It's another very wet and windy June weekend, and 200+ web developers, engineers and tech eccentrics have gathered at Alexandra Palace for Mashed 2008. There's something rather befitting about the media of the future being hacked around at Alexandra Palace which, you may or may not know, is the international birthplace of TV. The first trials of TV broadcasts were here in 1936. Where do we start?
Photo by Matt Cashmore on Flickr. Some rights reserved.
There are 12 talks taking place until lunchtime (or should that be launchtime?), so developers have been hearing, amongst other things: how to use the interactive TV programming language MHEG to build applications around interactive TV (like building a hack for a lie detector to react to Today, or Question Time); plans for the new version of iPlayer; what BBC Backstage is all about; and how Nasa is developing technology to explore new planets with the Autonomous NanoTechnology Swarms, or ANTS. Wheels, apparently, don't work, because they are designed for the environments we have on Earth. The structures Nasa are exploring are part vehicle, part structure, and in the form of tetrahedrons. The most advanced prototype has 12 nodes and 26 struts - but they developed this with only a few hundred thousand dollars funding and are having trouble finding venture capital support. Any takers?!
