Box UK: BBC Innovation Labs Blog

We’ve always been aware that our labs idea has partly already been done before. Luckily, these previous incarnations are – without exception – very poorly executed, with question usability. And, as we’ve argued for years, the execution of an idea accounts for at least 50% of it’s success.

Even so, given that we’ll need to excite the BBC commissioners on that fateful last Friday of the labs, and having read the blog posts describing the evolution of others’ ideas during the labs, we’re keen to extend the scope of our basic premise.

We’re comfortable sticking with the ‘regional’ aspect of the idea (after all, we’ll be pitching to the ‘Nations and Regions’ commissioner), and with the ‘mobile’ means of delivery. But we still feel there are at least three different routes we could take to expand the reach of the project, and deliver greater benefit to the user.

1. Delivery Channels

You’d think that by choosing ‘mobile’ as a platform, there’s not much that we could do to expand the scope through delivery channels. As we’ve seen in the last 12-18 months, though, the mobile platform has quickly evolved into a rich environment, offering a huge number of possibilities.

SMS will still be our core focus, as we’re still keen to produce a service which offers valuable, timely information using a ‘push’ format. After all this time, SMS still feels like an under-utilised communications channel (by services, not consumers), and we believe that we can not only offer a highly-desirable SMS service, but that we can develop it as a ‘best practice’ example.

Voice is our second opportunity. Asterisk, a massively under-rated open PBX system, offers us a huge number of features to take advantage of. To start with, we’ll be looking at features like text-to-speech and speech-to-text, as a more ‘on-demand’ means of defining your route and receiving relevant information in return.

The mobile web is our third opportunity. With the latest Opera Mobile and iPhone Safari browsers now becoming commonplace, a far richer, more user-focussed experience can be delievered through mobile handsets.

And, fourth on our list, but possibly the most exciting, mobile operating systems Android and iPhone OS offer us a means for delivering tightly-integrated services, that can take advantage of geo-location, text, voice, the mobile web, and advanced means of user input (such as the iPhone multi-touch interface).

2. My Journeys

We could consider widening the breadth of our idea, so that it doesn’t just cover ‘changes to my journey’, but is a generic application for managing all aspects of the journeys you make; this could include the integration of some user-generated content, finding the cheapest en-route petrol prices, automatically arranging car-pooling, and much more.

3. Expect the Unexpected

Similarly, we could broaden the topic of the service in a different direction; rather than just ‘changes to my journey’, it could cover generic ‘changes to my routine(s)’, which could also include unexpected changes in weather, cancelled local events, and more.

Well, that’s it for now. Claire will be writing our next entry (we’re taking it in turns), so keep an eye out for her next post, where she’ll probably use an even more obscure word than ‘nomophobia’.

*** Dan