Box UK: BBC Innovation Labs Blog » BBC

Box UK and the BBC – the beginning!

Claire S — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 16:20:07 +0000

Over the last week or two we’ve started work on the initial stages of our project with the BBC, which we’ll be keeping you up to date with over the next couple of months.

The initial stages will be very much R&D related and will involve experimenting with the BBC’s existing data. One of the issues that we’ll need to deal with is coming up with amazing, sexy but useful applications that users won’t be able to live without. Dan’s previous posts go to show some of the scope that can be covered with just travel data.

When we were picked to take part in the Labs we went in thinking that, by restricting ourselves to just looking at travel data , that we had a fairly limited scope, and I’m happy to admit that there was a slight feeling of jealousy at the companies sitting in the room with us talking about ARGs and interactive television shows.

However, when we sat down and started looking at the sheer amount and variety of travel data that’s available, the platforms and media that it can be pushed out on to, and the other data that can be mashed with it, we’ve come to realise that there is huge potential to develop applications that are sophisticated, fun, useful and visually stimulating… and we’re getting very excited about the whole thing!

So we’re going to regularly write about all the cool stuff we’re doing and if you have any thoughts or comments along the way please let us know…

*** Claire

Web Scene #3 overview and pics!

Claire S — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 08:59:40 +0000

So Wednesday 4 June was the third Cardiff Web Scene Meet-Up at 10 Feet Tall and what a great night it was!

We were really pleased to see both familiar and new faces, mingling and chatting about the latest happenings in the web and the industry. We were even happier to hear that some of you made some great connections and even potentially got some new work from the event!

We were very lucky to be joined by Matthew Cashmore, Senior Research Producer for the BBC who invited everyone to Mashed at Alexandra Palace on 21 June (and also provided some free BBC goodies … We love you Matt!). For those of you who were unable to come to the meet-up but still want to take advantage of the free Cardiff to London (and return) ‘Mashed’ bus, you may still be able to sign up for your place online.

You can also keep up to date with the latest ‘Mashed’ and backstage news at Matthew’s Backstage blog.

Unfortunately our second speaker, Tim Holmes from Cardiff University wasn’t able to attend the meet-up, but we’re hoping he’ll join us to talk about journalism and writing for the web and one of the next events.

So that’s it for another couple of months, if you’ve got any questions or comments about the last or the next meet-up, or would like to speak at the next one, please let us know. We’re already thinking about Meet-Up number 4 which we’re planning for September and maybe even a festive meet-up in December.

If you want to keep up-to-date with our plans and progress you can join the Facebook group , sign up to the mailing list or watch this space…

*** Claire

The third Cardiff Web Scene Meet-Up is finally here

Claire S — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 08:41:27 +0000

Yes, it’s finally here, despite burning buildings and ailing speakers – The third Cardiff Web Scene Meet-Up is tonight (please contain your excitement)!

It’s still at 10 Feet Tall in Cardiff city centre (a few doors down from the newly roofless O’Neills), starting at 6:30pm and it’s free entry before 8:30. Unfortunately Tim Holmes from Cardiff University has had to drop out but Matthew Cashmore from the BBC is still coming to talk about Mashed and Backstage and rumour has it, will be bringing some goodies along with him. We’re also going to be taking signups for the FREE Cardiff to London Mashed bus.

The night will be rounding off with music from Ridinghood and Suitcase. There is usually an entry fee of £3 per person to see the bands, however, if you’re coming to the meet up and you arrive before 8:30pm you can see the bands for free.

You can register for the event online or just turn up!

We look forward to seeing you later, please pop over and say ‘Hi’ and introduce yourselves and if you have any comments or feedback from the night or if you would be interested in speaking at the next Meet-Up (which will be in September… watch this space) please let us know.

*** Claire

Don’t drive to Cardiff on a Monday…

Dan Z — Tue, 27 May 2008 13:18:27 +0000

Our database of incidents has been growing over the last couple of weeks, since we started recording data from the BBC Travel feed.

The dataset size is still relatively small, for meaningful statistical analysis, but I just thought I’d perform some random mining of the data, for fun. (Yes, ‘fun’… I do need to get out more).

