Another week of some truly amazing web & mobile fun. In the previous weeks we’ve really been focussed on future phone payments, but this week Thought Den are breaking into the ‘original online’ world again. So let’s have a look at some of the things we’d love to play with this week…

Interactive Youtube - Ben is clearly a better magician

It’s seems Youtube is taking the next step in video being more than ‘just watchable’. Videos are now supporting a new feature, ‘annotations’ which allow a publisher to add interactive commentary to their work, eg, little hotspots which can link to anything, “click here & goto our site”.

So far it just looks like little gray boxes that slightly get in the way of what you’re watching. But, I’m excited to see what people will start doing with it for fun, also to see if any other vendors will start mucking around with new interactions in their players maybe layered animations? But, to be honest, it’s something we’ve all seen before in the South West and Coull make their money out of it!

The success of the new player will be interesting, I wonder if it’s going to follow the same route as Interactive Story DVDs, anyone remember Final Destination 4? It didn’t really hit the papers with it’s “choose their fate” selectors and gory promises. But I suppose the Youtube audience is a lot younger and open to trying out new things so who knows, it could become a fun way for telling a story.

So here’s a few Viral Campaigns we’d like to run at Thought Den now…

• Anne Summers (not with the Wii this time)
• Lynx
• Dungeons and Dragons, “will you attack the beast (goto video 4) or will you use your sword of many omens (goto video 9)”
• Final Destination 5…

Become a 3GP avatar

Tech-crunch blogged about Beema, who’ve released a new platform (in beta) that allows users to generate 3D speaking avatars with only a phone call.

You phone the number, register, pick (more…)

A film that has cropped up recently on the Rubber blog and Connecting Bristol is showing people what it’s really like for us lucky people to be working here in the South West.

For us it’s all about having the open spaces, greenery, no tube stations, no shoulder-to-shoulder grinding with suited monkeys and always having really amazing (more…)

Check these sexy bad boys out!

We’re playing in the Hewlett Packard five-aside competition over the next few weeks, as part of the Pervasive Media studio team, we’re gonna KICK ASS with these sleek little goal-scoring wonder-feet. Watch this space for an update on how many own-goals we score / how many times Ben hoofs it out of the stadium / how many times Dan does a swan lake pirouette…

It’s been a long time coming, but we’ve finally done it. The first event was a resounding success - 30 students, 4 briefs, 7 hours and a whirlwind of creativity later we’re still buzzing!

Besides the complete logistical cock up getting to Bournemouth (train tickets not valid, a 6 mile bike ride across town and back at 6am, finally resorting to a rush hour dash in Dan’s car) we arrived with 15 minutes to spare, wolfed down a coffee/croissant breakfast and got to work. There was an incredible amount to cram into the day so we started as we meant to go on, talking 19 to the dozen at rows of sleepy students unsure what to expect from two caffeine fueled meejah tarts from the city. Not to mention the video camera in their faces, handled excellently by Holly Budge of Hip Joint Films. The video will be up shortly…

After the first session we all did an introduction session to get the energy levels up, which was followed by the open brainstorm to develop 4 briefs the teams would be working from for the rest of the day. Having whittled the list of clients and platforms down to four apiece we ended up with:

Anne Summers - Wii remote installation
Guinness - Rich media flash site
Roman Catholic Church - Alternate Reality Game
Apple - Video virals

Before lunch each team had to submit a pitch document (more…)

It’s been hard-core few months, as you might tell from the other blog posts and mediasandbox…a lot of fun, inspiring, challenging, and more than anything this project has opened hundreds of doors for everyone involved. A realisation dawned this week that we really are operating at the forefront of the pervasive media industry…things break, people don’t understand, it’s new NEW stuff!

Our stand looked beautiful, as did Tom’s face beaming out from the 42″ plasma screen. People milled around, took the Happy Packages GPS demo for a test drive, asked us what on earth we were talking about and nodded knowingly when we explained the difficulties working with pervasive convergence in multi-platform content distribution systems.

At around 3 or 4 it was time to deliver the 6 minute presentation and face the judging panel, who were:
(more…)