Ashley Highfield, Director of New Media & Technology at the BBC, shared a platform with Bill Gates for the Keynote speech at Microsoft’s Mix06 conference. He showed a prototype of ‘MyBBCPlayer’ – an on-demand TV platform – built within Microsoft’s new Vista operating system. Its well worth checking out the webcast of the speech (Ashley comes on about 36mins in) it shows the player as a widget on the desktop – demonstrating the kind of ‘beyond the browser’ interface that we’re building on the Innovation Labs. There’s also a news article in the Guardian on how the BBC plans to work with external partners to overhaul its website for the Web2.0 era. Well worth reading to see how BBC New Media is committed to external innovation, and to give a strategic context to projects like Backstage and Innovation Labs.