We’d like to kick 2012 off with our nearest and dearest in true Thought Den style. Come and trash the new studio with us! (It’s actually quite nice, don’t trash it please)

So our new home is still Stokes Croft, this time right on the main drag, pretty much opposite Pie Minister. What more could you ask for? A lick of paint perhaps – and we’re on the case! The next two weeks will make Handy Andy proud: painting, hanging, chopping, glueing all for you good people. Friday 3rd Feb is the first party of the year, and the first in the new digs.

Expect (and get) proper food (Gloucester road delights, please see Lunchometer.co.uk) drink, entertainment, dangerball, gifts and prizes, borne from the Thought Den furnace.

Friday 3rd February, 6pm – 6am.

27 Stokes Croft, BS1 3PY (Buzzer between Fixie shop and Dulex paint centre)

What are our kids learning these days? Sitting in classrooms playing with their iPods, spending more time on Facebook than paying attention in class… why aren’t they engaged with the learning!!!

If you often find yourself pondering the above, it sounds like you should have come to BETT conference last week and seen what the future of Better education technology is! It’s the place where UK teachers visit to pick up what they hope will be the best software, hardware and technology for teaching the British Curriculum.

Since Thought Den started attending, way back in 2009, there has been a paradigm shift in the how the crowds experience most of the new programs;  screen based clicking has been replaced with touch screens, and learners no longer crowd around one PC game but each have their own tablet device. The advent of surface computing has been another exciting concept at BETT.

This year more companies are picking up on mobile apps, remote learning and preparing equipment for every student to have a smartphone or tablet to learn with.

It’s becoming more about making use of the wealth of available technology. Children are bringing devices in naturally, so rather than telling them to switch it off, let’s engage them with learning using the tech they understand!

Importantly this year as we’ll be looking at some heavy changes in the ICT Curriculum. State Education is realising the importance of teaching learners about the inners of the software they’re creating and the circuits of the computer they’re working on.  Children should be taught that they are masters of the devices, rather than a slaves to them, and that they don’t have to be constrained by the available software but can create whatever they can think of with the wonders of programming.

With such a selection of products I really don’t envy any teachers making decisions for what to spend their budget on. The iPad is a new invention and only two years old, the 3D printer is only really making a breakthrough into affordability and the app store still has nappies on.

Everything is so young. And probably still about to be replaced in the next two years again.

So, what were my best and worst bits of BETT this year?

Cool BETT

NAO, the logic robot that teaches learners to start playing with programming – made by http://aldebaran-robotics.com/

Safe BETT

A certificate in Safe Social Networking – www.digitalme.co.uk/safe

Best BETT

An Award winning suite for learning on multiple devices: tablets, iPads – www.ko-su.co.uk

Technology Master BETT

Understanding the innards of DVD Readers, Routers, Scanners… the lot! – www.labtech.org

I BETT you need to learn some more…

There were more apostrophes missing again this year, even from some BETT signs!

Thank you BETT, we’re looking forward to 2013 already.

As the rollercoaster of time hurtles ever onward, sometimes it’s nice to step down and enjoy a little of the candyfloss of reflection while holding the stick of memories, possibly washed down with some hindsight lemonade.

Pointless metaphors aside, here’s a little looksy at the past year from the Den-o-View…

January

One of the tightest schedules known to man led to a ‘frisson of excitement’ (read: pant-wetting stress) as we delivered ITRNomad, an e-learning tool for global risk consultants Drum Cussac. Amongst other features, you can play the ever popular game of ‘Is this man going to punch me in the face?’ It’s a classic.

February

TD history was made in Feb as minutes after Ben ‘Ben’ Templeton set a new chin up record on the amazingly painful G-Clamps of Doom, Antoine ‘AK47’ Kougblenou risked life and fingers to the destroy Ben’s new record and become Champ of the Clamps!

