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The 2010 MediaGuardian Innovation Awards shortlist has now been announced:

Launch

Load &Go
O2 & ZenithOptimedia / Channel 4 / The Outfit

Load & Go was a bite-sized rom-com that ran in the centre break of Hollyoaks every day, with characters discussing the plot lines and demonstrating the benefits of O2's Load & Go card. Recognised by the viewers as entertainment in its own right, the soap within a soap got people talking, took them online to find out more and delivered brand and sales results for O2.

Teenage Kicks
NHS Leicester City & The Rocket Science Group
www.hey-babe.co.uk

Aiming to reduce incidences of teenage pregnancy in Leicester City, a shocking viral film was created, showing a teenage girl giving birth on a school field. The unbranded film was placed on YouTube with the pioneering strategy that it would most likely be removed for breaching the website's graphic content. A media campaign then followed using a new branded version of the viral to increase awareness, backed up with an informative website, online drama and competition.

PR

Mystery Packages
RNLI
Proximity London

With a need to target a younger audience for support and donations, the RNLI engaged 12 of the UK's most prolific young vloggers as ambassadors. Each vlogger was sent an anonymous 'mystery package' inviting them to rebrand their generation, challenging negative perceptions of young people. The resulting films received almost a million views, and via these 12 people 11% of 15-20 year olds in Britain were reached.

ComputerTan
The Karen Clifford Skin Cancer Charity (Skcin) & Limelight Public Relations
www.computertan.com/

ComputerTan is an innovative hoax campaign, engaging a hard to reach audience with an important message about skin cancer. On visiting the website, users click through to the free tanning trial, and their computer is converted into an array of buzzing UV bulbs. Shortly afterwards users were confronted with shocking images and facts about skin cancer as well as a link to Skcin's website.

Blackpool: J'aime la Tour
visitBlackpool & SKV Communications

VisitBlackpool's humorous viral film playing on the similarities between the Eiffel and Blackpool Towers generated talkability and achieved a revaluation of Blackpool. An exclusive was given to the BBC which sparked take up amongst other media and overwhelming public awareness.

Advertising

It doesn't have to happen
Home Office & Manning Gottlieb OMD
www.bebo.com/itdoesnthavetohappen/

This campaign to reduce knife crime created a community of young people to deliver its message. The campaign name, its direction and production responsibilities were all created by young people, with the message being delivered on Bebo and on the ground.

Kasabian Football Hero
Columbia Records / Umbro & Sony Music Creative
www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XjwoVqM_qE

Sony teamed up with Umbro to promote the release of Kasabian's single 'Underdog' and Umbro's new sportswear line. They programmed and built a giant 'Guitar Hero' game, played with footballs by football freestylers. The game itself showcased the new Kasabian single as well as the new Umbro clothing line. A short documentary of the project was released on YouTube.

Lips Number One Hits: Lips Jukebox for Xbox 360
Xbox & AKQA
lipsjukebox.xboxemea.com/

To celebrate the launch of Xbox's karaoke game, Lips: Number One Hits, AKQA created an entertaining and shareable online application. The app used facial recognition technology to position animated lips on Facebook users' photos, encouraging them to create and share karaoke videos with their friends.

Creative

Hopper Invasion
Sony Ericsson & Dare

The Hopper Invasion enabled users to inflate spacehoppers by the power of Twitter and the #pumpt tag, extending a campaign idea online and beyond. 245,000 hoppers were created by more than 17,000 people, pumping the hoppers in the warehouse, live, by the power of Twitter.

House of Cards
Shelter & Leo Burnett

The House of Cards campaign was created with no budget, but raised awareness and money for Shelter. As well as a traditional media campaign, the concept was extended to an exhibition of leading British artists, a talent competition and an auction.

onedotzero_adventures in motion festival identity 2009/2010
onedotzero & Wieden + Kennedy
code.google.com/p/onedotzero-ident/

The festival identity actively involved onedotzero's core audience of design and computing enthusiasts in the creation of an innovative design piece. Identity assets were generated by users and interacted with at a Nokia-powered identity projection at BFI Southbank.

Technology

Accessible Newsreader
CBBC
www.bbc.co.uk/cbbc/newsreader

This project was developed to open CBBC's news content to disabled audiences, initially designed to cater for complex motor disabilities such as cerebral palsy or spina bifida. The simple clutter-free interface displays a rectangle around a menu item, and then moves between each option on a timed delay. When the desired option is highlighted it can then be selected via the enter key.


Scraperwiki
Scraperwiki Ltd
www.scraperwiki.com

ScraperWiki is a data store which allows developers to scrape, store, aggregate, and distribute unstructured public data in more useful, structured formats. The ambition is to fill ScraperWiki with thousands of public data sets that can be used by journalists, researchers, developers and public bodies.


To see the rest of the shortlist please visit here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/megas/shortlist

Picture: A man standing in front of a microphone on a stage at the Media Guardian Innovation Awards Ceremony, with thanks to joellybaby for publishing on Flickr under a Creative Comms license with some rights reserved.

