The official line isn't ideal, since we're a little off target in terms of nailing down business partners for a key milestone, but the far more exciting and important news is that the idea has undergone a rennaisance! Following our meeting with Sharon from the Watershed we went back to the drawing board, and ran a number of brainstorming workshops. At first the team thought I was pulling out the same old moves - what do you want to achieve? what can it do? what does it look like? - but in the end it was all just to stimulate the creative juices, and we hit on a lovely little concept that will now form the foundation for the project.

We've been struggling a little with getting the prototype made simply because we were trying to take on too much in this early iteration of the application. And this new spin on the idea has really helped us figure out the next phase of production. It's all very well talking in grand ways about what an all singing all dancing version would achieve, but in this early phase we need to get content on a screen so people can interact with it. 

The new twist actually goes back to some of the core ideas that spawned Happy Packages phase 1 - communities interacting, sharing content among friends, discovering digital delights around the city. What we're aiming to do now is give users the ability to explore new places in Bristol by browsing what other people have rated. It borrows from Amazon's famous "You bought this, so you might like this" technique, but we've adapted it to social movements. You're in the Watershed. You like it. You whip your phone out, you smack the 'YES, I Like it!" button, and then hey presto, it delivers you 5 other places in the area that other likeminded people also like, or have visited after being at the watershed. The core concept is learning about new places and new communites. Once this iteration is developed, we can explore social tagging and more complex criteria like the weather and time of day when the place was rated. We can then explore how the product can deliver exisiting data on these locations from the web and deliver packages of happiness - vouchers, comments from friends, flickr feeds from the funny night you had there, streamed audio from the previous weeks events at that location, preview content for upcoming events, flyers from club promoters - at this stage the list seems endless, but the most important thing is that the mountain that is Happy Packages now seems scalable...

Posted by Ben Templeton