Whilst this work provides for relatively engaging mobile sites, it misses a few of those things that make mobile such a buzz-word right now.

It's the contextual differences that potentially add something more interesting than a streamlined version of a website. Location-awareness is one of those differences.

When a user is 'mobile', i.e. on the move or out and about, offering services tailored to their current location can be a great way of aiding usability by filtering out unnecessary content and showing things that should be relevant in that time and space. It can also save some time and fiddly effort entering postcodes or addresses (predictive text doesn't tend to like postcodes!).

How does this fit with the BBC's radio services you may ask? Well it fits in many ways. We've served localised radio to our audiences via FM for many years, not to mention traffic and travel news tailored to your location. It makes perfect sense that we look to do this with our online services too.

By way of a trial, we looked at the uses of location most popular with mobile audiences right now, noting the numerous 'check-in' services that are really driving use. It may seem a little ego-centric to tell all your social-media contacts that you are somewhere special, but there is a level of kudos to be gained, ("look where I am!") and it can also be a very useful way to quickly find other friends who might be in the same place, without having to contact each one directly.

There are a number of such services available on most of the latest smartphones, including Foursquare, Gowalla, Google Places & Facebook Places - all being used in a similar way; "I just checked in to (insert place here)". By way of an experiment therefore, we decided to see if we could make such a service possible using web-browser functions - bypassing the need for users to download and install an application, which can be prohibitively expensive to develop, and not ideal for something that only exists for a short time.

The Radio 1 Big Weekend offered the perfect opportunity to try this. We know the line-up in detail, and where each stage is located, and we know the audience has an appetite for 'sharing their pride' via social networks. Some research was conducted to see which platform would reach the most users, and somewhat unsurprisingly Facebook was in the top slot.

Working together with Facebook, we managed to find an approach that would work via the browser for a large number of the latest smartphones (iPhones and Android devices primarily, more will support this type of function in the very near future). Being something very new for the BBC, we invited a few external mobile experts to tender for the build, eventually selecting Future Platforms to assist with the technical execution of this experiment.

Here's a quote from Client Services Director at Future Platforms, Sergio Falletti:

We built the Check In product as an HTML5 web app because it gave us the best compromise between the flexibility and client-side functionality. Given the project's timescales and experimental nature, iterating native apps for iPhone and Android would have been too inflexible and time consuming - HTML5 allowed us to target both platforms with the same code-base... We however needed access to client-side APIs for location lookups and to integrate with Facebook's services. The former is well supported in HTML5. The latter (Facebook integration) could have been handled server-side, but performance and data security considerations make client-side processing preferable."

Along the way we've encountered quite a few challenges, not least the data security considerations that Sergio mentions, but also around the technical limitations of the check-in process. As we wanted users to be able to check-in not to the location as such, but the artist currently playing on a specific stage at the event, we needed to find a way to change the 'place' that the user would check into each time the artist on stage changed. This could mean that the user would be checking in repeatedly to the same physical place, but there would be no point adding a status update to their newsfeed saying "I'm here", "I'm here again", "I'm here again".

The way we got around this problem was to have the user check into a URL rather than a physical location. We assign a location to each URL, but have a separate URL for each band/artist that could be performing. This requires some active management of the 'places' throughout the day, so Future Platforms also created a simple web-based interface for us to create/edit those places during the event. Best intentions aside, we can never guarantee that an artist won't change their time slot or not show for some reason - so this flexibility had to be built into the system.

We also had to deal with the graphical challenges of presenting the title 'CHECKIN' without people reading it as 'CHICKEN'. Cue chicken jokes... Why did the Chicken cross the road? To check-in to his favourite artist at the Big Weekend of course!

Then there's the site itself. We were very pleased to note that several of the mobile network operators have added extra cell-masts to the area to improve mobile reception.

Although that should mean users can access mobile websites no problem, those cell-masts, being temporary, may not have location-information assigned to them, meaning that it might be necessary for users to turn on their device's GPS to accurately locate them. We'll have to wait and see how that works - there's a reason we wanted to experiment with this before considering such services as core to the BBC's mobile offerings.

We hope that a lot of folks in the audience at Radio 1's Big Weekend will try the service, quickly and easily showing their loyalty to their favourite artists to their Facebook friends, sharing links to the wealth of artist and event info on the corresponding desktop and mobile websites and generally spreading the love. Whether they do or not, we'll be monitoring the amount of activity around each stage and reporting back our findings to the rest of the BBC.

If you'd like to see more of this kind of thing, and you're heading to Carlisle for the Big Weekend, then don't forget your smartphone - the BBC needs you!

Richard Morland also talks about creating the Radio1 Big Weekend Check In project.

James Simcock is Executive Producer, Mobile, Audio & Music Interactive

N.B. This post was initially published under the wrong name. This was entirely due to my error. My apologies to James, Richard Morland and readers.

Live radio is the original mobile media, since the mid 1950s when the Regency TR-1 introduced the world to transistor-based radios - looking not enormously dissimilar to the Apple iPod. (See this picture comparing the two on Flickr.)

Although many devices have FM radios included - this is not so in most of the latest web-centric smartphones, nor does it give access to our digital radio networks. Live radio is of course the heart of what BBC Audio & Music produce. Not allowing access to live radio streaming on mobile has left us with a very limited offering to mobile users.

