1. Join the Quality Police

    Posted in News by Jenny Wong on 06 August, 2010

    Our Quality Assurance team is looking for two new testers to join us.

    One tester will be based in our London office and one will be in our New York office.

    If you’re analytical, have a great eye for detail and you’re interested in helping create innovative social websites, please get in touch.

    Please see our jobs section for more details.

    (The London tester role has now been filled)

  2. Quotables: Hiring in Glasgow

    Posted in News by Andy Bell on 04 August, 2010

    Quotables is looking for a community champion and two interns. Quotables is based in Glasgow: we felt the site needed to be in the part of the UK with the shortest lifespans and the best jokes. After all, we are here for a good time, not for a long time.

    We've been enthused by the comments we've received since Quotables went public last week:

    Brilliant idea, looks great.

    Graham Linehan (Yes, Graham Linehan from the IT crowd!)

    I am loving Quotables and wish you every success with it.

    Oli Barrett

  3. Organogram News

    Posted in News by Andy Bell on 29 July, 2010

    The last few months have been exciting times for Mint, with many new projects, several great new hires and the momentous decision to spin off Picklive and with it our beloved Tim, Noam and Krzysztof. (Now promoted to the Mint Hall of Fame.)

    It seems a good time to reshuffle a few things at Mint. The aim of these changes is mainly to bring clarity and focus to the business and to ensure that Mint is in great shape to achieve its goals.

  4. Love a Good Quote

    Posted in News by Andy Bell on 29 July, 2010

    QuotablesLogo500pxRed

    We are just launching a new project called Quotabl.es. The aim of Quotabl.es is to be the freshest and most accurate quotations site on the web. Long term, Quotabl.es aims to do for the dusty quotations dictionary what Wikipedia did for the Encyclopedia Britannica.

    But that's the long term aim.

    Today, we need your help. If you've got a minute, please add one quote you love. (Go to Quotabl.es, sign up and click on ‘Submit Quote’.)

    To see regular updates of popular quotes, follow @QuotablesLoves.

    Quotabl.es is work in progress. Any feedback much appreciated (either in the comments below or to hello@quotabl.es).

    And remember:

    If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.

  5. Soulful ad for kick-ass job

    Posted in News by Andy Bell on 20 July, 2010

    It's not often you get a soulful moment in a job ad. I love this sentiment from our normally stone-hearted CEO:

    We all have a responsibility to help those less experienced than ourselves. Those of us who are experienced developers can all look back on mentors who helped us along the way. 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. At Mint many of our "junior" developers have moved into senior roles in the last two years, and we're very proud of this aspect of our culture.

    We are hiring a variety of developers (London, New York or Glasgow) and an interaction designer in London.

  6. Mint Mobile Open for Business

    Posted in News by Christopher Wilson on 28 June, 2010

    mint-mobile-logo-phone

    Buoyed by the success of our iPhone app building weekend exercise, the fantastic response to our World Cup real-time visualizer, and the confidence from working on production projects in the mobile web space for blue-chip clients, we are ready to declare our mobile division open for business.

  7. LivePitch

    Posted in News by Utku Can on 17 June, 2010

    livepitch

    Just over a month ago, we wrote about a concept World Cup real-time visualiser for the iPad. We had some tremendous feedback since then, so thank you for your interest. Over the course of the month, we have been working hard to build that application.

    I'm delighted to announce LivePitch is now available, for free, on the App Store!

  8. A glorious month of Picklive

    Posted in News by Andy Bell on 11 June, 2010

    Pick Live Flag

    I'm nervous about USA v England tomorrow. We all know that the USA has better dentistry, better writers, better mix-tapes, better magazines, higher GDP per head, more charismatic leaders. Football is what England is supposed to be good at. What makes it worse, there are characters in our New York office who will never shut up if USA win. 

  9. Precious Gems

    Posted in Tech by Ron DeVera on 10 June, 2010

    One of my favorite aspects of Mint Digital's work is starting new projects on a regular basis. This lets the team learn from past mistakes, and incorporate the latest design and tech ideas that we've been itching to try out. When we find something that works well, we're able to update other projects with the best new ideas.

