News
Film & New Media | Ben Templeton | Thought PieThoughtden were lucky enough to speak at Cineformation's last event at the Watershed: Film & New Media. Not only was it a great chance to share ideas with like minded people, we also tested Compila, the open-source Bluetooth software, by spamming the room with Dude Corp videos and the results of our group brainstorm session.
The brainstorming was great fun and we came up with some bizarre scenarios to explore how people might access and pay for video content on mobile devices. Though no solid conclusions were drawn, it was in enlightening half an hour all the same. The industry is moving so fast at the moment it's impossible to determine exactly how we'll be using our mobiles in 12 months time.
As for the results of the Happy Fountains experiment, people were far more keen to watch the Dude Corp videos than look over the JPEGs we produced. Humour was a BIG factor when deciding what content would be allowed onto peoples' phones.
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.
