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.

What's key to fostering growth and retention in the UK games industry? Is it through government initiatives like tax breaks?

There are five things I concentrate on in supporting the games industry, I call it 'The Five 'P's'.

One is 'Perception', the perception of games to change, with people talking about them in a more positive light, whether it's the media, the government, or whoever.

The second 'P' is 'People', we need a skilled workforce – that's one of the reasons I wrote the NextGen report with Alex Hope - to get a skilled workforce, that can work not just in the games industry but in all the creative industries.

We need 'Pounds', and by that I mean access to finance. Tax breaks are absolutely important and one of the reasons the Canadian, Montreal in particular, games industry has grown at such a stellar rate – they're offering a 37.5% production tax credit for anyone who sets up shop there, but I'd also welcome a more long-term solution: getting investors to understand the value of digital content companies, games in particular.

Startups don't necessarily need the tax breaks for day one, they need smart money, investment capital, so they can bring their games to market. Once they start to grow they will benefit from a production tax break but on a much wider issue I'd like to get people investing in games rather than tax breaks, which are probably seen as a subsidy and preferential treatment. I want people to understand it as an business opportunity to invest, because [currently] games are seen as risky and not as investable as traditional industries. So I think that's a more important issue, tax credits fit within that remit.

The fourth 'P' is 'Property', and by that I mean intellectual property. Our ability as a nation to be one of the most creative nations in the world, to create fantastic intellectual property, but retaining ownership of it. Often you hear stories of people selling their IP too early, or publishers seeing greater value in our IP than we do ourselves, the ambition of some creatives being short-term, they're happy to sell it early. So I think to build the next Twitter, Google, or Zynga, we need to be able to retain ownership of our IP take it to the next level, scale the investment through understanding digital content.

The fifth 'P', 'Pipes', as in high-speed broadband, not just to download content but to be able to upload content to global markets.

Is it domestic publishers that will allow developers to retain IP?

Developers and publishers are one and the same these days in the online world, the route to market has diminished to a virtual pipe. We need to invest in people to be able to scale their own businesses to make sure the IP resides, from a tax point of view, in the UK.

Do you have an image of what a good Computer Science teacher would be?

Let's get one thing straight, I'm not an educationalist or a technology expert. All I do know is that the UK needs more computer scientists that it's got today. All I've done in the Next Gen report is highlight the need for a skilled workforce because the universities are failing the students, schools are failing schoolchildren. If you look at the universities, there are 150 courses around the country with the word games in them. But they're, a lot of them, not fit for purpose. They're generalist courses, essentially media studies courses, and they're teaching the philosophy of games rather than the skills in how to make them. What we need good programmers and animators, not someone who knows the social relevance of Grand Theft Auto. That was one problem area we highlighted.

Then we looked at ICT in schools: whilst useful it's nothing more than office skills. Learning about PowerPoint, Word, and Excel is useful but nobody's going to give you a career in the games industry.

There's been a disconnect of understanding of what people think ICT is. It's largely about using applications, not teaching them how to make applications. It's the difference between reading and writing. We teach children how to read but we don't teach them how to write. What they need is creative technology in which they learn how to build stuff and use technology.

But What age do you think we should start it in schools?

Certainly by GCSE but I think you could start a lot younger. Children I've seen in school who have been given the digital building blocks, you see their imaginations engaged, they're happy, they're creating, it inspires them to want to learn more. So we need to give them those digital building blocks at an early age.

Do you feel we're behind the rest of the world in supporting out technology scene?

Well, we're behind some, and it just seems an obvious thing to do to have Computer Science on the schools' national curriculum as an option within science. Not force it on [students], but give them the option to do Computer Science.

You look at all the countries who are successful in the digital world and, guess what, they've all got Computer Sceince on the curriculum, China, Isreal - some of the best digital IPs in the world today are coming out of Israel. It's not rocket science to understand this.

But we've always had a tradition of people discovering and learning technology by themselves.

