Mint Digital

The votes are closed. Envy and Other Sins are winners of Channel 4's mobileAct.

Phew... Everyone at Mint can breathe again. This was Channel 4's first online vote since the TV voting scandals earlier this year. We had to adhere to a super-strict set of new guidelines. We built a system capable of recording hundreds of thousands of votes a day. We've withstood penetration testing by a bunch of Channel 4 employed hackers. We've logged votes in two separate ways and securely transmitted them to an independent adjudicator at Olswang for analysis.

But this is rock'n'roll. It's about the parties. And it's great to know that Alex Zane (seen here carousing with Thomas Pomfret, VP Technology) digs our web technology.

I have just returned from the Sheffield Documentary Festival where at a glittering awards ceremony on Saturday night we scooped the Crossover Prize.

The idea entitled ‘Museums of our Future’ (then renamed ‘Tomorrow’s Today’) was the output of a week working with Diarmid Scrimshaw from Warp Films and Anna Higgs from Quark Films at the UK’s first ever Crossover Lab.

A few things that stand out for me about Crossover/DocFest:

1. I love our idea

As well as loving my team, I love our idea. It works beautifully across three platforms (TV, web and real life). We are going to work hard to bring it to a screen, laptop and event space near you soon.

Happily the idea was not spawned by some elaborate ‘let's all think about the future’ type of brainstorm. It emerged from a meeting of minds over dinner one evening. An intellectual debate ensued, a creative match emerged and, hey presto, an idea was born.

2. Creative environment

The Crossover environment was really conducive to thinking. We were literally locked up in a hotel for a week (okay, not literally). At times it was all too much but ultimately all the teams developed inspiring ideas.

3. Great people

It was a pleasure to meet loads of creative people with different skills and experiences from around the country. The mentors, commissioners and, most of all, the other participants really rocked da house.

Three things that I learnt from the experience were:

• Go with the idea that you are passionate about. If you don’t love your own idea then nobody else will;
• Run it past anyone who will listen. An old colleague from my accounting days had a screensaver that read “Feedback is the breakfast of champions”. Hard to apply in the world of auditing but a great maxim for devising crossover documentaries;
• When it seems like you have hit a brick wall - keep going. Give yourself a deadline by which time you have to pitch something. Otherwise great ideas can be written off as soon as they reach the first 'this is difficult' moment.

On a more personal level, I found the whole experience quite emotional. I sometimes act like a 'cold as ice small town likely lad' (although, like many Welshmen, I burst into tears at the opening bar of a male voice choir or watching the rugby at Cardiff). At Crossover, I experienced a sense of hiraeth. Normally this feeling is reserved for Neath, Swansea and Port Talbot area but now I must add Skipton to that list. Very odd.

Marvellous memories, inspiring ideas, but most of all firm friends.

So, I spent the last couple of days learning about 'the future' at the Future of Web Design conference in wonderful New York City. It was great fun. There were lots of interesting topics and inspiring people. Here is a brief run down:

Day 1

There were talks on a wide range of topics including designing for mobile, flash design, AJAX, finding inspiration and CSS3. My personal highlights were Ryan Singer's (37signals) talk on web usability, Ryan Sims' (Virb) and Keith Robinson's tag team approach to redesigning a site like IMDb. Also Jeffrey Kalmikoff skinnyCorp had an excellently presented chat about community-centred design.

The evening finished off with a Media Temple hosted party in the heart of NYC offering free booze and three floors of DJs. I chatted to, amongst others, Tyson an awesome designer at Virb and Keegan from The Big Noob.

Day 2

The day was made up of two workshops. In the morning Ryan Singer talked through his approach to usability for web apps. The main theme was focus on keeping the design as close to reality as possible. For instance, no lorem ipsum, keep the content real.

In the afternoon, I went to Lea Alcantara's branding workshop. This touched on many things I was already aware of from the web design sphere, but it was interesting to hear it from a branding perspective. A highlight was having to interview her as an Italian chef.

All-in-all it was an inspiring couple of days. I look forward to future events arranged by Carson Systems, along with getting back to a good round of Photoshop back in the UK.

We've just launched a new version of the mobileAct website for Orange, SonyEricsson and Channel 4.

