Author: Ianforrester

Senior firestarter at BBC R&D, emergent technology expert and serial social geek event organiser. Can be found at cubicgarden@mas.to, cubicgarden@twit.social and cubicgarden@blacktwitter.io

Boxee brings social extras to xbmc

Frankly xbox media centre better known as xbmc is the best media centre application I've ever seen and the most forward looking. Better still is its now moved from its xbox background to linux, mac and even windows platforms via the ability to compile the whole lot yourself under the GPL licence. So it almost comes as no suprise that some company has eyed up xbmc and decided to use it as the base for its own take on the media centre. Boxee is a funded team of about 10 people including a guy from Slingbox media.

Boxee is currently still in alpha and you have to be invited on the alpha to get it. I've looked over the blog and looking at the specifications for the linux version, you can certainly tell its xbmc underneath. I'm sure my replacement xbmc box will manage the alpha fine, so if you have a invite which you'd like to share with me that would be great.There's little about Boxee online but hopefully once I get an invite (wink wink nudge nudge), I'll be able to do some comparisons and post a load of screenshots (spoke to soon).

There's no douht xbmc is a powerful platform. Its great to see a open project branch out like this. Currently you have the main trunk which is somewhat controlled by the xbox media centre guys, then a osx only port by plex and now boxee. I look forward to seeing where others take it, but i'm sticking with the main trunk for now.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

Young people fcuking … its that good!

I bet that title attracted your attention? But your mistaken, I've not suddenly decided to talk about my personal life. Instead its the title of a frankly amazing film which I watched and am now recommending to all my friends.

Its a comedy centred around five different couples and one night (obviously not at the same time, you dirty minded people) Nope its basically five stories (from wikipedia).

  • The Best Friends – Matt and Kristen decide to become friends with benefits, but discover romantic feelings for each other exist
  • The Couple – Husband and wife Andrew and Abby choose to celebrate
    his birthday, only to find that their love life was worse than they
    thought.
  • The Exes – Mia and Eric meet up for a one-off after having broken up some time back.
  • The First Date – Jamie brings her womanizing date Ken back to her apartment.
  • The Roommates – Gord, his girlfriend Inez and his roommate Dave.
    Gord invites Dave to make love to his girlfriend while Gord watches.

The problem with this film is that the name, young people fucking or ypf. People instantly think its a porn film or going to be tacky and crap. Its neither and good fun. Seek this film out if you can. Its unfortunately only available in America and Canada, but of course there's other ways to seek it out.

Actually I was making this point to a work friend the other day. She was asking about the economics of media if people are downloading content for free. Anyway, after a bunch links (including the government study that the biggest downloaders pay more for media) I made the point that Hollywood alone is putting out up to 60 movies a day and there is no way anyone one person could watch all those movies. Ok I didn't pay to watch YPF but if I could buy it on DVD now, I would. I also would have happily paid to watch this at the cinema. Actually to be honest if they brought this out in the cinema, I would watch it again with friends. Oh to note, I spend more money on going to the local cinema (the lovely 16 screen AMC in deansgate) every month that some people spend on DVDs and the cinema in a year! So that study really makes sense to me.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

Yet another campaign for a english (silicon valley) techhub

So I started to write a comment to this TechCrunchUK blog post. But decided it was worth writing a blog post instead.

So a quick overview of the blog post. Mike Butcher went to Dublin to check out Digital Hub which is funded by the Irish government. He then launches into a pled for the same thing in the UK. He names it the Techhub and starts to say it should be based in London.

But I think it ought to be in London. Why? Simple really. Money, access and the networks inside London. Startups can make use of the amazing access to the wealth of mentoring, venture capital and talent here. I know there is an argument for creating other centres around the UK. But the classic clustering effect created by Silicon Valley would be replicated by concentrating efforts on one geographical area.

Yawn! I've heard it all before, and to be frank its getting a little tired. What is it with people and big shiny shiny central locations? What would this all achieve? Remember the dome people dummys! What about all the other simular activities going on all across the country? Liverpool where I was tonight has something like this, Manchester already has the MDDA and is working with many others on Media City UK, even Bristol now has the iShed project which i'm hearing so much about. Yeah forget all those, lets build another one bigger that everyone elses. Also what is the need to duplicate Silicon Valley in the UK? We should be building on our strengths and building the next, not a copy of the past.

What really gets me is, what is techcrunchuk going to do to make this all happen? Seriously, what practically are they going to do?

I was talking to the people at Geekup Liverpool today and explaining how Geekdinners changed over time and how it was different from other events in London at the time. The point I was making, was that when I first moved to London, I got fed up of the events I was going to. So I did something about it. I made something happen. I mean for example, the Techcrunch tours, what happened to those? What came out of them? Anyway, Mike jokes at the end…

This is going to require people from government to get involved. I may even have to kidnap Boris Johnson and hold him to ransom.

I'm not advocating kidnap, but hell if you could get some action by fingering through that massive contact list you must have and pulling some strings to get something done. Then great do it. But till then, I don't really want to hear anything more about techhub. Support whats currently going on across the country before thinking up yet another version of the same.

Rant over….sorry mike but its frustrating to see what people are doing across the UK and your advocating something which doesn't seem to help them or the industry in a meaningful way.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

Look out twitter friends, I’m now watching…

So finally I've found a Twitter client for my phone which I'm actually happy with. This means I'll be watching twitter a lot more that I use to. To tell the truth I use to only really read the direct messages. Why? Well when I first started using Twitter they had a IM bot, so I could work and watch the conversations. But that went away. I do sometimes use a twitter client on the desktop but generally I have my IM windows open for Ping.FM, Jaiku and AzureusBot.

So anyway, with ceTwit now installed on my phone and running smoothly with updates every 20mins. I'm going to be across twitter a lot more that I was before. What's also great is ceTwit now supports Ping.FM, so I can update all my status from one client and keep an eye on people are talking about.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

Services shutdown, a call for dataportability

I've seen a couple of things recently which has had me screaming data portability.

Yahoo is going to shutdown its DRM licence servers, so if you've bought DRM music from the Yahoo store its going to stop working soon. This already follows the shut down of the unlimited music store a while ago. When MSN did this a while ago they at least switched on another load of servers and promise to keep them running till 2011. Without going into the whole DRM is a stupid idea and killing music debate data portability wise, the only way to get your LEGALLY purchased content to play on your computer in the future is to burn it to a Audio CD and then rip them. For people who have seen my dataportability talk, I have a slide (44) I use to talk about what happens when services shutdown. Well everyone laughs when i talk about one by one transfering images from a online service, well imagine burning 100's of albums to audio cd just so you can rip them again into a free or open format. This is insane and should not be tollerented by people who paid for music. Oh a quick plug, if your affected by this whole thing, give the open rights group a shout.

Its not just Yahoo at it, AOL have also decided to suspend some of their services and give their (in some cases – paying) customers a dilemma over getting there data back. Xdrive, AOL Pictures and Bluestring. There in talks about selling the services and if not AOL have said they will consider burning CDs and DVDs for its customers or allow them to transfer to other services. It will be interested to see if it allows access to other rival services.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

Mainstream media still doesn’t get geek culture

I can't believe I'm defending a line of people about to buy the iphone 3g, but the reporter in this video sums up the general stinking attitude the mainstream media has for geek culture. It stinks and I'm glad someone asked called the reporter out on how childish his questioning and reason for being there was. It would be great to have something which re-addresses the balance but without going all play-school. News night for geeks?

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]