We'd like to introduce you to Projecteo. The tiny slide film projector that brings your favourite Instagrams to life in the real world. It's matchbox-sized, meticulously designed, and basically adorable. We’re pretty proud of this little guy.

A smash-hit Kickstarter success last year (funding at 450%), the response from our initial 2,789 backers has been hugely positive. And now we’re excited to set Projecteo loose on the rest of you...

Prototypes sound good: they suggest innovation and flexibility, without the cost of setting anything in stone.

As a digital innovation agency, we’ve built a good few prototypes for our clients. Alas, these prototypes have been some of our least satisfying projects.

Yes, we've been inspired by the initial vision. Yes, we’ve worked hard to make the client happy. Yes, we’ve gone the extra mile to delight. And yet, and yet... something has never quite clicked.

What goes wrong?

Slip

With no go-live date, difficult decisions get delayed.

Bloat

There are bigger ambitions for a prototype than for a normal project. Freed from the constraints of shipping code, everyone hopes to create something game-changing. Extra features get added as the team grasp towards that big ambition.

Lack of Focus

Not wanting to blame the client, but... usually there’s no one at the client firm who is totally focused on the prototype. A prototype is often a bit of a hobby, somewhere down the to-do list.

Good digital products are often simple ideas kept sharp by hard design decisions. Prototypes pull in the opposite direction.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the final edition of our BACON speaker series, before the event itself tomorrow, yes, tomorrow! Team Bacon are currently prepping the venue, getting the bacon sizzling, and getting psyched up for the big event.

Today's Q&A is brought to you by the wonderful Jake Archibald, who's aim is to make developers lives a bit easier, will be helping us render without any of those unnecessary lumpy bits at this weekend's conference.

Jake Archibald | http://jakearchibald.co.uk/ | @jaffathecake

Jake works in Google Chrome's developer relations team, working on specs, testing implementations, and ensuring developers have tools to make their jobs less painful. He's a big fan of time-to-render optimisations, progressive enhancement, and all of that responsive stuff. Prior to Google, Jake worked at Lanyrd on their mobile web site (http://lanyrd.com/mobile/), and for the BBC working on JavaScript libraries and standards. Outside of the web, Jake likes F1 and nice beer.

Today's edition of the BACON speaker series is an extra-large helping of delicious, bacony goodness, courtesy of the wonderfully loquacious Christian Heilmann.

In his Helping or Hurting? keynote, Christian will be exploring how we may be hurting the cause of the web by abstracting problems away, instead of learning by failing. Expect inspiration by the bucket load...

Christian Heilmann | http://christianheilmann.com/ | @codepo8

Christian Heilmann has dedicated a lot of his time making the web better. Originally coming from a radio journalism background, he built his first web site from scratch around 1997 and spent the following years working on lots of large, international web sites. He then spent a few years in Yahoo building products and explaining and training people and is now at Mozilla. Chris wrote and contributed to four books on web development and wrote many articles and hundreds of blog posts for Ajaxian, Smashing Magazine, Yahoo, Mozilla, ScriptJunkie and many more.

Robert Peston recently discussed how to get businesses borrowing more. He says the problem for banks is:

“businesses they deem to be creditworthy simply don't want to borrow right now.”

The view from this small business is rather different.

Mint is small, fast-growing digital product development company. In eight years, we’ve gone from 2 people to 35. With access to a bank loan, we would have grown more quickly, hired more people and reduced the risk that a cashflow hiccup could capsize us.

At several points in our history we’ve gone round the banks, looking for a loan. We’ve tried them all: from the high street names to specialists like Coutts and Silicon Valley Bank.

We have always been turned down.

We have an Easter treat for you today - a piping hot edition of our BACON speaker series, fresh from the griddle. (And what goes with eggs better than bacon...?)

Today's Q&A is with the scarily-talented Joel Scotkin, who will be geeking us out with his terrific-sounding talk on computer-controlled rockets. Joel's current projects include: "designing the landing approach for the next major Mars mission". We like this guy.