From initial results, it looks like Monday is the worst day for driving:

And, if you’re travelling along the M4, the city of Cardiff – although not the largest urban area along the length of the motorway – seems to suffer from the most incidents (clearly, it’s the large number of tourists flocking to our beautiful city).

More coming soon…

*** Dan

Geek is the new black

Claire S — Wed, 21 May 2008 13:11:50 +0000

Continuing with the BBC connection, we’re really pleased to announce the first speaker for the next Cardiff Web Scene Meet-Up. Matthew Cashmore, Senior Research Producer for BBC Future Media and Technology, Research and Innovation who will be talking about ‘BBC Backstage’ and ‘Mashed’ at Alexandra Palace and just another quick reminder that you’ll also have the opportunity to sign up for the ‘Cardiff Mashed Bus’ which we will be organising for anyone who is interested in free transport to the event on June 21st.

Organising the next event has given us a warm fuzzy feeling that we’re doing something nice and good for the web industry and we hope that everyone who comes along will feel the same. As I’ve mentioned before, networking events and recognition for those that work in the web are few and far between however, thankfully ‘Geek Meet-Ups’ seem to be springing up all over the world from Oxford to Leeds to Boston.

Hopefully it will give the industry the bit of a boost that it needs, for example the BBC Innovation Lab that we recently attended follows a similar pattern to the last two web scene meet-ups in that the male to female ratio was about 15 – 1, and I bet Mashed will be the same. Why are women in the web in such a minority?

Is it to do with reputation? I’m not sure that terms such as ‘Geeks’ and ‘Nerds’ have helped promote the industry in the best light. Perhaps schools teaching ‘IT’ should get kids involved in the web a bit more and show them the funky stuff you can do with Flash and AJAX as well as the Word and Excel basics that are drilled into them on a daily basis. And not just the web, but games development, 3D graphics and simulation too.

Let’s all do our bit to show what a stimulating, fun and sexy industry the web is to work in – it can only be a good thing. It’ll help with recruitment and job prospects, more recognition and cooler events, bigger and better improvements in technology, and your mum and dad won’t keep asking ’so what is it exactly that you do?’.

The future is not just bright, it’s luminous!

*** Claire

Updated Personalised Travel Feeds… Now in HTML!

Dan Z — Thu, 15 May 2008 15:30:57 +0000

Quick update to the personalised XML Travel feeds. I’ve added a little feature that converts (server side) the XML to another output format. For now I’ve just written the HTML converter; am hoping to add RSS and other formats quite quickly in the future.

The additional parameter for requesting any personalised feed in HTML is ‘/format/html’, for example:

http://feeds.boxuk.com/bbctravel/xmlfeed/place/cardiff/format/html

I’ve purposefully omitted any HTML header information; this just returns an HTML list, suitable for embedding in remote pages.

*** Dan

Personalised BBC Travel XML Feeds

Dan Z — Wed, 14 May 2008 14:27:45 +0000

OK, so I’ve updated my little experiment so that you can now request personalised travel XML data, which is taken and filtered from the original huge BBC travel XML feed.

The root URL for the feed is:

http://feeds.boxuk.com/bbctravel/xmlfeed/

You can use the following parameters to personalise the data:

road (either a road number or name)
place (this one’s a bit odd at the moment due to the original data, some cities work, some counties work)
severity (either very severe, severe, medium or slight)

Multiple values can be separated with commas, and the parameters can be specified in any order. Example feeds are:

I’m hoping to add in some longitude/latitude parameters soon, so that you can request a feed for just a particular geographic area.

If you have any ideas or comments, please add them to this post!

*** Dan

PS This is just a hack for the time being, with little in the way of caching or robustness… Please do not rely on these feeds!