Within the mobile web browser, what we've been able to make available previously was comparable to DVD extras without the main feature. Such supplementary content can be useful, entertaining or enjoyable, but rarely comes close to matching the value or impact of the feature itself. In this case, the main feature is the live broadcast output of the BBC's national radio networks.

Until now, we were rather stuck on this due to the end-user cost and bandwidth limitations of mobile web traffic. However, as our audiences spend an increasing amount of time consuming content via their mobile devices it seemed the time was nigh for a change in our policies. Over the past two years, UK page views to the BBC Mobile site have increased almost six-fold, from 35m in April 2008 to 208m in April 2010 (Source: Sage).

Historically, and with the best intentions, the BBC has taken a very cautious approach to high-bandwidth services on mobile. This has been to help avoid what the mobile industry terms "bill-shock", where users don't realise how much data they are consuming till their monthly bill arrives or till their PAYG (pay as you go) credit runs out unexpectedly. However, the market is changing dramatically. Now many new phones are sold with an included unlimited data plan. Even a large proportion of PAYG users would now find themselves on a flat-rate per day (unless roaming), so there's no difference in end-user cost browsing a simple, text-only site or browsing a data-intensive site, with lots of audio and video content.

It's taken many months to make a change to the BBC's position on mobile streaming, to develop optimised audio streams for all networks and to create various device detection rules to try to ensure we serve the right streams to the right devices (some work differently to others).

Now that the radio station offer has changed, steps have been taken to make it easier for users to find and navigate to the BBC Radio mobile sites. Mobile users who, for example, type into their browser www.bbc.co.uk/radio3 are automatically redirected to our mobile optimised site, www.bbc.co.uk/mobile/radio3. (This is currently true for all mobile devices except iPhone/iPod Touch as streaming radio is not yet available for these devices). And if the user prefers the full-fat experience, there is a clear option to 'Go To Desktop' in the footer of each page. For the BBC, it means one URL to promote; for the user it's just one URL to remember and fewer clicks.

As a user, once you navigate to a BBC Radio mobile site, you'll see a link to 'Listen Live' under the name of the show now on air near the top of the page. Before audio streaming begins, an interstitial page displays detailed guidance and a warning on costs, in order to help users avoid any bill-shock. A couple of clicks later, via a majority of mobile devices (iPhone & iPod Touch to come) you'll be able to access all of the BBC's national radio networks. For our digital-only networks such as Radio 1Xtra, Asian Network, 6Music and Radio 7, as well as Radio 5Live (AM + DAB), this is the first time their output have been available on a majority of mobile devices, so it's quite a significant step forward for us. You don't need any fancy or expensive downloadable apps, or even a high-end smartphone - just a stable internet connection from your phone, be that EDGE/GPRS, 3G or WiFi.

If you're using your mobile to read this article, then you could click through now to www.bbc.co.uk/mobile/radio, pick a station and hear for yourself.

We hope you enjoy listening.

James Simcock is Executive Producer, Mobile, BBC A&Mi.

*Currently known exceptions being the Apple iPhone/iPod Touch, which we're working on, and some devices where streaming functionality is disabled - sometimes the case with business Blackberries.

Rather than sticking with our usual, one-size-fits-all model for mobile browser pages, we implemented a level of device detection to serve different versions of the site optimised for specific devices.

We'd like to have been able to do this for all devices, but there are so many of them, with vast differences in terms of what they can support technically. So we did some analysis of the handsets which most often visit our mobile pages for radio and music to find which devices we should focus our efforts on.

What we discovered was quite surprising.

High-end phones such as the iPhone and Nokia NSeries made up almost half of all our mobile web traffic (quite different to what we see when looking at top pan-BBC devices).

The iPhone and Nokia NSeries are capable of supporting some enhanced services within the browser and have screens large enough to render some nice graphics too - not to mention the BBC iPlayer service which is available on the iPhone and iPod Touch.

Breaking out of our usual templates for these devices gave us the opportunity to find new ways to make a mobile site easy to use, and to take steps to reduce end-user costs when paying per MB for data access. To this end we implemented some javascript elements which allow the user to pull information into a page template, without having to reload the surrounding graphical elements.

We were also able to incorporate information pulled dynamically from our programmes database. This shows "next up" schedule information (for TV, radio and red button), automatically updated throughout the event. Most importantly, we've been analysing usage from these pages and dynamic elements in detail to inform our future plans for mobile.

The designers (Sacha Sedriks and Stephen Robertson) and the developer (Daniel Moll) who produced these pages have never worked specifically on mobile before, but they've done a tremendous job. The work they've done, with support from some the BBC's mobile veterans from the FM&T Mobile Group, will benefit all our future work for mobile platforms. While I'm naming those that have contributed, a special mention to Mobile Producer Jo Bellingham who put together the standard pages for other devices and has been updating JSON feeds, SSSIs, image galleries and more throughout the event.

To see what we've created, point your mobile browser to https://bbcbreakingnews.pages.dev/mobile/eproms and if you're using an iPhone, iPod Touch, NSeries or ESeries Nokia, you'll see the site optimised for your device.

James Simcock is Executive Producer, Mobile, BBC Audio & Music Interactive.