Joel Scotkin | http://www.masten.aero

Joel started his career in financial technology. As JP Morgan's first webmaster he helped launch the very first online presence for a major financial firm with their RiskMetrics offering in 1994. In 1995 Joel founded Random Walk Computing, which drove the acceptance of Java into the financial domain and grew to become Wall Street's leading capital markets technology consultancy. After selling Random Walk to Accenture in 2006, Joel decided to pursue his dream of building rockets, and joined Masten Space Systems as lead investor and eventually CEO. Masten won the NASA Centennial Lunar Lander Challenge X-Prize in 2009 and has pioneered fully autonomous hovering rocket vehicles via dramatic advances in on-board computation. Current projects include work with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory designing the landing approach for the next major Mars mission, angel investing in a variety of startups, and pondering the next big thing.

Our BACON speaker series has been going down so well that we've decided to make it a double helping each week, starting with this bonus Tuesday edition. Twice the tastiness, no extra calories. Yum!

Next up is Vanessa Hurst, who believes that Developers Are Superheroes. We're on board with that. Her BACON talk is all about how great power comes with great responsibility, exploring software projects with a mission to save the world.

Vanessa Hurst | http://vanessahurst.com | @dbness

Vanessa is a data fiend turned social entrepreneur, currently building CodeMontage to help developers improve their skills while improving the world. She believes coding is one of the most efficient and effective ways to improve the human experience. Vanessa also founded and runs Developers for Good, a network of technologists and organizations who build technology to achieve social missions. Previously, she led data and analytics at Paperless Post and co-founded Girl Develop It to provide low-cost, judgement-free environments to learn about software development.

It's Friday, so it must be time for another instalment in the BACON speaker Q&A series. The perfect way to ease yourself into a weekend of bacon-based brunches and messing around on the internet. Or whatever else you have planned...

Each week we're throwing the spotlight on a different BACON speaker, with a quick-fire Q&A designed to offer a little taster of what we can expect from them at this year's conference (and how they like their bacon).

Next up is Seattle-based Aaron Patterson, whose Curing the Feedback Loop talk promises to help you improve your processes in both your code and your "day-to-day meat curing applications". Our kinda guy.

Aaron Patterson | http://tenderlovemaking.com | @tenderlove

Aaron was born and raised on the mean streets of Salt Lake City. His only hope for survival was to join the local gang of undercover street ballet performers known as the Tender Tights. As a Tender Tights member, Aaron learned to perfect the technique of self-defense pirouettes so that nobody, not even the Parkour Posse could catch him. Between vicious street dance-offs, Aaron taught himself to program. He learned to combine the art of street ballet with the craft of software engineering. Using these unique skills, he was able to leave his life on the streets and become a professional software engineer. He is currently Pirouetting through Processes, and Couruing through code for AT&T. Sometimes he thinks back fondly on his life in the Tender Tights, but then he remembers that it is better to have Tender Loved and Lost than to never have Tender Taught at all.

Picture the scene: the BACON team are settling down for a strategy session. Mugs of tea in hand, thinking caps on, plates of crispy rashers at the ready.

We had decided to set ourselves a mission: How can we help someone convince their boss to let them attend BACON?

We reckon BACON offers tremendous value - but your boss might need a little bit of persuading that a conference is a worthwhile investment of time and money. So, we could make one of those generic bullet-pointed pdfs...

Or we could do something a little bit more, well, BACON. Something tasty, tempting, and just the right amount of fun.

Feeling hungry for some BACON?

In the run-up to this year's conference, we're going to be whetting your appetites every Friday with a quick-fire Q&A from one of our amazing speakers. We'll be grilling them on everything from their text editor of choice, to the way they like their bacon. It's going to be tasty...

First up is GitHub's Vicent Marti, whose BACON talk will be lifting the lid on the fascinating problem of dealing with scalability at the world's largest source code host.

Vicent Marti | http://vmg.im | @vmg

Vicent Martí used to make videogames, but he sold out because he likes to wear expensive clothes. Or any clothes at all. He now works full time as a systems engineer at GitHub, focusing on security and performance issues on the backend. He's also the maintainer of libgit2, the Git library that powers GitHub's backend and native clients. He takes long showers because he enjoys smelling nice.

BACON is Mint's conference for developers, by developers, on things developers love.