UPDATE: Just added a little dynamic ’summary’ page too from the live/historic data too, which I’ll try to add some more graphs to…

Using the BBC Feeds: Whetting the Appetite

Dan Z — Wed, 14 May 2008 09:48:42 +0000

I spent a few hours yesterday setting up a script that periodically grabs the BBC Road Travel XML data, parses it into a database, then grabs the current weather conditions for any new incidents (for the local area), and stores that alongside each incident. Hopefully in a week-or-two there’ll be enough data to produce some interesting graphs, such as number of incidents vs. weather conditions, or number of incidents vs. time of day.

In the meantime, just out of interest, I’ve quickly grabbed the BBC 7 Day Listings data, and grep’ed it for some different genres of output that the BBC is pushing to its audience in the next week. As a committed atheist with a scientific background, it’s a bit dis-heartening to see this kind of balance of output from the BBC:

With about half of British people now having no religious beliefs, and I expect a slightly higher percentage having some belief in Science, I wonder how long this situation can last before the public demands a more even balance.

*** Dan

BBC Labs Day 4 – Onwards and upwards

Claire S — Thu, 01 May 2008 22:35:07 +0000

As the sun sets over the sleepy hills of Powys and day four of the Wales and West Midlands BBC Innovation Labs 2008 draws to a close, you’d be forgiven for thinking that there was peace and tranquility at the Lake Country House in Llanmmarch Wells… but you would be wrong. Listen a little bit closer and you will hear the rumbling of keyboards and the almost inaudible buzz of stress, frustration and yes, mild panic… that right folks, it’s pitch day tomorrow.

As luck (or fate) would have it, we are pitching first tomorrow morning and despite the minor curve ball thrown our way yesterday, which resulted in us ripping up our original idea and starting almost from scratch at 11am this morning, we think we’ve done OK. But there’s nothing like adrenaline to help you pack two months work and preparation into 22 hours!

Today mainly saw us left alone to push on with our pitches and the Box UK corner was a hive of activity (well almost) as we worked on our new idea, but has it been enough…?

I suspect the real reason for putting us in such a remote location is not that the distant bleating of lambs and twittering of birds will calm your nerves, but probably more to the fact that no-one can hear you scream. Despite all of our research, one thing that didn’t expect is the lack of spare time you have once you’re here. Every day this week we have worked from 9am through to 7pm and then had homework. It would be fair to say it has been a bit of a slog, but we have met some great people and learnt a lot in a short space of time.

So all that leaves me to say, before I *attempt* to get some sleep, is thanks to the BBC for a fun, challenging week and good luck to all the great teams that have worked so hard over the last couple of days.

I hope you’ll join me tomorrow for the next exciting installment…

*** Claire

BBC Labs Days 2 & 3 – Users, the BBC and a mind reading bat called Plasma…

Claire S — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 11:51:41 +0000

It’s nice to be on Welsh turf and as with many Welsh web related gatherings there are some familiar faces. The guys from Cube are here with their idea for following news stories, and are also blogging their experience and Peter Gill & Associates are here trying to bring ‘new music to the masses’.

Day two was spent focusing on the users, we worked on personas, their experience of using our service and how it effects and works with their day-to-day life.

Working with a mentor and another team (we had the help of Matt Cashmore who is organising the labs and CMS Video with their ‘Play Music’ project) this exercise gave us a real insight into what the user needs and stands to benefit from signing up to our service. However it also gave us a couple of things to think about and demonstrated that we still have a bit of work to do before Friday.

We also found out yesterday why the BBC warned us about our idea being pulled apart. I think two days of ‘constructive critisism’ started to take its toll on a couple of the teams (ourselves included!) but we’ve been assured that by Friday we’ll be glad that it happened and will see the benefits…

Day 3

Day three of the labs, the sun is shining in Llangammarch Wells and it’s commissioner day. This morning we split off into our teams to go to and do a bit of fine tuning before we get a half hour with the commissioners this afternoon. The attitude today is slightly more positive and I think that some of the teams are starting to see a light at the end of the tunnel!

As for us, our idea is growing…

We’re also learning a little bit more about our mentors, Frank Boyd (who has been great) did a magic act involving a mind reading vampire bat called Plasma once upon a time, who I’m hoping will make an appearance later today as I’m sure mind reading skills could be quite useful for the rest of the week!

*** Claire