We've let an opportunity slip through our fingers, in the 1980s the BBC Micro was the cornerstone of computing in schools and at home the Spectrum was an affordable, available, computing device. Some years later, Schools stopped programming and moved to ICT that taught applications not programming. So we went backwards, I think people are only starting to realise that.

What sort of response are you finding to the report?

Well, we launched Next Gen in February, since February we've been gaining slow support, until recently following the MacTaggert lecture in which Erich Schmidt (Chairman of Google) referenced Next gen in his criticisms of the UK's educational system not having Computer Science on its curriculum. Since then it's galvanized lots of support. We had a ten minute feature on Newsnight about it, we had a debate about it in the House of Lords about it, several Lords recommending our suggestions be implemented, I was at No. 10 recently discussing it with some of the special advisers there. So it's definitely being brought up as an important issue, whether anything will happen we'll have to see but I'm very hopeful.

Do you think the Raspberry Pi is this generation's BBC Micro?

I'd like to see it become the new BBC Micro. The Raspberry Pi is an fantastic initiative, I think David Braben and the other people in the charity are doing something that is fundamentally and potentially brilliant. The Raspberry Pi itself could be manufactured, I believe, for about £15 and potentially given away to schools. You just plug it into a screen or a TV, plug in a keyboard, and, because it comes with Linux software on-board, you're up and running. You can be programming just like that [clicks his fingers].

Is the attitude to gaming changing?

I'm delighted by the way this government is coming round to the games industry as being a core component of the digital economy going forward. If you think about it the manufacturing services are in disarray and the games industry could potentially be one of the main drivers of the economy. We have the creativity, we have the technology, and potentially we have the skills.

What happens now for Next Gen?

We get a formal response from the Government later this month and then we respond to their response. With the intention that one day, hopefully in the not too distant future, we'll get Computer Science in schools as part of the National Curriculum because we can't build a digital economy with a nation of digitally illiterate people.

 You can read the Government's response to the Next Gen report here.

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?

The Humble Bundle showed there's a wide audience out there who are ready for a game like this and so many people have asked us about a version of the game for iPad.

What we really want is to get support from Apple because we think it could be a fantastic product to show off what the iPad is really good at doing.

What sort of thing is it particularly good at?

[One] thing that we're doing is you're going to have hot seat. So you can put it down on your table, give it your mate and they can play their turn and give it back to you. It's also going to be cross-platform with the PC. Games that you've taken a turn in you'd be able to do that next turn on the iPad.

Had you always had plans for it to go on the iPad?

I'm a convert now, initially I thought getting the game interface to work would be too hard. I'm thinking about the issues I have with that, and I have a build that I can fudge around with until the interface is ready. It was always a PC game originally but I just think that, if we do it right, it could be this killer thing that everyone has on their iPad. It's very cool.

How are you getting around the interface, some parts of it require quite precise control?

What we have now is a build which is just the pc version with touch for the mouse. And that is one of the first issues that came up, that nexus between the player and the aim and time control. And that's something we're going to have to work out so it's more intuitive on the iPad. Similarly, zooming and editing plans in fine detail.

How else does it differ?

You don't have the mouse-over function, on the PC you rely on mouse-over to inform you about what you're about to do. In interface design being able to anticipate is vital for a user. We've got to find a way you just know in advance what's going to happen and that's so hard to get there, it just requires a load of tweaking. It's not a rational process, it's just kind of intuitive.

We're going to do the interface ourselves and be really hands-on for that and make sure it has that level of polish. That's the thing when you move to a different platform, there are things in porting that can be lost in the interface. So we think that's really important to focus on.

You've mentioned plans for DLC in past, what sort of thing would this be?

Because the system is quite flexible, one of the things we're going to do is game modes. We have some pretty interesting game modes now, like charge and hostage, but there's definitely scope for designing gameplay because we've kept the mechanic itself really simple - there's lots of things we can project on top of that. And game modes don't impact balance.

