4iP, Channel 4’s ambitious project to kick-start a wave of new investment in public service digital media, announced this week that it is investing £500,000 in its latest slate of investments. The seven projects all reflect the themes that 4iP aims to promote, including finding new ways of holding power to account, helping people discover stuff that could change their lives and enabling individuals to MOT their lives. This is a summary of all the deals we announced this week.
MirrorMe
In partnership with Northern Film and Media, 4iP is providing start-up funding for MirrorMe, a facebook application that uses advanced facial recognition technology to help users see the effect their current lifestyle will have on their appearance over time. Users upload a photograph of their face and then answer questions about their lifestyle and habits including smoking, drinking, diet, drugs and sun bed usage. The application then scours over 86 individual points on their face to generate a new image of how they will look in the future if their current lifestyle continues unchecked. Designed as a light-hearted and easy to use application, MirrorMe has a serious message and aims to use fun, laughter and a dose of shock to inspire change in users’ habits helping them ‘MOT Their Life’.
GymFu
Continuing the theme of ‘MOT Your Life’, 4iP is also providing funding for two innovative iPhone applications. GymFu is a new application designed to make exercising fun and compelling, encouraging the public to take control of their fitness. The new application will allow users to train and track their progress in a variety of exercises, enabling them to squeeze the recommended 30-60 minutes of daily exercise into their lives in bite-sized chunks. To keep you motivated, users can follow and comment on the progress of their friends and share their own progress on the web.
Splashpath
Splashpath is an iPhone application with one clear goal; to get as many people enjoying the health benefits of swimming. In partnership with the Leisure Database Company, Splashpath will open up a comprehensive database of UK pool information. In addition to providing information about the opening hours of their local swimming pools, SplashPath aims to connect users with other swimmers creating a virtual world of ‘buddies’ to race against.
4iP has also invested in two significant new projects designed to help people discover stuff that could change their lives.
School Report Card
School Report Card is an online application that helps parents simplify one of the most important decisions they will ever have to make – how to choose a suitable school for their child. Historically this has involved wading through pages of impenetrable Ofsted reports and local authority websites to find reams of data you then need to analyse. School Report Card attempts to address this problem. The application will bring together multiple sets of information in an accessible and user-friendly way. In addition to league tables, School Report Card will provide a meaningful interpretation of what a school is really like – the atmosphere, internal organization, teaching standards, facilities, discipline and much, much more. Simply by making this data easier to access and navigate, 4iP believes School Report Card will provide a significant benefit to many parents at a stressful time in their lives and its funding will be used to help build, launch and run the initial product.
ScraperWiki
4iP is also providing start-up funding for ScraperWiki, a platform for gathering, storing, aggregating and distributing publicly useful data sets. The Liverpool based project will unlock data hidden away in unstructured and unusable formats on the web and make them usable. The project aims to bring together a community of data savvy journalists and developers with a civic conscience to use their respective skills for public good. For more information or an invite to the alpha version go to http://scraperwiki.com/.
Slugger O’Toole
Slugger O’Toole is a Northern Irish based news and research portal that looks at various strands of political life in Northern Ireland, bringing together comment from the full range of the political spectrum. Already established as a political platform with a reputation for ‘knowing it first’, 4iP’s joint investment with Northern Ireland Screen will enable the platform to extend its reputation for hyper-local political coverage to other areas around the world, creating a more sustainable business designed to support a free online service.
Yoosk
Finally, 4iP is also confirming it has agreed follow-on funding for one of its most talked about projects; Yoosk.com. In partnership with Screen West Midlands (“SWM”), the development agency for screen media in the West Midlands through its Digital Media Fund supported by Advantage West Midlands, 4iP first invested in Yoosk in January of this year, providing funding to enable Yoosk to develop a number of ideas to help grow the feedback and rating elements of the platform and to integrate its features into other news and social networking sites. The second round of funding for Yoosk, provided jointly by 4iP and SWM, will be used to add further functionality to the service which is already being used by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Ministry of Justice.
Tom Loosemore, Head of 4iP, said: “When we launched 4iP last year we always said we wanted to help companies use the best of digital media to create projects that would make a genuine difference to people’s lives and our recent projects definitely achieve this. From mobile applications that encourage you to stop your bad habits to websites that make data easier to navigate and use, these projects demonstrate how digital media, when used wisely, can have a hugely positive impact on our day-to-day lives.”
