The dust is settling and the bikes are on the wall. Finally all the boxes are un-packed, the desks have been scraped together and the recycling bins have been swallowing 50 cans to the dozen…

…so it must be time for the moving-in party!

Thursday 29th, 5:30 until late
14 Backfields Lane, Bristol, BS2 8QW

All Thought Den peeps are invited! Email party-invite@thoughtden.co.uk and then after a rigours process of elimination, we’ll put you on the doormens’ list.

Come and drink booze and eat BBQ niceness!

Here’s some piccies from the move so far…

You know when you’re moving to a new house. There’s always that list of new bits you need to go buy, scrounge or ‘borrow’. Things like Cabinets, Poncy Coffee table, Cupboards and there’s no doubt that you’ll be missing all your table-spoons. Well our list after the recent secret move of the Den could do with one thing adding it’s list. A Sandbox.

Not a normal grainy one with endless castles and pit potential. But more like one of the Media Sandboxes that the Pervasive Media Studio has just released.

The Pervasive Media Studio

To fill you in, a Media Sandbox is a funded challenge open to any technologists. It’s aim is purely at  allowing people/companies/artists to come up with a idea to tackle a problem, create a new service or create an experience.

A 2009 Media Sandbox commission

The first is B-Open Sandbox (http://www.mediasandbox.co.uk/awards/), and invites ideas on utilising the wealth of data-feeds out there and turning them into useful apps, sites or experiences. So for example and app which helps people decide which city to move to according to a government air-quality feed.

The second is Pervasive Experiences Sandbox (http://www.mediasandbox.co.uk/awards/) and invites ideas on creating ground-breaking pervasive which should pull together mobile, wireless & sensor technologies to create meaningful experiences.

Thought Den, being a company who are constantly playing with, researching and creating new technologies for clients, commissions and fun (just check out our latest Geek club). Will definitely be putting ideas & concepts into the mix.

Then hopefully we’ll have a new Sandbox to play with in the Den.

Our previous Media Sandbox commission

Happy Packages Dick Penny

Ladies and gentleman it’s been a while. I won’t spend long on the soap-box, and where possible will stimulate with moving pictures, not words, but the important new is – Adam Vernon has joined Thought Den and hopefully you’ll come to love him as we already have (despite his gammy eye, though he insists it’s a new, Bristol-based affliction. He moved here especially you see! A good stat for Bristol Media perhaps – Thought Den drag Edinburgh graduate 400 miles to new Bristol studio)

Below is video 01 from our new Geek Club series, charting the Den’s trials, tribulations, banter and revelations. Think Blue Peter, without the bog roll tubes. Or HP Labs, but with less money and more sellotape.

Adam says :

“It makes use of the OSC protocol (likely eventual successor to MIDI), which is normally used to transmit musical and audio control data over UDP. The iPhone app, TouchOSC, is designed to be used as an OSC controller and also supports transmission of accelerometer data, indicating the orientation of the phone. The UDP packets are received by a Java flosc server, running on the PC, which retransmits the OSC data over Flash-friendly TCP. On receipt of a packet, Flash assigns the received orientation values to the rotationX and -Y properties of a cube made with the Flash10 3D API.”

Word on the street is that we’ve moved studio. An official (and thoroughly imaginative) announcement will follow forthwith. Isn’t it a shame that ‘real’ work gets in the way of devising these witty and clever ways to let you know we now stare at different coloured walls when Firefox crashes? Soon your inboxes will sing to the sound of Thought Den’s latest self-indulgent, digital distraction. Curious? You should be…

What a “Good Friday” it was last week! The Thought Den crew all came into the studio to solely badger away and put live the new Florrie site, florrie.com.

The project was no small undertaking,
- concept
- branding
- design
- a Squarespace site-build
- social media page branding (Youtube/Twitter)
- working on Good Friday =)

The process
Here’s some sneaky shots of the Thought Den process which produced the sexy results

Who is Florrie?
If you’d like to know who Florrie is, (she will be gracing our radio airwaves and tv sets very soon!). She’s a singer, songwriter and rather importantly a drummer!

Check it all out!
Site – http://www.florrie.com/
Twitter – http://twitter.com/florriemusic
Youtube – http://www.youtube.com/user/florriemusic

Like what we did?
If you’d like to talk about Thought Den’s full branding & online services, please mail ben@thoughtden.co.uk for more details

Dan too, and here’s his plan to fix it. This coming Thursday (8th April), Thought Den are hosting a mini flash game code-a-thon and we’re inviting other AS2 coders to come along.

Flash AS3 day

The day will see us all coding our own games, but we all have to do it in AS3. Painful? No, because we’ll all be in the same room, we’ve all coded in AS2 before, we’ll have the internet and most importantly we can share as we go. A bit like crowd-sourcing from clever individuals.

Thought Den provide.

breakfast, coffees & lunch
prize for the best game at the end of the day!

You provide.

computer with Flash installed
a game idea
openness to help your fellow man

Mail me, dan at thoughtden dot co dot uk for an invite.

—— DETAILS ——-
The plan.
Code a game in AS3.

Prize for best game.
A book! yup. “The Art of Game Design: A book of lenses: A Book of Lenses” (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Art-Game-Design-lenses-Lenses/dp/0123694965/)

Who’s it for?
AS2 coders / coders, looking to start coding games in AS3

The place.
Pervasive Media Studio
Leadworks,
Anchor Square,
Harbourside
Bristol
BS1 5DB
some details are here – http://www.pmstudio.co.uk/open-studio-friday

The time.
Thursday 8th April. 8 till 5.30.

Places.
Mail dan@thoughtden.co.uk