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The Innovation Shortlist

It is with pleasure to bring to your attention the 30th international conference on entrepreneurship and innovation PODIM, which will be held on 14th and 15th April 2010 in Maribor, Slovenia. This year topic is Selling Innovative Ideas. Detailed information is available on web page: http://en.podim.org/

If you are interested in contributing to the PODIM conference, you are invited to submit abstract in word document including author’s full name and address (with 1/3 CV), title of paper and up to 1 page abstract. Papers must relate directly to the main theme of the conference and have practical implications for entrepreneurship and innovation development. Selections will be made by a reviewing committee on the basis of the abstract, with a final decision based on the full paper.

Detailed instructions for formatting the paper together with other information on the conference content and venue will be sent to authors after acceptance of their papers for presentation. Conference proceedings will be published in an ISBN numbered book, and best papers will be considered for publication in peer-reviewed journal Naše gospodarstvo / Our Economy, indexed and abstracted in ABI Inform and EconLit.

Important dates

January 25th, 2010
Submission of abstracts (1 page) and a 1/3 page of the author's C.V. By e-mail.

February 1st, 2010
Acceptance of abstracts; instructions for preparing the final papers. By e-mail.

March 8th, 2010
Submission of final papers covering 12 pages (maximum). By e-mail.

March 20th, 2010
Deadline for the conference fee payment.

March 25th, 2010
Final program and information about the conference. By e-mail.

April 14th – 15th, 2010
Conference dates

Submission of abstracts should be addressed to: barbara.bradac@uni-mb.si

Prof. Dr. Miroslav Rebernik

Conference Chair

Picture: The words 'Selling Innovative Ideas' along the top in a red font. Below is a photograph of participants at a conference sitting on rows of chairs with a white board and two giant advertisement boards at the front.

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Event: Selling Innovative Ideas

Video is the most popular media format and with all the footage available it becomes increasingly difficult to find an efficient way to search through it.

vidipedia started life as a DTI sponsored Research & Development project investigating human indexing of video archives. enigma was appointed project lead and worked with project partners; ITV, Imperial War Museum, British Film Institute, Codeworks Connect, C.C. Harvey and the Universities of Newcastle and Sunderland, to find a way to improve video content searching.
The amount of footage viewed and produced is dramatically rising; viewing figures continue to increase, more viewing platforms become available and production costs shrink. According to Nielsen, the average American now spends 5 hours watching TV/DVR footage per day, the UK is fast approaching this. If you add online video content to this, the popularity of video is undeniable. Approximately 20 hours of video footage is currently uploaded to YouTube every minute. When you take into account archive collections and out-take footage, that’s a lot of video content!

Much of this content has real value, whether it is of cultural importance, expensive to replicate or irreplaceable coverage of one-off events. Hundreds of thousands of hours of unique archive footage held on original film and tape is slowly degrading, to be lost forever if it is not digitised. The problem is that no-one can find an economic case to digitise it. We investigated whether we could unlock the value held in all of this video by making it more searchable.

Current video search systems can be quite crude. Essentially, video searching mirrors image archive search techniques; each video is associated with some human entered text data, which is then searched upon. A fundamental issue with this is that video varies in length, from short clips to entire reels, and classifying using a universal set of data doesn’t provide enough detail necessary to deem searching useful for uncovering value within lengthy or mixed content footage.

We needed to produce a system which supported indexing to a highly detailed level; down to the scene or even frame. It also needed to prove cost effective to footage owners.

We developed vidipedia as a unique suite of software which combines to deliver all the processes required to upload, annotate, manage, distribute and deliver video material in a form that is much more searchable.

Video is stored centrally; multiple archives can store footage on a centralised system. Core functionality is delivered via secure web-services and interfacing with remotely hosted web applications. Complex data can be stored about specific time segments (clips) in footage. Footage can be annotated by users to provide indexed data on; personal experience, feelings, sounds, emotions, visual – with the added bonus that in the future, this could be used to produce “living histories” for archives. Users can search on this data to find specific clips within any footage.
Keeping human annotation at the heart of the process allowed us to obtain good quality data. We implemented systems that would follow the model of Wikipedia; supporting altruistic annotation, as well as revenue sharing for commercial services; users annotate the material in return for a share of future viewing or licensing royalties.

Main Benefits:


A wide variety of different video based applications can benefit from the improved searchability that vidipedia offers; video search engines, public access portals, asset management systems, online broadcast platforms. To effectively service all application types, vidipedia is not a single "product".

We developed a system that is a whole series of flexible software components that can be configured to support specific needs of different video based applications. It's best to think of vidipedia as an "enabler." Its power is in its flexibility, therefore the opportunities to commercialise it are great and varied.

Our plans for the future are to find an application for vidipedia that would greatly benefit from the way it makes digitised video findable and therefore unlocks its value.

The model provides an extremely adaptable and non-prescriptive solution and enables vidipedia to service any application that can benefit from its video handling capabilities. We look forward to developing it with someone to suit their needs and to unlock the potential of vidipedia.

