Out of control bonuses have been a prime suspect in the recent financial crisis.

At Mint, we took a different approach. Inspired by Love Machine, we've experimented with the following:

Instead of a management-led exercise in reviewing and ranking team members, simply give everyone in the company the same amount of money, and then tell them to give it away to everyone else, in any way they think makes sense.

(To be clear, 50% of the bonus was allocated in this way. The other 50% was given out at a flat rate across Mint, to ensure that everyone got a bonus in the event that the crowd-sourced approach strongly favored the few.)

What have we seen?

Early this year when we set about to "find our feet" in the mobile landscape, we went about it in the typical Mint way, simply jump in and try to make stuff. Past experience has taught us that this hands-on, "rubber meets the road" approach always lands us in new territory.

André put together a lovely video of this lunchtime's snowball fight.

(I feel the video may have been edited to make me look like the instigator, which is in no way true.)

Last week, with great fanfare, we unveiled the contenders in the Mint Digital Android Challenge 2010. Utku and I emailed about two hundred of our closest friends, and the closest friends of Mint, and asked you for your help in choosing a winner. Most of you responded, and we were touched by the thought that people put into their choices, and into the comments that came in along with the votes. All of the applications found passionate support amongst some of our voters

As well as being a feared member of QA Police, Bob D'Mello writes happy birthday emails for all the Mint. (This is a self-appointed role. No one asked him to do it.)

Bob is leaving today, to join the marketing machine (well, become the marketing machine) at our spin-out Picklive. In commemoration, and to demonstrate his own unique style, here's his final birthday email. Fittingly, it is for Mint itself, which is 6 today:

(This is the fourth and final post in a series documenting the making of our Android concepts. Catch up on the first, second and third.)

Instapaper has been one of my favourite apps for the iPhone for quite some time now. On the odd day I use public transport, catching up with my 'read later' list is both time efficient and a great way to relieve boredom.

Since starting at Mint, I have had the pleasure of living close enough to walk to work, a luxury I'm sure many people don't have. However, this means that I find myself needing to make time to 'read later' opposed to taking advantage of those convenient moments. I thought it would be a novel idea if I could listen to my Instapaper articles on my walk to work and in a way, become the curator of my very own podcast.

(This is the third post in a series documenting the making of our Android concepts. Catch up on the first and second. Look out for the fourth installment tomorrow.)

Having lived in the US for about a year now, it felt about time I started learning a little about the fundamentals of American sport. A New York brainstorm topic, 'Enhancing sporting events through mobile', led Mr. Corrigan to step up to the plate with an exciting germ of an idea named 'batting scope'. A promising concept and an excuse to learn the rules of baseball? How could I not develop this idea?!

(This is the second post in a series documenting the making of our Android concepts. The first is over here. Look out for the third instalment tomorrow.)

Hold That Sound started out from my laziness and frustration with downloading conference talks. My morning commute was the perfect time to catch up on them but the problem was getting the audio from the web onto my phone. It was annoying to have to deal with downloading the files, importing everything to iTunes then searching for the cable to sync the lot. I wanted to make this process as seamless as bookmarking a page.

This led my to my first sketch of how an app to solve this might work. I wanted to bypass any need for downloading to my desktop and simply pass the http:// link for the audio file from the website to the phone in one step.

(This is the first post in a series documenting the making of our Android concepts. Look out for the second instalment tomorrow morning.)

As a designer and visual creative, I always wanted a way of checking my image based feeds on my mobile phone. Surprisingly, until very recently, there was no app specifically designed for that task.

In one of our Friday brainstorms on mobile, I shared my frustration. That's how the idea started: as my desire to address that problem.

If there was such an app, what would it be like?

You may recall we asked our designers to each develop a concept for an Android app.

We've got back four really strong ones which we've put together a little showcase for.

If you are curious about the processes of these, keep an eye on this blog through the week. Each concept will have a making of posted by its designer.

