Anjali Ramachandran's posts

Given our collective interest as a company in social TV, I was mildly interested recently when I heard about Beckinfield, a show that claims to be the first 'mass participation' TV show, a new form of science-fiction web series. 

Essentially, what happens is that anyone can create a character and join in on the plot. The Beckinfield platform takes you through character creation and video submission. Each week the actors are emailed the plot twists and encouraged to post their videos. All of the videos are then combined to create a trailer of what happened in "Beckinfield" that week.

I got the creators of the show, Theatrics LLC, to answer a few questions - here you go:

Yesterday I was at 2-Screen 2011 organised by Mint Digital.

One of the key things that stood out for me was what Russell Davies said about big screens being for sharing and small screens being personal.

Big screens

Dextr, one of RIG’s ‘second screen’ projects, for example, is meant to be big; it could be a great accompaniment to what you’re watching on the telly even. It’s quite pointless if you try using it on your phone, though (I’ve tried).

Image by Flickr user laihiu courtesy a CC license

Here is a list of stuff that I thought was interesting that I sent round the office today. Perhaps some of you will find them useful too:

Will Amazon's Silk browser really prove a threat to Apple? The company also says privacy isn't a concern with Silk's new split architecture. 

As some of you know, we’ve been working with Skype on Skype in the classroom, a community for teachers and educators, for a few months now. In the time since it was launched formally in April, it has grown by leaps and bounds: we now have more than 16,500 teachers who are collaborating on more than 900 projects across the globe.

Yesterday, we released the most recent set of new features to the service, which we are very excited about.

Time for some Friday fun from us folks at Made by Many - you can thank us later :-D

This week, we look at 3 recent presentations on lean startups and customer development. 

To start off,  Janice Fraser, entrepreneur and founder/CEO at Luxr, a residency programme for lean startups in San Francisco, covers the basics and then goes on to explain how lean UX can change the way we do business. Some good sketches and quotes.  

Are you one of those people who look at your phone in frustration every now and then, with the knowledge that there must be thousands of fantastic apps you're not making use of because you don't know about them? Fear not - here's Made by Many's list of the apps we're using more often than the rest at the moment:

Games/fun

Death Rally: This is the app for you if speed’s your thing.

Toca-Boca Hair Salon: Tim was the one who first introduced us to this super fun app that allows you to change a character’s hairstyles as if you were a (slightly warped) barber. Definitely one that kids will enjoy too, even if that last bit sounds a bit counter-intuitive!

Toca Doctor: In Charlotte’s words, ‘anatomical educational fun’.

Here's a collection of links that went round the office today, perhaps you'll find them interesting too:

This week, I've put together a motley collection of 3 presentations that are all quite interesting from the point of view of the changing ways of interaction in different contexts: within communities, between agency and client, and mobile commerce.

Researchers at MIT in the US and the University of Southampton in the UK look into anonymity in online communities, using 4chan as a case study. This is particularly interesting given Fred Wilson's recent blog post on Google's clamping down on anonymous IDs in Google+ and the discussion on whether real IDs are required online, as long as the quality of discussion is good.

Here are some things that have been mentioned in the office lately. Happy Tuesday!