Days 4 and 5 of the Labs

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 by Noam Sohachevsky

19 April, 2008

First slide of the Different and Mint presentation

The last two days were demanding. On Thursday each team worked on the presentation of their idea.

Friday was pitching day. It ended on a high. The BBC commissioned Different and Mint to develop the “Doctor Who: In Parallel” idea.


In Parallel is a web and TV entertainment event. Fans collaborate to create their very own episode of Doctor Who. 3 exciting things about this are:

  1. This is innovative. I’m positive it would be a headline-grabbing event.
  2. In Parallel could replace the huge hole left in the schedule next year. Doctor Who is taking a break. This means Doctor Who doesn’t have to go away in 2009.
  3. If we play our cards right, we might end up building a show agnostic platform for the BBC. This will allow the BBC to do similar things on other shows. Or even let the people create an entirely new show.

All 10 presentations were excellent and the ideas had come a really long way since the first day of the Labs. Jason DaPonte from the BBC said “I see a lot of ideas. I’ve been involved with the Labs for 3 years and see Content 360 ideas at MIP. This is the strongest set of ideas and presentations I’ve ever seen.”

Here are 3 ideas that really excited me.

  1. Zeitgeist: David and Tom from Numiko
    Zeitgeist is drama series about an egalitarian new world order driven by mass online participation. It sounded as cool as something like Lost, Heroes or Skins. With mass participation at the heart of the story.
  2. Blue Button Bookmarking: Simon and Nick from Rocket
    This idea assumes that ipTV is commonplace. You’ll be able to click the “blue” button to bookmark what you are watching. You can then simply watch the rest later or share it with others. Felt a bit like Last.fm for telly.
  3. Inside-Out: Jim and David from Sumo
    Imagine you are at a festival. You wonder from one stage to another throughout the day. While you move through the festival your Facebook feed is getting updated with little messages saying something like “Tim has arrived at Glastonbury… Tim is listening to the White Stripes… Tim is at the beer tent… Tim is at the Pyramid Stage.” This might happen in the near future. Sumo have developed some technology that tracks a user’s real life location using Bluetooth in their mobiles.

Excellent work everybody.

Read what happened on days 1, 2 and 3 from the Labs.

Look at the photos from the pitching day.