Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Instructions for hand-in Friday 25th

Here is a summary of the practical guidelines regarding the hand-in of the text and pictures on friday 25th given so far, with a few clarifications.

General:
  • The text and images should be sent to me (Malin), Åke and Daniel, see Daniels mail for the adresses.
  • Only put your text in the Word-document, comments and pictures should be sent separately.
  • File format for the text: Word (so if you use some other program to write, make sure you export the document as .doc before you send it). 
  • 4000-6000 words.
Formatting:
  • If you have some special formatting requirements, for example that some text should be in a separate infobox, please mark the text with a different color and write in your email what it means. 
  • Tag your content as Body, Title (title of the paper), Heading 1 (for first-level headings) and Heading 2 (for sub-headings).
Sources:
  • Should be provided under the heading "Further reading" at the end of the text (if you refer directly to someone in the text, the source should of course be mentioned). 
  • "Further reading"-list according to Harward-system (google it). Some examples:
    • Books: Author, Initials., Year. Title of book. Edition. (only include this if not the first edition) Place of publication (this must be a town or city, not a country): Publisher. 
    • Websites: Authorship or Source, Year. Title of web document or web page. [type of medium] (date of update if available) Available at: include web site address/URL (Uniform Resource Locator) [Accessed date]. 
    • Sources avaliable on the Internet: Author or corporate author, Year. Title of document. [type of medium] Place: Producer/Publisher. Available at: include web site address/URL(Uniform Resource Locator).[Accessed date]. 
  • The list should be organized alphabetically.
Images:
  • About three images per group. 
  • Make sure the images are sharp and that the resolution is at least 300 ppi. 
  • Preferably Tiff-format and AdobeRGB color space. 
  • Deadline for handing in the pictures is the same as for the text, the 25th of november.
 Best of luck with your projects!
Malin

Sunday, November 13, 2011

Order of appearance for mid-crits

So I've put it all together, and we'll have the following schedule for tomorrow.
It's supposed to be 10 min for presentation and 10 min for discussion afterwards, so try to stick to your 10 minutes for the presentations.

We'll try this order out. If we feel that it works and nothing comes up, we'll probably keep it for the final presentation.

09.00-09.15 Introduction
09.15-10.15 1, 2, 3
10.15-10.30 Break
10.30-11.30 4, 5, 6
11.30-12.30 Lunch
12.30-13.30 7, 8, 9
13.30-13.45 Break
13.45-14.25 10, 11
14.25-14.30 Wrap-up

1 Personalized Radio
2 Radio After Tomorrow
3 Bringing the internet to radio
4 Public service of the future
5 School radio/podcast
6 Listening habits of the young generation
7 The audio pool
8 Radio in social media
9 Always Present Radio
10 Pay for Performance
11 Economic models of radio

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Pay for Performance

Project Idea

In order to pay for performance in terms of radio, we feel that radio has to adapt. We believe it will exist in the future, but perhaps in a new form. Therefore we believe in a symbiotic relationship between games and radio. The reasoning behind this is that online games has been on the march for quite some time, but in some of them there's either required a competitive edge or the methods of immersion becomes more and more sophisticated (And it is not uncommon that games require both these aspects).

We believe in implementing radio in games as a way of saving radio as an entertainment- and information medium while greatly enhancing the gaming experience. This might be in the form of information-broadcasts concerning game-results or information regarding lifestyles in the gameworld.

Salvation of radio

What we mean with this as a potential salvation of radio is that as it stands right now radio might die. There has been quite some talk about radio being "butchered" into tinier podcasts as a current development, but if our idea takes hold, it might be a way to collect all relevant information in one channel.

Profit

There are quite some ways to make a profit through this idea. The question is if it stops with the purchase of the game, or if the radio-station is something maintained outside the game-system. Is the radio a digital object acquired in the game world or do you need a functional radio in the real world to access the information presented there?

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Economic models of radio

Project idea

As in our group, when it comes to choosing appropriate economic models, we decided we could either try to adjust the present models in order to accommodate changing markets – or we can decide to map about a lush variety of dramatically different future scenarios and the economic models that could sustain within these futuristic ideas.

In order to pursue our main idea, it entails having contact with various other groups in order to paint a vast range of possible futuristic outcomes and use these scenarios to tailor them to the business model canvas. Once the mapping out has been done we will try to illustrate the development of radio from an economic perspective. Naturally some of the solutions will be a contrast of the dream vs. the nightmare scenario.

We will entail everything from how to sustain/increase revenue streams to what models will falter or fail.

Other questions

What is the likelihood of some of these business models killing radio or changing radio, as we know it? How big a part will advertising have on future revenues? Will product placement invade radio? Radio aggregation amplifying local radio?

Implementation

The business canvas and various economic models will be used as the foundation of our project. The approach we have chosen to pursue is contacting different groups to outline their work so that economic perspectives can be related to all of them (or of the selected few). There will be a lot of creative work for the final presentation.

The presentation

The ideas will be presented in a bold manner, and we will use various form of graphic illustrations to present our solutions. We have decided to present our results in the form of a film or video sequence so as to give the spectator insight to our findings.