    We certainly don't kick off each Rails app from scratch. The starting point is BloomBox, our toolbox for building fast, scalable websites. As the project progresses, we learn hard lessons about zero-downtime deployments, front- and back-end optimization, and our development and testing practices.

    A few critical pieces of BloomBox tech have made our recent websites noticeably faster and more reliable. These features would also improve our older projects nicely, so we extracted them to gems. These gems solve some common problems, so to contribute back to the developer community, we've released them as open source.

  10. First London Redis meetup

    Posted in Tech by Thomas Pomfret on 02 June, 2010

    Last week saw the first London Redis meetup, which we were proud to host over at Mint Towers.

  11. A statistical review

    Posted in Reflections by Tom Harman on 25 May, 2010

    Mint projects often have the following things in common:

    1. Tight design & build deadlines
    2. Live for a short period of time
    3. High user engagement
    4. New technical challenges
    5. New lessons learnt

    Our portfolio hasn't always been the most effective way of showing off these attributes. In an attempt to increase awareness of the more intricate details of our projects we had an experiment and put together a statistical case study for IT'S MY TIME...

  12. Hemlock goes Flash free!

    Posted in Tech by Kejia Zhu on 20 May, 2010

    New Javascript Compatible XMPP Framework

    We don't want to get involved in Steve Jobs' war on Flash. But just in case he wins (and on current form, who'd bet against him?), we have re-engineered Hemlock, our open source framework for real-time web apps, to work in 100% Javascript environments.

  13. Mint’s iPad Challenge

    Posted in News by Utku Can on 07 May, 2010

    Visualiser Photo

    We are fascinated with data and what you can do with it.

    We are fascinated with '2Screen'. People using a second device to augment TV is increasingly common.

    We are fascinated with the real-time web. Information delivered to you, as it happens, opens a world of possibilities. 

    We have combined these passions before. Picklive Football, our two screen, real-time game, has been spun out as a separate start-up.

    Lately, there's something else we've been fascinated with. It's the iPad. It's one of the most exciting canvases us digital folk have ever had a chance to build stuff on.

    Picklive captures a whole load of data during every football match they cover. For the World Cup, they'll be covering every single match. We always thought there were other things to do with this data. The World Cup and the iPad turned out to be the catalysts we needed to put things into gear, and we think we may be onto something quite special...

  14. Apps from the Weekender

    Posted in News by Utku Can on 04 May, 2010

    All Weekender Apps

    We never did report on the Web App Weekender 2010. Here's the 3 apps we created.

  15. 3 new developers

    Posted in News by Andy Bell on 19 April, 2010

    We are delighted to announce reinforcements to the Mint development team: Paul Fedory, Salvatore Formisano and Edd Sowden.

  16. Football3s becomes Picklive Football

    Posted in News by Andy Bell on 15 March, 2010

    Picklive Logo

    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.

  17. IT'S:UX:TIME

    Posted in Design by Tom Harman on 09 March, 2010

    Following the recent launch of IT'S MY TIME for Benetton, I wanted to give a little insight into our UX process with snippets from our approach and how we've tried to apply this thinking to IT'S MY TIME. I'll start with the obvious...

    There are two very distinct phases to UX design:

    Pre-launch launch and post-launch infographic
  18. We're off!

    Posted in News by Utku Can on 22 February, 2010

    4370439071_b485a58c83_o

    It's the WebApp Weekender 2010! Except, it's not on a weekend and we're not building web apps...

  19. IT'S MY TIME - 48 hours and 1.3m pageviews later

    Posted in News by Utku Can on 10 February, 2010

    IMT Graph

    Benetton's IT'S MY TIME launched just over 48 hours ago and we couldn't be happier with the response. So, we thought we'd share some statistics with you.

  20. Football3s is go

    Posted in News by Andy Bell on 02 February, 2010



    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).