The UK's Knowledge Network for the Creative Industries

The attendees were asked to look at some of the key issues effecting technology, consumers, gateways, business and content and come up with possible scenario solutions. Here’s what they said today in Bristol…

‘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!!