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.

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.

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.

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?

A couple of weeks ago I popped along to FOTE: the Future of Technology in Education conference.

I went to see my old pal Stephen Hardingham at Channel 4 last week. Before the meeting he said: "You could tell us about how things are going at Mint Digital these days."

This called for a short presentation. I hadn't seen Stephen in about 4 years, so here’s how Mint has changed since then.

I totally agree with Liz Murdoch that TV is failing to keep pace with the digital revolution. But I totally disagree with her suggested solution: more collaboration between the big players. These collaborations may deliver big infrastructure projects like YouView (of doubtful creative impact, in my opinion) but they will do nothing to deliver new formats making clever use of new technology, which is where the UK's great talent lies and where real value will be generated. 

Reality shows like Big Brother were made possible by cheap, robust offline editing, allowing the story to be pieced together after filming rather than before. The new wave of talent shows were made possible by large-scale telephone voting systems. New technology enables new formats, but in surprising ways that can only be discovered by creative experimentation.

Slides and notes from talk at Ignite Ubelly.

This is very speculative and I don’t know what I am talking about… but I think this is a really interesting concept, so I’d be delighted to hear any thoughts or suggestions.

Antifragile is a new book from Nassim Nicolas Taleb. It's not out yet but a couple of chapters are online (prologue, chapter 12).

His previous book was The Black Swan. This is in a similar territory. They both explore how we can think about and profit from the unknown.

Last week I attended the Media Guardian Edinburgh International Television Festival - the UK TV industry's annual decampment to the festival city for three boozy days of keynotes and canapés. Post bank-holiday, the dust has just about settled on Elisabeth Murdoch's MacTaggart (read the full text here), which went down pretty well on the ground, and doesn't seem to have ruffled too many feathers elsewhere.

For my part, I was most interested in what Murdoch had to say about what she called the "explosive emergence of a made-for-online video category". MGEITF was "powered by YouTube" - keeping delegates going with a swanky smoothie bar and getting highlights from every session online in the blink of an eye. But it was a small, low-profile panel session called 'Who needs a commission anyway?' that got to the heart of what YouTube means to the industry today.

To preface this, a personal confession: I'm embarrassingly obsessed with watching YouTube 'beauty gurus'. I'm not sure where it comes from - I don't even wear that much make-up - but I just can't stop watching them. My absolute favourite 'guru' (horrible word) is the entirely delightful FleurDeForce, a 24 year old with nearly 400,000 subscribers on her beauty channel, a wildly popular vlogging channel and a bridal channel. She's massive in the States too, with fans queuing for up to 14 hours to meet her at VidCon. A one-woman broadcast network.

I'd heard a lot about the mysterious and ever-growing Pocketmints meetups from across the pond. There had been six to date, they'd apparently been going from strength to strength and there was always a copious amount of food. So when I realised that my trip to New York would overlap with the seventh Pocketmints meetup I had many questions. Who would the speaker be? What would it be like? How much food is meant by 'copious'?

Our tribute, made from the parts of a MacBook Pro. By Mint Foundry.

Click to see large version

The stunning Finsbury Town Hall was the venue for last week's 2Screen 2011 - Mint's annual feast of all things connected TV. We had a blast, we hope you did too!

It was terrific to see the event grow so dramatically in the space of a year (we doubled our audience from 2010). The social TV conversation has raised its game too, with a brilliant bunch of talks from Andy Hood of AKQA, David Flynn of Remarkable, Declan Caulfield of Starling and Russell Davies of R/GA, all wonderfully compèred by BBC Click's LJ Rich.

Of course, as befits a 2Screen affair, the real energy of the evening took place on our second screens - the #2Screen hashtag is packed with gems and well worth having a dig through. This year we decided we wanted to take the kind of split-attention behaviour we've become used to at conferences and push it a step further. Our Footnotes app lived on the 2Screen mobile site and added an extra layer of engagement to the speakers' presentations, with a steady trickle of additional nuggets of information and useful links throughout the night. It was a fun experiment, if you got a chance to play with it we'd love to know what you thought.

We'll be back very soon with some lovely shiny videos of all the talks from the event, but for now I wanted to give a quick roundup of some of the 2Screen write-ups that caught my eye over the past week:

The countdown to 2Screen 2011 is almost over. Our sell-out event will be kicking off at 6.30pm tonight with awesome speakers, an exceptionally good-looking audience, booze, nibbles and good times galore. You can follow our #2Screen hashtag to keep up with the excitement. We love it when a plan comes together.

Over the last couple of days I’ve been exploring the lay of the land with a look at how content creators are approaching connected TV and an overview of what the new levels of audience data will mean for the industry.

But I’ve saved what is perhaps the trickiest area for last. Over to Google’s Eric Schmidt again - speaking at this year’s MacTaggart lecture - for a quick introduction:

“Now we’re riding a second, much bigger, wave of interactivity. It’s a convergence of TV and Internet screens. This time the interaction isn’t happening via your red button - it’s on the web through your laptop, tablet or mobile. But most important of all, this time it’s social.”

At Mint HQ we’re busy gearing up for our biggest ever 2Screen, so I thought I’d dig a little deeper into yesterday’s discussion on what happens when TV and the web get together.

It’s interesting to explore how the data that comes out of internet-connected TV and second screen apps is going to affect our viewing experiences in the future. TV commissioning today is still in thrall of the dreaded ‘overnights’, sourced from a supposedly representative slice of the population. It’s that BARB data that determines whether a show survives or disappears.

What will happen when broadcasters can access the huge amounts of data that will emerge from an audience watching on web-enabled TVs? Everything will be measurable: how many of us are on Facebook while we watch X-Factor? What programmes are viewers switching to after Downton Abbey? How many are actually watching, and engaging, with the ad breaks? This kind of audience access is unprecedented, and the minutiae of programme analytics will be pored over by commissioners, much as it already is by web entrepreneurs. How will that affect decision-making, and scheduling?

Two screen, three screen, dual screen, connected TV, IPTV, social TV, smart TVs... we might not know quite what to call it yet, but the intersection of TV and the web isn't a thing of the future anymore. 60% of TVs sold in John Lewis are internet-enabled, and the store expects this to rise to 80% by Christmas. Google TV is set to launch in the UK in early 2012, with YouView not far behind. Two screen is about to go mainstream. (There's even a rather excellent conference on the subject in London this week.)

On Monday night BAFTA hosted a panel discussion on what the future of connected TV means to content creators. Suveer Kothari from Google TV, Tom Williams from BBC IPTV, Kate Vogel from the Tate and Richard Welsh from Bigballs Films discussed everything from VOD, to multi-platform storytelling, to Carling using camels to deliver beer in Yorkshire.