Xover Networking Day, originally uploaded by FrankBoyd.

I attended a brilliant Crossover Session with Frank Boyd and co.
This time at Electric Works at the Digital Campus in Sheffield.

Topics of the day where business models for new media content, development of new media content for kids, IP and legal structures for new media collaboration, funding, commissions and the issues around cross-media delivery.

I had great chats afterwards with Dan Hon, Sixtostart and Richard Land, Illumina. Questions where raised about how to get paid for producing content. I think an important insight is to look at what services you could deliver e.g creation of attractive meeting points that meet a market need rather than just produce content.

On the train back to London we were a bunch of geeks including David Bovill, Dave Sag, Cathy Skinner, Dorigen and Mark Atkin that talked so intensively that we where degraded from first class to second class.

14092008494, originally uploaded by jasondaponte.

Wow it´s been a while since I wrote a post here!

The Launch of the first Crossover Nordic 2008 was a fantastic journey, including a lot of sweat. It went well and the response from partners and participants have been great. The Crossover labs model was adapted to the Nordic market, including strategies, infrastructure, translation work and coordination of a large amount of partners.

Crossover Nordic 2008 has been a pilot for a Nordic development lab for content and cross media projects based on the international model created by Frank Boyd, Unexpected Media and Heather Croall, Sheffield Doc Fest. Creators from different Media sectors and backgrounds including Mobile, Animation, Games, Film, TV and New Media, collaborates on the delivery of Cross Media projects using emerging platforms and new media.

21 Creators from the Nordic Countries plus international mentors, Frank Boyd, Unexpected Media and BBC Innovation lab, Heather Croall, Sheffield Doc Fest, Paula Le Dieu, Magic Lantern Productions, Mark Aitkin, SBS Australia, Neil Richards, The Mustard Corporation and Jason Daponte, BBC Mobile, participated in a one week “full on” lab at Slussens Pensionat, Orust. Read more on Jason Dapontes blog.

The Final Pitch of Crossover Nordic the 28th of September was held at Nordisk Panorama. 70 guests were invited and moderator for the pitch was Frank Boyd. 6 Groups pitched their final projects in front of a Jury and for a development sum of 100 000 SEK

The Jury was:
Erik Robertson, Nordic Game program, Sweden
Are Nundal, SVTi, Sweden
Anders Karlsson, Telia Sonera, Sweden
Klara Grunning, Kudos Family, Norway
Tomas Eskilsson, Film i Väst, Sweden

Commissioners and Financiers were invited and were given the opportunity to back the projects with development money. Further development discussions have been held after the pitch with several groups and their projects. See projects below and who participated at the Final Pitch.

The Winning Project was “Our Secret Society” with Andreas Öhman, Splinter Arts, Oskar Mellander, Royale and Gila Bergqvist Ulfung, Breidablick.

Crossover Nordic 2008 was financed by 9 funding partners, SVT, Film i Väst, Nordic Game Program, Region Västra Götaland, Center of Visualization, Danish Film Institute, Nordic Film and TV Fund and Moving Media Southern Sweden, plus Supported by Partners, Nordisk Panorama, Filmkontakt Nord and Telia Sonera.

Crossover Nordic was Produced by Martin Malii-Karlsson, BLaO Media.

Channel 4 are in the start-up mode of an exciting scheme called 4IP.

Matt Locke, Commissioning Editor at Channel 4 introduced 4IP at the brilliant minibar where all the Internet Geeks in London come together.

4IP is channel 4´s initiative to explore new ideas and new directions and transform traditional broadcasting into new platforms.

The 4IP fund will invest £50M in new concepts and new talents that can make a change in todays broadcasting and on of the first projects out are the School of Everything. I had a little chat with Andy Gibson Co-Founder where he explained the concept further.

I am currently working on a project that will be pitched to 4IP soon so if you are interested in getting involved please get in touch.

Apply now for the very first Crossover Nordic that is about to take place in Sweden between 15-19 September.

It is a five-day residential content/cross media development lab aimed at experienced and established creators of Game, Film, TV, Animation, Mobile or New Media in the Nordic region.

The lab is free for all the 20 selected participants. They will be selected by an expert committee from different media sectors.

All experienced and talented professionals from the Nordic Countries are eligible to apply and one project are eligible to win a development prize of 100 000 SEK.

A final pitch of the results from the lab will be held at the Nordisk Panorama Five Cities Film Festival in Malmö the 28 of September.

Click here for more info

Never Watch TV-Alone by Martin Malii-Karlsson

My intention was to write this post after attending the ip TV world forum 2008 in March at Olympia in London.

To come home full of inspiration and write about the latest innovations etc…but NO!

It was just a big hype, not any groundbreaking news… more information about who were manufacturing the boxes that were going to be delivered to client x.

Nosey as usual I asked a lot of questions e.g. Whats the point of having a box instead of just log into good old www…and view the content on line on a big screen?

Anyway…one clever solution developed by NEC captured my attention for a while. It was a broadcasting solution where you basically could watch a programme on TV and then continue watch it over the mobile phone in real time.

Imagine if you watch eastenders and must leave for an important meeting. You could then keep watching the program on your phone while you rushing out of the house and jumping on the bus.

