At the time we were writing about Plastic Logic’s development of it’s ereader which earned good revues at leading trade shows. Since then of course Apple have stepped into the market with the iPad.

At our  Digital Lounge in London last week, part of the Future of Digital Content project, David Rowan, editor of Wired in the UK, showed a video that demonstrated how the guys at Wired see their magazine adapting to the iPad/tablet device world.

They talk about moving beyond the static notion of ink on paper and making material in the magazine interactive. For ad agencies this offers potentially huge opportunities for new interactive adverts. Adverts for cars can now come to life enabling people to view not just a static photo but potentially a video or event look at the car from different angles and see inside. While articles could be tweated about or posted to people’s Facebook page.

For traditional publishers who are seeing their ad revenue moving online this could be the lifeboat they have been looking for.

The art guys and editors at Wired seem very positive about this and a search on google news shows other newspaper and magazine publishers exploring the possibilities that light, portable and smart devices the size of a traditional magazine or newspaper can offer.

As they say, watch this space.

This was just one of the suggestions that came out of the final workshop in the Unlocking Knowledge Transfer Beacon Project in Oxford today. The idea came out of a discussion about companies, particularly SMEs wanting to protect ideas but at the same time wanting to share the idea with other people who may have a valuable contribution to make.

It was one of a host of ideas that prompted a lively discussion.

Led by Prospect, the workshop brought together people from a wide range of businesses and academia to share their thoughts on how KT can be used to drive value for creative businesses.

The spread of people taking part produced a spread of ideas and suggestions around a number of scenarios. Prospect will now take all the material from the workshop to feed into the final report.

One thing that was clear however was that everyone felt KT offered a powerful tool for creative businesses. The next stage is to see how KT can be harnessed over the next five to seven years and what needs to be done to make it happen.

The scenarios report and baseline report are available on our web site where you can spark off discussions or share your experiences.

The final report will be published next month.

We are running the second round of events for our Future of Digital Content project which will include Digital Lounges in London, Newcastle and Sheffield.

Speakers include Dave Rowan, editor of Wired magazine, Ewan McIntosh, a leading expert in digital media and former digital commissioner with Channel 4’s 4iP project, technology broadcaster and writer Bill Thompson and the BBC’s Nick Gallon, the lead for TV Platforms the team developing Canvas.

We also have an update from Chinwag at the London event and North East Movies will be showing some of the best movies that have been uploaded to their web site by local movie makers.

For details of the dates, times locations and speakers at the different venues visit our events calendar.

You can register for all the event by clicking on the links below

London Digital Lounge

Newcastle Digital Lounge

Sheffield Digital Lounge

The Baseline report paints  a picture of where the Creative Industries see themselves today, as well as where they will be in five to seven years time. The next round of workshops will invite people from creative businesses and technology organisations to further refine these to help identify the projects, actions and funding needs to be in place to turn these scenarios into reality.

More details about the workshops are on our events calendar and you can also get involved in the debate and discussions on our web site.

As well as the workshops we will also be holding our popular Digital Lounge events at some of the venues. These open-house networking events are also a showcase for digital businesses and an opportunity to hear about funding opportunities.

The dates and venues for the events are:

Feb 17 – Reading

Feb 18 – Birmingham

Feb 19 – London (followed by Digital Lounge)

Feb 22 – Cambridge

Feb 23 – Newcastle (followed by Digital Lounge)

Feb 24 Sheffield (followed by Digital Lounge)

The http://tinyurl.com/ydl4l6v

Andy Duncan, former Chief Executive of Channel Four came up with this at the Oxford Media Convention. Andy said the media sector was suffering “acute case of RDS – repetitive debate syndrome.” The idea that the same things get debated over and over again with no progress being made.

He did issue a serious warning saying that, “the UK’s creative industries could go backwards, despite economic recovery, unless they work together to face future challenges”

Other speakers at the event included Stephen Timms, Minister for Digital Britain. Two of the issues he raised in his speech where IP and New Business Models. While Jeremy Hunt, Shadow Culture Secretary said in his speech that “the creative industries are becoming as important to our economy as financial services.”

But the event was not all about politicians there panel sessions on a range of issues, including one the CI KTN director John Cass took part in. “Our digital future: can Britain’s digital infrastructure compete”

The Guardian blogged and reported from the event and various people fed into the Twitter feed at #OMC10

A workshop is planned for March to help people get their ideas realised as working prototypes and potentially share in the fund.

The UK is a world leader in plastic electronics, much of the fundamental research is happening here now.  We are also world leaders in design and creating excellent products, services and user experiences.  This workshop is an opportunity for these two specialists to get together and build projects together.

The Creative Industries KTN held an information day together with the Photonics and Plastic Electronics KTN to share information about this opportunity.

Check out the videos on our web site to find out more about plastic electronics, how designers can work effectively with technology researchers to accelerate innovation and most importantly how to apply to be part of this amazing £3m opportunity.

These are a result of a series of activities exclusive to the Creative Industries KTN, including online surveys, interviews with leading industry experts and a number of workshops.

