Thought Den have been in London, invited down to a BBC Audio and Music Interctive christmas schmooze sesh off the back of the multiplatfom event at the Arnolfini a few weeks back. Don’t worry, those license fee pennies were well spent, no swanky venue and red carpet, but a great opportunity to bend the ears of some high-flying and genuinely interested indie commissioners. We talked IA, streaming, widgets, web cams and I even name dropped Happy Packages!

Our concept and prototype for the next level in locative rating systems really caught the attention and I found myself getting excited all over again. Two buttons, one red one green. Or one smiley one sad. Or one tick, one cross. And all you do is rate how you’re feeling at that time in that place. The iPhone fairy then takes over, sends the rating and GPS data to our servers and we create a happy heat map of the world…

In other news, touchscreens have taken over the world. Every shop front worth its salt within a square mile of Oxford Circus now has some form of large, interactive touchscreen wizardry for passing pedestrians. The battle is on for the hearts and minds, fingertips and hard-earned dollar of the casual window shopper. You Tube and 4OD have also teamed up in Carnaby St for a truly widescreen touch-off.

The exciting news is that Thought Den and Joanie Lemercier have been plotting some similar schemes over the last few months and our first prototype will be demoed at the TD offices in the new year. Watch this 3D space…

A big and very important publication shall soon be released, celebrating the success of the Media Sandbox scheme that proved so instrumental in helping launch our business. The Happy Packages project in collaboration with Mobile Pie, currently in suspended animation / on hiatus, has opened many doors for us but more than anything has kept the dream alive that one day we’ll get rich with our own IP. If all else fails, the pictures below suggest we might have back-up careers as a boy band, don’t they?

The Happy Packages team has been invited to explore the ethics surrounding our project today with some of the country’s top thinkers.

We’ll be presenting the project in all it’s detail to Pervasive Media Ethics group (http://pervasivemediaethics.blogspot.com/) who are then invited to discuss anything and everything. No holds barred!

I’ll then be blogging up the main points later, good and bad!

Come and sign our Hello World Thought Den book. It can even be a little rude if you want!

http://hello-thought-den.appspot.com/

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That’s the sound of our own trumpets screaming to the heavens as we find ourselves in the industry magazine NMA (New Media Age).

The article is all about the Happy Packages project and covers how Thought Den and Mobile Pie are working together in the Pervasive Media Studio to produce a sexy iPhone application aimed at friends leaving fun trails for each other.

If you’d like to read more about the initial Happy Packages project, take a look at some of our posts.

Small side note, it’s worth mentioning that they managed to spell our name wrong and we’re now ‘Thought Deeds’. Also while we’re at it, it’s a good time to mention the Evening Post’s misspelling of Ben’s (our creative director) surname a few weeks ago. Good morning, Mr Pembleton!

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It could’ve done cos’ the last time you saw the team we were hugging and drinking 9k’s worth of champagne at the final MediaSandbox Event. Well here’s where we’re at…

The Team have been ripping the research apart and putting it back together in the form of the Pervasive Campaign machine ready for investment.

Though June we (more…)

I’ve been carrying out some very ‘in-depth’ studies into social network usage over our short-lived British Summer, and realised I’ve been using Facebook a lot less.

Apparently my ‘phone-losing house-mate‘ hasn’t checked hers in a few days too and it raised the point relating to my pervasive weather post.

We’re more likely to interact with our desktops over winter’s cold months, but (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:
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A strange thing happened outside the office last Wednesday. Oceana runs an under 18 night, and out of the blue came hundreds of kids shrieking and laughing.

So rather than commenting on the youth of today, the price of cheese and other such things, we tried out some Bluetooth gopping with out the support of any Pervasive Relations (P.R). The test also had some different variables to our last gopping experience when we were chased by fanny in town, (more…)

The ideas for Happy Packages could be great or they may stink, but hell it’s a research project and that’s what Thought Pie are meant to be finding out. Either way, no matter how good the implementation and delivery, something we’ll have to be wary of is Pervasive Fatigue.

The Situation

People who are constantly bombarded with repeated Bluetooth requests every time they walk past Co-op’s Bluetooth gopping device are slowly or possibly very quickly going to get annoyed with the vibration in the pocket requiring their attention. It’s just bad etiquette to interrupt someone with something un-expected and then probably ask them again the next day. So if during their personal time, while a client is choosing a sandwich, they’re re-asked to about downloading something, are we providing them with some very simple and mostly detrimental choices, get it, ignore it or turn their Bluetooth off. (more…)