Prototypes sound good: they suggest innovation and flexibility, without the cost of setting anything in stone.

As a digital innovation agency, we’ve built a good few prototypes for our clients. Alas, these prototypes have been some of our least satisfying projects.

Yes, we've been inspired by the initial vision. Yes, we’ve worked hard to make the client happy. Yes, we’ve gone the extra mile to delight. And yet, and yet... something has never quite clicked.

What goes wrong?

Slip

With no go-live date, difficult decisions get delayed.

Bloat

There are bigger ambitions for a prototype than for a normal project. Freed from the constraints of shipping code, everyone hopes to create something game-changing. Extra features get added as the team grasp towards that big ambition.

Lack of Focus

Not wanting to blame the client, but... usually there’s no one at the client firm who is totally focused on the prototype. A prototype is often a bit of a hobby, somewhere down the to-do list.

Good digital products are often simple ideas kept sharp by hard design decisions. Prototypes pull in the opposite direction.

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.

Our 3D cardboard avatar creation service Foldable.Me launches today. The video above is a lovely introduction to Foldable, so to maximise the chance that you click on it, I won't write another word.

My favourite Mint job ad ever said:

We all have a responsibility to help those less experienced than ourselves… It's the nature of life that we can never really repay those mentors, so the only thing we can do is help others to develop their skills as well.

What's true for individuals is also true for companies. Mint has been tremendously fortunate with the help we received - particularly from our chairman David Frank. We are keen to pass the good karma along.

For the next three months, we're sharing our London office with two startups:

• Kooki - a mobile loyalty card app

• SketchStreet - a crowd-sourced fashion community, with built-in fulfilment

We hope they'll benefit from mingling with like-minded souls. We hope to learn something from their entrepreneurialism.

(Close followers of Mint may notice this is similar to last year's Don't Be A Banker scholarship.)

(Apologies, this news is about 6 weeks late.)

Picklive, the real-time fantasy football game spun out from Mint, has sold to a team headed by David Galan, CEO of Soccer Millions. Galan says:

We are delighted to have acquired Picklive. The founding team has developed world-class and truly innovative technology, which we believe is a unique fusion of sportsbetting, in-play engagement and social style gaming and that will undoubtedly appeal to gaming operators.

It’s great for Picklive as it gets the financial clout and distribution expertise to take it to the next stage. It’s great for Mint, as Noam and, shortly, Tim, return to the mothership. Welcome back, guys!

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.

What an amazing few days we have seen at the Olympics. Team GB have done us proud.

What more can be said?

Well, perhaps you start getting that guilty, too-much-sofa feeling. After all, the best part of sport is getting trainers on your feet, air in your lungs and endorphins in your noggin.

Working with a new charity, Join In, Mint built a site that make it easier to do just that, to get involved. Focused on the weekend after the Olympics, it is a celebration of local sport. And you are invited!

To celebrate the Diamond Jubilee, we made a portrait of the Queen from 1000s of StickyGrams.

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.

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 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%.