Research & development for the social web
Week #1192
We’ve spent a large chunk of this week writing proposals. Two for unsolicited work and one for a big tender thingy. The proposal for the big tender thingy was tortuous, mainly because the thing had a language all of its own and because the requirements for the tender weren’t obvious – which was perhaps a good first filter on their part. At then at the end of it all, we missed the application deadline by three minutes, due to the document becoming corrupted requiring us to reformat most of it at the last minute. Annoying. The other proposals faired better.
The East Midlands museums project got a name. ”My Life as an Object” is now in full flow. Other projects hit a rhythm which can best be described as a lope. We loped a lot this week. Aside from the document formatting hiatus, we never broke sweat. We did have a pleasant meeting with Adrian from the BBC where we showed a couple of ideas we’ve been thinking through, mostly around using Channelography and Muddy in new and better ways . 4iP came back to say that none of our last lot of ideas didn’t get funding. The ideas seem to get as far as “the board”, but we’re quite sure the board is big, and the board rubber is as big as a windscreen wiper.
We want to go back to a client about doing some wonderful trending stuff, and it’s all do-able and interesting, but the commercial implications didn’t get resolved – so we’re working on fixing that. Working out new ways to do stuff is ace, but we’ve realised that often this often also means that people don’t have existing budgets where it sits, or people that could be responsible for it. We need products, and preferably products we can put a nice box around.
In other news, Frankie got a new iPhone, despite me trying to convince him to buy an inferior Andriod device, just because I wanted to be contrary. I’ve also been looking at Siri, and thinking that the technical brilliance is no match for the human desire to be part of the decision making process, part of the negotiation for most actions. Be interesting to see how Siri pans out.
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