Thursday last week I went to Pizzaonrails, a meeting point for people interested in Ruby on Rails and web applications. I was there to make more connections with developers for a few projects that I am working on at the moment, including a Social Network.

At pizzaonrails you´ll find the best programmers and web developers in London, and you can have a chat with people from Bebo, Co-minded, Net Auctions etc.

I got a few more contacts for my projects now, but was unfortunately a little bit too late for the presentations and the pizza!

BETT show 2008 - National Hall, originally uploaded by Peter Bromley.

I attended the huge BETT show last week to have a few informal meetings with possible partners and for some inspiration.

A fantastic show and enormously much to take in. One day was not really enough to cover the hole show.

It struck me again (have been on quite a few shows about new technology now), there are loads of companies that offers LMS and CMS but there isn´t many that offers engaging content. I´ve been hearing voices from the exhibitions saying that the money is in selling the CMS and LMS and not in the content itself. A lot of talk about “content is king” 592,000 hits on google but it doesn´t seem to be true so far…it should perhaps be, CMS is King!

One exception is Espresso Education, now proud owners of Channel 4 learning which they acquired in March 2007. They have a really nice designed learning platform with engaging animations and video clips from channel 4´s clipbank.

A smart and well designed learning platform is Norwegian Fronter Open learning platform, VLE or MLE. They started up in 1998 in Norway and are now taking a good position on the European market with offices in 10 countries including the U.K.
I met by occassion Steinar Hov, Training and Delivery Manager at a café in Islington just after they won the final BECTA award in May 2007, after being one of ten accredited companies. They are now in full steam to implement their learning platform in over 2000 schools in the U.K.

Not so well designed but quite cool is the Just2Easy web based document processor. There is a great potential in this tool. You can create word documents, layout pictures, videos etc and draw animations in realtime on the web. You can invite people to take part of the creation and share the documents.

A quick explanation of Buzzwords:

ICT - Information Communications Technology

Curriculum Online - Curriculum Online is part of the UK government’s drive to get more ICT and multimedia resources in classrooms across the country. This is done primarily through the eLearning Credits scheme, which is operated by Curriculum Online.

VLE - Virtual Learning Environment

MLE - Managed Learning Environment = VLE

LMS - Learning Management Systems

Virtual Security, originally uploaded by svenwerk.

Is the solution for virtual crime to invent a virtual police force?

I read this article about a 17 year old teenager that was arrested for stealing virtual furniture worth £2800 at Habbo Hotel and I was thinking, How would a virtual police force would look like!

I remember when Mindark (from my old hometown Gothenburg, Sweden) where struggling setting up the virtual world Entropia and where fighting against their biggest enemy, the cashflow. I also remember the quite weird thought about buying a virtual redbull for 50p to get more power. A golden dream for brands, to be able to sell products without the need of stock.

Now its cash-in time, Last year MindArk had a turnover of $365,000,000 for selling virtual items. One user have paid $100,000 for a virtual space station!

Feedback, originally uploaded by FrankBoyd.

The Crossover Labs have been very successful and I asked Frank Boyd, Unexpected Media if I could use my contacts in Sweden to produce a Crossover Nordic.

The interest has been great and I have convinced broadcasters, film institutes and regional funders in the Nordic to be partners in a lab next year. I invited Desirée Engholm, Commissioner from SVTi (Swedish TV) to come over to the U.K for one day to study the lab. SVTi has now decided to be one of the partners in the Nordic version next year.

In the Crossover U.K everybody was really open to share ideas and to collaborate.

Frank Boyd describes the U.K version on his blog www.unexpectedmedia.com. “Crossover UK, which finished on Friday, was probably the best of the 35 creative labs we’ve done in the past 10 years. Good people, good projects, great pitches on the final day. Roy Ackerman, creative director of Diverse, described it as: ‘an inspiration, enjoyable, creatively empowering, almost life-changing’.

The Crossover labs differ from the BBC Innovation Labs in that people don’t come in teams and they don’t come with a project. The point is to get people from different backgrounds (film, tv, games, animation, web design) generating ideas and working together in interdisciplinary collaborations to develop them.

It’s a demanding creative process designed to be accessible and engaging at the beginning but which quite quickly encourages participants to move beyond their comfort-zones.

The ride can get quite bumpy, one of the documentary film producers said: “It was a remarkable week and I felt extremely privileged to have been part of it…I may have resisted at moments, but it’s given me a lot of food for thought, and since I like challenges, at least of the creative kind, then I am grateful for the push”.

Some of the projects developed at Crossover will take part in a pitching competition for a £10,000 development award at the Sheffield DocFest in November.”

My (brilliant) idea was to invent a tool, that you could use to scribble down notes, drawings etc online and use it when you are chatting or skyping with someone, in a conference or in a brainstorming session.

I did my research and I found out that there were at least three different existing tools already. There are probably more out there. Let me know if you heard of any others.

Queeky
Is an ambitious site, built as a community for people who like drawing and would like to share their knowledge.
A nice function is the replay function, where you can follow how the drawing was made.
In the Multi-Draw function you can create a drawing together with a friend.

Imaginationcubed.com
A clean and well designed site, sponsored by GE. You have the basic functions here, Multi-Draw, replay and you can share the drawings with your friends.

Offtype.net
A quite simple site, feels like hobby project by a programmer, but it´s functions works fine.