Student wins Gary Frisch Bursary

A student from Leeds has been awarded the Gary Frisch Bursary 2008 for his web development work at Leeds Student Radio station, LSR FM.

Barry Carlyon, who is entering his second year as a New Media Student at the University of Leeds, wins a £4,000 prize to help further develop his system and enable its release as open source software to community radio stations across the world.

Established last year, the Gary Frisch Bursary recognises an entrepreneur or pioneer who is innovating in the fields of radio and audio software.

Barry received his award at the Gala Dinner of the annual Radio Festival in Glasgow last night. It is given by QSoft Consulting in association with The Radio Academy.

Barry said: “I am over the moon at winning the Bursary. It has been one of the best phone calls to wake up to, much better than ‘The studio is broken, can you come in and fix it?’.”

The systems Barry has developed for LSRfm.com provide the volunteer staff, heads of department and DJs the ability to manage both web content and the day to day running of the station. They are designed to be modular allowing new controls to be written and easily added via a built in template engine.

Various modules of the system push data to other external services such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as providing it in a format that can be read and parsed on other websites. A Podcast Module pushes the podcast page to iTunes and Twitter, whilst the MySpace page references RSS feeds.

The Bursary judging panel, chaired by Trevor Dann, includes Henry Badenhorst, Co-Founder and Managing Director, QSoft Consulting; Robin Crowley, Station Director, GaydarRadio; and Matt Honey, formerly Managing Director, Unique Interactive.