Think music, rocket science, games and superheroes. Plus plenty of brain food - on everything from the history of Raspberry Pi, to why Go drinks Node and Scala's milkshake. It's all happening on April 12th and 13th, in central London. Oh, and there's bacon. Lots of bacon.

So, you're pretty much sold, right? But maybe you think your boss is going to need a bit more convincing?

Your worries are over. We've been cooking up something special, just for you...

Some of you are probably wondering what we made at 4D2L.

First, let's remind ourselves of the brief:

"The education industry is charging far too much for a product that is of questionable, and declining, value. Can we create a product or service that tackles some small part of this problem?"

This post is short and sweet, showing the things we made and a line about how we validated ideas. You might see more details on certain projects in the next few weeks.

So, what did we make?

Mint are off on our annual hack week /booze-a-thon - 4 Days 2 Launch (previously the Web App Weekender, until we realised it had ceased to be about web apps, and is no longer on a weekend).

Every year we head off to the seaside, divide into three teams and tackle a product development challenge designed to scratch our creative itches and sharpen our skills. The winning project from 2012's 4D2L was Foldable.Me, which was 1000% funded on Kickstarter and is now a thriving cardboard buddy creation business. The bar is high...

Although a little later than originally planned, Iteration 3 of the Mint site is now live.

This update brings in a new visual style. We updated typography and tweaked the colours a little, then styled all the pages in line with this. You'll notice it's a little basic at places, but this is our first take and I'm sure the style will change as we bring in more content.

I've also started documenting the iterations over at Flickr, if you wanted to see how the site is changing.

This year I participated in the MIDEM Music Hackday. It was a great experience!

This is the third year the event has been run, but the first time I've participated in a hackday. I attended MIDEM last year and thoroughly enjoyed myself, but as an introverted hacker at heart, I was happy to spend a chunk of my time this year out of the way of synergies, ARPUs and (most of) the biz-dev stuff, focusing instead on hacking away at an idea I've been toying with on and off for the last year or so.

That idea materialised at the hackday in the form of "Mouzu". It's a pretty simple idea. In it's essence, Mouzu sets out to answer the question "what kind of music do you listen to?" - a question I like to ask people when I meet them, and one that more often than not yields the wholly unsatisfactory response "a little bit of everything". Really? Everything? Swedish Death Metal, Trad Jazz and Nosia? I think not.

The hardest person to design for is yourself. All intuition disappears and you over question every decision.

That's a familiar tale, I'm sure, to any digital company that ever embarked on redesigning their website. For ages, we too have been suffering from this. In the drive for perfection, it's easy to end up not doing anything. So, we decided to do something.

How far can we get from predicting the future by looking backwards? Probably decently far, but I find it more fun to predict the future from sci-fi. If we can imagine it, we're that much closer to making it. This next year might not be the one where you get your flying car or your hover board, but I'd love to be proven wrong there. So, what can we expect to see from the exponential curve of technological progress in 2013?

Hello everyone! I'd like to introduce our latest product, Projecteo.

Projecteo is a tiny Instagram projector about the size of matchbox. It works by projecting light from an LED through a 'wheel' of instagrams developed onto Kodak 35mm slide film. Wheels are replaceable and hold nine images. You turn the wheel to cycle through your images.

Projecteo smashed expectations and hit its Kickstarter goal of $18,000 in under 22 hours.

The campaign has been covered by a range of great press and has even had celebrity endorsements. Highlights include:

“Now this is SICK!!!” - Nick Cannon

“For committed fans of retro photography apps such as Instagram, it could be the ultimate way to continue the retro theme.” - Daily Mail Online

I joined CharityHack over the weekend. It was an awesome hack. I just wanted to say thanks.

To @johnxcom and @sauliuz and the rest of the @charityhack crew.

To the caterers, who fed us all so well. The mini-burgers were a delight.

To all the hackers who made the place feel full of energy and drive.

To @stefek99, half hacker, half raver, constant source of entertainment.

To @pornelski, an excellent developer. We made OhCharity together and it scooped the top prize! (OhCharity needs some more work, don't make a widget just yet).

I'm already looking forward to Charity Hack 2013.

For the second year running, we hosted four graduates for three months at Mint under Foundry, our graduate scheme. This year, their brief was 'Make a toy that has a reason to exist.' What they ended up making is, well, insane.