1500 bands initially applied. This was whittled down to 50 when the show started and now twelve. Bands can upload video and pictures and write blogs - building their online fan base will be crucial as the series progresses.

Watch the show on T4, 12.15 Sundays.

I've just returned from Cross Creative in Glasgow. It was interesting to hear Andrew Chitty discuss Illumina's approach. In some areas it is quite similar to Mint, in other areas quite different.

For Empire's Children, Illumina built a map for users to submit their histories. Illumina felt it was important to bridge the gap between professional quality of TV content and amateur quality of much web content. From what Andrew showed, they did a good job of this.

When Wall to Wall saw the site, their immediate reaction was 'it would have been great if we'd had a tool like that when we were making the TV show'. Currently they are working together on a project to make that happen. That elusive 'genuinely 360 idea' edges closer.

Recently, Illumina have taken on some projects for museums. Like TV, museums group people together by shared passion. Unlike TV, museums exist in the physical world. This is interesting. Lots of the most interesting 360 ideas in advertising (e.g. Nike's RunLondon or Innocent's Fruitstock) exist mainly in the real world (and only secondarily online). I think this trend towards the real world will extend into TV cross-platform ideas. The MobileAct project we are working on for Channel 4 has a massive real-world element.

For the new Centre of Cell experience, Illumina created a website that you need to visit before and after visiting the museum. The museum itself becomes one part of a bigger experience.

For Kew Gardens, Illumina noticed there were 4 million photos on Flickr tagged 'Tree'. This shows a tremendous level of interest. Illumina's aim building the new site is to bring this conversation within the Kew site.

This half of Illumina's work is about user-generated content and the participatory web and is similar to what Mint do. The other half involves narrative and video production and is a whole different world.

On November 8th and 9th, the TV, digital media and advertising industries will converge on the Future of Television forum. Speakers include executives from Fox Interactive, NBC, ABC and Endemol USA.

Mint is one of the main media sponsors. The Future of Television builds on the success of UGTV and NYTVF’s Digital Frontiers panel to promote discussion about the creative possibilities of cross-platform TV.

We've recently made some changes on Islandoo.

The Islandoo casting system is now open to anyone casting for TV, film, music, adverts or theatre. (Previously, it had been exclusive to the Shipwrecked team). In the first week, 8 shows signed up.

We designed the system to help casting professionals. There is a slick interface for managing the casting process. Each opportunity gets promoted to Islandoo's 38,000 members.

The community gets what they are looking for: lots of chances to shine.

Here's what the tech blogs say: Techcrunch, Mashable.

In collaboration with Channel 4, we are hiring a trainee web producer.

To apply, visit 4careers site and enter reference 4T TWP.

Just back from RailsConf Europe. These were my three top moments:

1. Jason Hoffman's session on scaling was really superb. Over the last few months we've had to deal with scaling a Rails app urgently. Jason had sound advice and interesting perspectives.

The headline is scaling isn't a Rails problem but a network and hardware issue. Interesting things Jason suggested:

• Use multiple asset hosts to get more connections to the browser (e.g. most browsers will open only 2 connections per host, if you set up media1, 2, 3 and 4 for assets even if they all point to the same box, the browser will open up to 8 connections.
• Use DNS in a major way.
• Make separate apps for each controller and keep them on their own boxes/processes. This may sound strange, but Jason said most apps could have the following DNS (either on the same box or different ones):
  • Dynamic (domain.com)
  • Static (assets1-4, 5-8)
  • Uploads (break into separate app)
  • Downloads (unauthenticated to static servers, sixty secs urls for authenticated)
  • Admin

2. Evan Phoenix spoke well on Rubinius the new Ruby virtual machine. It was a really fun talk with some carefully made up graphs and stats. The bottom line is that it is much faster, takes less memory and is much easier to fix bugs or extend as most is written in Ruby.

3. For me, the real highlights were the events surrounding the conference. Both Bratwurst on Rails on the Sunday and Reject Conf on Tuesday night were great places to meet with loads of interesting people, including the guys from SoundCloud and my fellow countrymen from Scotland on Rails.

MobileCrunch has a nice review of the Thumbplay community site we just launched.

They say "this is for those who want to record those special moments on their phone and share them for the world".

