Hello Thought Den blog, I haven’t paid you enough attention lately. But here’s some good news! The Fire Kills campaign managed and seeded by Team Rubber and built by Thought Den has clocked more 800,000 plays. The COI (Central Office of Information. Sounds a bit George Orwell dunnit?) are thrilled and plan to make a case study of it, because we’re all just so good at what we do…

In other news, Thought Den have joined Simon Games in the igfest engine room, provided commercial-minded support. This basically means we’ll be pestering some bad-ass brands over the next few weeks to get them involved. It’s too good a proposition to miss. Look at the similar event-based marketing activity of brands like Red Bull (Air Race, Formula 1), Virgin (V-Feset), Orange (Glastonbury), T-Mobile (Trafalgar Singalong etc) and Jack Daniels with their music programme.

If anyone has any thoughts on how we could pimp igfest, please do get in touch. And if you want to volunteer to help run the festival, please get in touch. And if you want to play – get your arse down to Bristol town centre on 11, 12 and 13 of September for some serious frivolous mental fun-ness. Over n out Cap’n.

As the bloggers, tweeters, compulsive status-updaters, cyber-geeks and games fans return from the recent SXSW Interactive festival in Austin, Texas, the Guardian’s tech writers are already drawing their conclusions. It seems the buzz this year is all about developing location-aware experiences, be they online, over mobile or using close proximity technologies like RFID. There are countless enterprises (BrightKite, Foursquare, Fire Eagle, Bliin, Gypsii etc) whose core offerings revolve around organising, sharing and distributing location-specific information, with an increasing trend to connect with existing social networks such as those on Twitter, Facebook, Bebo, MySpace and LinkdIn.

This is all good news, considering the nature of the next Happy Packages release! We’re currently beavering away on our iPhone application which, funnily enough, revolves around location specific information, social network connectivity and even a little hint of gaming! Read the Happy Packages journal for updates, discussion, prototype launches etc

As an aside, Simon Games have been the talk of the festival with their Hat game, which was mentioned again by Alex Krotoski but in print this time – Thursday’s Technology Guardian. See Other articles here.

They’ve acctually done it, Google went ahead and released lively.com a 3D world to “create an avatar and chat with your friends in rooms you design”.

[youtube]http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=5YbwfOucET8[/youtube]

They packaged the whole product to explore the lands completely through your browser, no need for a separate client application, just download a package (windows only) and install it to run in Internet Explorer or Firefox! A full 3D world in your browser to go explore, to read more about the product check out Lively.com but now read to open up thoughts on the wider aspects of Lively.

Offshoots

The package initially makes me wonder what (more…)