Mint Digital

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, you might like 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

The London version of Google Street View launched today. A few Mints have landed starring roles.

Thomas and Utku saunter round Oval (alas, photo now removed)

All 18 Mints have decamped to the Dorset countryside for our annual web application building competition.

If you're interested, read more on the dedicated blog or on Twitter.

Osama bin Everywhere is a cross-platform documentary we produced last year. (Osama Loves is the web part.)

It aired for the second time last week. For some unknown reason, we got far more feedback this time.

Here are some comments:

"I am a Catholic and father to 6 children. Having just watched Osama bin Everywhere, I feel this programme should be shown to every child in every school in the UK regardless of religious belief. How refreshing it was to watch. This young women deserves public recognition and a national award. The comments made and feelings expressed by all the Osamas were a true insight to Muslim people and the meaning of their religion. The programme should be shown in a primetime slot to maximise the effect of its message. Bad people are bad people, they don't need to blame their religious beliefs. We all know who they are in our respective communities. Congratulations to all involved. Thank you again."

"Not really a press enquiry but please pass my congratulations onto Farrah - I taught her at school in the 1990s. Watched today's Channel 4 programme whilst at home recovering from surgery. Very, very proud of what she's become - but not at all surprised!"

Hemlock is Mint's toolkit for building Flash applications that support real-time many-to-many interaction. Hemlock is open source. We hope to release it mid-February.

Thursday's mashup* event is about the 'Realtime Social Web'. We will be demoing two Hemlock applications there to show the type of application it inspires.

We are hiring someone to help us grow a community around our forthcoming game, Football3s. (This position has now been filled)

At Doc/Fest on Saturday, Lunchtime Loveboat won the Crossover Labs pitching competition. This award is considered the America's Cup of interactivity.

Lunchtime Loveboat combines the flirty dating of a site like I'm in Like With You with the reality energy of a show like The Salon.

Channel 4 just launched Sexperience (commissioned by Adam Gee). Yesterday 463,744 pages were viewed. Each visitor viewed 10.5 pages on average, indicating a high level of engagement.

The backbone of the site is over 350 videos, featuring multiple answers to questions like When were you sure of your sexual identity? or Have you ever slept with more than one person at the same time?

Last month was 2gether08. The stand-out speaker was Russell Davies who gave a wonderfully counter-intuitive talk on how being clear often runs counter to being interesting.

Also Julian Baggini was great talking about his Welcome to Everytown experience. At a technology conference, it is easy to forget how important locality is to most people. Two thirds of Britains live within five miles of where they were born.

Mint was proud to premiere Web 2.0: The Musical. It looks like we'll perform this nonsense again. Watch this space.

Also, I made a speech on How to be Generous. Here's the Guardian's take on it. This blog post is sort of my summary.