Nice to see they understand the mobile aspect of what we are building.

At the end of November, Mint is dividing into two teams for a long weekend of coding. Each team has four days to build and launch a web app.

We thought we'd do this to:

• Spur creative thinking
• See what we'd come up with
• Have the fun of starting with a blank sheet of paper
• Focus on a project in a small team

The rules are:

• Max 5 people in a team
• No .net*
• Stop working at 5 on Sunday - what's live then gets judged.
• Before the Weekender you can spend as much time as you want brainstorming and researching the concept. Also, you can register a domain name and set up the plumbing.

Does anyone else want to join? We thought it would be interesting to open it up and see what other people get up to...

I'm imagining each team would work separately. We'd have a wiki so that teams can report back progress. We'd meet on the evening at the start of the Weekender for a drink. At the end we'd have a party. We'd find some neutrals to judge. We'd invite a celebrity (probably Cameron Diaz) to present the prize.

If you'd like to get involved, email andy@mintdigital.com

* Joke! You can if you want.

Update: This got postponed. It will now happen on the 28th Feb - 2nd March.

We've just launched a community site for US mobile content provider Thumbplay. The community section has tight integration with the rest of the Thumbplay site (using BloomBox's RESTful API to share content). Also, it's the first BloomBox site with mobile upload and download.

The 2007 New York Television Festival (September 5th - 9th) presents independent TV pilots and network screenings for both industry professionals and TV fans.

As well as the parties and the premieres there is the NYTVF Panel Discussion Series. This begins on Thursday, September 6th with a talk sponsored by Mint Digital: Digital Frontiers in the Advertising Marketplace (scroll down page for details).

To obtain a pass, visit www.nytvf.com and click on Box Office. Thursday Day Passes, All Access Passes and Industry Packages grant admission to the Mint Digital panel and the A&E Cocktail reception that follow the panel, as well as the FOX red-carpet première of "New Amsterdam" on Thursday night.

Thanks to everyone who came to UGTV New York. Despite the storms the turnout was fantastic and the panel debate rocked.

If you missed it, here's a webcast and additional audio.

Some choice quotations from the event:

1. On quality "Just because it's user generated, it's kind of 'who gives a crap?'. But using it to make better television, that's interesting." – Joey Jodar of Heavy Worldwide

2. On barriers to entry “Time, these days, is the only real barrier to entry for content creators. To edit together a daily podcast takes time, and creating a five-minute video that looks good takes skill.” – Shelly Palmer

3. On editorializing user-generated content “I’m excited about Shelly Palmer’s view regarding taking a programmatic view of user generated content, as this is central to the way we work at The-N.” – Amanda Peters of The N.com

4. On monetisation “There’s now a chance for advertisers to really interact with users and create a relationship as opposed to just talking at them.” – Jake Brenner, Marathon Ventures

For more coverage see Ben Homer, Dorian Benkoil and John C Havens.

Thanks to Kevin Shively of TV Worldwide for the webcast and John C Havens of Blog Talk Radio for the additional audio.

Thanks to everyone who came to UGTV London. Here's some pics.

The event was described as "excellent" by Colin Donald and "very interesting" by Mark James Bowness.

A more sceptical note was sounded by Ved Sen.

Coming up tomorrow night: UGTV New York.

Last year we ran an evening conference call UGTV '06. It seemed to create some worthwhile conversations. (At the very least, we enjoyed it and met some interesting people.)

Since then, this whole area has developed rapidly. There is growing understanding of the the types of project that are likely to work and those that aren't.

On a Mint Digital level, we've recently opened a New York office to better service the needs of two big American clients we are creating social applications for.

To celebrate, this year we are running events in New York and London. We've got a great line-up of speakers and good food, so they promise to be enjoyable and informative evenings. To request an invite, please go to the relevant page. Hope to see you there!

A few weeks ago we launched Joseph Choir Search, a new BloomBox site for the BBC. Running in conjunction with Any Dream Will Do, the website is a nationwide search for a school choir to support Joseph on the TV finale and at a West End charity gala performance.

A fortnight ago, traffic took off like a falsetto. As the deadline for submissions approached, more and more choirs uploaded their entries. For every choir that entered, there's an army of pupils, parents and teachers behind them. It was not uncommon for local radio and newspapers to get involved, further fuelling the traffic. Grassroots marketing was driving traffic to a degree we simply hadn't imagined possible.

