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Business Briefing: Where Next for Venture Capitalists?

Despite the economic downturn venture capitalists are still looking at investment opportunities in digital media. New Media Knowledge spoke to one to get the low down on what VCs want.

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Social Media in Practice: BBC Radio 5 Live

Web publishers and broadcasters always have to look for new and innovative ways to maintain existing audiences and win new ones. When BBC Radio 5 Live realised it was losing listeners to other sources of football-based content it launched a new service to win them back. New Media Knowledge met the people responsible.

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Conservationists Embrace Social Media

Television is increasingly embracing new media to reach new audiences and add interesting applications. New Media Knowledge talks to the people behind a new online conservation series that aims to raise wider awareness of the plight of endangered species.

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i-design 08 - Brendan Dawes, My Interactive

Brendan Dawes, creative director of MacneticNorth, talked about the ways in which his early experience of technology has affected his approach to interactive media and of the seismic shift that has taken place in recent years in how people use technology.

In 1979, the 2000AD annual promised a fairly close future filled things like flying cars and laser guns. When the year 2000 came around a few years later, it emerged that the future was not quite so exciting. However, there have been real changes.

The real fore-runner to Brendan's current involvement with technology came two years later in 1981, with the release of the Sinclair ZX81. The advertising of the time seems rather strange by today's standards, with acres of text and features like '24 FOR-NEXT LOOPS' proudly bulleted.

On the other hand, the device had some charm. You connected it to your television and it switched on instantly. There was no GUI, no mouse - just a blinking cursor. It meant that you were forced to create something with it. Dawes recalled visiting Dixons and invoking the classic lines:

10 PRINT "BOLLOCKS"

20 GOTO 10

...before a quick exit and a shop-full of embarrassed staff. Geek skills were empowering.

Now that power is being given to normal people as well. Dawes realised that this seismic shift was happening when his wife, a beauty therapist with no previous interest in technology, asked for a Nintendo DS. In many ways, Nintendo have been very clever in their positioning of the device, using the likes of Nicole Kidman as their brand advocates. But nonetheless, the request seemed to indicate a sea change in the nature of technology. Dawes showed a picture of the contents of his wife's handbag, her 'survival kit', with the DS as normal and necessary as the purse, make-up and gloves. Technology has been democratised.

Similarly, the Wii has changed the nature of gaming - Dawes showed an image of an old lady playing darts using the Wii controller across a normal living room. The geekery has been taken out of it, he said. 

But there is a problem with all of this.

As our photos move to flickr rather than frames on the mantelpiece; as our music and films moves off the shelves and into the likes of iTunes, then the physical memorabilia starts to disappear. What will it be like to go to people's homes and not be able to tell anything about them, because there are no records, no books, no DVDs or photos? Something important is potentially being lost in the move to digital.

There ought to be better ways to consume digital media as well. Having digitised all of his DVDs, why can't Dawes set up a smart playlist to show car chases in San Francisco featuring Mustang cars.

It was thinking such as this that led Dawes to create a digital snowglobe. Snowglobes are pure memorabilia, a kind of memory device. But this can be enriched. Dawes attached a motion sensor to a New York snowglobe and attached it to his Mac. When you shake the snowglobe, the machine shows a slideshow of his pictures of New York from flickr.

More recently, Dawes has created the Mixa. This is effectively a USB memory stick in a plastic cassette housing, the idea being to allow people to create mix tapes as gifts for other people. As an artefact, they are both digital and physical. They are soft technology, more romantic and more about recapturing shared feelings. The Mixa was created as a commercial product by MagneticNorth and proved a more satisfying project than most client work, albeit involving dealing with alien situations such as the creation of plastic moulds.

Finally, Dawes cited Bug Labs. Bug is a kind of lego for technology. You get hold of all the elements you want - maybe a GPS device, a camera and a wireless transmitter, for example - and then fix them together to create a custom device whose purposes are only limited by your imagination. Currently, getting these devices to work involves some programming ability, but it didn't seem far off, perhaps only five years, before his wife was creating and using such devices.

A video of Dawes' presentation will be made available shortly.