Alas, I couldn’t make Mashed, the BBC hacker event over the weekend (largely due to wanting to see my wife and children in the breaks between my TechCrunch Euro Tour of European startups). However, the Guardian has done a great round-up of the projects presented during the competition. Alas, not many URLs are yet available to point to as yet. But the projects that won prizes and which also caught my eye are below.
By all accounts (and the photos) Mashed was a great event from the BBC, and comes just in time for us to thrash out the ideas around the BBC’s data in two days time.
Winners:
TEAM BOB
Parses BBC subtitles onto the cards in Bob Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues.TWITTER ON TV
An interactive TV app which displays RSS feeds as subtitles on your TV screen.MICHAEL STILLWELL
Uses Fire Eagle to work out where you are and pushes Loney Planet tips on interesting things in the neighbourhood.CURRENTCOST LIVE
Takes electricity monitors and publishes their information to the web – allowing you to compare energy consumption with friends.SCRIPTING ENABLED
Makes the BBC Redux API accessible for blind people, so they can find the audio they want – a similar process is also shown for Slideshare and Powerpoint.NORTHENDERS
Dubs a TV show into another language in real time: running the subtitle data through translation software and then uses speech synthesis to dub the video (which is delayed by 10 seconds for synching)Looks interesting:
Jamie Munroe: Uses a music fingerprinting algorithm to match music you liked against stuff from BBC Redux. It can tell when DJs play the same song, or what tracks a TV show uses.
Video mashup: Watch TV and talk about it online at the same time: watch any TV channel and enter an on-screen chat too.
Bradley Freeman: Your ISP probably doesn’t support multicast – which helps networks save bandwidth by caching popular streams locally. This lets you do it even if they won’t let you.
Phil Lewis: Download the h.264 streams from the iPlayer site, for people who use Macs or Linux. [Illegal surey? ;-) ]
BYK: Looks at the audio on your computer and finds BBC radio shows and tracks for recommendation.