Mint Digital

David Putnam’s keynote was an excellent introduction to the changing media landscape. He really gets the excitement of the internet. I thought this was interesting:

Five years ago a functioning TV studio would have cost £800,000. Now it costs approximately a quarter of that. A camcorder you can buy from Dixons today is higher resolution than anything the BBC owned in 2000.

Like many people Adam Gee from Channel 4 is not a big fan of the phrase ‘user-generated’. He loves the idea behind it though. When he made a list of 8 projects he was excited by, he realised all of them had a user-generated element. Ones he mentioned include:

• 1-2-1: co-authored international blogs
• Germ: UK’s first competition for viral digital content (got good press)
• Lost generation: people can add media of all sorts
• 4Docs: high-end user-generated content
• 4Laughs (forthcoming): talent discovery in comedy

I was hugely impressed by Steve Cullen and the guys from someth;ng. For the festival they had created a system that allows a user to bookmark a moment in time and space via a RFID tag. It matches you with people who have gone to similar events at similar times. It’s fun, it’s cool and it might even be useful. What is more, they had built the system from scratch in 6 weeks. Great work, lads.