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)

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!

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!!!

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

1. We are moving office on the 1st of December! It’s bigger and better and nicer and has a swanky new meeting room. It’s still in Stokes Croft
2. Before leaving, we have managed to change the layout of the office about 3 times in a week (in binary that is eleven) !
3. Dan likes the 11 times table because it’s so easy to remember. He is actually pretty good at coding things.
4. Dan is also an experienced “piper” having Grade 6 flute and Grade 5 saxophone (which equals, uhm, 11)
5. Antoine can do 11 pullups on the office RSJ, which is impressive because it DESTROYS your fingers. No-one else has come close.
6. Dan likes binary. Today’s date is 1023! (1+2+4+8+16+32+64+128+256+512) -> 11/11/11 11:11:11
7. Current studio intern Peter Simon likes sandwiches and liquorice. But presumably not liquorice sandwiches.
8. Ben Templeton and Ben Webb are currently redesigning the Thought Den website. Turn it up to 11!
9. George Rowe is skiving today. Apparently he is having his legs waxed at the Clifton Lido. Or something.
10. Our bike suspension system currently holds up 2 bikes (next to each other, like 11) but when we move it’ll be expanded for all the office. No more director’s privilege.
11. oops

The event was attended by the great and good in playful production (Preloaded, Mother, Hide & Seek, 4T2 and AKQA to name a few) and some incredibly experienced commissioners from the BBC, Channel 4, Tate, Wellcome Trust, Stardoll and EMI.

More interestingly, though, were the representatives from all kinds of brands, institutions and enterprises looking to level up and get their game on. Was it surprising BAE Systems were along for the ride? Or a chap from HSBC? Don’t McLaren Automotive have their hands full making cars go fast round corners? And what does gaming have to do with selling seats on Virgin Atlantic? A surprising amount, as it turns out, because like it or not, we’re entering the era of gamification (surely there is a prettier, less cynical word?)

Gamifi-what?

LinkedIn introduced a feature a few years back that had a profound effect on site engagement. Did anyone else feel press-ganged into completing their LinkedIn profile because of that bastard progress bar? Or even worse : “The fastest person to register today did it in 14 seconds. Can you beat it?” I’ll beat it alright!! **smashes keyboard into monitor**

Nicholas Lovell from Gamesbrief remarked that any parent is painfully familiar with gamification techniques – How quickly can you get into your pyjamas? If you eat one mouthful of broccoli you can watch Nickelodeon for four and a half hours. Etc. Play is an obvious motivator and brands are seriously looking at ways of harnessing this. Product placement in consoles for example. Or custom-built viral games like Fire Kills and Swamp Drifter from the Den. But it’s much more than that…

A fine example

The finest example I took from the event was Star Player, by AKQA for Heineken. For those who have not yet had the pleasure of using their Champions League “watch with mother” app, the top level aim was to capture the tension, immediacy and community-spirit of watching live at the stands and put this in the hands of the casual home-viewer. And boy did they nail it. Andy Hood’s illuminative breakdown made it look easy.
His top tips: Understand your subject and your audience down the most granular level, build core functionality, then iterate. Obvious really…
Favourite feature : hit the ‘Goal Now’ button and if a team scores within 30 seconds you get a squillion points.
Interesting point : the system is 100% manual, requiring a team of expert football and gaming fans to mange match events as they unfold, thus creating live gamable data for home-viewers.

A final rundown

Brief round up of other awesome stuff from the event :
Ville Heijari from Rovio (Angry Birds) said it all started with the characters – initial game mechanics were far too complex. So rather than get people addicted, they wanted players to love their characters and rewarded them with a rich, distinctive look and feel.
Jo Twist from Channel 4 Education hasn’t yet worked out what to call immersive content environments that aren’t games. Playful systems of content is pretty catchy, right? Plus she was ‘gamed’ into replying to people on OKCupid after realising she had the ‘Badge of Death’ for never replying…
Robin from PLAStudios recognised that games can’t be ripped like music can and they offer a connection with the artist that fans are looking for.The new LP sleeve for today’s gamers? Play his great annoyingly addictive game for Blink 182 here get182.com
Tom Chatfield was full of insights and it’s worth following his twitterings. He talked about the challenge of hard play (the mastery needed to complete Portal 2) and the delight of easy play (chucking a shiny bird at evil pigs)
Good and bad of gamification : Giff Gaff incentivised their customers with cash-money to provide support to other customers! Klout is rubbish, and easy to cheat, and has loads of annoying alerts and badge-awards you can’t skip.

