Sanky's choice of stories for 2011: Mike Senese, Blaise Aguera y Arcash, broadband TV, Kenetic Hacks

One of the things that excites me about the next year is waiting to see who is going to win the on demand media space. Is it going to be google TV? Is it going to be Qwiki?

Who’s going to win the contest of delivering personalised online content in more of a televisual kind of way. There’s a lot of money behind this, with all the broadcasters involved and some organisations are trying to get into that space, but it’s going be really tricky.

Kinect hacksOne of the best decisions Microsoft has ever made is to leave one of their really solid, good platforms open so that people can do stuff with it. Because of this you can basically create Minority Report interfaces now and the number of meetings I’ve been to in the last four years where people ask ‘Can you do what they do in Minority Report? and I’ve had to say ‘No! We can’t!’ Now, actually we can do that and this is opening up things that were literally, impossible a year ago. All the possibilities are there. With some technical abilities it is now possible to create these user interfaces with, to a certain degree, a lot of the work done by a product that is in the high street. Mike Senese Very lo-fi but there seems to be a movement towards grass roots programmes for bringing the community or like minded people together and there’s a guy called Mike Senese who works in an ethical, environmental way. He talks about not throwing anything away and makes things out of other things.

He basically creates practical ways of reusing things with stuff just lying around, so it doesn’t cost you anything, which is really good. In July he posted a piece on how to recreate a record with about £1 worth of stuff. It’s quite amazing some of the stuff he comes up with. He’s like a recycling boffin and I like the fact that with more stuff through grass roots programmes, there’s loads of them which are about bringing the community together and making something out of it. I think there is going to be more of these type of things, as people seem to be moving more towards the mindset of caring for the planet a bit more.

Blaise Aguera y Arcash

This is the guy who developed Seadragon for Microsoft. Whatever he is going to be doing I want to know about. Now he’s going to move into augmented reality mapping. It’s like a social community creating virtual models of our actual space. It’s gob smacking really. So I choose to advise that you watch out for anything he is going to be doing. The School of Life's business solutions

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They address ideas around why work is unfulfilling or why your relationships don’t work so much or why it’s hard to talk to people in a work environment. They run a programme almost every day based around slightly personal issues that people work that are related back to work. Previously they’ve run programmes that have been about people, but not they are going to begin to look at businesses and bring their intelligent approach to business problems. I’ve had a look at what they do and it will be interesting to see how something like that will work. It seems to be more academic and how they take that to a business space will be interesting. They deal with a lot of academics and literary figures.

They’re a strange organisation that are about to work in a business space and I think that they are going to be interesting.