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?

We know! So if you’re looking for something free and fun to do, like Alton Towers with no ticket booths then the ‘igfest – come out and play festival’ is making a grand opening at the Bristol Harbourside from the 19th – 21st September.

igFest (Interesting Games Festival)

Taking place around the Harbourside in Bristol, igfest is the first festival in the south west to invite people to discover and re-discover the city through playing games in the streets.

There are tons of games over the weekend, too many for anyone to play them all, but we hope you’ll love them all so much you will want to try as many as you can.

Here’s a few you’ll enjoy that weekend…

Moose Hunt

Moose will be making his autumn migration from the deepest Forest of Dean to Bristol over the week before the festival. Your mission is to find him and photograph him. Text ‘moose’ to 60300 to receive a map of the moose’s current location. But be careful, the moose will be told your location and if he ’shoots’ you before you ’shoot’ him you are out of the game. Prizes for photographs in various categories including first sighting.

Holla Lu Lu

Fill the night with your sound. Find members of your team across the city by hollering your unique cry.

Koreanlazerball

Korean Lazer Ball is the newest sport of the 21st Century.

Teams of lazer gladiators battle it out, scoring goals by bouncing the lazer beam from hand-held mirrors onto a super high-tech spot on the wall.

I personally suggest the Comfort of Strangers, a street game which was created in the media sandbox 07.

All the games’ start times can be seen on their Schedule and the only cost for you is your time (and the bus into town obviusly), ‘cos everyone & anyone in Bristol can play! For free!

See you there at the igLounge by the Watershed.

IgFest is organised by The igLab (Interesting Games Lab).

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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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…)

Our new bit of lovely Bluetooth equipment arrived today, a Gumstix “Proximity Marketing device”!

This box will be able to push out files over Bluetooth to enabled devices and comes with a mini antenna and some fun Bubble-wrap! (more…)

The Happy Packages site is now live! It’s up and beautiful at, http://www.happypackages.com

It has details of all the projects Mobile Pie and Thought Den are exploring with the MediaSandbox research project and will be the public facing site for the projects.

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Thought Den are still hanging from the Soco Social knees up in London last night (guests of honour, of course – here’s why) and from the dirty-early coach journey back this morning to meet our very special guest, Mr Alistair Darling! He came to open the Pervasive Media Studio and dutifully cut the digital ribbon with an HP iPaq!

Both Clare and Dick from the Watershed lay down some inspirational speeches, waxing lyrical about the fantastic creative and computing industries currently booming in the west country. Roll on world domination. View the rest of the pics here

Well whaddya know!? Some quick thinking from Thought Den Creative Director Ben Templeton and some smiley pen-work from Tom of Mobile Pie and we’re off to a flyer with a nice feature in the Guardian. Read more about it at the Guardian Media Blog I couldn’t help but put a smug comment on the Guardian Blog, only to have spelt hot-bed wrong. Ok, so Bristol’s a Media city, not a spelling city.

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Is the new term given to people who send unsolicited files in a Bluetooth zone posing as the people visually transmitting.

Today we checked the distance we can deliver our content from when broadcasting from a raised position in the office.

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