March

March was a month that now signifies revolution in the art world, as two of America’s most prominent artists released their most brilliant work yet. Installation artist Charlie Sheen aired his ‘completely batsh*t mental’ series, where he subverted the notion of TV interview by describing himself as an F-18 fighter jet with wings of crack and filled with tiger blood from MARS. Not to be outdone, controversial poetry star Rebecca Black explored the linear, entropic nature of time with a rousing, anthemic ballad called, simply, ‘Friday’.

April

Nothing happened in April.

June

All change on Backfields Lane as we said bon voyage to Flash Developer Adam Vernon and Studio Manager Kaila Engar, and hello to new Studio Manager George Rowe. We also enjoyed a plethora of lovely interns this year, so a big salute to Chris Carter, Rachel Chu, Abi Ponton and ‘the’ Peter Simon.

July

PARTY! The yearly 14 Backfields Lane studio party rocked some bad magic, with a combination of random punch, cheese toasties and dangerball. Dangerball 2011 proved to be a mildly less destructive affair than 2010 as no Powerbooks were broken, but the spirit of danger was alive and well and we definitely broke a few glasses.

August

The month of August has become synonymous in the Den with the words “bOOm! thanks for following!” (B!TFF!) and the ‘If This, Then That’ fiasco. For those unfamiliar with ifttt.com, it’s a collection of interacting APIs; you can set it so one event triggers another in separate application. Our casual experiments led to ‘B!TFF!’ being posted on our Twitter account about 30 times in a day, as Tech Director Dan’s personal Twitter account automatically posted B!TFF when somebody followed him (but not actually @ them), which was then automatically retweeted by the Thought Den account.

Lesson learned: just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should.

September

Ever wanted to run your own exhibition featuring Gilbert & George, Damien Hirst et al but didn’t want to have to spend years at Art College talking about juxtaposition and wearing a beret? Well now you can! September saw the release of ‘ARTIST ROOMS: The Game’, a collection of minigames that ape the challenges of running your own gallery. Made for officially the 19^th coolest company in the World, Tate, you should go play it, if you ain’t already. You even get a 3D gallery at the end to explore. wOOt.

October

Sad news this month as a mobile app we, and our internationally renowned client, have sweated blood over for months and months gets blocked in the App store due to a copyright issue. It’s still stuck there, wallowing in dev limbo. Here’s hoping some Christmas goodwill may let this FREE and MEGA COOL app finally out into the wild. We hope.

November

Shiz got furry in November as we launched ‘Survival’, an iOS and Android game for the lovely wildlife charity Wildscreen. Clocking up nearly 10,000 downloads in its first 4 weeks in the wild, Survival teaches the kiddies about endangered animals and engages them with the charity. Plus lead designer Ben Webb got to draw lots of pictures of lovely animals. Result.

In other November news, we gave Owen Curtis-Quick, lead developer on Survival and ‘Supercake’ to his friends, a lovely cake to say thank you for his amazing work on the game.

Aaaaand Dan and Ben got invited to the House of Commons to talk digital industry with the Crafts Council and MP Barry Sheerman MP. Busy month!

December

Well, we wrote this blog post, for a start. And North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il died, but the two were largely unconnected. It was also revealed that the ‘Ultimate Dog Tease’ was the UK’s highest watched YouTube vid this year, which Thought Den contributed at least three views toward.

What a year! And we didn’t even have a chance to mention:

• A continuing shift in company focus towards ‘playful learning’. Education + Fun = Funucation!
• Creative Director Ben dating an award-winning TV personality.
• We’re moving office in January. Yeah I know it’s in 2012, but we’re thinking about it now. We’re having a party, you can come. He can’t.
• Our oldest Product (capital P) gets a rebrand: Virtual Tours for a sexy world: TD Virtual Tour site

We look forward to seeing y’all in 2012. Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year!

- Ben, Dan, Ben, George, AK, Peter and all the Thought Den fam!

