Social networking on your radio

Matt has just posted on the S&W blog about Olinda, a project that they are doing for BBC Radio - building a fully working digital radio with built-in social networking, hardware expandability and some interesting form and interface ideas.

Obviously it's really interesting in itself but we also hope that it will inspire and lead the digital radio industry down some new avenues with their future products. And, as Matt says, to enable this we will be making the IPR of the design and ideas of this radio available under an attribution license for anyone to use - open source hardware.

I went over to see Matt and his circuit boards earlier today and I can assure you that the DAB and wi-fi chipsets are working. Their next stage of work is to put it all together. Very exciting.

Oh, and the social "now listening" site he describes is Radio Pop (see previously), with some specific additions. Which we need to add. Quite soon.