We are also thinking about new units, but we are really aware that new units are such a massive issue in a multiplayer game and really change balance, making the game really different. So we're going to approach that seriously and have a beta community around that. I'm a big Starcraft 2 player and the stuff that Blizzard are doing is fundamentally changing some things about the game and what classes of units they choose to introduce are really intriguing to see where it goes. And that level of detail terrifies me. But there are things we can do that modulate the gameplay rather than break it.

I'd love to do more singleplayer and extend the story, and music as well, people are always asking for more of that. So just more content really. So we'll test the waters with a small DLC pack and see what people want and what we can deliver.

You can pick up a copy of Frozen Synapse for the PC from the Mode7 site here.

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?

I called up Nick Underhill because they have something called Freerange Review which is a directory site of producers and shops that produce and sell quality local-ish food. I figured that if I wanted to succeed I really needed someone big and with a public presence to work with. There's a big critical mass thing in any public network, especially the food network, that if you're trying to join lots of dots then you really want to join as many as you can as quickly as you can. So I wanted someone a bit more substantial to throw some weight behind it. So I got talking to Nick and he told me about Peoplefund.it as well.

What is it the site offers you that other crowd-funding sites don't?

What's nice about that is because you can volunteer time and skills as well as money. That's really useful to us because we really need people on the ground who can go into businesses and say “Have you heard about [Sustaination]?” It's easier if someone friednly and passionate, and ideally one of their normal consumers can go in and say “This is cool.”

Being able to have that explicit asking for time is taking it on a notch. Things like Kickstarter don't do it in and of itself.

Now that the site has launched and people can start lending their support, what are you working on?

What we're doing is concentrating on building the platform and making it easier to extend that. We're going along the approach that if we get a crap-load of really cool data in one place and put in the frameworks to make it useful for businesses then the developers can extend [it], building their own applications and start analysing the data that we've got to add value to it. Then people get to own what they've created. It makes that really firm ecosystem of involvement. A bit like Shopify.

Shopify?

Shopify is an ecommerce platform, people can build extra little widgets and services that they can plug into it. They can then sell to people using the Shopify platform. So, for 50p a month you get a nice little coupon system, or track shares, or something that ties it into Facebook.

So what data do you have entered at the moment?

We've got about 60 – 70,000 businesses in places already.

Wow! Is that from people who've registered interest already?

I wish! No this is from publicly available databases. It's more we've got the data working to be claimed than we've got 60,000 pre-registered users.

Even so, that means you've got a lot of data to visualise

oh yeah, the maps are looking cool. We've been doing some sample stuff, prototyping, and it's neat.

Are the supply chains visible now?

Yeah, that's the sort of thing we've been doing. Unfortunately we don't know for sure what connections people have got. That's another thing we're asking, for people to pop down to their shop, or pop down to their pub and ask “Can you tell me five people that you buy from?” Then enter those connections in. Then you'll have the pub as a dot linking out to five separate farms, then you can start mapping the food network more effectively. Those we've got look cool, but so far we've only put in dummy data.

What other things can you use the data for, besides creating supply chains?

You can start calculating all sorts of other stuff on top of it: where distribution hubs should be, looking at national averages and regional shortfalls; how to make the local and regional networks more efficient; or if you've got two distributors 50 miles apart whether you can get them to share delivery trips and so on. That's part of the reason that we're building it in a platform style, so that people can extend it to work out lots of this stuff. And save us lots of the programming stuff. Though we couldn't help ourselves, we just wanted to play.

How will you be making money back from it?

Because we're trying to encourage local trading, and the standard definition of local is about 30 miles, if you want to [contact anyone] in less than 10 miles that's totally free. That just makes sure that we help out people with vegetable gardens and people who are starting out and want to scale up slowly over a couple of years. But if you want to be found up to 30 miles away we have a really low rate, we haven't worked it out yet but £20 a year – that sort of thing. If you want to do more than 30 miles, and communicate with people more than 30 miles away then we'll charge you a bit more and so on and so on. Say, if you want to use bulk contact tools and things that make it easier to do your job, managing more clients and things [like that]. It's designed to work to reflect the scale of the operation the business is running. So, essentially, you're going to be able to afford it and it's going to give you value in proportion to your scale.

