Virtua Team Talk

Watching The News on television has been part of normal life as long as I can remember and it is thanks to one of our greatest national institutions – the BBC – that the news from all over the world arrives on our TV screens every night. Now of course the BBC is expanding its horizons into new technical media, including mobile phones, in order to bring us up to date high quality information at the touch of a button.

The BBC’s Research and Development division has been at the heart of the global broadcast engineering industry for more than sixty years. From the early days of the “Home Service” (one service on one platform) to the multiple services on multiple platforms available today, the BBC have been innovators in technology enabling them to deliver public services free and at the point of use.

The evolution of BBC services has taken time though. Early TV programmes were essentially visual recordings of radio programmes, but programme makers gradually grew to understand and develop the medium and TV took its rightful place alongside radio as a second service platform. Today the BBC is at a similar turning point in the internet age.  The corporation still tends to define the digital agenda through the lens of broadcast output but times are changing and the internet is now taking its place alongside TV and radio as a third platform in its own right.

“BBC Online”, for example, has evolved throughout its twelve year history. The service licence allows the BBC to offer mobile access to BBC Online, bringing increased public value to audiences. Ten years ago it launched BBC Online’s first WAP site. Later, graphics were added and after that audio/ video. This has established “BBC Online” as the second most-visited mobile website in the UK – largely driven by the uptake in smart phones. Also, with more languages than any other service, the BBC’s World Service has made good use of mobile and long term mobile phone could become the primary point of internet access for millions of people across the globe.

This year the BBC plans to provide many new online services for a range of mobiles and smart phones. BBC News and BBC Sport applications are already planned, starting with BBC News on the iPhone. Each application has been designed specifically to focus on what the audience most wants from a mobile device, taking the BBC’s audio-visual content to audiences on the move. Mobile though is only one part of a bigger picture. BBC Online can now deliver rich, interactive content to the web, to mobile and to TVs – with a user-experience tailored to the platform that carries it to the device.

For mobiles, it means a location-based, simple and personalised user experience. For the web it means rich functionality and a wide range of content and for TV a combination of passive experience with the power of on-demand services.

So the somewhat stuffy old BBC is now clearly trying to embrace the digital age.  It has moved from radio to TV and now to the smart phone – and we are all now part of this digital journey and enjoying new forms of multi-media experience. The future is already here and it’s great to be part of it.

Good old ‘Auntie’!

There seems no limit to the imagination when creating new innovative ‘apps’ for the iconic iPhone or some of the other popular range of smart phones. Now, it seems, the Royal Mail have jumped on the innovation bandwagon by launching the world’s first ‘intelligent’ stamp.

Viewing the stamp via a smart phone takes users to a related webpage which launches online content. The stamp works in conjunction with a specific image recognition software application developed by a company called Junaio – versions of which have been made for iPhone and the Android smart phone. According to the Royal Mail intelligent stamps mark the next step in the evolution of stamps, bringing them firmly into the 21st Century.

Those viewing the stamp, which is part of the Royal Mail’s latest Great British Railways edition, will be directed to a short film showing Bernard Cribbins reading Auden’s famous poem “The Night Mail.” W. H. Auden wrote the Night Mail poem in 1936 for the Post Office’s own blockbuster film of the same name, which for many people of that generation has always remained popular.

The application is yet another example of so-called ‘augmented reality’ in which real world scenes or situations are annotated and enhanced by pairing them with web-based data. Philip Parker of The Royal Mail said of the new iPhone app: “This is the first time a national postal service has used this kind of technology on their stamps and we’re very excited to be bringing intelligent stamps to the nation’s post.”

For many years the Royal Mail’s special stamps have marked key events and anniversaries in the UK’s heritage as a medium which aims to be both educational and informative. Now the leap into intelligent stamp technology is likely to open up to a whole new world of information, interest and fun for enthusiasts and collectors as well as the millions of people who will receive them on letters in the years to come.”

Although Virtua work at the cutting edge of mobile phone technology we are still amazed at the new applications that are being developed and this new stamp innovation is going to turn the schoolboy stamp collecting hobby into a whole new world of possibility. Whatever will they think of next?

“This new generation of phones have so much power in them, so many activities, so much information that it is the defining new category for our industry” Eric Schmidt, Google Chief Executive.

In some ways the mobile phone industry is going through one of those technology shifts like the one that happened in the 90’s. Nokia was the first to realise that kids thought mobile phones were as much a fashion accessory as a communications device.  That paradigm shift is happening again now as “smart phones” start to become more and more useful.

This time, though, the shift is affecting more than just the mobile phone industry. Smart phones and tablets are going to affect the computer business as well.

It’s two years since the iPhone was launched and it’s certainly changed the way in which people use hand held devices. As I talked about last week, it’s even changed the way quizzes are conducted at the local pub.

Some say that the success of the iPhone is down to the huge range of interesting applications that are available for it. It’s claimed that whatever you want to do there is an app for it. In some ways they’ve copied the very successful model Microsoft used against Apple in the early PC market place. Bill Gates always said that he considered the contribution of Windows as an application development environment to be much more important that its role as a user interface or an operating system. In other words, get great apps developed for your platform and you will win. It worked then and it seems to be working now.  The success of Apple’s ‘app store’ is testament to that. The store – which now boasts 65,000 apps and over two billion downloads, is now making serious money, but more strategically it’s making it harder and harder for rivals to compete.

So is the iPhone the end of the story? I don’t know. I think that the ‘form’ factor of devices will continue to change. I’ve long thought that in the fullness of time we will still all have two devices. We’ll have something “consciously portable”, which will probably resemble an A4 piece of paper. Why? Well, the paper business has had plenty of time to evolve to a size that humans feel comfortable to write on and carry. People don’t carry A3 notebooks, and only reporters’ carry A5 size ones. Your other device will be “unconsciously portable”. You won’t know you’re carrying it – and something about the size of a credit card seems about right.

I might be wrong about this ‘form’ factor thing, or even about the role applications play but I’m interested in this topic because it supports the view, which does matter, that the days of desk bound computers and phones are over.