Day: 22 February 2011

Beyond the data: making meaning of data

Ian Forrester at Next 09

The Next conference is looking for speakers for 2011 and they have opened a public voting system to seek out the next generation of speakers. Of course I have put a talk based around the Channelography project.

Beyond the data

Data is something we have been working with before it became mainstream a few years ago. We have many projects using data but what are the challenges once you have the data? Using the prototype Channelography (http://channelography.rattlecentral.com/) we will explore the challenges and dangers of collecting data and trying to make meaning of it.

So of course, it would be great if friends could vote for my talk, although there’s some great proposals like this one for OKcupid to talk and Brian Suda’s rally cry to analyse 15 Petabytes of data from the Large Hadron Collider.

Hollywood is loving the apps

Inception the App

I had multiple people tell me about the Inception App on Apple iOS devices. I think its interesting but not good enough to make me want to rush out and buy a apple device.

Interestingly, Michael Breidenbrücker is one of the guys behind the app. I know Michael from my course at Ravensbourne where he co-founded Last.FM and decided to go off and develop that away from the fingers of the college. Recently… he’s been focusing on RJDJ which is a music generation tool.

Anyway, the idea of Augmented sound isn’t new but its so so interesting. The rest of the app is well a little bit of a wet squid in my view but hey you can’t have it all. The app is pretty expensive but you do get a copy of the film tied to the app. There is a question in my mind if buying the app for 10 pounds and getting the ability to tweet and like sections is actually worth it.

Ether way, you can see Hollywood jumping into the app market in a big way in 2011. Warner brothers already have a Dark knight app too, while the Unstopable app is Fox’s work and runs on Android (the largest platform now).

I do find it intriguing that Inception isn’t available on Android, I wonder if the lack of content protection mechanism (or plainly put DRM) might be the problem for Warner Brothers? No problem for Fox or even Sony though…