So a few guys from work and myself were asked to compete in the Microsoft PhizzPop challenge this week. I had heard of the competition a few months back, but I had thought it was more of a student challenge. After being able to rearrange my work schedule for 3 days of Silverlight training, I was off to the MN Microsoft campus!

The training was taught by Aquent, which was nice to have a neutral party teaching the software. I was actually pretty impressed with the Microsoft Expression Suite. We spent most of the class working in Blend 2 building Silverlight applications. After working in Flash and other web technologies for years, I was happy to notice the similarities Microsoft incorporated into the Expression Suite to help first time users jump right in. My favorite part was the tie between Visual Studio and Blend. Using Visual Studio to edit the C# (main programming language for Silverlight applications) worked great. I never knew Visual Studio was so robust as an editor, I wish I could edit Actionscript in it!

So after 3 days of training, we received our challenge from Microsoft: Pitch an idea to help a fictitious retailer engage more customers online and offline. My team regrouped and over the next 5 days (3 of them business) worked on our pitch. During that time I was the team’s developer. It was my job to build out the technical part of the pitch using Microsoft technologies (Expression Studio mainly). One neat thing to note, everyone in the contest was able to develop for the new Microsoft Surface and Microsoft Airwave technologies. We had access to one of the few Microsoft Surface prototypes to use in our presentations. The scheduling around developing for these technologies was a little too tight, we could only debug on a live machine for a couple hours the day before the contest, so my team decided to stick to desktop development instead. I will admit switching over to a new technology in such a short time then creating an entire business pitch in three days was a pain.

My team pushed late into each night to develop the concept, art, and media files for our final presentation. Finally on Thursday evening, we headed over to Solera in downtown Minneapolis for the PhizzPop event. Microsoft did a great job with the event, lots of lights and drinks (do not try the absinthe!). Each team had 8 minutes (10 tops) to present their pitch to a panel of 5 judges from local business and agencies. My team nailed our presentation, and in the end were one of two favorites. The other was Minneapolis design agency Zeus Jones. After 15 minutes the judges regrouped and announced the winner of the event. After all that hard work and effort over the past two weeks, team space150 (my team) lost to Zeus Jones. I was bummed, but if we had to loose to any of the teams, I was glad it was them.

Overall it was a great experience that brought us together and I can walk away with some great knowledge of this new technology. Going forward I don’t plan using Silverlight all too much, it definately has limited moments of being a better option than Flash for me.

WeatherVision3D.

The FWA Theater recently opened it’s doors and is showcasing a new interface called FiV. This new interface/platform is developed by Fantasy Interactive. It has the typical Fi look and feel that has plagued made a name for Fi for years. The FiV system seems to be a great fit for those that have a lot of video content and need to have it organized and easy to navigate. With the rise in bandwidth speeds, more sites seem to be gearing towards video content. The only catch that I can think of is a site that can handle/afford the bandwidth of a system that has massive amounts of video content will probably have the budget and need to design their own system. Could you imagine Hulu using this system instead of their own?

This would be a great tool if it was cheap (think Slideshow Pro), and could handle smaller amounts of video content gracefully without looking empty. Future potential could then be an online video editing suite add-on (think Slideshow Pro Director) and Live Video stream support.

I don’t believe this system will take off to quickly, but has a great potential.

Web developers have to stay sharp, the technology changes constantly and if you don’t keep up, you get left in the virtual dust. Six Revisions has put together a pretty comprehensive list to help you fill up your Google Reader. Granted this list is mostly design/interaction orientated, I still find it useful for inspiration and to get a clear view at what others are doing. Feel free to check out another list from the same author that is basically the same thing, but with different sites.

[ via Digg ]

“Make your own TV spot, on the spot!”

[ Holton Sentivan + Gury ]