I spent last week inhabiting a black hole in the UK mobile networks while attending the BBC Scottish Innovations Lab. The Forrest Hills Hotel would seen an excellent site for a Picocell - although, judging by the performance of the flaky T-Mobile Wifi , there may be a back-haul problem. You can see a picture of me (on the left) along with Mark Grindle (centre) pitching to Martin Trickey, a Commissioner for BBC Vision. It’s a shame there wasn’t a camera rolling when we were interrupted by a waiter proudly presenting a silver tray with two large platters of reheated stew and congealed rice - closely followed by another with tea and coffee.

The lab itself was excellent. One of my stated goals was to learn eight times more than I did at the BBC Innovation Labs open day. Frank Boyd and the mentor team delivered on this and more: always there when help was needed, but never intrusive. Calico Jack has never been daunted by hard technical problems in agentive representation, advanced logics and communication management. In fact we’ve made part our living out of skepticism about what is technically feasible. The problem is that we have sometimes solved the wrong problems and committed sins of omission. As Frank’s persona based approach addresses both these issues, we are are integrating it into our development method. I’ll be writing about our experiences as we progress.

Matt Cashmore soaked up the stress and kept the whole thing rolling along - even on the day that his breakfast didn’t turn up. Well, look on the bright side Matt: it possibly saved another shirt.

The lab was also a good opportunity to meet up - or catch up - with folk in the Scottish technology scene. In particular, I should mention CerProc, Think Tank Mathmatics, Richard Harris and Feaghus McKay : CereProc - nothing to do with GM crops - are ex Rhetorical Systems guys with some excellent speech synthesis technology. A neat demo can be found here. ThinkTank Mathematics are a good creative crew, though I wish someone could dampen their enthusiasm for Android (just know I’m going to get mail about this). For me it would be enough to mention Richard Harris’s association with Douglas Adams. Richard has a lot of good ideas - and experience of implementing them. Fearghus McKay was also a contributing presence at the event. I knew that I’d met him before. It turned out that it was from the early days of Connect when he was with Intertrader.

I’ve got one bit of advice for participants in the other regions: Think about the end and what you are going to ask for. Would you offer it if you were on the other side of the table? If not, you might want to ask for something else. I’m quite happy to elaborate on that. Mark and I came away with a much stronger concept than the one we arrived with. I’m currently working on a technical implementation plan.