Mint Digital

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 areas you don't normally hear from. 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.

Hello and happy new year from Mint!

On January 1st, we launched New Year Revolution for Channel 4.

The starting point for New Year Revolution was the observation that most of us make new year's resolutions, but few of us keep them. The ambition is that by harnessing faces of Channel 4 and the collective willpower of the social web, we might help people keep the resolutions, and have some fun along the way.

In the first five days alone, we had over 20,000 join the revolution, and it is still gathering pace.

Update: The interaction designer position has now been filled. We are still looking for our visual designer!

We are looking to grow the Mint Studio by adding two new designers to the team.

We think designing here at Mint has to be one of the most exciting jobs around. Just in the last year, we launched Speedo Pace Club, the very magnetic Stickygram, "the award-winning"* Sexperience 1000, ran 2Screen 2011, launched Olly, the list continues...

If you want to join this small team making big things, head over to jobs, take a look at the visual and interaction designer positions and drop us a line.

We look forward to talking.

* I always wanted to say that.

Last night we were at The BIMA Awards 2011, where The Sexperience 1000 picked up the award for 'Best use of Data, Mashups & Data-Visualisation'. We were also delighted to be nominated for the 2011 Grand Prix award!

Thanks go to all the Mints who worked on it, our tech partners for the project LingoBee, Ipsos MORI, Endemol and of course, Adam Gee and all at Channel 4 for allowing us to keep making great work.

I'd heard a lot about the mysterious and ever-growing Pocketmints meetups from across the pond. There had been six to date, they'd apparently been going from strength to strength and there was always a copious amount of food. So when I realised that my trip to New York would overlap with the seventh Pocketmints meetup I had many questions. Who would the speaker be? What would it be like? How much food is meant by 'copious'?

On 8 August 2011, we launched Mint Foundry, our first ever graduate scheme. We set four makers the brief: Make something connected to the Internet that doesn't live on a screen.

Sadly, their three month tenure with us is coming to an end. As a final farewell, we are hosting an informal presentation by our four graduates on what they've been up to, followed by some drinks. There will be a bit of a grand unveil, and hopefully a chance to play with what they've made.

It is this Thursday, 27 October at the Mint Offices at Exmouth Market. You can book yourself a spot on the event page.

Hope to see you there!

Our tribute, made from the parts of a MacBook Pro. By Mint Foundry.

Click to see large version

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.

The stunning Finsbury Town Hall was the venue for last week's 2Screen 2011 - Mint's annual feast of all things connected TV. We had a blast, we hope you did too!

It was terrific to see the event grow so dramatically in the space of a year (we doubled our audience from 2010). The social TV conversation has raised its game too, with a brilliant bunch of talks from Andy Hood of AKQA, David Flynn of Remarkable, Declan Caulfield of Starling and Russell Davies of R/GA, all wonderfully compèred by BBC Click's LJ Rich.

Of course, as befits a 2Screen affair, the real energy of the evening took place on our second screens - the #2Screen hashtag is packed with gems and well worth having a dig through. This year we decided we wanted to take the kind of split-attention behaviour we've become used to at conferences and push it a step further. Our Footnotes app lived on the 2Screen mobile site and added an extra layer of engagement to the speakers' presentations, with a steady trickle of additional nuggets of information and useful links throughout the night. It was a fun experiment, if you got a chance to play with it we'd love to know what you thought.

We'll be back very soon with some lovely shiny videos of all the talks from the event, but for now I wanted to give a quick roundup of some of the 2Screen write-ups that caught my eye over the past week:

The countdown to 2Screen 2011 is almost over. Our sell-out event will be kicking off at 6.30pm tonight with awesome speakers, an exceptionally good-looking audience, booze, nibbles and good times galore. You can follow our #2Screen hashtag to keep up with the excitement. We love it when a plan comes together.

Over the last couple of days I’ve been exploring the lay of the land with a look at how content creators are approaching connected TV and an overview of what the new levels of audience data will mean for the industry.

But I’ve saved what is perhaps the trickiest area for last. Over to Google’s Eric Schmidt again - speaking at this year’s MacTaggart lecture - for a quick introduction:

“Now we’re riding a second, much bigger, wave of interactivity. It’s a convergence of TV and Internet screens. This time the interaction isn’t happening via your red button - it’s on the web through your laptop, tablet or mobile. But most important of all, this time it’s social.”

At Mint HQ we’re busy gearing up for our biggest ever 2Screen, so I thought I’d dig a little deeper into yesterday’s discussion on what happens when TV and the web get together.

It’s interesting to explore how the data that comes out of internet-connected TV and second screen apps is going to affect our viewing experiences in the future. TV commissioning today is still in thrall of the dreaded ‘overnights’, sourced from a supposedly representative slice of the population. It’s that BARB data that determines whether a show survives or disappears.

What will happen when broadcasters can access the huge amounts of data that will emerge from an audience watching on web-enabled TVs? Everything will be measurable: how many of us are on Facebook while we watch X-Factor? What programmes are viewers switching to after Downton Abbey? How many are actually watching, and engaging, with the ad breaks? This kind of audience access is unprecedented, and the minutiae of programme analytics will be pored over by commissioners, much as it already is by web entrepreneurs. How will that affect decision-making, and scheduling?

Two screen, three screen, dual screen, connected TV, IPTV, social TV, smart TVs... we might not know quite what to call it yet, but the intersection of TV and the web isn't a thing of the future anymore. 60% of TVs sold in John Lewis are internet-enabled, and the store expects this to rise to 80% by Christmas. Google TV is set to launch in the UK in early 2012, with YouView not far behind. Two screen is about to go mainstream. (There's even a rather excellent conference on the subject in London this week.)

On Monday night BAFTA hosted a panel discussion on what the future of connected TV means to content creators. Suveer Kothari from Google TV, Tom Williams from BBC IPTV, Kate Vogel from the Tate and Richard Welsh from Bigballs Films discussed everything from VOD, to multi-platform storytelling, to Carling using camels to deliver beer in Yorkshire.

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.

We found a beautiful venue, confirmed the first bunch of speakers and finalised the booze order. 2Screen 2011 is set for 29 September 2011 at London's Finsbury Town Hall.

We launched Sexperience, the web partner to The Sex Education Show on Channel 4 back in September 2008. In time for Season 5, we undertook the most major overhaul of Sexperience since launch.

With a new site architecture and codebase, complete content reorganisation and refreshed interaction and visual design, this is the best Sexperience has ever worked and looked. Do check it out.

But as Steve would say, 'There's one more thing…' Alongside the site re-design, we have been working on another product to add to the Sexperience family.

We started 2Screen in 2009 with the question 'Can TV & the web make a baby?'. We returned in 2010 to explore what was by then becoming a mainstream trend.

Now, 2Screen is coming back for a third year on 29 September 2011. We're putting together an exciting line-up to discuss the intersection of TV and the social web.

We're going to be announcing more details in a couple of weeks time. If you'd like to receive an update when we do, leave your email address on the 2Screen site.

Mint Foundry is our brand new graduate scheme. This first year tasks four makers for three months with the brief:

Make something connected to the Internet that doesn't live on a screen.

I know I keep banging on about it but this Saturday is a massive day for everyone in Sussex. We have waited 14 years for Brighton to have a new stadium. We've been to Downing Street, we've had to play 'home' games in Gillingham and then had many years in a depressing athletics stadium.

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.