Thursday, November 27, 2008

Manifest Digital wins PhizzPop Chicago with Five Star City

by Adam Kinney via Adam Kinney on 11/27/2008 6:16:00 AM

For PhizzPop Chicago, Manifest Digital was tasked with creating a digital strategy for Chicago's bid to become the host city for the 2016 Olympics.  Their winning entry was Five Star City, a digital scrapbook allowing the people of Chicago to express themselves and explain why think Chicago would be a great place for the Olympics.

The Silverlight-based application has a few interesting features worth calling out:

• Custom Profile Page - users are allowed to post photos and videos on their page to give their personal view.  I love that video has become so easy to do use now that it has become part of the UI, integrated among photos and other UI elements.  Let's hear it for increasing the 4th dimension aspects of application development.
• Avatar Editor - following a current trend in avatar creation users are able to plant their face on a cartoon body.  maybe we'll get to do that in the next Xbox Dashboard update.
• People Plotting - Plotting points using Silverlight and Virtual Earth is even cooler in 3D view.  The more I look into Live Services, the more possibilities I see.  I can't wait for this stuff to explode.
• Tug of war comparison - Groups can organize and compare member count with a classic game of tug of war.  Its a fun visually, especially with the shrunken avatars.

You can see the application in action by checking out there video presentation.

I'm really enjoying watching what the applications coming out of PhizzPop this go-around.  I'm not sure if I wasn't paying attention as much before, but actually I believe its because their doing a fine job of holding the contests and training the contestants.  To get an idea of what the contest is like checkout the Chicago Highlights video.

There's five more stops left in the current tour - Minneapolis, Miami, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Austin.  I'm expecting five more inspirational winners.