Mint Digital

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.

At Mint, we make some pretty cool websites. We also pride ourselves on the quality of our code. Sites like Landshare, Orange unsignedAct and Sexperience all use technologies like AJAX and JavaScript to make them look good and feel great. But, as with anything in life, adding complexity to something increases the risk of things going wrong.

Until now, we have relied on our eagle-eyed Quality Assurance Police to prod, poke, push and pull our sites ad nauseum in search of these failures.

This is time consuming and error prone, even for our über talented QAs. So, being the geeks we truly are, we thought we’d get a computer to do the leg-work. Consequently I have been working on a little hocus-pocus to bewitch web browsers into thinking a real person is using the site. The result is pretty entertaining: a browser dancing away, apparently all by itself! It also uncovers any errors in the code - but that is less fun.

I had to move the browser so you could see it, but other than that it's all magic!

Last weekend’s Edinburgh International Television Festival will have to go down as one of Menthol TV’s finest hours yet.

It’s hard to know where to begin. I could start by telling you about the captivating speech given by Clay Shirky on post Gutenberg Economics and what this spells for TV in the 21st Century. Or Peter Bazalgette’s theory on how the credit crunch will accelerate US-driven consolidation in the industry. Or what about how MENTHOL TV BLEW THE ROOF OFF THE PLACE with a devastating pitch by chief Mayhem Maker and dragon slayer Mona Yousefi!

Having been selected to take part in a special festival edition of the BBC’s Dragon’s Den, Mona had five minutes to impress four real-life commissioning editors with her Mayhem Makers pitch. Within seconds Mona had the dragons and the audience on the edge of their seats. Regaling the auditorium with tales of Mayhem Makers’ sell-out West End screenings and the story behind the show, the knockout blow came when she played the promo.

The crowd went mad and the dragons were speechless, except for Heather Jones, MTV’s Executive Vice President, Content & Creative Director of Television who said.

"It was worth coming to Edinburgh just to see this."

Thanks to Mona’s outstanding pitch, we won the competition but what was most exciting was the response from the 250 TV types in the room. They loved it! Mayhem Makers was the people’s choice.

Another Mint / Menthol TV project that was making noise at the festival was Osama Loves.  Cover star of Future Media, Osama the Nigerian Tailor and his love for chickens was everywhere. Watch this space on news about the documentary due to air later this month.