Both reports make great reading and have some fascinating insights and ideas into both of the topics covered.

They are available for free on our web site and are a must read for people in the creative industries and technology community. The reports give details of the methodology as well as the survey findings and material from the interviews.

The next stage is to develop a series of scenarios for the future of the creative industries and what projects, actions or funding needs to be put in place in order to achieve these for the long term benefit of creative businesses.

People can still get involved through the interactive wikis for these projects and we will publishing further updates and reports on our web site.

The workshop picked up on the ideas outlined in the Baseline report for the Unlocking Knowledge Transfer Beacon Project.

There were plenty of interesting thoughts which people captured on post-it notes as they mapped out the opportunities and challenges and worked through to specific ideas that translate the key issues from the earlier baseline report and place them in a framework that will help generate ideas to improve KT in the future.

The next workshop is in Edinburgh on Wednesday, Jan 13.

You can get involved in the discussion and debates on our website.

Have a look at them and post a comment.

‘My Personal Avatar’ effectively a firewall around each of us, with all our preferences and interests – to stop fragmented data across the web but centralised into an Internet Service ‘Oyster’ Card. Downside is the Government might need to regulate this and those who aren’t connected would be isolated.

‘Automated eBay Invest / Consume Button’ – i.e. use within interaction TV or the like where the red button shows you an opportunity to express your interest and invest in it. Links it back into Personal Avatar.

‘Develop People As Gateways’ – single styling, standards, open platform, biometric responses and AI, with easily understood privacy balance. An interface that says what are you today – feeling open or private – do you want a noisy day or a quite day – knows the weather time, recent events or if you like or hate emoticons. Can swap preferences with your friends to increase serendipity. Must be able to kill this if you want and there must be community knowledge, probably rather than legislation. Possibly not one national network which gives one organisation all the power.

‘Solving the economic problem to make money out of content’ – sell bundles of content in a way that is affordable, convenient, but enhances your status and kudos. Work out what people will and won’t pay for, i.e. providing enhancements, access, to watch the programme when you want it or any other extra quality or functions or ownership to keep the content. Membership as a package from a trusted source. We’ll need content producers connecting with others to do deals. Either be a gatekeeper or preferably a number of distributed gate keepers who market to the audience to buy any content bundled for their personal tastes. Upside no need for Government legislation that makes a mess of digital areas. Works for everyone, consumer has convenience and benefits as well as discounts to experiences or access to the content providers themselves. For bigger content providers a hope of survival. Would need cross/intra sector cooperation and a transaction arrangement – possibly without Google or Amazon taking it over…

‘How to know whether the content you are looking at on a web page to know whether it can be trusted’ – the trust Algorithm provides green trusted, red not trusted, including people’s recommendations or whether it’s been accredited by relative bodies giving you the most trusted web pages. We’d need to set up a Ministry Of Trust who have human beings who set up the boards internationally of the right people who could be involved. This could be funded by those using the trust algorithm search engine, but a better idea might be when its working the businesses who want to be accredited on these pages pay for their inclusion if they pass the Ministry’s of Trust standards.

‘Digital Poverty’ to help with the digital divide across the world. We donate are old devices to others around the world, helping to speed up digital development in these places.

‘Device Churn’ is not sustainable – the components we use are minerals from around the world that we just throw away. There are elements that can be recycled. Perhaps using cloud services to share resources.

‘Cloud Services’ keeping these facilities cool uses a lot of energy – we need to have an energy rating of the total energy used i.e. in the Web, between Google and Yahoo to drive these organisations to become more energy efficient. Idea would be to put your energy centre in places where its more suitable – needs more consumer awareness, may need regulations and for the big brands to come onboard with this.

‘Interactive Content Across Multiple Platforms’ – if you want to deliver content to an Xbox you go to Microsoft, if you want to go to PlayStation you go via Sony. Also multiplatform’s for mobile devices. So shouldn’t we focus on the experience for the user and the content instead of the delivery mechanism via individual platforms? How can this be moved forward?

The Government and the Technology Strategy Board are very much behind creating opportunities for all of us at the cutting edge of digital content and experiences. The commitment the TSB has is to find interesting ways to stimulate and support your business. The mechanisms they use are competitions. Their thinking for the next few months are open to companies of all sizes although each competition has a very specific agenda to work out how their intervention can make the biggest difference. Two large areas of interest industry often talks about include Meta Data and Convergence. Both of these enable content to be enjoyed in new environments in new ways.

Meta Data is key – its about rights, billing, the relationship you have with your customers, personal and private info and advertising – its used in many different contexts and will emerge in the next few years is how can we monetise via meta data and how can content producers continue to produce content in the UK in a sustainable way.

Convergence is how we view the content.

So these two areas form part of the competitions that are coming up.

Also the TSB are providing test bed environments to help test your product or service – this testbed is designed to provide some basic infrastructure to allow you to experiment with new business business models as the consumers engaged with the testbed agree to allow you to examine the data to see how they consume your content. These testbeds are a £30m investment by the TSB, with £10m in the infrastructure and £20m in the content. So there is a lot going on – get involved!!