One of these concepts will get made into an app. We'll announce which one soon.

Check out the Android Challenge showcase at http://androidchallenge.mintdigital.com.

We've just launched a new feature that starts to make sense of the product vision for Quotables. Get the bookmarklet.

This had led to a rather unexpected but wholly delightful wave of publicity:

The Next Web gives Quotables 4.5/5 and says:

At its core, Quotabl.es is an nifty quick and simple way to collect quotes. It’s a beautifully designed web app that’s likely to inspire you to collect quotes even if you’re not one to normally do so.

Lifehacker says:

If you dig the occasional mind-moving quote, as we do, Quotables seems like the right place to keep them together.

TechCrunch Europe says

It’s fun and quick, as well as being potentially useful for recording those little gems of wisdom or idiocy online.

On 14 October, London's Conway Hall was the setting for the return of 2Screen, our conference that explores the opportunities of TV and web working together.

I'm delighted to announce that Utku Can has been made Creative Director of Mint.

Utku had an unusual route to Mint: He was hired after chatting to the CEO's wife while playing Blockles. Since then Utku has walked a line between unmanageable waywardness and unsackable brilliance.

Utku has been at the heart of many of Mint's most high profile projects including LivePitch, The Great British Sandwich and Benetton's IT'S MY TIME.

The creative team has two areas of focus: helping brands create big impact via mass-participation projects and finding ways for TV audiences to meaningfully engage online. Utku is closely involved with both areas, he's working on a bunch of interesting projects in the pipeline.

If you want to see him in action, he's speaking at the forthcoming 2Screen event this Thursday.

Congratulations!

P.S. This means Mint has a vacancy in the team for a creative strategist. If you want to create work that makes people tweet 'Holy shit, this is awesome!', check out the details.

We are delighted to announce that Margaret Robertson will be speaking at 2Screen.

She'll be looking at the precedents from the world of gaming for splitting user atttention. She says:

I have been thinking a lot about games that have already figured out smart split attention/2 screen game solutions. So, interesting ways the DS has used two screens, interesting things Nintendo did with the GameCube and GBA hook up, early, overlooked Nokia N-Gage experiments.

Also speaking will be Tim Morgan CEO/Founder of Picklive, a 2Screen football game initiated at Mint. The Next Web recently said that Picklive was one of five UK startups "that spring to mind who are doing fantastic, innovative work that’s on a par with Silicon Valley’s output".

There's only a dozen or so tickets remaining, so if you'd like to come, get one now.

Earlier this year, we set ourselves an iPad challenge and that turned out quite well.

One of the ambitions of our new Mint Mobile arm is to be equally proficient in iOS and Android development. So, to flex our muscles with Android development - and to show equal love for both platforms - we are launching Mint's Android Challenge.

The challenge? Develop a great concept for Android. Through October, each member of our design team is responsible for fleshing out and visualising a concept for an app. The initial idea can come from their own twisted imaginations, from the weekly Mint brainstorms or from the outside world (feel free to suggest an idea in the comments below).

The prize? The winning concept will be made.

On November 1st, we will post the strongest concepts on the Mint blog. There will then be a semi-public vote to decide the winner.

The aim is to create an app that is either cool enough to generate buzz or monetisable enough to generate cash (or, ideally, both). We are looking for concepts that are simple enough that a launchable demo can be built by a couple of developers in a few weeks.

We'll report back in a months time. But in the meanwhile, feel free to suggest any ideas below.

Last year's 2Screen event was a great success. It's back, for one night only, this October 14th: bigger, better and more central than ever before.

There's a great line up of speakers including Kevin Slavin from area/code, Matt Locke from Channel 4 and a head-to-head: Picklive's Tim Morgan versus Mint Digital's own Utku Can.

For details and tickets, visit 2Screen. Hope you can come!

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

Jemima Kiss 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 Quotables 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 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.

(The London tester role has now been filled)

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.

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

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.