Almost 1000 people have registered to take part in Duncan Speakman’s Subtlemob project – and we’re having great fun being his technical support team. The project has featured in The Guardian, Grazia and the Evening Standard to name but a few… Our server almost crashed last night as hundreds of people attempted to download the 50MB audio file for London, but fear not because Rackspace Cloud Files
Cloud Computing came to the rescue! We thought our original provision would be sufficient, but it wasn’t, so now the MP3s are hosted on a dedicated whatsit up in the cloud somewhere and are screaming down the thingamajiggers faster than mustard. This is what they say “Cloud Files from The Rackspace Cloud is an offering which allows users to store data on the Rackspace infrastructure, from 1 byte to 5 Gigbytes.”
Subtlemob site
The Twittersphere is slowly catching on, so all you tweeters make sure you use the hashtag #subtlemob and spread the word. We’ve still got London, Bristol and Liverpool coming up. Download the audio file, grab partner and get on board for a magic piece of crowd theatre.
And as Dan Course himself said after the pioneering Bristol subtlemob earlier this year “Suddenly the world seemed rosier, I was wrapped up in a bubble for 20 minutes, and, um, fell in love with a complete stranger…”
Step forward Mr Rhys Thomas, new Thought Den employee and pumpkin-carving PHP extraordinaire. He’s currently working a 3 month trial (baptism of fire?) with us down at the Paintworks. In only two weeks he’s already played for our adopted football team – Team Rubber – been out on the piss with Mobile Pie, worked late, gone home early, cycled Dan’s bike to Sainsbury’s and visited the Pervasive Media Studio at midnight.
Rhys Thomas - Thought denner
His first project build was Subtlemob – take a look, it’s all going down this week.
Now he’s working on amends to Parashoot, the film industry’s Base Camp – we’re about to make it even more kick-ass with a nifty mobile phone feature.
We just had an interesting email from CBSNEWS. We know, already it doesn’t sound that interesting. Sure it’s just an email. Sure, it’s for an American Channel who have possibly bought our email address. But that’s beside my point.
CBS News mail out
What’s interesting is not the dull blues and greys. It’s how focussed the mail is on selling direct links to their twitter & facebook pages. But not their main CBSNEWS site.
Can you see how the lady, katiecouric, is always mentioned with an @ symbol (for her twitter feed) & the most prominent logo you can see is the facebook icon.
There is no direct mention of the CBSNEWS site.
So are some bigger companies more interested in getting people connected through their Social media sites rather than their own site?
Something to ponder while Thought Den wrap up their next MySpace app for aMap and plan a twitter game =)
Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls, draw near for the day of the digital un-dead is nearly upon us. Your iPhone cannot save you now. Update your status if you must, but you are simply adding to their power. Tweeting cannot prevent the ruthless and twisted onward march of technology gone bad.
Fear not, for Thought Den have visited the sensory soothsayers, taken prayer with the bluetooth gods and consulted the ethernet queen. A parchment of infinite age has been entrusted to them, along with the fate of creative Bristol, and there-in were the words of salvation. A virginal sacrifice has been made and the voodoo artefact has been positioned on the beta meridian. Now we must all hold hands and pray that Bristol will be spared the wrath of the Digital Devil as he prowls these rich lands in search of HTML horrors, Photoshop faux-pas and Flash bashing.
Exciting week or what! Thought Den have a new employee Rhys, a Halloween surprise for everyone later this week, but also we’re trialling a new Bluetooth box with the Old Vic!
This project is in conjunction with the Bristol’s Old Vic and is aimed at enhancing peoples’ theatre experience, post-show.
An exciting moment for me… my first blog post for Thought Den, infact first blog post that’s not on my own blog!…
So far I have been designing logos, web layouts and an iphone game, so lots of fun and varied projects for me to get my teeth stuck in to! See the subtlemob site – our latest creation, where I designed the layout with Ben’s guidance! Check the event out while you’re there.. it looks awesome!
I sit here in my room – (a place I am very proud of, my own little Thought Den.. ambient bubble of music and lighting, beneath drapes and walls carefully plastered with creative inspiration) – I think of how to sum up the past few weeks freelancing for Thought Den. My first paid job actually doing what I love to do… and what an amazing thing it is to do what you love every day and be guided by professionals who can teach you more at such a fast rate!! The highlights so far probably being white boards, creative brainstorming, jokes, drinks, paper throwing when ‘in the zone’, learning fast, and being a part of the thinking den!
Thought Den are very proud to have launched the new subtlemob 09 site. For those who don’t know what a subtlemob is yet (which could be most of us!), here’s what Duncan Speakman (the producer) has to say about them.
‘as if it were the last time’ invites you to take part in a secret event this November. You’ve seen the people freeze in train stations and the mass pillow fights, well this will be a more subtle experience.’
There’s been a lot happening over here at Thought Den towers recently.
New offices, more desks, new work and most most most importantly (to Dan)… a new kick ass mofo of a cloud hosting server.
That’s right, as technical director, I care enough about servers to write a blog post about it. “Yaaaaawn” I hear you e-mail, “I don’t care, how much nippy’er your Drupal sites are, how much faster my flash game loads and how blindingly fast your web apps will be now. Big YAWN”.
Then that’s cool.
Just over the next week don’t ask me about the Rackspace cloud sites package we’ve got.
Almost 100 pics here of the festival we can’t stop talking about. We’ll be quiet now. But not before congratulating Team Rubber on their Bristol’s Biggest Player win!
You may soon tire of igfest self-congratulation but we’re still buzzing from it. And here for your image-based viewing pleasure (though word on the grape-vine is that someone has uploaded a **VHS** recorded version to Vimeo) we enclose some funny little stills of our moment with BBC Points West on Friday, just before the headline game La Noche De Los Muertes kicked off.
