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…

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…”

Thought Den have just returned from a whirlwind trip to the big smoke to check out the fresh new talent blossoming onto the creative scene. Free Range at The Old Truman Brewery on Brick Lane has been running for a while, and as an ex-Bournemouth student I exhibited there myself; it proved to be a great start to the career, and I also got to collect millions of cool postcards from all the illustrators at Central St Martins, Camberwell, UCA etc.

We were invited to the preview of the Screen Grab showcase, the Bournemouth Media School lot, who over the years have created a name for themselves as interactive maestros, mixing interactive displays with 3D Unity games, iPhone apps, hyperlocal Google mashups and social networking. Course leader Mik Parsons gets in the groove with Aneurin’s drum-tastic drumming game…

The beer and busines cards flowed but we had to make our drunken exit for an early train. There’s some really great work there and it’s open for the coming weekend so head down if you’ve got time. It’s also right by Spitalfields, where Dan and I snuck in some cheeky Capoeira…