I could have thought of a less obvious title, but I just liked the joke, okay?

A few weeks ago I came across a framework called popcorn.js which, as its name certainly does not imply, allows the user to create timed interactions within a video.

Say some people in a video are snapping their fingers (those crazy kids); by using one of the multiple plugins of the library, it’s possible to get a kid in another completely separate part of the page to snap his fingers AT THE SAME TIME.

They say it’s an HTML5 framework that will find use in the hands of filmmakers, web developers or anyone who wishes to create time-based interaction with media.

The plugins include interaction with Youtube, Vimeo, Twitter, GoogleMap, Wikipedia, LinkedIn, Timeline and many more.

In the example below (which is inspired by Dan Harper) I merely used Google maps, Footnote (to write some content to the page), tag this person (to create a tag) and also some truly amazing images and subtitles.

WATCH OUR VIDEO HERE!!

As you can (maybe) see, it’s easy to use and super, duper fun as well.

One possible example of usage could be for a ‘How To’ video; adding interactive information, popping at key moments on the page, would give an extra level of content to the vid.

The framework is part of Mozilla’s Popcorn Project. For more details check out: http://mozillapopcorn.org/.

What are you waiting for? Try it already!!!

On Wednesday 23rd and Thursday 24th Bristol was graced by the great and good of advertising, marketing and creative thinking. Vision Conference delivered on all levels and the Den is bouncing with new ideas. Hopefully this summary captures some of the inspiration that was shared over the two days. Huge thankyou to Bristol Media.

Andrew Keen

Quick summary : Humanness, mystery and intimacy in a digital world

@ajkeen
You’d be fair to think this chap was just a cynical academic with voluminous hair, but for me at least, it was refreshing to hear some well-formulated and expertly communicated theories on why the perma-connected socially-extended world in which we live is not quite the digital utopia it’s cracked up to be. My summary : we need to show a little more restraint and privacy in the web 3.0 world (following the 1.0 of ‘need data, search data’ and the 2.0 of ‘you and me exploring our identities online’) Data is the new oil and we are spewing forth great quantities of the stuff into the hands of a select few. Goobook anyone? (To be deliberately oblique, this is my clever concatenation of Google and Facebook, internet superpowers)

After iTunes, iPhones and iPads the real ‘i’ word we crave is intimacy. In order to maintain our humanness we need to withdraw a little, retain what remains of our ability to be mysterious. Apparently there is a growing rejection of Facebook and Twitter among the tech-savvy teenybop-tweenagers. Let’s see how that goes.

Patrick Collister

Quick Summary : We need more right-brained visionaries

@patrickcollis

There’s no escaping it – we’re all creative, it’s a hard-wired competitive instinct. Regrettably the enduring image is of the “creative tossers” with fussball tables and minscooters in their shiny Shoreditch offices. But a world without creative right-brained thinking would be pretty shit. Maintaining the status quo is a fool’s game.

1/5 of us SEE the world. 4/5 of us READ the world. The right side of the brain (think vision, random, holistic) enables us to understand the whole. Apparently open-plan working does not do creative types any favours, but gone are the days of Don Draper and his private whiskey stocked office. Bring on the new visionaries! Top Tips:
1) At every meeting you have, make sure there is a decision-maker present

Steve Henry

Quick summary : The weird shit is the good shit

Steve’s Blog

Creativity is the only unfair legal advantage a business can use. The unspoken truth of adland us that 90% of advertising is shit and doesn’t work. If your output isn’t 9/10 there’s no point trying. But getting clients to buy big and brave ideas is tricky. Steve Henry suggests a bit of disruption – get them into the studio and fill a wall with the work of their competitors. Only then will they beg for something different.

