Last year Mint launched Foundry, our graduate placement scheme. It has two key principles:

1. Don't get graduates in simply to help with jobs round the office.
2. Hire people who don’t do what Mint does, to work on things Mint hasn’t done before.

We're delighted to announce Foundry is coming back for 2012, and applications are now open.

Following on from winning a BIMA (and geting nominated for the Grand Prix), Sexperience has been shortlisted for the Broadcast Digital award for Best Website.

We are very proud of Sexperience. It delivers a valuable public service to the demographic who need it most. The video above explains more.

In terms of stats, since its launch in 2008, Sexperience has generated:

• Over 7 million visits.
• Over 40 million page views.
• 58,000 questions submitted.
• 66,000 experiences shared.
• 8:36 minutes average session length. (That's the longest session length of any Channel 4 site apart from games or 4oD.)

If you'd like to visit Sexperience, here's the site and here's the visualiser.

Wow! Our new project Foldable.Me has raised over 200% 500% of its funding target in its first week 20 days on Kickstarter.

You can still pledge if you want to receive one of the first Foldables and get them at the pre-launch price.

Foldable.Me seems to have struck a paper nerve.

Wired Gadget Lab says:

Papercraft, that’s the future of creating tiny effigies - especially ones of yourself.

The Next Web says:

Ever wish you could just post yourself somewhere and visit friends far away? Well Mint Digital has a solution for you. Foldable.Me is their latest and possibly one of their cutest endeavours.

Last summer was the inaugural year of the Foundry, our graduate scheme. Their brief was 'create something connected to the internet that doesn't live on screens'. In response, they came up with Olly, the web connected smelly robot. It turns your online notifications into smell.

We are delighted to be launching Ladyblabla, a mobile phone comparison site with a mission to fight mother-to-baby HIV transmission in southern Africa. (UK only, for now.)

Across Southern Africa, where healthcare provision is patchy, mother-to-baby HIV transmission is common. It's largely preventable, but prevention involves doing lots of little things right. It's hard to stay on track.

A charity called mothers2mothers is having great success with a new approach. They train mentor mothers - local HIV-positive mums - to be a layer of front-line support for new mothers.

Mint is heading down to Dorset for our annual product development competition and knees-up formerly known as the WebApp Weekender.

As one old timer famously remarked 'It's better than Christmas'.

The WebApp Weekender is no longer particularly about web apps and isn't over a weekend, so we are renaming it WAW. Like BP, CBS and AT&T, it stands for nothing but itself. It's an orphaned initialism.

The brief this year is to launch a business in 4 days. The business has to 'scratch a person's creative itch in a low cost way and touch the physical world'. What that means, I guess we'll discover by Friday.

The winner will be the team who generates most revenue in six weeks after the weekender. If you are interested, here's the full brief.

We'll be back in a week...

Angie, Colin and I went to MIDEM last week. It's probably the biggest Music Industry focused conference in the world. This year there was a greater focus on tech than in previous years, so we thought we'd go along and see what was up. Below I've highlighted 3 themes that ran through the conference, from the point of view of a digital agency guy.

Bacon is a conference about all the stuff that developers love (for instance bacon, but also functional programming, machine learning, Android development, memes, databases, astronomy, HTML5, electronic music, etc.) It aims to support the emergence of Silicon Roundabout as a technology hub, reflecting the energy and diversity of London’s web scene.

It's slightly inspired by Strange Loop - one of the best conferences we've been to - but with less emphasis on academic research and more on coding from the trenches. Confirmed speakers include Zach Holman of GitHub and Sean Treadway of SoundCloud. The call for proposals is still open. If you've got something you'd like to say, visit the Bacon site.

Oh and it's on April 20th and 21st 2012, if you'd like to come. Tickets are from £265.

Hope to see you there.

Hello and happy new year from Mint!

On January 1st, we launched New Year Revolution for Channel 4.

The starting point for New Year Revolution was the observation that most of us make new year's resolutions, but few of us keep them. The ambition is that by harnessing faces of Channel 4 and the collective willpower of the social web, we might help people keep the resolutions, and have some fun along the way.

In the first five days alone, we had over 20,000 join the revolution, and it is still gathering pace.

Update: The interaction designer position has now been filled. We are still looking for our visual designer!

We are looking to grow the Mint Studio by adding two new designers to the team.