Then we got linked off the BBC homepage, one of the most trafficked pages in the UK...

The Joseph BloomBox installation took a battering.

But it kept alive.

Last week, we had to disable voting to decrease the load on the database (we'd had 250,000 votes in 48 hours). Since then we've added more hardware, improved caching and made a heap of other optimisations. Since last Monday, we've resumed voting and Joseph Choir Search is performing smoothly amidst the voting frenzy.

The energy that's gone into the competition is amazing. It is well worth checking some entries.

Joseph Choir Search is a standard BloomBox installation. There are a couple of innovations worth mentioning:

Audition room We were keen to ensure that the best choirs rise to the top. We were worried that large schools would be able to mobilise more parents and teachers to vote, distorting the rating process. To counteract this potential problem, we implemented an 'audition room' concept.

The audition room means that you can't follow a link to vote for a choir. Instead, if you want to vote you enter the audition room, where you are shown a random stream of choirs (including the choir you initially came to see). This decreases the incentives for ballot stuffers and increases the value of the contribution from dispassionate amateur judges.

Looking at it now, the audition room concept does add a certain burden to the usability of the site. However it also seems to be helping ensure it is the best choirs that rise to the top.

Using JavaScript to create personalised, cached pages One of the technical challenges of building many-to-many publishing sites, like Joseph Choir Search, is that every page is dynamic. This means there are more hits on the database and the sites are harder to scale.

With BloomBox, we've developed a technique whereby we cache versions of each page and then use JavaScript to figure out the dynamic part. This has been a key reason in why we've been able to serve many millions of dynamic pages, off a relatively small hardware installation.

Finally, I'd like to say thanks to Jo, Ted, Dan and Kate at the BBC. Firstly, for commissioning this project. The more we work on it, the more it seems genuinely innovative in the way it reaches out to and connects with its audience. And secondly, for supporting us as we've developed the site. It hasn't been the smoothest process (we've made a couple of big mistakes along the way) but there's been a genuine sense of teamwork as we have all strived to deliver a project that has turned out far bigger than any of us had initially anticipated.

Thomas and I popped along to the FOWD conference last week.

3 highlights from the day.

1. Denise Wilton from Moo spoke about how to add character to your web app. She asked the question, "how do you want people to *feel* when using your web app?". This is a great question. We talk about users a lot. We sometimes forget that they are people, with feelings and emotions. Denise encouraged the audience to think about language and typography. Just look at the Moo sign in page. Chatty language and friendly type makes me feel welcome here.

2. William Rosen works for Leo Burnett, the company behind the 'Verb Yellowball campaign'. The idea: 500,000 yellow balls were dropped across the US in an attempt to get children moving. Each ball gave kids three simple instructions. (1) Play with them. (2) Blog your stories. (3) Pass them on. I loved this idea. No fancy technology required. No fancy UI required. Just a great idea. Only made possible by the connective power of the web.

3. Andy Clarke, Creative Director at Stuff and Nonsense showed everyone his cool wall. He took the piss out of Dropsend and claimed it was uncool. For Mr Clarke, Google and Flickr were the only two sites that deserved to have the tag 'sub-zero'. That's cooler than cool!

......................................

See FOWD photos on Flickr

Last Saturday, I went to the Gotham Ruby Conference. It was partly sponsored by Google, at their New York offices. They're beautifully set up to handle these kinds of things, with a nice sound system, open wireless, and four big screens for presentations. Overall it was a great day, with interesting speakers, and ample opportunities to meet our fellow New York (and Boston, and Philly, etc) Rubyists. Here's my quick summary of what I saw:

Mint Digital has been shortlisted for the MIPTV Content 360 competition in Cannes this April for the second year running. If you are coming to the festival, it would be good to meet up (email tim@mintdigital.com to get in touch).

The competition drew 449 entries from 36 countries. Our proposal is one of 25 shortlisted.

Last year Mint won its category with Buried Alive which was described by Gary Hayes, of Laboratory of Advanced Media Production, as:

"the best project from all the pitch sessions as it really combined user-generated content, community, rich media and potentially mobile."