Always present radio



Imagine that you have your own personal radio channel and its always present. Your personal radio concists of an AI that gets to know you, and the more you interact with it the better it knows your taste. The user can choose to interact with either a voice or an interface, its all up to you. The best thing is that it is a new standard that all developers can use. This means that you can have it on your computer, phone, TV, in your car and of course in your stereo. You dont even have to sign in because you can with just one single action decide what unit that you want your personal radio to start playing on. By physically tapping on a device you choose which one you want to use. Say that you for example like to listen to a specific podcast, the AI can remind you that this weeks podcast is out and it can also tell you if there are other podcast that you probably will like. You can also tell it to make a jog playlist if you are planning to go for a jog, this can be done because the AI knows exactly which kind of music you would like to hear. That´s because it knows your taste and what you like to listen to while training. The AI can in a similar way choose different kinds of music for other moments and activities. It adapts the music depending on what you do and what you like. All you need to do is tell it what kind of activity you want it for or what preferences you have regarding music. For example, you might want to listen to music that suits your mood of the day.   

We would like to present a scenario to explain our idea further more:
You are sitting in a rented car heading to work and you have tapped it’s radio so that your personal radio is playing on it. You are listening to your playlist that you have created at home, but you find your own music boring. Therefore you ask it to play something that you should like but haven’t heard before. When you get closer to the city you suddenly get stuck in traffic and you ask it to play the latest traffic news from the area, and after that you ask it to play the latest news. The AI of course knows exactly which news you like, so it only plays that. After hearing the news you want to listen to your favourite podcast. The device knows that the latest episode is out and starts playing it at your command. Before finishing the podcast you arrive with your car at the office. You tap your phone against the car’s radio and continue to listen to the podcast as you take the elevator to the top floor of the building.  When sitting down at your desk you obviously want to finish listening and you simply tap you computer and the podcast seamlessly starts playing on your computer speakers. With your personal radio channel you’re always ready for another day of work.

Contextual radio (Personalized radio (Death of radio))

Background:

In recent years we have seen a trend with context based information involving GPS based localization, and “likes” that can be used to decide what information is more likely presented to the user. Also, the portability of information technology devices is an important trend; people can get access to content/information wherever they are, but they can also create content/information wherever they are. We have also seen that content and information is being more organized and structured; this is made possible by search engines and other services. Furthermore, tagging content has become usual, which makes it possible for users to index content. We believe that context can be used for presenting the right information to the user, which in the case of radio is audio.

Problem(problem area):

How can the most relevant content be presented to the user with as little effort as possibe from the user? How can we aquire the proper information from the user? How can we generate content from that information?

Suggestion/idea:

Based on trends mentioned in the background we will create a concept for future audio consumption. We imagine that the information is acquired from the users’ current situation. Examples: sound, pulse, location etc. This information can be used to present the right content to the users.

Method:

We will:

-Create a brief state of art analysis on our problem domain.
-Make an overall plan for the design process of the concept.
-Use different user situations to develop our concept.

Presentation:

We will vizualize the concept by showing different user scenarios, presented in a video.

Listening habits of the young generation

Thesis: To make kidz/teenz listen to radio in the future.

We want to find out more about radio listening habits of young people, aged 16-20 years, to be able to develop program concepts that these youngsters will find attractive.

Definition of radio: Content in some way distributed to a listener, the content is mainly, but not limited to, the form of audio. Extra material could be pictures or text.

Definition of future: 10 years from now.

Background:
How can radio find reliable future scenarios? Scenarios that can help them finding usable strategies for the future? We believe that technical development is pushed forward by individuals and trends in the society. To find possible future scenarios we will look into young people’s habits, attitudes and expectations. When we know what is perceived as attractive and usable, as well as what fits into the life style, we can start to develop products and services that fits into that lifestyle.

Problem (problem area):
“How can we make young people listen to radio in the future?” To study that question more closely we decided we have to break it down further into a new set of detailed questions about the listening habits of young people. How do young people listen to radio? When do they listen? Where do they listen? What device (cell phone, computer, other) do they use to listen? Do they listen alone or together with others? What content do they listen to? These questions are quite general, but they will hopefully give us a grasp of the listening situation as a whole. The understanding of the listening situation will be our starting point when we try to come up with well fitting innovative concepts that will make the target group want to listen to and be involved with radio.

Methods:
Interviews with people who work with radio aimed at our target group and people from our target group. Interviews are quite time consuming but give possibilities for in depth discussions about attitudes and concepts.

Suggestions for people to interview: Someone working with radio for youth. Some young people. It could also be interesting to talk to somebody who does trend analysis concerning young people and media usage.

After collecting this material and analyzing it we will develop 5-10 radio (station/program) concepts that we will evaluate in focus groups with our target audience.

Focus groups with young people where we will present 5-10 radio concepts. The participants will be encouraged to answer questions about the concepts, rate and discuss them.

Finding suitable participants for focus groups is usually a challenge. One way, maybe the easiest one, is to pick younger persons from our own contact networks. However we are a little bit concerned that those participants will not represent the target group as a whole. To get a more representative selection of participants we think that recruiting in schools or youth centers could be good alternatives. That will require a little extra work since we then will need permission from the school and/or youth center.

Based on the evaluation in the focus groups we will decide on what concepts to keep and refine into the product we will present at the final presentation.