Q&A: Ian Livingstone on the Importance of Computer Science to the Digital Economy
Ian Livingstone is the President of Eidos, and also co-author of the Next Gen report, a study that stresses the importance of the digital economy and the role teaching Computer Science in schools plays in its growth.
We were able to talk earlier this month at the Explay Festival where he gave one of the keynote speeches.
Q&A: Paul Taylor on porting Frozen Synapse to the iPad
Photos lifted from the Mode7 press release. Taken by Rich Whitelock
Mode7, makers of Frozen Synapse announced last month that they're working on a port of the game for the iPad. At the recent Explay Festival held I was able to snatch a brief chat with one of the studio's co-founders Paul Taylor. We talked about the current state of the port, the challenges it presents, and the future plans for the game (both the port and the PC version).
What brought about the decision to bring Frozen Synapse to the iPad?
Q&A: Ed Dowding on Sustaination ‘the Dating Site for Food’
Following the recent launch of Sustaination I was able to talk with its creator Ed Dowding. The 'dating site for food', connects food producers with local businesses to foster communities and help small farms exist whilst in competition with the big supermarkets. We talk about the difficulties of making a simple to use system that still has the richness and complexity that makes it useful, how the site came to be a launch project on Peoplefund.it, and what they plan to implement in the future.
The site doesn't just put producers in contact with consumers, it also allows users to form supply chains that allow for transport of goods much further than a producers normal distribution range.
So how did you get involved with Peoplefund.it?
Explay Coverage: Day Two
My continued coverage of the Explay Festival.
Day two of the Explay conference continued to cement the prevalence of developers and companies active in the South West. After registering attendees milled around the conference floor, where two gaming cabinets vied for their attention. The first of the these is the mighty Plymatron, an arcade cabinetbased on the designs of the Canadian Bit Collective's Winnitron.
Explay Coverage: Day One
I'm down in Plymouth this weekend covering the first, well sort of, Explay festival. This is the first long form Explay event, there was a single evening event held last year, an event that kicked off the Explay community network. The network of South Western developers was celebrating its one year anniversay tonight, so I can't quite call it the first Explay event.
Q&A: Emily Oliver on crowd funding ethical projects with Peoplefund.it
Recently I was able to talk with Emily Oliver, Content Producer at KEO Digital - the production company behind Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's River Cottage - about their newest project Peoplefund.it.
Like an ethical Kickstarter, Peoplefund.it allows you to support projects that aim to do something good for the world. But unlike the other crowd funding sites out there, Peoplefund.it lets users donate skills and time as well as money.
With the site launching this week we talked about how the project came about, what their future plans involve, and how the skill donation is going to work exactly.
How did KEO, a television production company, find itself making this platform?
The New Gambit: A Gamble Born Out Of Dead Ends
News tends to break on the fastest medium. Most news is now read on the internet first before finding its way into print. There are exceptions, such as The Guardian breaking the recent phone hacking scandal in its paper, however, as we move our media onto the internet this is becoming a rarer event. The shift is one of the things that prompted the calls that "Print is dead" etc. The problem with such statements is the close-handed nature of them. They offer no useful criticism but simply shut off discussion. It's led a number of publishers to dismiss the moves in technology, a decision which will likely impact them heavily later. But we are starting to see some fruitful shifts.
Out with the old, in with the… old?
As a bonified Tech blogger for the Huffington Post, I'm going to be splitting my time between here and there for when it comes to blogging.
Can you remember the last time you clicked on an ad whilst watching a video of Muppets a cappella? This is what's worrying the owners for YouTube. Only a few users in a thousand actually respond to the advertising, a tiny proportion of their views make the site any money.
Interview with co creator of The Pirate Bay and Flattr Peter Sunde
Tiding you over until my post about chainsaws this evening, here's an interview with co creator of The Pirate Bay Peter Sunde for Wired.
We talk about Flattr, his service that lets you donate money to musicians, youtubers, bloggers, and the like. Sunde describes it as "the 'like button' that means something."
He was great to interview, a really friendly guy who happens to have also changed the face of the music, film, games industries, and the way we use the internet
You can read the full interview here.
Interview with David Britton
Photograph by Colin Hattersley
That's me in that photo up there. It captures me journalising, that, and that I apparently take notes with my eyes closed.
But let's move on. Yes, as I hinted at yesterday, this is the interview with David Britton I managed to grab for Wired at the Turing Festival.
He has an immensely cool job, at the immensest hotspot of cool on the planet. And, let's not question whether you can have a hotspot of cool, because science will probably prove us all wrong. He's project leader of the GridPP project, they organise the computer labs around the world that handle all the data produced at CERN. That, and many other major experiments the world over.
So, read and enjoy, I'll be putting up the rest of the interview later this week because I don't think you should miss anything he says.