It’s hard to know where to begin. I could start by telling you about the captivating speech given by Clay Shirky on post Gutenberg Economics and what this spells for TV in the 21st Century. Or Peter Bazalgette’s theory on how the credit crunch will accelerate US driven consolidation in the industry. Or what about how MENTHOL TV BLEW THE ROOF OFF THE PLACE with a devastating pitch by chief Mayhem Maker and dragon slayer Mona Yousefi!
Having been selected to take part in a special festival edition of the BBC’s Dragon’s Den, Mona had 5 minutes to impress four real life-commissioning editors with her Mayhem Makers pitch. Within seconds Mona had the dragons and the audience on the edge of their seats. Regaling the auditorium with tales of Mayhem Makers’ sell out West End screenings and the story behind the show, the knock out blow came when she played the promo.
The crowd went mad and the dragons were speechless, except for Heather Jones, MTV’s Executive Vice President, Content & Creative Director of Television who said.
“It was worth coming to Edinburgh just to see this”
Thanks to Mona’s outstanding pitch, we won the competition but what was most exciting was the response from the 250 TV types in the room. They loved it! Mayhem Makers was the people’s choice.
Another Mint / Menthol TV project that was making noise at the festival was Osama Loves. Cover star of Future Media, Osama the Nigerian Tailor and his love for chickens was everywhere. Watch this space on news about the documentary due to air later this month.
Last month was 2gether08. The stand-out speaker was Russel 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 5 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.
On Monday, we launched the unsignedAct website, part of a cross-media campaign to find the best unsigned musical talent in the UK.
The project is BIG. It spans web, WAP, print, TV and live music events. It is sponsored by Orange, broadcast by Channel 4 and enabled by Sony Ericsson. Universal Music provides the prize (a record deal).
IRIS, Princess, Airmotion and Mint are turning the whole thing into a reality. IRIS have done a splendid job on the branding and visual identity (the logo has been built from custom-made flight cases). Princess is producing the TV show. Airmotion is making the WAP site. And Mint? Well, our handsome team refined the site concept, designed the user experience and built a rock-solid piece of software.
Acts enter the competition by making a demo CD. Each demo CD can be customised with artwork and contains up to 3 tracks. It’s intended to be a little gem, showcasing the best of each band’s creativity.
Fans add their favourite tracks to a personal mixtape. Mixtapes can be customised and shared with friends (check my selection, below).
It’s been 48 hours since launch. Over 1,000 bands and solo artists have entered. Princess were hoping for 3,000 acts to enter in 3 weeks, so it is a promising start.
Today, on August 1, 2008, both the UK and US offices of Mint Digital internationally celebrated the first Ron DeVera day. Simply put, Ron was the first employee hired by Mint Digital to sport a mustache. Since his arrival at Mint, he has ascended to near legendary status through his relentless work ethic, peerless HTML/CSS/JS skills, and his total domination in all company award categories. All these traits are personified by the tasteful choice of facial hair that has endeared Ron to Mint.
In the quest for the secret to the DeVera mojo, Mint Digital requested that all employees cultivate what is known simply as “the look”. All the entries have been digitally documented and uploaded to Mint Digital’s photo challenge site which was developed at this year’s WebApp Weekender. Anecdotally, Mint has found that the mustaches have improved the collective morale, increased individual productivity, flattened the learning curves for difficult technologies, enhanced creative output both qualitatively and quantitatively, and have provided numerous unspoken benefits outside of the office as well.
Personally, I must say that I was confronted with aesthetic choices of uncommon weight and subtlety. When I fashioned my mustache early this morning, there was a temptation to be outlandish, a seduction towards the theatre of the garish.
However, I reflected and stopped myself immediately. This was no banal mustache-growing competition one might find in some underfunded regional circus.
Filmmaker Masood Khan and junior doctor Farrah Jarral are setting off on Osama Loves, a mad adventure to prove that not all Muslims are ‘extremist nut jobs’.
Over 50 days, they seek out 500 people called Osama and ask them “What do you love?” They hope that by using the name of the world’s most infamous Muslim, they will reveal the sunnier side of Islam.
The mission, and the resulting documentary, is produced by Mint’s TV arm Menthol. The website is made by Mint Digital and as such, it is the first of our TV/web crossover commissions.
It is a very exciting project. I can’t wait to see what happens.
On behalf of Festival Director Heather Croall and the entire Doc/Fest team, I would like to say thank you for all your hard work, thoroughness, persistence, cool-headedness and patience.
Thank you to the software development team who make everything seem effortless. We are in awe of your conceptual brilliance and phenomenal problem solving skills.
Thank you to the design team [our friends, Designers Republic] who make us look so good: true talent and unparalleled attention to detail.
We love our website. It is a great testament to Mint’s visionary leadership and renegade team spirit.
Looking around the Mint Imperial (our luxurious Vauxhall office), you might think that Mints don’t get fashion. The average Mint looks like he hasn’t been shopping since C&A closed its doors.
The site is fabulous. As well as providing all the latest news and behind the scenes content from Graduate Fashion Week, Style Insider offers tips and advice to fashion students looking to break into the industry.
