's new and hot from some of the leading lights in Virtual Worlds technology.
I'm looking forward to seeing how this technology evolves, as time and again speakers mentioned how virtual worlds are on the cusp of major development and in a similar emerging state as the web was in the early 90s. Here are my notes from some of the speakers - there was a huge amount to take in!
The conference had a theme of interoperability between virtual worlds.
Presently there are no standards for virtual worlds interaction, for example you can't take your Second Life avatar to visit a friend in say Twinity or in an MMOG such as WoW, although it must be said that you probably don't want to take your Second Life avatar into World of Warcraft as they'd be annihilated pretty quickly ;-) There's also a mix of open source and proprietary software which causes the usual problems and discussion about free apps vs. subscription apps/worlds, funding, etc.
*warning* - I got a bit carried away with my notes, consequently this is a very long post, so only hit the extended entry link if you're not rushing off anywhere!
The ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Research and Innovation are known for working on some of the hottest technologies that we use now and will use in the near and far future.
This experiment is a European collaborative project called (Conveying Affectiveness in Leading-edge Living Adaptive Systems). , has you picking emotions based on character gestures.
This work will contribute to emotionally aware interfaces for future ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ services, and be made more widely available as an open-source component. So everyone is contributing to something everyone can use in the future. All details will be kept confidential and all data will be anonymised. So what you waiting for? and have a go.
Backstage is at Google Developer Day again this year. There's a couple of things hot on peoples lips and one of them is Android. Luckily Google was good enough to show us for the first time in Europe, The mobile carrier was covered up and hidden from view but we think the phone looks just like the .
Chris has been hacking about with the code for his recently.
Now there's a few different interfaces/stylesheet changes per machine type,
iPhone , mobiles , Wii and iGoogle . This is on top of existing changes to the interface.
But thats only the start, in response to feedback. Chris has added integration with the beta, using the . So now you can Pop your habits to Radiopop. Chris is using OAuth to pass the users information back and forth smoothly.
Chris evening are pretty full because he's also trying to add support, so like Radiopop, you can add tracksplaying to your audio-scobbling and Instant messenger support via .
Backstage was also at BarcampBrighton3 last weekend, we arrived in time for opening speeches and the traditional method of introductions - where everyone attending introduces themselves with three keywords to sum themselves up.
If you’re unfamiliar with Barcamp events, they run as an ‘unconference’ and it is hoped that everyone who attends will participate by giving a 30 minute session on something they’re into. Attendees add their sessions to an open schedule grid, usually reflected as half hour slots aligned across a number of small rooms or presentation areas. They usually run over two days with a sleepover incorporating games, hacking, socializing and lots of fun!
Since Yahoo employee has been thinking hard about pragmatic web accessibility. So much, that he's setup , a conference breaking down the barriers between disabled users and the social web. "Its a chance to giving ethical hackers real world issues to solve", says Chris. "We talked about improving the accessibility of the web for a long time - let's not wait, let's make it happen"
While at we got a chance to sit down with him and catch him on camera. Once and with the legendary . It was during the d.construct conference, so expect some background noise.
Last Friday, Backstage was down in Brighton at – a one-day conference for designers, developers, producers and anyone interested in building social web applications & sites. The Dome was jam-packed – I hear about 800 people attended. Ian and I looked after the Backstage stand and interviewed some of the speakers, sponsors and people who came to talk to us - which we’ll link to soon!
The Radio Pop just went live with a test/beta/public prototype. You can sign up
Radio Pop will store your ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Radio listening habits. It will then can then create graphs, charts and lists of your listening, give you recommendations from your friends, allow you to share your tastes and browse around to see what other people are hearing right now. Its social radio...
But the best thing about social radio pop is, its your social radio. There's of course a , complete with even support. So you can make your own prototypes and share them with the world and of course backstage.
Radio Pop is an experimental prototype - So it may break and the cats might need rebooting every once in a while. There's also support for most browsers including Google Chrome.
There's more detail on the radio labs blog but just sign up and give it a try. Hey where's the OpenID support? Oh yes they even got that right...
Its the 25th Anniversary of the Free Software Movement and to celebrate this, the GNU project have got . Unfortunately we couldn't get the Free player embeded and working correctly, so ended up using a instead.
Free software is a regular discussion point on the , with people taking many different positions. But there is a concern that sometimes we interchangeable use without thinking about what they actually mean. We shall see if Stephen Fry's video changes this at all.
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