What difficulties have you come across?

You can see why it's so hard to do, when you start designing it making it simple enough for everyone to use. You've got that trade off between simplicity and that lack of granularity, when you're searching for something you really want to be able to filter it down and put in all the specific criteria like you do on eBay. To get that kind of granularity on the filter side you've got to get that data input as well. And if you're trying to say to the people, who are already too busy running a small farm or a pub that's struggling to make ends meet “Hey, can you spend two hours filling in your profile so we can help you out a little bit?” It's a bit of a hard sell. It's been a challenge making it as possible as we can whilst still making it useful.

How are you tackling this?

We're going to have a very flexible taxonomy so you can put in whatever you like and for every additional term that's added we cluster those names under different types of food, so we know Cox is a type of apple. Which means that we can then start doing suggestions. If they search for Cox's and we don't have it, we know it's an apple and we can suggest a different sort of apple. If you look for mango we can go “Well there aren't any locally grown mangos but there are locally grown peaches”

Because we're using graphing database that allows us to know the distance between geographical locations and the number of nodes and hops between those - in the same way we can give the information to know that a peach is more like a mango than an apple is - so we can make suggestions of availability to people based on what's around them.sustain

Do you want people to stop importing foreign fruits?

We don't want to stop people eating mangos, I mean mangos are awesome, and bananas are lovely. You can import them and that's fine, it's the case of saying let's make sure we import the bananas and not the apples.

You can find out more at Sustaination's website, and you can get involved here.

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.

Hand built by members of the Explay community, the Plymatron is the first of its kind in the UK - Bit Collective's design allows people to make their own gaming cabinet and even supply a batch of modern indie games to play on the system but they require the machine to remain in public spaces and be free to use. After the conference it is going to remain in use at whichever bar hosts the Explay's monthly meetups.

The second game that was drawing the attention of those on the floor was the very nifty R-fidghter, a research project that looks set to evolve the card games market. Taking games like Pokemon cards and Magic: The Gathering as its inspiration, R-fidghter gives players a set of physical cards, each depicting a monster and a set of special attacks The cards could be used to battle like other trading card games, but in each of these cards is an RFID chip, so once it's slotted into the bespoke controller and connected up to the R-fidghter videogame you and your friend/enemy can battle in a virtual arena. It's a great idea, and one which I'd be surprised isn't already in the works at companies like Nintendo, there was certainly something similar Sony tried to launch on the PS2 that used the Eye-Toy camera but was never too successful. Yet there is a simplicity to R-fidghter that's appealing and some of the characters they had on display were charming, so it's definitely worth looking out for future developments from the project.

Distracting games aside the talks began with Dan Efergan from Aardman Digital, his talk, titled 'Sex, Lies, and Video Games', stayed true to it's word: he lied about it containing sex. So what do you say about videogames to an audience of videogame developers? Efergan gave a run down of the told us of how the digital department at Aardman expanded from its original four members to twenty, and how their remit, which was originally just to maintain the various websites for different Aardman products  became making games, to the point that they're about to release their first commercial product. The emphasis was very much on baby steps, well, baby steps for Aardman.

They're first game was commissioned by marketing to promote the Wallace and Gromit special 'A Matter of Loaf and Death'. Rather than create the thing entirely from scratch the team - and Efergan wholeheartedly recommends this approach to developers - licensed their engine from Flash Game Licence. Using a small team, only three developers: one coder, one artist, and one producer they made a game that was played over 13.5m times in three years. Using the same formula, their next gam, Suspension Invention, was played almost 17m times in two years. And their most recent game, Home Sheep Home, made in just 12 days, has been played over 105.5m times in two years. So a quick run down of his tips: license engines where possible to speed up your process, don't waste time making pretty prototypes because "you should be able to have a hell of a lot of fun with rubbish graphics, and test loads.Off the back of these free web games they were able to pitch Home Sheep Home 2, their first commercial release, which is set to come out in the next month or so.