Best of all is the UGC Style Insider Challenge. River Island shoppers photograph their own look and upload the picture. Users vote for the most stylish or individual look, leading to prizes for the most popular entries.
We’ve having a summer party for everyone at Mint, their friends and anyone else who wants to play. If you want to get involved, email thedaddy@mintdigital.com.
I have just come back from Digital Hollywood where I spent the whole of last week. Highlights included:
Listening to Chuck D, founder of Public Enemy speak. I reckon he might be the best speaker on digital publishing that I have heard. Some highlights included:
Don’t worry too much about contractual terms and other barriers to getting stuff out there. If you have a good idea its most important that you just get it out there. The deal will fall into place;
When somebody compared UGC to McDonald’s and said that people prefer editorially selected content (fine restaurants where people were prepared to spend big money) to UGC (McDs), Mista Chuck pointed out that whilst nobody ever reheated a Big Mac, if you bite into a fresh one, it tastes really good (and so it is for UGC).
What was most special was that Chuck D used 10 words when most people would have used 100 and he clearly had not just read a bunch of blogs and regurgitated the consensus. Maybe not surprising given that he has a track record of innovation in music. Afterwards I got the chance to trade a few stories with him from back in the day (him from Long Island, me from the Swansea Valley) as per the photo (apologies for picture quality but this was taken on a 59p hamburger of a camera phone);
Driving to meetings in an automatic hire car. I couldn’t get used to the fact that there was no biting point and you should only use one foot, so often the Mints showed up at meetings with a jerky motion as the automobile lunged into the car park. We also found an awesome radio channel so we had a soundtrack to our arrival, and at one point my voice was coarse having been singing in the car too much on the way to the meeting. The moral of this story is to save your voice for the meeting;
Looking around the event and the wider Hollywood community, it struck me that most digital endeavours were either focussed entirely on technology or on making short form content for the web. I think Mint’s focus of combining technology with ideas for hit formats is fresh and exciting;
I had a good chat with a lot of delegates about the importance of agile technology when it comes to TV on the web. All were in agreement that the agile approach demonstrated by Mint is the only way to build sites that move as fast as their audiences do.
After 4 months of intense work, we have just launched the Weplay beta. Weplay is a sports network for children, something like Piczo meets TeamSnap. The client is a startup backed by Major League Baseball, Pequot Capital and Creative Artists Agency. By transferring our technology, and working closely with the outstanding development team at Weplay, as assembled by Luke Melia, we helped Weplay hit a very aggressive launch target.
Weplay.com is one of the biggest sites Mint has built. It includes a complex model of parent to child permissioning, a state-of-the-art UI, and a very robust security model to ensure the online safety of the children who make up the sites core demographic.
Yet again, Carsonified put together a strong lineup of speakers covering a wide range of topics themed around where design on the web is currently heading. After the pre-conference party the night before we made a slightly slow start to the conference but soon got to hear some great talks.
It’s a neat little app that counts down to your holiday. Every day it offers you a local tip and tells you the weather in the place that you are travelling to.
The app is part of the promotional campaign for the Lonely Planet Encounter city guides. Over the next few weeks, the Desktop Countdown will be promoted on coffee sleeves at 14 locations in London, banners on Yahoo! Weather and on London Underground posters. The total reach of the marketing campaign will be to over 3.6 million people. We snapped this poster at Vauxhall tube, round the corner from our office.
From a technology point of view it is pretty cool. It is the first time Mint has used Adobe AIR. AIR is Adobe’s platform for creating desktop apps. It brings the web closer to our desktop. It blurs the boundary between online and offline. In short, it opens up a bunch of new possibilities.
Well, a few other Mints and I are just back from Scotland on Rails and what a good time we had! First, it’s always good to be back in the homeland. Second, it was a great conference.
What made it for me was the size. It was big enough to have decent talks but small enough to get to meet everyone you wanted. Out of the talks I saw, the JRuby talk on Saturday was particularly interesting. I’ve been meaning to give this more attention for a while and this has definitely reinforced the reasons for doing so.
Jonathan Weiss gave an interesting talk on Rails patterns which crossed over with our work at Mint. It’s great to see someone else talk about ideas we’ve been playing with internally. Image processing and asset storage are things we deal with in almost every project.
We also had a great post-conf meetup in London on Tuesday. I wasn’t aware at the time but it was actually a music and Ruby hacking meet. Writing Ruby to make music anyone? Combining two things you love is always good!
Anyway, a great conference all round and I’ll be back next year (if it’s on!). Well done guys. Check out the photos.
Added by Andy Bell: Two Mints were speaking at the conference. Paul Dix was speaking on collective intelligence. Thomas was speaking on high performance rails apps. I added the photo too, in case anyone is wondering why Thomas is posting pictures of himself.
Mint blog
This blog consists of (1) any news that confirms Mint's own existence and (2) thinking on the ethics of user-generated TV, the anatomy of cross-media hits, the principles of participation design and the battle to unmute audiences.
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