We are Tom Allender (Yahoo! Maps, Flickr stream), Chris Folkerd (text filtering, database dev), David Moss (interface design, BBC News Online Feed) and Stephen Newey (DVB poking, subtitle OCR).
Tuesday 19th June, 2007
I'm really aware that most of you will have only seen the screenshot below, or at best the 10 seconds during the presentations when I was actually showing Nwsr24 running. So, to hopefully demonstrate that it's actually a real live thing, I've now made live a version that uses the RealPlayer feed from News 24, combined with subtitle data that's being pulled off the aerial at my house! Luckily the delay in subtitle data combined with the delay in the Real feed tie together quite nicely!
A word of warning though, you'll obviously be needing RealPlayer, and apparently it doesn't look to hot in IE at the moment, so take a look in Firefox or Safari (though it's not like any of you use IE anyway I'm sure!). Also, we're still doing rather basic filtering on the subtitle text, so the keywords may not be ideal. We're working on replacing this part of the project with Yahoo's Term Extraction engine, so that should improve things greatly. Finally, as I said above, the subtitle feed is coming from my house, so should my server, internet connection or aerial go a little weird, the keywords might not update 24/7. Steve
Sunday 17th June, 2007
Thanks to the BBC and Yahoo! for staging an amazing event that we'd been looking forward to for weeks and exceeded our expectations when the day arrived. And an impressive job by the Ally Pally staff getting us back into the room so quickly after the lightning strike and rather unusual rain at an indoor event!
And massive thanks to the judges for picking us for best BBC hack, we're going to have fun dividing the Apple TV up between the 4 of us :)
At the moment we've got a screenshot of our hack below, but soon we'll hopefully have a demo that's a little more 'live'.