The day ended with a keynote from industry godfather Ian Livingstone. Livingstone's been in the games industry since 1975 when he began Games Workshop with John Peak and Steve Jackson, a mail order boardgames shop. He talked about the early history of the company, which for all the his gilding sounds to have been a pretty turbulent time: upon securing the rights to distribute Dungeons & Dragons (D&D)in the UK Peak left the company, they were kicked out of their flat in Hammersmith, spent three months living in a van, and were unable to get a loan from the bank because no one was willing to invest in these so-called "Roleplaying games". Though, through this time they were steadily selling copies of D&D. Eventually they were able to open a shop in 1978 and from then things went up and up for the pair.

Although that covers the start of a company that is close to many gamers' hearts - elvish fantasy having been a mainstay genre of the industry for decades - it wasn't what brought Livingstone to speak to a crowd of developers in front of the world's most distracting screensaver - for those who didn't read yesterday's coverage, the conference is taking place at Plymouth's aquarium in front of a tank full of eels, rays, and sharks - it was what Livingstone worked on after Games Workshop that brought him to Explay. Upon selling out of the business in 1981 he invested his money in a games developer called Domark, makers of Championship Manager. Domark merged with Eidos and was later bought by Square Enix, becoming the Western arm of the Japanese company. So as Life President of Eidos he is at the top of a very influential company in the UK games industry, a company that owns some of the most recognisable brands in the world.

Throughout the talk the point being driven home was the importance of intellectual property (IP), D&D wasn't owned by Games Workshop so after their three years of exclusivity they lost control of it, they could have licensed something else but insteda they chose to create their own game: Warhammer. Owning the IP to this game they had a consistency to their company, they weren't continually hounding developers for new games, instead their strength came from being the exclusive rights holder of the most popular miniatures game in the UK. Similarly, when Core created Lara Croft and the first Tomb Raider game, Eidos, their publisher, held onto the rights. Yes, this first game was wildly successful selling over 7m copies but because they'd retained the rights they were able to licence the image to Lucozade, Hollywood, and merchandising companies, deals that made Lara more recognisable than the Pope. Livingstone repeated "Own IP, I can't stress it enough," just to make sure everyone had got his point.

So that wraps up day two of the conference, tomorrow I'll take a closer look at what's been going on at the Games Jam.

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.

Nonetheless this is getting sidetracked. The Explay event celebrates developers in the South West of England, from Bristol to Bournemouth: celebrates them, and connects them. The conference is a many layered beast and as such I'll be attempting to give day-by-day coverage but you're going to have to accept that whilst I'm in one room there's things going on elsewhere that I won't be party to.

Layer one is a traditional conference format of industry speakers laying on their wisdom. Traditional yes, but the impressive lineup alleviates any worries of a dry weekend. The two keynotes are Ian Livingstone and Paul Taylor. And if you don't recognise those names I can hardly berate you, I didn't either, but then I saw their CVs. Ian Livingstone co-founded Games Workshop in the 70s - the home of Warhammer, Warhammer 40k, and a myriad of other strategy games. He didn't rest on his laurels though as he also brought Dungeons & Dragons to Europe and went on to become Creative Director at Eidos overseeing projects such as Tomb Raider and Hitman. Throughout that, and up to the present day, he's been investing in British indie developers and has remained a big player in the UK games industry.

Then there's Paul Taylor, Paul Taylor co-founded Mode 7 Games the makers of Frozen Synapse, one of the most nerve-fraying games available. Referred to by some as a turn-based Counter Strike, but that is unfair to the depth of this game. Counter Strike is played best by the empty minded player, the game is over in a flash and thinking only slows you down in the click-fest combat. A game of Frozen Synapse can't be won by playing thoughtlessly. Your are forever trying to guess your opponents moves, planning out your own moves accordingly. Every time I commit my moves my heart skips a beat.

And that's just the keynotes, there are 20 other speakers talking over the weekend.

