News
Happy Monday! | Dan Course | Thought PieThe 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.
Thought Pie Progress | Ben Templeton | Thought Pie
After some productive and painful discussions with Parkhouse of Rubber fame I think we're a little closer to finalising the research question of the Happy Packages project. From the off our proposal made reference to all the successful yet 'old' media in Bristol (magazines, posters, stickers, SMS shortcodes etc) but there's quite a gap in uptake between these and the more advanced 'pervasive' WiFi / GPS enabled devices such as those that support the mscape software.
What we find interesting (read challenging!) is how to encourage Joe Blogs to start using funky connected pervasive technology & applications so we are producing three or four projects under the Happy Packages umbrella to explore where the drop off and loss of impulse occurs.
The first, and most simple (the 'control' in our experiment) is called Happy SMS and we have secured a partnership with Venue Magazine. We have developed an Artificial Intelligence back-end that will interpret a text message sent to our special happy short code 60300 and reply with the most relevant what's-on information. For example 'happy music jazz centre of town' will return 'Venue Mag and Happy SMS recommend the Tantric Jazz Cafe, 8pm, live jazz with Henry Humperdink, free'. It'll be up and running when the Mobile Pie boys get back from their gallavanting…
The second, slightly more advanced in terms of technology and engagement, is called Happy Fountains. What some might think amounts to spamming, others define as 'contextual information distribution'! We are setting up a network of Bluetooth zones, or fountains, where users can pick up Happy content. The ultimate goal of this area of the project is to allow the targeting of specific users (unique MAC address) with specific content that reflects the relationship between the sender and recipient. However, we are yet to find the perfect hardware - trials are ongoing…
The third, more advanced concept, is Happy Stamps - this is an application that is downloaded to the phone that represents your passport. We hope to encourage people to visit the happiest areas of Bristol (defined by you the ugly masses!) in order to collect all the stamps. Just like that annoying friend of yours that didn't forget to ask for stamps in their passport on their gap year and now has all those lovely colourful foreign marks of authority. The Happy Stamps application will reward users with discount vouchers at Happy Package selected places round Bristol.
To drive traffic to the Happy Packages projects, and to encourage UGC, we also have something called Secret Happiness which lets users anonymously submit a sentence and image describing a Bristol place / activity / idiosyncrasy that makes them happy. These will be distributed via happy Fountains, Happy Stamps and happypackages.com, Facebook, MySpace etc
Also, for your interest, below is some development work we did on the Happy Packages character…
We're in the GUARDIAN!! | Ben Templeton | Thought PieAfter some quick-thinking from the Happy Packages team, an impromptu photo shoot and some excellent work by the PR team, we've finally got lift off on some mega-publicity. Though, in truth, I'm not sure who reads this blog….
Have you seen QR?? | Tom Dowding | Thought PieWhen Thought Pie first came together (what a day), Mobile Pie talked a lot about these things called QR Codes and Thought Den thought that we were a bit obsessed with them. It was true that we desperately wanted to use them, but we heeded the warning of Film Producer Lord Puttnam, who said "Kill your darlings first", by which he meant, if there's something that you are really keen on doing, or are really proud of having made, drop it, because you probably want it in the project for the wrong reasons. We took his advice (though he clearly ignored it himself when using the squirty cream guns in Bugsy Malone).
However today the light switched on for Dan when I showed him how to send a text message via QR, and now it's wormed its way back into the plan. For those that don't know what I'm talking about (which happens alarmingly often), QR stands for Quick Response, and a QR Code is a 'Physical World Hyperlink' - a barcode with 2 dimensions of information designed to be captured on a phone's camera. It looks like this:
They can be used to encode text, phone numbers, URLs, and SMS messages! The only barrier is that you have to download a QR Reader onto your phone. We have found that the best one can be found here (it's free).
If you want to try it out, get the reader and snap the image above and it should create an SMS automatically that is preloaded with my phone number and a message! So come on try it out!!! It's said that 90% of all WAP usage in Japan is made via a QR code, which is staggering, so one thing that we want to achieve as part of Happy Packages is promote the use of QR to the general public in Bristol. We will be using it in at least one of our mini-projects. So stay alert!
Open Source Placecasting | Richard Wilson | Thought PieSo we've been 'gopping', been chased by 'fanny' and otherwise annoyed several Bristolians with our various bluetooth shenanigans but whats been powering all this
mischiefresearch? While we get to grips with the exact requirements we need from a bluetooth transmitter we've been using some open source software called Consola (http://www.consola.org/) to turn our lovely macbooks into full blown bluetooth pushing ninjas. There are plenty of good things about Consola (nice UI, lots of features such as blacklisting), a couple of bad ones (it crashes occasionally) but the best thing about it is it's Open Source. This doesn't just mean its free, but rather that the developers have chosen to share the source code - inviting other developers from around the world to add to it and generally improve the product. This is great in the case of Consola as the original developers no longer seem to be around, so we're still able to fix bugs and add new features ourselves.
