Mint Digital

We are hiring someone to help us grow a community around our forthcoming game, Football3s. If you are interested here's the info.

At DocFest 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 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.

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.

We are delighted to see Osama Loves being reported in The Sun.

To celebrate, here's some Mints doing the Osama Loves pose:

On Wednesday at 2gether08, we première our new show. It's already generating buzz.

"I laughed so much, I almost integrated with Flickr."
says Jon Gisby

"Take some Tweets, throw in a Poke or two, add a Digg and a Recommendation, and voila - 'Web 2.0: the musical' - enjoy!"
says Adam Gee

"2.0 out of 2.0. I loved it."
says Matt Locke

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.

Good luck, Farrah and Masood!

Some days it feels like clients don't understand all the effort we put in. Other times they really do, and it makes the appreciation all the sweeter.

Tam at DocFest wrote this lovely email:

Congratulations Mint geniuses!

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.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

With much respect and appreciation.

Tam Nguyen Festival Producer

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.

Sometimes Tom likes to work in private.

Just in case anyone is looking for something to print off and read in the park, here are two articles that have inspired us Mints recently:

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus by Clay Shirky Is Mint trying to solve this problem or make it worse?

Sign Up Forms Must Die by Luke Wroblewski We've been designing flows along these lines for a little while now. It is nice to see someone voice this approach.

We have got a vacancy for someone to dream up and develop mass-participation web ideas.

More details here.

Mint has just returned from a long weekend in the Dorset countryside. We split into 3 teams and spent 4 days competing to build the best web application.

As well as drinking loads of booze, we created some pretty cool apps.

Oh!Creative is a platform for freelance designers to showcase their work. It also allows people commissioning that work to manage their work flow and scheduling.

All Mints together (first time for 18 months!)

Mint has pulled off an almost unprecedented one-two for the Content 360 competition at MipTV. 'One Month Movie Marathon' is shortlisted for the Ogilvy category. 'Kissing Against the System' is shortlisted for the National Film Board of Canada.

Furthermore, Mint collaborated with Different to create 'Dr Who: In Parallel'. This multi-platform concept won a place at BBC Innovation Labs.

(Originally published at NextNYers.)

We've just launched the Skins website for Company Pictures.

There were two things we were aiming for.

Firstly, to let fans get closer to the show's production process. Skins is written by a team of super-talented young writers, working with a bunch of experienced professionals. SkinsLife mimics this process and expands it online.

Secondly, to combine web and real-world activity. A key part of SkinsLife is a party tour. Big-name headliners (soon to be announced) mingle with SkinsLife members showing off their talents. This collision of web and real-life talent will make the parties burst with energy.

The site is striking visually (thanks, Tal!) and offers our slickest usability yet (I especially like the multimedia commenting, a new BloomBox feature).

On the web, words are key. It has been fantastic working with a red-hot drama team who know how to write sentences that zing off the page. Combine that with their deep empathy for their audience and you begin to understand why Skins feels so very different.

We are really proud of SkinsLife. Hope you like it too.

I've just returned from Crossing the Void in Bristol. There was an interesting session on Picture This, a cross-platform photography project.

The discussion was between Preloaded (the web producer) Renegade Productions (the TV producer) and Channel 4 (the commissioner). Here’s some notes:

• "I had hoped the web and the TV would be more integrated" said Alan Hayling from Renegade. This frustration was echoed throughout the team. He said that budget had been part of the problem but also there had been a conservatism on the part of the TV production crew. He would fight that harder next time.
• 11.4% of web sessions are 30 minutes or longer. The average session includes 14 page views. These stats are helping when Channel 4 considers whether to recommission.
• A community web site is a supportive environment. A modern TV show is conflict driven. It was hard to reconcile this tension. Flickr, who provided the web infrastructure, had to be handled with care. The TV show ran counter to their corporate belief that "no photo is better than another".
• Flickr were keen to keep all branding and traffic off their core site. They care passionately about their community and wanted their members to have to deliberately opt-in.
• Preloaded repeatedly iterated designs with target users (in "lab conditions"). One surprising discovery is that many potential users were intimidated by Flickr and felt their work is somehow "not worthy". Armed with this insight, Preloaded focused on making the website approachable, constructive and friendly.
• The plan for one sequence was to film the judges and the mentors reviewing web photos, and to incorporate this footage into the TV show. This didn’t work well in the edit. So it evolved into this budget being spent paying those people to comment directly on photos on the website. This proved popular.

On the train home everyone agreed that Katz, the organiser, is a great "curator of people". In particular, it was inspiring to meet Monterosa (mass-participation TV) and Team Rubber (viral marketing).

We are happy to announce the launch of Menthol TV. We are delighted to announce that Jeremy Lee, formerly Series Producer at Ricochet, will be Director of Programmes.

Jeremy has been involved in some of the biggest factual entertainment formats of recent years. Credits include Supernanny, Risking It All, It’s Me or the Dog and Can You Live Without? Menthol TV will specialise in Factual Entertainment and Entertainment formats, many with a multi-platform edge.

Jeremy says:

“Menthol has a unique understanding of how the web and TV can interact to deliver genuine cross-platform entertainment. In a year where we will see advances in TV production and the way broadcasters commission, Menthol TV will be leading the way with a new generation of break-out hits”

Over the last few years Mint has developed lots of cross-platform ideas (some of them award winners). It has proved difficult to take these further. A big problem has always been the number of stakeholders involved in making these ideas a reality. Over the last year, many key broadcasters have unified their cross-platform commissioning structure. Menthol TV means we have unified the delivery mechanism. Check out the new Menthol TV site. It doesn't say much but - with any luck - it conveys the vibe.

Press: Supernanny's Lee joins Mint Broadcast Mint Digital breathes life into entertainment TV Guardian

Note: Menthol TV was initially Mint TV. Then we realised there was already a Mint Productions and we didn't want any trouble.

We're very excited to announce that Paul Dix has joined Mint. We're going to be helping him with his super-cool Tahiti project. He's going to be lending us his super-hot Ruby skills.

He's already survived his first hot pot (centre left). This is becoming the initiation ritual both in the UK (welcome Jeremy and Adam!) and in the US (welcome Ron!).