As many of you may have already heard through the geek grape vine (GGV 2.0) ;-) The BBC and Yahoo! are planning to get together to hold 48 hours of hacking madness this summer.
Over the weekend of June 16th and 17th we plan to see over 400 developers and designers from all over Europe heading to Alexandra Palace in London to hack the hell out of our APIs and various feeds and systems. Plenty of help will be on hand if you're new to the scene, or if you just want to push the envelope with your ideas and prototypes.
We plan to finish the event with a huge concert (band is top secret - more details via GGV I'm sure) and party open to over 1000 people we hope.
The formal announcement and sign up will go live soon - so block the dates out of your diary and get those laptops charging.
And we're finally back from the University tour. We will have a full report of what happened (in reality and in second life) but till then we have a whole bunch of lovely pictures and our slideshow for everyone to download and view.
Why New Media is Dead
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Michael Arrington finally responded to the comments he made at the Future of Webapps conference last month.
I sometimes say regretful things when speaking off the cuff at conferences. Last month at The Future of Web Apps conference in London I (jokingly) called for the dissolution of the BBC because some of their online ventures are, in my opinion, stifling private sector startup initiatives in the UK and Europe. As a publicly funded entity with near limitless financial resources, I think the BBC needs to be careful about what businesses they dip their toes into. I mentioned a new BBC virtual world product as an example.
Did I mean it literally? No. The BBC sends us far too much traffic for me to want it to dissolve (and I think it’s a brilliant, well run company as well). But the whole thing was caught on video and, as you can imagine, I was roundly (and I believe properly) criticized (although see this comment). At best this is none of my business, although I lived in the UK for many years and well remember the dreaded BBC television tax.
He then talks about
BBC Jam which was recently suspended.
Newcastle
Monday evening we're at "the other bar" in Newcastle for a social event.. Tuesday were at Newcastle University during the day, and a few of us might go out for a meal afterwards. On Wednesday were at Northumbria University during the day.
Kent
Thursday afternoon/early evening we're going to be at Ravensbourne college. I'm sure some of us will end up at the well loved La Pasta in Bromley at some point afterwards.
Hull
Friday were up in Hull University but the Scarborough Campus. We're talking after lunch and we're trying to arrange something for Friday night.
Hope to see a lot of you guys next week. If we have missed your area, don't worry. The Backstage Tour starts again in September.
Backstage kicked off its University tour yesterday at Manchester Metropolitan on why new media was dead. We had quiet a diverse selection of students attend and ended up using all the time allocated, so didn't get a lot of questions afterwards. That or the students were not expecting such a brain dump of information. To make up for the brain dump, Backstage Schwag went down very well.
Dr Mark Stubbs from MMU said,
Good choice of stimulating material delivered with real passion - for what more could students ask!
Shortly afterwards, the Backstage bandwagon rolled into the MDDA for the Geekup event (Dave Verwer filmed the whole Geekup event.). After halving the talk down for a more savvy audience and more Schwag, it was off to the local bar to discuss some of the points. The night was enjoyed by all who were involved.
Roll on,
Newcastle next Monday
Northumbria on Wednesday
Ravensbourne on Thursday
and finally Hull and Scarborough
