Recent posts

Introducing the Holiday Calculator App

We launched a mobile phone app this week. It’s called the Holiday Calculator App. It’s a first for us in a few different ways: the first thing we’ve done targetted at mobiles, the first time we’ve really started to use HTML5 features, and the first consumer app that we’ve released for sale. So, I thought [...]

Terrace Tweets and modelling football

Hello. Today sees the launch of a service we’ve built for Umbro called Terrace Tweets (nee. Project Cromer). It’s a way to see the support for different teams and players around a football match and it gets its first outing tomorrow for the FA Cup Final (which for those outside the UK is the biggest and [...]

The Newsography Experiment

The complaint of regional bias in news reporting is, more often than not, concerned with the media’s fixation on the capital’s institutions and populace. What basis is there for this argument? And is it possible to determine the extent of regional under representation whilst proving London enjoys near constant attention from the UK media?  The [...]

Designing A History of The World

The BBC contacted us in Spring 2009 to help them think through different audience propositions for what is now A History of The World, a landmark series on Radio 4 produced in conjunction with the British Museum.  The basic premise of the programme is to provide a history of the world through objects, including 100 from the British [...]

Muddy

The gestation of some projects is longer than others. The one we’re ‘launching’ today is elephant-esque in it’s development. Muddy is here. Muddy is a data mining tool that, for a given web page or document, will tell you what the notable things are from which you can then grab extra information. It’s like an [...]

Muddy: Playing with the Powerhouse

We’re releasing Muddy in the next couple of weeks (as a web service complete with a range of APIs and also as an appliance you can rack). It’s a service that indexes your content and finds ‘notable’ things and can tell you about those notable things (because the entities we identify are part of linked [...]

Blue plaques project update: How to create ‘guerilla plaques’

I thought I’d update you all on our blue plaques project, which has been pitched to 4iP. The idea has evolved slightly. We’re taking it in a direction beyond simply making information about pre-existing blue plaques available on your mobile phone, and more towards building a service and a community where people can suggest new [...]

Pitching The Great Manchester Cultural Cookoff

We were at the Whitworth Art Gallery last week to give our final pitch in Manchester Beacon’s ‘Mapping Creativity‘ project, after being shortlisted in October. Our proposal is for a social website and event called The Great Manchester Cultural Cookoff. You can find out more about the project, by watching the video of the pitch, [...]