Layer two is Bootcamp, an accelerator program that aims to foster 12 South West developers under the watchful of veteran industry mentors. The participants will spend this weekend in seminars that will teach them the skills outside of their creative focus that are necessary for a successful business: how to build a team of complimentary talents, how to prepare for future industry developments, and how to create a commercial project from the off. The companies taking part are a varied bunch, some are only months old, others are over a decade. Some a games developers, some audio specialists, some are involved with theatre and interactive spaces. They're brought together by the desire to grow as a company.

The final layer, layer three, is Game Jam. A 48-hour hackathon, the Game Jam participants - at last count 50 - will be work tirelessly through the day and the night, foregoing showers and social contact, to make a playable game by Saturday afternoon. The game will be based around a theme, a theme that will only be revealed at the start of the event. Tonight all over Plymouth coders and designers are sitting in anticipation for tomorrow they jam.

Which brings me to tonight, the quiet VIP event that would kick the whole thing off. Now I said there were to be two keynote speakers, but that's not strictly true. Tonight's proceedings kicked off with a talk from Dr Richard Wilson, CEO of TIGA. I didn't mention him before because his talk wasn't open to everyone, but for those of you without a valid reason for being there, or press passes, here's a summary of what went on.

Most talks take place in fairly dull conference centres, podiums set up in front of beige walls and all that. Explay went a different route, the event is being held at the Plymouth aquarium, so instead of drab décor, Wilson stood in front a glass tank full of massive fish, shark-like fish, manta-like fish, in short, fantastic fish. It was a setting worthy of a Bond villain. Not to imply Wilson is part of a nefarious organisation, far from it, TIGA are the trade association representing the UK games industry. They ask the question why is one of the UK's most profitable creative industries not receiving the same government support as the others. Filmmakers and studios receive tax cuts, government funded studio space, and recognition that the games industry does not. They're working to get developers those same breaks.

Answering questions about sector growth, Wilson pointed to universities as the key to forming local studio collectives. Areas like Dundee and Leeds are fast becoming industry centres because the courses offered at their universities train good developers, many of them relocate to London but it only takes a few to stick around each year to create a net to catch juicy talent from the next year's graduates.

He went on to say that this form of community development is slowing because there are fewer people taking the relevant courses, such as computer science and maths. To encourage this he suggests lower tuition fees for those subjects that we want to drive people into. It's not a bad idea in principle, though it would need to be a pretty hefty cut to persuade people to switch courses or, if they were planning on skipping university, to apply.

Another suggestion was to encourage veteran developers to go into lecturing. If good universities retain developer communities then we can increase the number of developer communities by improving our universities.

I'm going to have to stop there because it's two in the morning and there is a full day of talks tomorrow that I need to prepare for. But I hope this has been enough of a tease to set you up for tomorrow's coverage.

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?

Emily Oliver: KEO sort of stumbled into crowd sourcing with Chicken Out, we got this great number of supporters and then asked people to help out paying for the tabling of a Special Resolution at the Tesco AGM, and the community raised over £88,000 in 24 hours. After the success of Chicken Out KEO digital was spawned within KEO.

Since then we've done Landshare which has 65,000 people in the UK, who are either people who have put up land that they're wanting to share or are people who want to grow and it connects those people. We've recently launched in in Canada and Australia, and we're about to partner with Shared Earth in the US as well.

And so how did this lead you starting Peoplefund.it?
Really, this came about from our most recent project energyshare which is a renewable energy tariff and online community that we've launched in partnership with River Cottage and British Gas. As we were doing that we began to look at the renewable energy sector and particularly peoples behaviour around it. It requires people to engage in a community basis around it to make it work.

We began to talk to people who believe they have solutions in this area, and at the same time we were getting feedback from our community - which is 1.2 million people across each of our projects - all of whom were frequently saying they wanted to get more involved with projects, they wanted to help solutions happen.

As we talked to some organisations who are really well informed about this like Forum for the Future and NESTA is the solution tends to come from unusual places and they tend to come from people collaborating, something that the internet facilitates really well. So based off that original idea we've looked at various other crowd sourcing ideas, we aren't really doing anything that's that crazy or different, what we are doing is providing a platform our community is asking for.