Conference summary as a poster!

Beautifully designed by our pigeon-loving intern Abi and curated by other folks at Thought Den from the #games4brands Twitter feed, it features the top 10 tweets of the day laid out for your inspiration – download it here

It was great to see the Tate team and hear more about the game they’re launching with Preloaded, all about neuroscience and Alice in Wonderland…read more on that over at Preloaded’s house. Download our lovely poster!

Back in the good ol days

They didn’t want it! Well, they did, but they didn’t do anything with it for ages, so we stole it back (AHAA). Based on their original idea, we have now created…www.lunchometer.co.uk

Let me tell you a little bit about it…

Everybody likes lunch, but it’s a minefield out there. What’s needed is an easy method, preferably built in flash and colourised in earthy tones, for rating and sharing your favourite lunch spots. Lo and behold, from the fingers of tech emeritus flash wizard Adam Vernon flew graphs of spellbinding beauty…

It’s just a bit of fun, but we think it’s a nice way to do a little bit of office bonding, maybe give the new kid/senior C# developer advice on where to eat, and embed a little something cool on your blog without even breaking a sweat.

All you need to do is go to the Lunchometer creation-o-matic, specify a name and your area and start entering in your haunts! If you like, you can then copy the embed code and paste it anywhere you enjoy pasting HTML.

Here is the Thought Den Creative Director/senior hairstyle guru Ben Templeton’s one about lovely Stokes Croft:

As you can see, Biblos came out on top, mainly due to their bad boy portions, extreme tastiness and proximity to the office, with the French Patisserie coming in a close second.

A few of our good friends have had a pop as well:

Scott at Play Nicely clearly loving the work of slightly-out-the-way, Edward Lear themed Runcible Spoon.

Dave Tidman over at Kerve in Bath, collaborators on projects for JD and Soutern Comfort, obviously feeling the Nando’s portion love!

Whereas Hannah Flynn from Tate, for whom we made this lovely game, gives you a little rundown of what you can get around their neck of Millbank, LDN.

You may have also noticed the little ‘settings’ fork and spanner in the top right. Click on it. Go on! You can use these functions to discount certain ratings categories (if you don’t care about proximity, for example) and see how this effects the rankings. You can also change the graph to a more horizontal alignment, turn off the auto sorting or even make that Lunchometer full screen! MADNESS. Feeling hungry? Create your own Lunchometer right here!

Hello, I’m Abi.

I’ve just finished my degree in Illustration at the University of Gloucestershire and am lucky enough to have an internship at Thought Den for a couple of weeks. I have been living in Bristol for about a year working under the name of Pigeon; doing exhibitions, entering competitions, meeting with local art groups, doing commissions for children’s books and local bands and anything else I can find to do with art and illustration.

I am currently working on a series of Christmas cards and other products to take to a gift fair in December and preparing work for upcoming exhibitions. I like to draw animals, especially birds because they can be easily adapted to do lots of things, so my character for Thought Den is a bird  playing a game on an iPhone because they love their games and apps.

Things you need to know about me if we are going to be friends:

• I love good coffee, freshly ground, yum
• I have a really sweet tooth and love sweets, cake and chocolate of any kind
• I like little dogs with funny faces
• When I was little I wanted to be a bus driver, an opera singer and a zoo-keeper
• I do not like seafood or fish of ANY form

Hi, it’s me, Dan Course, Co-founder and Technical Director here at Thought Den. That’s me on left. Hi! This week I’ve been lucky enough to begin mentoring a group of four College lads from St Brendens in Brislington as a part of the Bristol Young Talent Awards.

Our team’s project is to promote Bristol’s BloodHound Project with an app created with the AppFurnace platform (another Bristol thorough bred).

In making the promotional app, the students will receive training in Project Management from Everything Everywhere (T-mobile & Orange), Presentation skills from BBC and Work Attire from Cribbs Causeway.

The awards seem to have hit a national and local nerve. Businesses have offered cash prizes, coverage and one company have put forward a fully paid apprenticeship for one lucky student. I’ll be keeping you updated with how our group’s going over the next 6 months.