Mint Digital

Football3s has become Picklive Football.

This change is partly to reflect the increasing megalomania of the Picklive team (they don't want to limit themselves to Football).

And partly because every new user mispronounced Football3s as 'Football Three Ess' (rather than 'Football Threes') which rather ruined the point of the name.

Two weeks ago, Tim made this video contrasting the tech buzz of so-called Silicon Roundabout with the dire tech scene in South London's Vauxhall.

Bizarrely, reality has just caught up with fiction. This week, Tim and the rest of the Football3s team have moved to Clerkenwell. A new company has been spun out from Mint to develop Football3s and other real-time sports games.

The first job? Build desks.

(By the way, they are looking to hire a developer interested in real time games).

Meet Lammie. A client (who wishes to remain anonymous) sponsored her in Mint's name. We thank you.

We are hoping she will be friends with Tom the Alpaca and his defunct Twitter account.

Last Friday, the 20,000th bug was entered into our tracking database. As Christopher commented when we reached bug 10,000, this industrial-scale error generation is not cause for recrimination. Quite the reverse, it is time to celebrate.

By that logic, it should be a double celebration: we've doubled our rate of bug creation. Mint's first 10,000 bugs took 26 months, the second 10,000 took under 14 months.

To get this online party started we are holding a prize sweepstake. Guess the date Mint hits bug 30,000 to win (enter in the comments below).

The prize is fumigation for life.

Kevin Slavin, co-founder of Area/Code, spoke at the RSA's Playing The City event on Wednesday night.

Area/Code's initial focus was creating games that use technology but take place in the real world, like PacManhattan. Some of their recent work has had a TV focus, like Parking Wars or Sopranos A&E Connection.

Mint has gone in the opposite direction. We started in TV and, with Football3s, are moving closer to the real world. It felt like we are interested in the same things but from different perspectives.

I can't do justice to his talk, but here are a couple of nuggets.

Who would believe it? 5 years old and still in business.

A couple of weeks ago documentary film maker Adam Curtis spoke at BBC Vision Forum on his latest work, a co-production with installation theatre group Punchdrunk, called It Felt Like a Kiss.

A few notes:

1. The internet is changing the dominant sensibility from wanting to be told stuff to wanting to experience stuff.
2. Punchdrunk has cottoned on to the fact that personal experience is the most important thing. Everything else, TV included, feels thin.
3. The internet, on its own, can't do stories. Hybrids of TV and the web may be the way forward.

Apparently, two Mint projects for Channel 4 have been nominated for the Royal Television Society Innovation award for UGC.

Both projects combine TV audiences with web mass-participation. For the last four years, we have been convinced that this combination provides great opportunity. It is great to see these ideas come to fruition.

Where did these ideas come from?

In the corner of our New York office, a guy called Joel has spent the last two years beavering away on rocket software.

Yesterday his team qualified for Level 1 of the X Prize Lunar Landing Challenge.

Congratulations, Joel and Masten Space Systems... that's an awesome achievement!

The 2Screen event has reached capacity. If you'd like to come and haven't got a ticket, you can add yourself to the waiting list. We'll do our best to fit you in.

Thanks to everyone who bought a ticket. Look forward to seeing you on the 24th.

More and more people watch TV with their laptops open.

Groups of web and TV producers are attempting to create experiences that make use of this new behaviour.

The area is ripe with possibility. Most recent web successes have social interaction at their core. Nothing beats TV at getting large audiences to congregate.

It also throws up new problems. How can you create an experience that is compelling on both screens, but not distracting on either?

We thought it would be good to talk. 2Screen is an event that gathers a bunch of innovators who are doing interesting things in this area. Each speaker has 10 minutes to present their experiences.

The evening aims to answer the burning question: 'Can web & the TV make a baby?'

It is at Hoxton Hall at 7pm, 24 September. There will be a party afterwards.

Sign up now!

So, we've launched Hemlock the website. It's a strange sort of open source project: no code, no documentation. Just hot air. That will be remedied soon.

(Incidentially, if you like the url hemlock-kills.com, you might like the mixtape Girl Talk murders Seattle.)

For the last few months Mint's design team (that's Noam and Tom) have been working with an intensity best described as scary. From early to late, they have been thinking so hard that you can almost see steam coming out of their ears. If you distract either of them, they have a far-away, pained look as they attempt to keep their brain full of the design they are working on. They give the impression, oh so very politely, of needing to get back to their screen.

Now, help is at hand. Three tremendous designers have just joined Mint. That calls for an introduction:

Sanjay Mistry