This project is being funded by a grant from NESTA, and one of the things they were really keen to look at is how we can remove some of the barriers to people collaborating to help make the world a little bit better. How can they use their spare cash, time, and skills in order to work together?

So, what's the process of donating your time?
The model that we're using at the moment, and, this is a research pilot for us so we're going to be very reactive to it, is that you need to financially support a project, and that can be from the lowest level of reward, that could be just £1, and then you'll get a message that will tell you if that project is also looking for time and skills. If they are it's really simple and straight forward, they will have them listed - the amount of time and skills they're looking for - and you just select [those you can do] and it operates as a really simple information exchange. [The user's] email address and information of whatever they've requested is passed on to the project owner [who can then get in touch with them].

The reason we've done that is not to try and get money out of people. We were initially thinking about allowing people to just crowd source their skills, time, and money, but the projects said "We really want the focus to be around funding because there are lots of ways we can get time and skills, and that's a really helpful benefit, but we want to focus the messaging on the funding."

Also, we think that once someone is financially invested in a project they're more likely to want to engage further with their time and skills, they've made that commitment so they're more likely to follow through with the time and skills that they've pledged.

What sort of targets are the projects going to be setting themselves?
On Kickstarter the average raised is about £5,000, but the target varies from £500 up to £30,000. Because we're focussing on projects that require higher capital requirements, like renewable energy, we suspect people will be going for larger targets. One of the reasons we're launching the site is because there's a recognised funding gap in the market between £0 - 200,000. For the launch projects we're really only looking for a maximum target of £50,000.

How open is the project, is it easy for people to get their project on the site?
We all know it's frustrating when you submit something and you don't know if it's going to be approved. So we've got various checks and balances that remove that necessity. The key distinction [between us and Kickstarter] is that you have to upload a video in order to post your project. That was just based on our research that showed a project is so much more likely to get funded if it had a video, and that we wanted to try and ensure there was some commitment so there was a sort of quality control in place.

But it's also an open project in another sense.
The source code will be available as one of the conditions of the grant from NESTA, it builds on our general approach which is collaborating with people whenever we can where possible. So it will be integrated with each of our other projects and we're keen to make it available for other projects as well.

If someone wanted to they could rip off most of our site and replicate it elsewhere which is why we're very clear on saying two things. Firstly, we're launching this to our community, because they're people who want it, and secondly, this is what we're launching initially but we're looking at quite a lot of other ways to invite crowd sourcing.

We're developing a learning community online. All of the projects will be archived so people can look back on what's been successful and what hasn't. We'll be uploading resources and we'll have a Q&A forum where people can talk to other project owners and backers because they're your audience and who you want to talk to.

There's a heck of a lot going on at the moment, the issue is that no one is really focussing on things that need to be solved.

Peoplefund.it launches this week and if you're interested in learning more as well as see the projects you can support then visit their site here.

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.

Speaking at the Turing Festival this August, Stephen Dunn from The Guardian explained how the newspaper had developed its online presence into a platform instead of simply a website. It isn't a sign of publication abandoning its print publication any time soon, rather a sign that it has acknowledged and adopted the way things are moving. It's preparing for the eventual change. It's content is available to be displayed on many sites besides The Guardian's, making them far more visible and more difficult to pin down to a single outlet. The internet allows them to become ubiquitous.

But, there is something else that's coming, something that is a bizarre hybrid of the physical print world and the virtual world. A hybrid that, on the surface, has taken the negatives of both mediums. Paul Carr, formerly of TechCrunch, has announced The New Gambit. It's an offline unprinted news source. Unlike other publications, none of its content will appear online. The only way to read it is on a a tablet or e-reader.

Carr's tired of the Search Engine Optimised (SEO) articles that fill the internet and the tactics websites employ to grab traffic. Take the recent news of Steve Jobs' death; how many of the obituaries were an homage and how many were simply for hits? By removing the immediacy of the internet Carr hopes to retain editorial integrity, they'll only write about the things that they deem important, and they'll write about them in the style that they want to.

