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If you've not already heard, ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Backstage is sponsoring and supporting the from Liverpool to Newcastle via Manchester, Leeds and elsewhere. But what is the Techbus?

The Tech Bus Tours experience has been devised for conference goers. It offers a unique travel, networking and collaboration experience (much more fun than traveling on your own by train). A Tech Bus Tours journey is an event in its own right; a bit like a mobile, micro unconference... on a luxury coach.

Getting to conferences can be a pain mainly because of the time it takes and your usually travelling alone and without the benefits of wifi and electricity. But not if you travel the Tech Bus where every seat has wifi, electricity points and a table. Plus the whole Tech Bus is green, as the journey will be carbon offset.

The best aspect of the is that it will be full of other delegates, so you can spend time discussing the conference and other related subjects all the way home. Its a mobile micro unconference, as the site puts it.

Although this is a trial around the , we really love the idea and look forward to filming people on board for part of the coverage surrounding the conference, so get yourself on board if you want to take part, .

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On Monday 27th April the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ are jointly hosting an event to showcase the outcomes of projects from our co-funded Knowledge Exchange Programme. We will also be exploring the wider implications of the projects' findings and their recommendations for our respective communities as well as the future of the partnership itself. The event is being held at in St Pancras, London.

To find out more about the Knowledge Exchange Programme and this event visit our blog at: /blogs/knowledgeexchange.

THE EVENT IS FREE but places are limited. Refreshments and a light lunch will be available. If you wish to reserve a place and find out more about the day please contact Louise Elliott at the AHRC (l.elliott at ahrc dot ac dot uk).

Cheers, Brendan

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is Principle invester at Venture Capital firm . The same firm which 2.5million euros in Soundcloud.com. At a recent event he had a lot to say about cloud computing and running a business using the cloud.  If your interested in this video, you may also find the when the audience gets to fire back questions interesting too.</p>

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³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Backstage is hosting the next with the help of Lucy Bridges. We hope you can all make it if your close to Manchester. Otherwise there are .

So why a party for Ubuntu? Well here's a bit from the ubuntu site,

For every Ubuntu release we like to organize parties all over the

world. At these parties everyone is welcome and we get together to

celebrate, meet new friends and often introduce people new to Ubuntu to

our community and our Operating System. Release parties are not only a

great way to meet people but they are a lot of fun!

There will be public wireless so you can download and install if you like but I would highly suggest bringing along a Live CD to avoid the rush to download it at the party.

If your thinking about coming, please either reply to this

blog post, add yourself to the or event pages or

send Lucy a 'dent at

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³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Backstage is proud to announce the new project aimed at people creating open learning resources. Its called and is now launched for anyone to engage and participate in.

Unlike ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Backstage, its much more accessible to the education and learning communities (such as teachers, learners, developers and anyone with an interest in creating 'open source' learning resources).

Rather that try and cover two quite different communities in the same way, it became clear that Backstage's output is best served to a community of developers, designers, hackers and geeks (and thats not going to change). And although you do get a lot of cross over, the educational and learning community have some different needs and so was born.

Both share the same backstage values of openness and edging the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ closer to its audience. So expect us and the openlab team to be working in tune on new projects in the near future...

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We're very excited to announce that today we are launching R&DTV, a pilot project that we've been working on with our colleagues in RAD. I've been working on this as producer, with co-producer Hemmy Cho, as well as Ian Forrester and George Wright.

So what is R&DTV? It's a monthly technology programme made up of interviews from knowledgeable ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ developers, ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ project experts and external experts from around the world.

We're looking at how we can use off the shelf technology, various codecs and different methods of distribution to create and share content - it's a voyage of discovery, so watch out for news on how this project develops. This is our first pilot episode, we'll release another in May and hopefully (if you like it) we'll make some more! In Episode 1 we have interviews with The Digg guys, Nicholas Negroponte of OLPC as well as Graham Thomas, Ant Miller and George Auckland talking about their work for ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ R&D & Learning Innovation.

The content comes in 3 forms.

1. A brief 5 minute video, containing all the very best bits
2. A longer 30 minute video, containing deeper conversations
3. The Asset Bundle, containing everything we used and didn't use to make the videos above

We expect most people will just enjoy watching the videos, but if you want to explore or see footage which didn't make it into the cut for what ever reason, the asset bundle is your friend. The clips are mostly uncut & straight from our cameras and although this may be too much for most people, it makes great footage for those who want to remix and mashup our interviews with their own or others.

Where do I go to download?

There are some versions to download here:

• - the 5 minute cut in Flash format (37.4 MB)
• - the 5 minute cut in Quicktime format (155.2 MB)
• - the 5 minute cut in Ogg Theora format (29.2 MB)
• - the 5 minute cut in Matroska format (28.4 MB)
• - the 5 minute cut in AVI format (62.9.4 MB)
• - the 30 minute cut in Flash format (214.2 MB)
• - the 30 minute cut in Quicktime format (998.5 MB)
• - the 30 minute cut in Ogg Theora format (222.7 MB)
• - the 30 minute cut in Matroska format (270.6 MB)
• - the 30 minute cut in AVI format (278.2 MB)

There are even more formats available on or take a peep at the . You should download the version which your machine can play safely without additional software. Generally Quicktime plays on Macs, Windows Media files on Windows and Mpeg4 and Xvid versions work across the board. Ogg Theora is a new open codec which you will need software for it to play. We are also going stick the same videos on and . As for the , well that's a lot trickier but we're hoping to host it at alongside the next generation peer 2 peer service .

What's the catch?

You can watch, rip, redistribute and remix all the contents of this package under . We're pretty excited and ask you to please tell us what you do end up doing with the asset bundle, so we can learn what works and what does not work and fix it next time we release another asset bundle.

We'd love to hear your comments and if you have any problems, questions or emails of support for these videos, please contact us on rdtv at bbc dot co dot uk.

Update: as requested I've added the file sizes above (and added MKV & AVI) and we also have RSS feeds if you'd like to subscribe to the episodes as they get released: and .

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We're pleased to announce the launch of , developed by ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Research and Development with Liverpool John Moores University. We've been waiting for this one for quite a while.

Homura produces natively 3d games that can be exported to Java WebStart for deployment over the internet. The IDE is a plugin for Eclipse, which provides the Homura libraries and tools for game development. The game engine code is derived from JME.

The whole project is being run in conjunction with Liverpool John Moores University and the British Broadcasting Corporation Research and Development. The .

So what you wanting for????

Go and download it and start building...

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