Thought Pie Progress

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…