Mint Digital

We quietly launched Quotables about six weeks ago. Today, it nudged closer into the limelight.

Jemima Kiss at Guardian wrote in the Guardian PDA: "Channel 4's latest web project reinvents quotations for the Twitter age"

Ewan McIntosh wrote on edu.blogs.com:

A beauty of a service, finally providing a beautiful, slick home for the world's best quotations. It's a brilliant resource for any student of history, English language, Classics, science, or PowerPoint 101.

Never again will I have to suffer inaccurate citing in keynote presentations, or dinner parties where people quaff fine wine while stealing great one-liners with the catch-all "I don't know where this comes from, but...".

Adam Gee, the Quotabl.es champion at Channel 4, wrote on the 4iP blog:

There are certain factors that set Quotables apart from the various other quotations websites around:

1. Improvable

As Wikipedia has clearly proven, it is powerful to have a structure where everything can be edited, refined and improved by the community.

2. Hierarchical

All users can show which quotes they love. This enables the best and most appropriate quotations for any tag, author or source to rise to prominence.

3. Annotatable

Anyone can add notes to a quotation, so that often there will be background information for an individual quotation – what the original context was, where it’s been used, how it’s been interpreted, etc.

Martha Lane Fox, founder of LastMinute.com, tweeted "i do really like this little site for high class online quotes backed by gang at c4"

Also, you can win an iPad if you tweet a quote before midnight today (more details here).

Our Quality Assurance team is looking for two new testers to join us.

One tester will be based in our London office and one will be in our New York office.

If you’re analytical, have a great eye for detail and you’re interested in helping create innovative social websites, please get in touch.

Please see our jobs section for more details.

Quotables is looking for a community champion and two interns. Quotables is based in Glasgow: we felt the site needed to be in the part of the UK with the shortest lifespans and the best jokes. After all, we are here for a good time, not for a long time.

We've been enthused by the comments we've received since Quotables went public last week:

Brilliant idea, looks great.

Graham Linehan (Yes, Graham Linehan from the IT crowd!)

I am loving Quotables and wish you every success with it.

Oli Barrett

The last few months have been exciting times for Mint, with many new projects, several great new hires and the momentous decision to spin off Picklive and with it our beloved Tim, Noam and Krzysztof. (Now promoted to the Mint Hall of Fame.)

It seems a good time to reshuffle a few things at Mint. The aim of these changes is mainly to bring clarity and focus to the business and to ensure that Mint is in great shape to achieve its goals.

We are just launching a new project called Quotabl.es. The aim of Quotabl.es is to be the freshest and most accurate quotations site on the web. Long term, Quotabl.es aims to do for the dusty quotations dictionary what Wikipedia did for the Encyclopedia Britannica.

But that's the long term aim.

Today, we need your help. If you've got a minute, please add one quote you love. (Go to Quotabl.es, sign up and click on ‘Submit Quote’.)

To see regular updates of popular quotes, follow @QuotablesLoves.

Quotabl.es is work in progress. Any feedback much appreciated (either in the comments below or to hello@quotabl.es).

And remember:

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.

It's not often you get a soulful moment in a job ad. I love this sentiment from our normally stone-hearted CEO:

We all have a responsibility to help those less experienced than ourselves. Those of us who are experienced developers can all look back on mentors who helped us along the way. It's the nature of life that we can never really repay those mentors, so the only thing we can do is help others to develop their skills as well. At Mint many of our "junior" developers have moved into senior roles in the last two years, and we're very proud of this aspect of our culture.

We are hiring a variety of developers (London, New York or Glasgow) and an interaction designer in London.

Buoyed by the success of our iPhone app building weekend exercise, the fantastic response to our World Cup real-time visualizer, and the confidence from working on production projects in the mobile web space for blue-chip clients, we are ready to declare our mobile division open for business.

Just over a month ago, we wrote about a concept World Cup real-time visualiser for the iPad. We had some tremendous feedback since then, so thank you for your interest. Over the course of the month, we have been working hard to build that application.

I'm delighted to announce LivePitch is now available, for free, on the App Store!

I'm nervous about USA v England tomorrow. We all know that the USA has better dentistry, better writers, better mix-tapes, better magazines, higher GDP per head, more charismatic leaders. Football is what England is supposed to be good at. What makes it worse, there are characters in our New York office who will never shut up if USA win. 

One of my favorite aspects of Mint Digital's work is starting new projects on a regular basis. This lets the team learn from past mistakes, and incorporate the latest design and tech ideas that we've been itching to try out. When we find something that works well, we're able to update other projects with the best new ideas.

We certainly don't kick off each Rails app from scratch. The starting point is BloomBox, our toolbox for building fast, scalable websites. As the project progresses, we learn hard lessons about zero-downtime deployments, front- and back-end optimization, and our development and testing practices.

A few critical pieces of BloomBox tech have made our recent websites noticeably faster and more reliable. These features would also improve our older projects nicely, so we extracted them to gems. These gems solve some common problems, so to contribute back to the developer community, we've released them as open source.

Last week saw the first London Redis meetup, which we were proud to host over at Mint Towers.

Mint projects often have the following things in common:

1. Tight design & build deadlines
2. Live for a short period of time
3. High user engagement
4. New technical challenges
5. New lessons learnt

Our portfolio hasn't always been the most effective way of showing off these attributes. In an attempt to increase awareness of the more intricate details of our projects we had an experiment and put together a statistical case study for IT'S MY TIME...

We don't want to get involved in Steve Jobs' war on Flash. But just in case he wins (and on current form, who'd bet against him?), we have re-engineered Hemlock, our open source framework for real-time web apps, to work in 100% Javascript environments.

We are fascinated with data and what you can do with it.

We are fascinated with '2Screen'. People using a second device to augment TV is increasingly common.

We are fascinated with the real-time web. Information delivered to you, as it happens, opens a world of possibilities. 

We have combined these passions before. Picklive Football, our two screen, real-time game, has been spun out as a separate start-up.

Lately, there's something else we've been fascinated with. It's the iPad. It's one of the most exciting canvases us digital folk have ever had a chance to build stuff on.

Picklive captures a whole load of data during every football match they cover. For the World Cup, they'll be covering every single match. We always thought there were other things to do with this data. The World Cup and the iPad turned out to be the catalysts we needed to put things into gear, and we think we may be onto something quite special...

We never did report on the Web App Weekender 2010. Here's the 3 apps we created.

We are delighted to announce reinforcements to the Mint development team: Paul Fedory, Salvatore Formisano and Edd Sowden