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…”

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.

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.

One of the biggest challenges we’ve seen at Thought Den, (apart from having killer ideas, eyeing up potential ventures and knowing where to start…) is getting people to actually interact, turn on their Bluetooth or send an SMS with the system. In our every-day lives, we just don’t have the reason to start mucking around with our devices for doing more than sending a text or listening to music.

So a question is raised, (more…)