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:Ben Metcalfe Blog

The Virtual Investor

Great example of why rights management DRM sucksSeptember 4 2008

I live in the USA, and I can’t access the BBC’s stream of John McCain’s acceptance speech… because “the media is unavailable in my territory”.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

Sure, this is nothing new to those of us familiar with online media. But equally, one has to ask why the BBC doesn’t secure worldwide distribution for ‘general news’, esp like in this case where it’s probably recording the broadcast live from the convention… it’s BBC copyright end-to-end.

And of course, it’s just plain stupid that I can’t watch John McCain’s speech here in the US from a website that is even served from the US (BBC serves international users mainly from servers in New York). Crazy.

Apture trial on BBC News Website a great successAugust 26 2008

The BBC News Website has been trialing Apture for a few a weeks now - it’s been great to see one of my new projects find its way onto on of my old but significant projects.

The Beeb’s has been trialing Apture to provide background context for concepts and themes mentioned in it’s stories. If you want to see a great example of this, check out “Driving primates to the edge“. Tristan Harris, Apture’s co-founder and CEO, writes more about the trial on the company’s blog and the BBC also have a post about the trial on their Editor’s Blog too.

BTW, if you’re not seeing the Apture links on that primate story it may be because you need to switch to the UK version of the BBC News site (the BBC is only trialing Apture on the UK view of it’s site) . Click “UK version” in the BBC page’s left sidebar. If you return to the BBC story page, you should see a box called “BBC trial - in page links”. Click the “Turn on in-page links” button, and Apture’s iconic links should appear on the page.

Emerging results of the trial

Please vote for my SxSW panels!August 8 2008

I have two submissions to SxSW 2009 and would be delighted if you would consider voting for them please:

> Taking Platforms to the Next Level

Companies are finally realizing that in order to find market success they must build their products as platforms and empower their technical audience to embrace and extend their core proposition at the edges. But what comes next? Where is this all heading? What does a platform ubiquitous internet look like? Where does this all lead to?

This is a panel with my ‘professional hat’ on. I want to bring together some visionaries in the platform space and brainstorm a little on what the future of the platform is. We’ll concentrate on use cases, new ways platforms can work and opportunities for doing cool new thing. This won’t be a circle jerk about who will be the leading vendors, etc… at this point that doesn’t matter so much.

> Puppets, Theatre and the Conflation of ’Successful’ with ‘Popular’

Loren Feldman used a puppet to ruin a social media consultant’s career. Every day we witness ego driven squabbles and arguments play out on our twitter strea

Presdo API contestJuly 7 2008

Presdo, the online scheduling start-up, has is running a mashup competition around their API. Build something cool with it, win an iPhone 3G.

Sounds pretty good to me, so I was delighted to accept Presdo founder Eric Ly’s request to be a judge for the competition. Yes, that sadly means I can’t win one of those little boxes of Apple 3G goodness

If you have a cool idea for a calendaring-meets-your-favorite-web-app/API/social site/whatever application then you’ve got until July 18 2008. Good luck!

[via VentureBeat]

Apture: elegantly adding context to your siteJuly 3 2008

“Wow, that’s really really slick!”

That was my reaction when Tristan first showed me a demo of Apture (which just opened for signups, if you want to add it to your blog or website).

We’d met a few times previously and he’d been teasing with hints about the product he was working on - but refused to show me anything, or even give me any detail about what he and his fellow co-founders were really up to.

All I knew was that we shared a common interest in both grassroots and mainstream media, and importance of innovation given the nature of the content often being communicated. We’d spent several meetings discussing all sorts of interest stuff - from the way the media is often the last resort to keep governments and business in check, the need for informed society, through to the power of building products with a platform-orientated architecture.

Very much a meeting of minds - and so when I finally got to experience Apture, I was delighted that it too was at the intersection of so many of my favorite topics. I’m also proud to say that I am a member of Apture’s advisory board.

Welcome to Apture

For me, Apture is about bringing light-touch context and background to topics within the page you are looking at. In essence, it provides a simple framework to attach background context and ancillary content to subjects mentioned in your page - al