- A special thank you to Zoe Hartill for the blog pose. For more details please e-mail her at zoeh@enigma-interactive.co.uk, or visit their website: www.enigma-interactive.co.uk and view their portfolio.

Picture: A screenshot of 'Vidipedia'. A video is being shown at the top with links to other videos below.

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Having trouble finding a video?

A couple of posts back the head of our team, Carol Patrick reviewed the event 'Innovate 09', click here to read the post. Nikhil Shah was a speaker at the event and has kindly agreed to write a blog post on his company 'Mixcloud' - how it was started, the current success and future aspirations of the company. Happy reading!

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Presenting the YouTube of Radio: Mixcloud

DC10plus is the national collaborative authority on Digital Inclusion issues and how they impact at a local level. The DC10plus vision is to be a network for change, helping local authorities and their delivery partners to empower people and connect communities through technology and innovation.

Three years after its formation (following the Government's Digital Challenge competition), DC10plus has considerable experience of what works in Digital Inclusion, and, perhaps just as importantly, what doesn't work. DC10plus is now moving into its second phase of development which involves rolling out successfully developed products to new local authorities and their partners.

DC10plus has carefully mapped its products against Local Area Agreement National Indicators and established that they make vital contributions to key local targets. Products have been developed in six work streams which map against priorities familiar to all local authorities. The work streams are:

• Communities Building Capacity - proving the vital contribution digital technologies can make to community development, community cohesion, and tackling worklessness.

• Digital Environment - driving forward the fight against climate change using digital technologies, and making sure the carbon footprint of the technologies themselves is reduced.

• Digital Switchover - utilising the switchover from analogue to digital television to build platforms for the digital delivery of local authority services.

• Next Generation Connectivity - creating well-targeted and innovative interventions for “next generation connectivity” (NGC) through the deployment of high-speed broadband (100 Mbs and above) using fibre, cable and wireless connectivity.

• Independent Living - aiming to improve citizens quality of life through making access to services easier and more time efficient, basing services around customer rather than provider needs, for example providing specific technologies such as assistive technologies and remote healthcare to help people with disabilities or dependency issues lead independent lives

• Regional Engagement - DC10 plus members work with partners in their regions to promote the take-up and use of digital technologies to tackle social exclusion and improve the places in which people live.

The current climate faces local government with many challenges, not least of which is dealing with increasing demands on its services at a time of tightening public resources. While it is by no means the only reason for seeking to adopt technological solutions, increased efficiency and effectiveness are proven outcomes of some of the successful DC10plus products. Adoption of DC10plus products offers local authorities and their partners opportunities to work together to achieve efficiency savings while meeting the needs of residents and businesses.

There are more than 20 DC10plus products which have been developed and tested by local authorities who are part of the network. These products are now at a stage where they are ready to be rolled out into new areas, by individual local authorities and their partners, and, in some cases, on a joint basis. Examples of products include:

• PC Loans Scheme - Developed by Milton Keynes Council with Microsoft, and has so far loaned around a 1000 used public sector computers to low-income residents. Has been also adopted by Sunderland and Durham.

• Welcome to Birmingham - A website providing access to information, advice and guidance for refugees, asylum seekers and migrant workers.

• Techno Footprint - Developed by Connecting Bristol, a model for advising businesses about energy use and sustainability.

• DEHEMS - Manchester’s Digital Environmental Home Energy Management System (DEHEMS)

• Digital Media Guides - User friendly practical advice on planning and delivering meaningful digital media projects. Developed by Shropshire County Council.

•STREAM Personal TV - Developed in Hull, STREAM provides older people with access to locally relevant and personalised information, online services and communications through their television.

• E-Neighbourhoods Programme - Devised in Sunderland, a programme of capacity building and community development using ICT, focused on the most disadvantaged communities.

DC10plus is now seeking expressions of interest from local authorities and partner organisations wishing to explore the opportunity to adopt one or more of its products. If this interests you, please can you please add a comment to this post, and/or email your contact details to michael.dodd@sero.co.uk confirming your interest in the potential to adopt one of more of the DC10plus products.

With special thanks to John Popham & Michael Dodd from Sero.

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DC10plus – Rolling out Digital Inclusion Products

Woolies may have gone but you can still pick and mix. We recently gave you a flavour of the possibilities of Pic and Mix – an exciting project which could transform the way the public access, customise and share information. The idea is that, rather than make assumptions about the information people want, we put publicly available information in one place – www.picandmix.org.uk – and give people the tools to be able to ‘mash’ and personalise information.

We’re working with a pilot group if SME’s who are giving us valuable insight into the sort of data that would be useful to the business community.

Over the coming weeks we will continue to add new data feeds and mashup examples. Through a programme of work with schools we hope to engage young people in the project. Their feedback will help shape the project and propose ways in which Pic and Mix can benefit the Kent community.

You can follow the project on Twitter.

(picture of the Pic and Mix website)

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