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The BBC is launching a new homepage which it hopes will help users find a broader selection of its content.

As of 10am today, UK visitors to BBC Online can access the ‘work-in-progress’ beta BBC Homepage from a link on the current homepage, and it hopes users will provide feedback over the coming weeks and months before permanently replacing the existing homepage later this year.

Back in January, the BBC announced plans to reshape its online offering, centering around ten products – including the BBC Homepage. This was part of its ‘Delivering Quality First’ programme of change, which at its core it says is about doing less things, but doing those things better.

Last month, the BBC launched a new version of iPlayer specifically for TVs, before setting out its vision for the service in the future, as it strives to take it beyond the tech-savvy, beyond catch-up and beyond the PC.

The BBC Homepage is the broadcaster’s third most popular section after News and Sport, and the beta launch of the new portal provides a first glimpse into the core design principles that is likely to underpin the reshaped BBC Online service. Indeed, during a demo yesterday at BBC Broadcasting House in London, it was clear it’s looking to feed changes in user behaviors into its future designs – for example, the preference for ‘swiping’ through content, which has become increasingly popular thanks to smartphones and tablets.

It’s likely that these principles will be reflected across BBC Online services and will be rolled out gradually, leading to a “graphically-rich London 2012 Olympics digital offering”.

Beyond reorganization of content and clearer signposting, a key facet of the redesign is a ‘carousel’ designed to let users browse the BBC’s content more easily, whilst also providing an easier route to discover new content.

The beta BBC Homepage will be released in stages, and will eventually include:

Carousel featuring colour coding to denote categories and icons to depict content type.
Filters for users to tailor the page based on their interests.
Sliding ‘drawers’ that reveal more or less detail across the most popular content on BBC Online, and real-time listings for BBC TV and Radio.
At-a-glance aspects: News and sport headlines, weather forecasts with lottery and travel news updates to follow, plus traditional index-based navigation for quick look-up.
Nations’ homepages united into a single product to provide relevant local and national information based on a user’s choice of location.
Location will form a key part of the new Homepage too, with users able to set a location preference which will determine what content they see. Part of this will also eventually include traffic and travel information which is tailored to the user’s vicinity.

Phil Fearnley, General Manager of News & Knowledge, BBC Future Media said:

“We’ve made improvements progressively to the BBC Homepage since it launched in 1997. The beta version launched today represents a real step change: we’ve rebuilt from first principles to deliver an intuitive experience which makes it easier for users to explore the wealth of BBC content on the web than ever before.The BBC Homepage attracts over 9 million unique browsers a week across devices and the new page is designed to meet the challenge of serving this mass audience by showcasing the breadth of what we create on the web, whilst enabling the simple filtering which users have come to expect.”

The BBC’s remit to take its online offering ‘beyond the PC’ means that the new BBC Homepage will subsequently be optimised for mobile and connected TV devices too, but for the time-being it will be limited to the desktop.

The BBC’s Homepage has undergone a few marked changes over the years, and it’s last big overhaul was in 2008, with the launch of a new ‘drag-and-drop’ widget-based portal which allowed users to customize it to suit their preferences:

The latest redesign is its biggest change yet, and it seems it has been completely rebuilt from the ground up. It’s important to stress that it is a work in progress, and it will be fine-tuned in the months ahead. It’s hoped that this will be the last ‘big’ change to the BBC Homepage, with all future alterations merely building on this new layout.

The new beta BBC Homepage is now live via a link on the BBC’s UK Homepage, or you can simply enter the following URL: http://beta.bbc.co.uk/.

Microsoft is to be probed by the UK’s Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) after complaints about the company’s claims it can guarantee 99.9% uptime on its cloud services, The Register reports.

With the Redmond-based company’s Office 365 platform going down twice in just three months, it will face challenged over misleading claims of its reliability and uptime, with the complainant noting that Microsoft hasn’t been able to achieve 99.9% uptime since it launched:

The ASA said:

“The complainant challenged whether the claim that Microsoft Cloud Power could achieve 99.9 per cent uptime was misleading and could be substantiated, because they believed that Microsoft’s Cloud Service had not achieved that figure in the year to date.”

Microsoft says on its Office 365 website that: ”you can count on Microsoft, an industry leader in productivity, for reliability. Microsoft provides a financially-backed 99.9 per cent uptime guarantee”.

If Microsoft’s downtime exceeds over 8.76 hours a year, the company could be forced to compensate customers according to its Service Level Agreement.

The company told The Register:

“We take our responsibility to deliver reliable services very seriously, and have built Office 365 from the ground up with an updated platform, new infrastructure investments and the latest technology innovations – and Office 365 is backed by the industry’s most rigorous financially-backed SLA”.

The ASA’s decision could come within weeks but the regulator has said that it “may take longer, depending on the complexity of the issues raised.”

Economists based in Google have predicted that an Internet boom in the UK could open as many as 365,000 jobs within the next five years, with the Internet accounting for a fifth of the regions GDP growth, The Telegraph reports.

Google’s European Vice-President and chief of search operations Philipp Schindler believes that despite European businesses fighting to remain afloat during a period of economic uncertainty, Internet-based or Internet-related companies that use the web successfully were still growing strongly.

“A study by McKinsey has shown that in France and in a mature economy like the UK, the internet is responsible for a fifth of GDP growth. In the UK, given the rate of job creation that economists associate with a rise in GDP, this translates into an expectation of hundreds of thousands of new jobs thanks to the internet,” he said.

“And I think that is on the conservative side. That is what could be achieved by putting a focus on this sector. That feels to me like a sizeable number.”

Schindler is in the UK to help drive Germany’s mid-sized sector, helping to drive the amount of goods exported by businesses in the region. He noted that for every pound that is imported, the UK exports “close to £3 in e-commerce goods and services”. He adds that the “UK is already doing relatively well in that sector but the ratio could be significantly higher”.

Google drives home the point, backed by other technology companies, that businesses across Europe need to understand a series of digital “mega-trends” if they want to be able to reap the full benefits of what the Internet can offer. Recent trends include a shift to mobile, the adoption of Cloud-based technologies and online media could all help encourage innovation.

Schindler also noted Google’s plans to expand its presence in the UK:

“The UK is our second largest market in the world. In a lot of areas in the UK businesses are defining the online world globally, they are innovation leaders. In terms of investing in the UK, we will obviously continue to invest in the UK – on the engineering side and the business side. We’ve just opened our third office here in Soho, it has a lot of seats.”