Mint Digital

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.

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...

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.

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.

There's been much recent sniping about Tech City. Most of the criticism has focused on the cost of the website. As I see it, there are two bigger problems:

The name

It takes a special type of government idiocy to attempt to replace the phrase Silicon Roundabout with Tech City.

Silicon Roundabout has a nice touch of British self-deprecation. It captures something of the place, centered as it is, on a grimey old roundabout. It is slipping into widespread usage, from The Economist to The Sun.

Tech City could be anywhere. If I had to guess, I'd imagine the outskirts of somewhere like Doha or Shenzhen. It combines a linguistic tone-deafness with a whiff of compromise to suggest it was invented by a committee of people who don't speak English fluently. It's prematurely dated like an old Sci-Fi film.

Introducing a new name for basically the same place will, at best, be ignored. At worst, it creates confusion.

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.

I'm a country boy at heart. Summers would drift by lounging on a swingseat reading old New Yorkers and dreaming up punchlines to home-made jokes. But London marches to a different beat.

3.45pm last Thursday: the Mint office was buzzing. Both meeting rooms were taken. A sound system was being tested for the office-warming party. I had a presentation to write for a meeting at 5pm. I couldn't concentrate, so I nipped out to the park behind the office.

JustGiving, launched in 2000, often used to be held up as a UK dot-com success story.

Recently I've seen lots of people using their competitor Virgin Money Giving (Launched October 2009), including, ahem, young Ramzi Bell. I know, a sponsored swim for a 10-month-old is ridiculous.

Initially I thought it was a shame to see a big corporate like Virgin is ripping off a plucky little startup like JustGiving. But Virgin Money Giving is a not-for-profit. Unlike JustGiving, there's no monthly subscription and no charges on Gift Aid. They do charge 2% on transactions, but that is lower than JustGiving's 5%.

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?

What have you got against bankers?

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.

Welcome to the first in a semi-regular series of a few things that caught our eye recently.

Net-a-Porter Live

Net-A-Porter's live fashion map shows one way the theatre of real world shopping can be re-created online. The execution perhaps falls slightly short of the rest of their site, and certainly short of Uniqlo, who've set the pace with these type of projects, but there is real energy to it. Clotaire Rapaille, in his half-genius, half-batty book The Culture Code, says the subconscious motivation for shopping is 'reconnecting with life'. With shopping such a social activity and e-commerce such a valuable activity, this is an area that is sure to be pushed further in the next few years.

It says on our jobs page that everyone at Mint is encouraged to attend two conferences a year. Most people choose ones that are relevant to their professional development. Popular choices are SXSW, RailsConf, RubyConf and FOWA.

it is interesting to see how far this policy can be pushed, especially as Mint's CEO Cameron Price has a strong libertarian streak.

Comic-Con?

Yes

AssetHat makes Rails 3.0 websites load their CSS and JavaScript faster.

In the figure below, Websites C, D, and E handle about 400,000 views/day. AssetHat saves users of these sites 91.8 hours each day. That’s 91.8 collective hours of staring at a screen, waiting for the internet to respond, that can now be put to more productive use.

We just released version 0.4. Read a full introduction on Mint's new tech blog. Or visit the AssetHat site for docs and download.

New Mint recruit Ed Ellson gained 15 minutes of fame in 2004 by wearing a skirt to school. As Ed explained:

We received a letter from the school saying trousers or, for girls, skirts, and it made me think, why not boys, so I wore one. But then I was told it wasn't allowed.

This instinctive distrust of authority coupled with fearlessness in the face of ridicule are great attributes for someone joining the Quality Assurance team.

If you've got a similar spirit, we are still looking for a mid-level tester and junior tester (no experience required) to join the New York team.

Mint Digital spin-out Picklive has been nominated for a Guardian MEGA award in the Breakthrough Technology Business category.

Congratulations, guys!

If you've never tried it, you can play along at 7.45pm tonight to Marseille v Manchester United. You get 3 free plays and you could win a tracksuit.

At this year's WebApp Weekender, we had 5 days to build the projects using the Quotables API.

As the brief was to generate traffic over a 30-day period, our team (Team Asimov) thought it made sense to experiment widely, fail fast and run with the winners.

Here's what we built:

Quotagram

Supercharge your instagrams by superimposing quotes. It's like lolcats for hipsters: http://www.quotagram.com or follow @quotagram.

Quizables

A white-label platform for quotations quizzes: http://quizabl.es or follow @quizables.

Please Release Me

A global art project to delight strangers with the power of an awesome quote: http://release.quotabl.es or follow @plsrelease.

We'd love your feedback on any of these projects. Please leave a comment below.

We are down in Dorset on our annual web application building competition.

Here are details of this year's challenge or browse #waw11 for latest chatter.

Update: the results

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?

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:

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.