So doing what you can’t do, what you shouldn’t do, feels like magic. It’s not just advertisers who revel in breaking the rules – games provide us increasingly life-like worlds in which to make mischief. So persuade clients to buy your radical work by disrupting the traditional models they use to evaluate it. Top Tips:
1) Break the Rules
2) Do it in a way that emotionally engages the target audience

Harry Pearce

Quick Summary : Follow your dreams and desires to make stunning work

@pentagramdesign

What a bloody clever and thoroughly nice bloke. There was so much more to this talk than the sheer quality and captivating imagination of his work. Harry took us on an honest, surprising and emotionally frank journey. I was sold from the first slide and merest mention of typography. It’s hard to know in what order to arrange the superlatives. The work he showed was beautiful, intelligent and funny. Who knew type could be so fun! Check out his new book Typographic Conundrums. Top Tips:
1) Write down your dreams
2) Take photos of funny/odd things you see, like the schizophrenic road sign “Avenue Road”

Rory Sutherland

Quick Summary : Look at things the other way round.

@rorysutherland

I’m riding on his coat-tails here, but join in, it’s fun. Why spend £6bn speeding up the Eurostar by 40 minutes when you could spend 0.01% of the budget putting Wifi on the trains and serving free Dom Perignon to all passengers? Who would then, of course, beg for the train to be slowed down. Essentially, creativity is forever being policed by logic. A million great ideas have been lost to SWOT analysis. But when are creatives asked to evaluate the emotional implications of a rationalised campaign? Or to find a completely different solution for that matter? Google the ’300 million dollar button’ for an example of a creative tweak going overdrive.

Rory is a master raconteur and a clever sod; Behavioural Economics is at the heart of this man’s thinking. His dazzling array of illuminative and witty anecdotes made a compelling case for looking at things backwards. You can’t change behaviours by attempting to change attitudes first. People won’t be converted into raving environmentalists before they start composting. If we make it easy for them to change their composting behaviour their attitudes will adjust accordingly. Top Tips:
1) Behaviour not attitude
2) Look at things backwards

Bernie Hogan

Quick Summary : Help! My Mom’s on Facebook.

@blurky

Sharing some of Andrew Keen’s scepticism, Bernie riffed on the challenges faced by the users and architects of social networks. The crux of his argument is social networks do not currently understand the statuses that exist in the real world. LOLing and ROFLing to friends is one thing, but this mostly unfiltered stream of chatter probably isn’t relevant to your mum / boss / son.

Google+ makes efforts to compartmentalise your social groups but Bernie argued this was only the tip of the iceberg. Brands are finding it harder and harder to talk with niche groups online since they must forever cater for the lowest common denominator of that group. It has to do with synchronous and asynchronous relationships but I have no chance of summarising that here. Bernie might help. Top Tips:
1) Map your network at socialnetimporter.codeplex.com
2) Manage your privacy settings

Dave Trott

Quick Summary : Creatives fear the obvious, but clients love it

@davetrott

A proper cockney geezer! And an ad legend, I should add. Dave explained how to sell big ideas to difficult clients. Thankfully, he proposed a few nice little formulas and gently walked us through them with the help of a flipchart; a conspicuous and low tech approach that was very effective. It’s simple stuff! If you put shit in, you get shit out.

Every dialogue, commercial or otherwise, has a basic formula. Impact (Crying Baby / Drumming Gorilla) Communication (Why is it crying? / That Gorilla’s having fun) Persuasion (I’ll get the bottle / I want some chocolate fun as well!) So client understands need for impact. Beyond that it is about using a language-frame the client understands. Be clear about what they want out of the project. If it’s 15 separate objectives, think of these as tennis balls. Chuck ‘em at Joe Bloggs and at best he’ll catch only two.

A binary approach is quick and effective. Market Share or Market Growth? Opinion Formers or Opinion Followers? Product Focus or Brand Focus? Top Tips :
1) Understand the meaning of people, what they want, do, love, hate
2) Always be different
3) Target opinion formers over opinion leaders
4) Put clarity in, get clarity out

All images *borrowed* from Vision Bristol