It's bold, but it's going to be a struggle. Not appearing online means limiting your exposure. Coupled with the fact that the only way to read The New Gambit is to put money down first is going to limit initial sales. With other websites, such as The Onion's, you're able to read a few articles before you hit a pay gate. Not appearing in print, again, limits the market. Back in the 18th century The Spectator was one of England's most popular dailies. It boasted a readership of 60,000 despite only printing 3,000 copies. There were twenty readers to every copy because it was passed around. It would be left at the pub, at the coffee house, read at the breakfast table by families. This doesn't happen with e-readers, not yet anyway, they're expensive devices, certainly not something to share around. It's not like a copy of the Metro that can be just left on the tube once you're done reading it.

So, it's success relies on word of mouth and endorsements from the ebook marketplaces. If Amazon were to bundle a month's subscription to The New Gambit with every Kindle, or if it were on offer in a high publicity spot in the Apple market place it could well take off. But, as a concept, it's coming out of the negatives of both the physical and the virtual world and for that I'm very interested to see how it works out.

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.

Part of the reason for this is the difficulty of targeting adverts for the videos uploaded to the site. Should every free-running video advertise trainers, or every cat video pet food? This week saw the news that YouTube are spending $100 million buying content from a number of partners in an attempt to tackle this problem. Unlike the 35 hours of video uploaded every minute to YouTube, the content from their partners can be watched and analysed for the most effective advert placements. The traditional way of advertising.

This is the problem of the modern media, it's still traditional at its core. We see the old methods being forced onto the new system. 4oD and ITV player insert ad breaks into their online content at quarter hour intervals; video streaming sites put ads at the start of their videos, more and more sites are putting gates between users and what they want to watch.

[pullquote]Ever since there has been more than one channel, there's been people who skip between them when the ads come on[/pullquote]

Since the invention of television, and particularly in the last decade, there's been the push to deliver on demand content to viewers. Ever since there has been more than one channel, there's been people who skip between them when the ads come on. Viewers want the most uninterrupted experience they can get. It's no wonder that users turn to piracy, internet viewers are the network's creation. TiVo and sites like iPlayer have given viewers the ability to watch what they want, when they want, and how they want: able to skip, pause, rewind through their programs.

It is only from the torrent sites that these viewers can get the purest, unadulterated content; stripped of ad breaks and trailers, high quality content for free. It's criminal, yes, but everyone thinks twice when they realise they don't have to watch that patronising "You wouldn't steal a car" trailer at the start of every DVD. Don't the distributors realise that the only people in the world who saw that horribly annoying pre-movie clip are the people who have legally bought the DVD?

Unfortunately, the response has been to shut down, rather than learn from, these sites. All it takes is a tweak of the model for everyone involved to come out from this situation happy. There are two reasons users go to these sites over buying the DVDs and using the online streaming services provided by the networks. The first is price, you can't beat free. The second is experience, an uninterrupted, unbound version of a program is always going to be preferable to ad laden platform restricted version. Looking at that setup it's difficult to think how the networks can adapt to this. But, the solution isn't new.

[pullquote]Potentially, the bug could change television[/pullquote]

In 2005 Mark Pesce gave a talk entitled 'Piracy is Good', in it he describes the power of the 'bug'. The bug is that little logo that sits in the corner of the screen during broadcasts. It's usually the network's logo, but occasionally it's a brand's. Potentially, the bug could change television. Pirated video strips out the ads and the trailers, but they don't change the actual content. So if there is a bug in the corner of the uploaded video it will remain there as it is infinitely copied around the world. If that bug is an ad, then it's being seen around the world by millions of viewers, viewers who can't skip it, but don't even mind it's there. It isn't obnoxious and it doesn't interrupt their viewing.

Networks could start distributing their bugged content through torrents, Pesce even suggests posting DVDs out to people's homes for free. The entire operation funded by the advertisers. That's the modern way of advertising, but no one seems to be jumping on it. Pesce gave his talk six years ago, yet we still have obnoxious, irritating, flow breaking ads.

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.

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.