We think designing here at Mint has to be one of the most exciting jobs around. Just in the last year, we launched Speedo Pace Club, the very magnetic Stickygram, "the award-winning"* Sexperience 1000, ran 2Screen 2011, launched Olly, the list continues...

If you want to join this small team making big things, head over to jobs, take a look at the visual and interaction designer positions and drop us a line.

We look forward to talking.

* I always wanted to say that.

Last night we were at The BIMA Awards 2011, where The Sexperience 1000 picked up the award for 'Best use of Data, Mashups & Data-Visualisation'. We were also delighted to be nominated for the 2011 Grand Prix award!

Thanks go to all the Mints who worked on it, our tech partners for the project LingoBee, Ipsos MORI, Endemol and of course, Adam Gee and all at Channel 4 for allowing us to keep making great work.

On 8 August 2011, we launched Mint Foundry, our first ever graduate scheme. We set four makers the brief: Make something connected to the Internet that doesn't live on a screen.

Sadly, their three month tenure with us is coming to an end. As a final farewell, we are hosting an informal presentation by our four graduates on what they've been up to, followed by some drinks. There will be a bit of a grand unveil, and hopefully a chance to play with what they've made.

It is this Thursday, 27 October at the Mint Offices at Exmouth Market. You can book yourself a spot on the event page.

Hope to see you there!

A skunkworks project has been brewing at Mint. Since February, Kejia Zhu has been working on a slightly eccentric scheme to print Instagrams on fridge magnets.

At every step of the way StickyGram has (i) been starved of resources and (ii) generated far more interest than we would have anticipated.

Back in March, Kejia created a one-page website with a couple of grainy shots of prototype StickyGrams and tweeted about it. That received 1400 sign ups in a week.

At the start of the summer Mint announced the Don't Be A Banker Scholarship. Our aim was to create an opportunity for aspiring web entrepreneurs to avoid the lure of corporate grad schemes and channel their energy into launching their own business.

We found a beautiful venue, confirmed the first bunch of speakers and finalised the booze order. 2Screen 2011 is set for 29 September 2011 at London's Finsbury Town Hall.

We launched Sexperience, the web partner to The Sex Education Show on Channel 4 back in September 2008. In time for Season 5, we undertook the most major overhaul of Sexperience since launch.

With a new site architecture and codebase, complete content reorganisation and refreshed interaction and visual design, this is the best Sexperience has ever worked and looked. Do check it out.

But as Steve would say, 'There's one more thing…' Alongside the site re-design, we have been working on another product to add to the Sexperience family.

We started 2Screen in 2009 with the question 'Can TV & the web make a baby?'. We returned in 2010 to explore what was by then becoming a mainstream trend.

Now, 2Screen is coming back for a third year on 29 September 2011. We're putting together an exciting line-up to discuss the intersection of TV and the social web.

We're going to be announcing more details in a couple of weeks time. If you'd like to receive an update when we do, leave your email address on the 2Screen site.

Mint Foundry is our brand new graduate scheme. This first year tasks four makers for three months with the brief:

Make something connected to the Internet that doesn't live on a screen.

Last week, Ed was at Lebowski Fest with the Mint Conference Policy. While we await completion of his illustration so he can post as himself, here are his impressions.

Of all the events in the world that hold a cultural or spiritual significance to you, which would you choose to visit? Perhaps the Hajj in Mecca if you are Muslim, or maybe Kumbh Mela if Hindu. Perhaps the World Expo is more up your street, which when held in Shanghai last year gained the status of the largest peaceful gathering in history.

Last week, I made my own pilgrimage. Travelling from London, England all the way to Louisville, Kentucky to an event they call Lebowski Fest.

Mint is awarding a scholarship of £4000 ($6000) to help a university leaver or recent graduate launch a business. We are looking for someone with a promising idea and the personal characteristics to turn it into a success.

If you win the scholarship, you will have two months to develop your idea, working in the entrepreneurial environment of Mint Digital.

At the end of this time the idea will remain 100% yours. We hope you'll want to develop it further with Mint, in which case we'll try to offer you a deal that will allow us to keep collaborating.

Why is Mint doing this?

We want to steer talented people away from a career in banking. We want to help create a new digital business. We think it might be fun.

What have you got against bankers?

We haven’t got anything against bankers. Our current CEO, our previous CEO and many talented Mints have worked in financial services.

It’s just that too many of the best and the brightest in the UK and the USA work for banks and other large companies, especially when they are first starting their careers. We believe there are better ways to enjoy capitalism.