Anyway, we were invited to UWE to take part in a Rapid Prototyping 2day workshop (much like our week long version) to help brush up on skills and solve a question plaguing the music industry. “How do we re-erect flacid music industry sales with a ubiquitous sexy product? Something physical to aid the declining CD and LP record sales.”

Not an easy question, but all the groups worked tirelessly to try and fathom a solution. The event was an ace mix of people; artists, engineers, script writers, technologists, students and research scientists.

I was lucky enough to be involved with an orgy of very clever minds from HP R&D, The Pervasive Media studio and UWE.

Our idea was to create a new market and intentionally stimulate interest in an album before it was even completed. Using some expensive Remote Studio Headphones which tune into the band’s recording studio sporadically. Super fans would to listen to new riffs, bouncing jams, banter and sparky live sets. It was called Gold Jack, see our mascot below.

Gold Jack mascot

To visualise that for a pitch, it was in all a proper dirty experience. With 3D printers burning through litres of plaster, post-its being slammed un-ceremonisasly to most surfaces and all interspersed with a lot of heated USP chats!

Post its

The workshop finished with all groups pitching to Seth from PIAS music and showcased some very beautiful ideas, like the “Music Vault”, engineered to capture memories and “dieTunes”, music only released when the artist had popped their clogs.

dieTunes

Thought Den value these training workshops very highly, it keeps the directors on their toes, tickles their digital gray cells and allows blind exploration into new business opportunities for all our clients.

Thanks UWE and Pervasive Media Studio for a very well organised 2 days.

Sex. (just felt like I needed to write the word after that post)

The festival, igFest (interesting games festival) was conceived by Simon Games and is weekend of free urban games. If ‘urban games’ sounds like a silly marketing buzz-word, it really means, legally borrowing car-parks to play snakes and ladders, being chased by zombies late at night, running around college green with water pistols and following moose in the forests trying to get a picture of them. All igfest games, that were great fun for all the public who stopped by!

The best part was, all these games were free thanks to sponsors by the National Lottery, Watershed, HP Labs and the sexy Pervasive Media studio.

Ourselves, Thought Den, were heavily involved with the Commercial managing, promoting, volunteering, marketing and copywriting with the Festival. This involved a lot of running around for business (not for pleasure) and doing our best to deliver some great results for a fledgling festival. Check it all out in the portfolio.

But most of all we were heavily involved with having fun and living up to the spirit of the weekend. Play is good!

That’s the sound of our own trumpets screaming to the heavens as we find ourselves in the industry magazine NMA (New Media Age).

The article is all about the Happy Packages project and covers how Thought Den and Mobile Pie are working together in the Pervasive Media Studio to produce a sexy iPhone application aimed at friends leaving fun trails for each other.

If you’d like to read more about the initial Happy Packages project, take a look at some of our posts.

Small side note, it’s worth mentioning that they managed to spell our name wrong and we’re now ‘Thought Deeds’. Also while we’re at it, it’s a good time to mention the Evening Post’s misspelling of Ben’s (our creative director) surname a few weeks ago. Good morning, Mr Pembleton!

[/PARP]

[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 kind of extra offshoots are going to start appearing from the ‘player’,  if I can embed parts of a digital world on my Facebook, blogs etc… it could mean having a window into a virtual world at all times.

Imagine this, you pulling up to your mate’s Facebook Profile in the evening and see in one of their application panel (past the Zombies, FriendWall etc…) a world which is moving, viewed like a quick web-cam following their avatar running around in a space chatting to some mates and doing silly stuff.

All you’d have to do is click, and go join them in their digital escapades. Suddenly with the whole application being viewable in a browser player, we can start crossing over to these spaces quickly.

The links with their Open Social (if Facebook joined!) are blindingly relative too, now the oppurtunity for another world to start integrating with our flat faced Social web-sites is apparent. Let’s wait till it becomes institutionalised like the Social Networking sites (facebook, bebo, myspace), then I’ll eat my digital hat.

Got the time?

However this does bring up some valid arguments for it’s use, what are going to be doing in that world? Just hanging out?

Is there really time in our lives to spend sitting in-front of our computers pretending to be in another world? Personally I’m busy enough with singing in the evenings, spending time at the Pervasive media studio looking at new technologies like ‘Multiple phone calling’ and sleeping! Possibly in the long term we’ll find it’ll be used a bit more in the Winter when people are staying in getting a bit bored and cold, but for now I’m struggling where to fit it onto my diary on a social level.

Why everyone can play there

I suppose the most exciting part about the whole Lively release is the brand it’s released under, Google.

In itself, Google represents a tool who is primarily accessible to any sex, race, class or age and most people use it daily. In turn, the same feelings will be passed with those who discover Lively. Suddenly we’ve got a 3D world who’s only barriers to entry are, “do you have a browser & do you know who Google are?”. Not much is it.

This means for those normal people who’ve read odd extracts in the papers about Second Life/ World of Warcraft and imagining it’s “something only for geeks” will now have a new social network where they can join in on the 3D avatar based fun and not feel so out their comfort zone. It’s Google, not Dungeons and Dragons!

Gaming

As we’re in the same space with Simon, we have Gaming on our minds quite frequently and it’s sparked another notion, “with the platform being so open to any everyone, is there a market for the biggest MMORG ever?”.

Already there’s links games like Fight Club, but imagine if the Lively platform opened up an API for huge rooms, then companies would start being able to produce Mass Multiplayer Online Role Play Games on the pre-built open platform.

They wouldn’t have any distribution, server load, login worries, all they’d have to do is program the game interface, rules etc… and there’d be barely any bigger technical issues to deal with.

Phew

I’m a bit excited by it all and most of my thoughts are widely speculive, but often with Google, things seem to go that way. All I have to do now is wait for them to release it on mac…