Facebook came out last week and made a bold statement - 'Chairs are like Facebook'.

We like chairs. Everyone likes chairs. So we got to thinking. What else are like chairs?

Easy.

Foldables.

I went to see my old pal Stephen Hardingham at Channel 4 last week. Before the meeting he said: "You could tell us about how things are going at Mint Digital these days."

This called for a short presentation. I hadn't seen Stephen in about 4 years, so here’s how Mint has changed since then.

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.

Last week I attended the Media Guardian Edinburgh International Television Festival - the UK TV industry's annual decampment to the festival city for three boozy days of keynotes and canapés. Post bank-holiday, the dust has just about settled on Elisabeth Murdoch's MacTaggart (read the full text here), which went down pretty well on the ground, and doesn't seem to have ruffled too many feathers elsewhere.

For my part, I was most interested in what Murdoch had to say about what she called the "explosive emergence of a made-for-online video category". MGEITF was "powered by YouTube" - keeping delegates going with a swanky smoothie bar and getting highlights from every session online in the blink of an eye. But it was a small, low-profile panel session called 'Who needs a commission anyway?' that got to the heart of what YouTube means to the industry today.

To preface this, a personal confession: I'm embarrassingly obsessed with watching YouTube 'beauty gurus'. I'm not sure where it comes from - I don't even wear that much make-up - but I just can't stop watching them. My absolute favourite 'guru' (horrible word) is the entirely delightful FleurDeForce, a 24 year old with nearly 400,000 subscribers on her beauty channel, a wildly popular vlogging channel and a bridal channel. She's massive in the States too, with fans queuing for up to 14 hours to meet her at VidCon. A one-woman broadcast network.

So, did you Join In last weekend?

To be honest, when we first started working on the website for Join In - a weekend of free local sport across the country - I didn’t really think I was the target audience. I’m not the sporty type. I think it comes from being a defiantly geeky kid in a house of enthusiastic football fans, and going to an overwhelmingly sports-mad high school alongside the likes of Andy Murray. I still regard the gym as a necessary evil.

But then we had the Olympics. And nobody was more surprised than me at how unexpectedly awesome it all was. I think the thing that I found most inspiring was reflecting on the incredible work ethic, discipline and self-motivation of all those athletes. What if we all applied a similar kind of drive to our working lives? I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately.

I also started thinking about my own attitude to sport because, frankly, it all did look really fun. And so I found myself browsing the lovely Join In site to see what was happening near me. In the end I chose fencing, because I’ve always wanted to try it.

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!

A couple of months ago, we excitedly announced the return of Foundry for 2012. Following a call for applications, we took over one of the shipping containers at Boxpark and invited our shortlist down to a day long workshop, as part of Uncontained.

The workshop was lots of fun and the selection process tough, but it now gives me great pleasure to introduce you to the team following the footsteps of Foundry 2011 and Olly. In their own words, they are…

We've just launched Mad World, an interactive audio experience that invites you to take a trip inside three very different brains, brought to life with the help of some mind-blowing binaural audio.

Mad World is the online companion piece to Channel 4's 4 Goes Mad - a season of prime-time programmes challenging mental health stigma and discrimination. The season kicks off on Monday 23rd July, visit the website for more info.

Developed in collaboration with mental health charities Time to Change, Rethink Mental Illness and Mind, Mad World explores three of the most misunderstood mental health conditions – schizophrenia, OCD and bipolar disorder.

We are delighted to announce Sexperience came away as the winner for 'Best Website' at last night's Broadcast Digital Awards.

We have been working on Sexperience with Channel 4 for the last four years, improving it year on year. In this refresh, we concentrated on unifying the areas of the site under topics most relevant to teenagers. We also made waves with Sexperience 1000, an interactive data visualiser around sex we realised with the help of our partners Lingobee.

Thanks to the Mints who all worked very hard on Sexperience, thanks to Endemol for their contributions and thanks to Adam Gee and all at Channel 4 for the opportunity to keep making great work. Last but not least, thanks to Broadcast Magazine for the hangover.

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.)

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.

Last summer was the inaugural year of the Foundry, our graduate scheme. Their brief was 'create something connected to the internet that doesn't live on screens'. In response, they came up with Olly, the web connected smelly robot. It turns your online notifications into smell.

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...