Design Thinking Digest

Where you aware? Things you didn’t know Microsoft did.

Apologies to John Hodgeman but sometimes it gets lost in the shuffle that Microsoft has some folks that are doing special things that sometimes go un-noticed. Our MIX Online Team is one of them. Here are some of the things they are working on. What’s wonderful about all of these efforts is that they are freely downloadable, open source, and immediately useable prototypes with no strings attached.

Oxite
^new!

Our Homegrown Content Management Platform

Oomph

Our Microformats Approach

A Website Named Desire

A Look At What It Takes To Launch A Website

Descry
^{coming soon!}

Exploring Data and Information Visualization

PhizzPop Chicago Highlights

A more detailed post is coming but check out The video hightlights for last Thursday's Chicago PhizzPop tour.

Meet the Chicago PhizzPop Design Challenge Judges

Those of us that went to design school or have worked at a traditional or digital agency have all learned to respect the design review. All design challenge contestants for the Chicago PhizzPop Design Challenge have to present to a panel of industry experts and peers that will pick a winner. Our Chicago judges represent a collection of some of Chicaogo’s best design talent and includes folks that work closely with Chicago 2016.

The judges (subject to change) are:

 

David Armano, VP and Creative Director of Critical Mass, creating of blog Logic + Emotion
www.criticalmass.com/ and http://darmano.typepad.com/
As VP, Experience Design for Critical Mass, David has the privilege of leading talented interdisciplinary teams across a variety of clients while leveraging his background as a creative problem solver and strategic thinker. David has over 14 years experience in the creative field with the majority of his time spent in digital marketing and experience design. An active thought leader in the industry, David authors the popular Logic + Emotion blog currently ranked in the top 20 media + marketing blogs according to Advertising Age. David’s writing and visual thinking has been cited by Forrester, The Boston Globe and landed him in BusinessWeek on several occasions including their “Best of 2006”.

Prior to Critical Mass, David spent time as a creative lead at notable firms such as Digitas and Agency.com—putting in a combined tenure of 8 years in the large digital agency environment. He led multiple initiatives for clients such as HP, Allstate, Fifth Third Bank, Miller Brewing, Grainger, and Bally Total Fitness. Previously, David earned his interactive stripes working with The Chicago Tribune on their site initiatives. David helped launch and upgrade site features, functionality and content for the Tribune’s flagship site. David also accumulated broadcast and direct marketing experience while working for companies such as Fox and Columbia House.

David holds a BFA cum laude in Computer Graphics from Pratt Institute. He minored in Visual Communications and was fortunate enough to study under some of the most creative minds in the industry. He currently resides in a near-northern suburb of Chicago, not far from Lake Michigan. When David isn't working, surfing the net, or riding his motorbike—he can be found spending quality time with his wife and two boys.

 

Blagica Bottigliero, Founder of Bsolutions
www.bsolutions.com

Blagica (blah-gee-tsa) Bottigliero is an Emmy award winning online marketing consultant, blogger and web entrepreneur.

Blagica worked in some of Chicago's most established interactive companies. She started her career at Giant Step (now ARC Worldwide), where she assisted Maytag and Purina with their initial Internet strategies. Blagica moved to the marketing side of the Internet when she joined Orbitz.com. At Orbitz, Blagica negotiated and managed multi-million dollar marketing campaigns, in addition to launching the Orbitz Affiliate Program. After a 'dot com' break in France and sailing home across the Atlantic, she returned to Chicago and managed Q Interactive's search and affiliate marketing efforts.

In the fall of 2005, Blagica formed her Internet marketing consulting company, Bsolutions where she and her network continue to assist small to large sized businesses navigate the Internet.  She also launched  CondoPerks.com, a loyalty program for condominium associations.

Blagica holds a BBA degree from Western Michigan University and is passionate about mentoring young women through her blog, Gals' Guide.  Blagica sits on the Board of Directors of the Chicago Interactive Marketing Association, is also a member of the NBC5 Street Team and is the Managing Editor of the Chicago 2016 Channel.

Bill Bulman, User Experience Director at Ogilvy One
www.ogilvy.com and www.twitter.com/bbulman
As User Experience Director at OgilvyOne, Bill leads Ogilvy's user experience team of User Experience Architects and Content Strategists for a variety of clients, including Chicago2016, American Medical Association, Oscar Mayer, and Allstate, among others.  With over 13 years experience in the interactive field and a focus on usability, user research and most recently social media, Bill has lead user experience teams at several interactive agencies and boutique research and design firms, including imc2. Most recently, he was a partner at Messagefirst, a boutique research firm in Philadelphia.
During his career, Bill has had the pleasure of working with some of the world's leading brands, including  Comcast, Polo/Ralph Lauren, Palm, La Times, Timberland, PBS, Eli Lilly, Kmart, Reebok, MLB, NASCAR, Pepsi, GlaxoSmithKline, Ace Hardware, Adidas, and General Mills.
Bill is active in the user experience community,  including serving as vice chair within the PhiChi organization, Philadelphia's chapter of ACM's Computer Human Interaction special interest group.  Bill has spoken at various events, on user experience, information architecture and social media including The Chicago Convergence Summit, UPA2007, and CHI2002, among others. 

 

Kevin Flatt, Executive Creative Director of Tribal DDB
www.tribalddb.com/
Kevin’s mission is to harness powerful, creative thinkubg form the diverse talent at Tribal DDB to create the most compelling brand experiences through digital media. Collaborating with brand strategists, art directors, writers, designers and producers, Kevin products ideas that integrate the innovative with industry standards.

Over his career, Kevin has created work for clients such as Alamo Car Rental, Amazon.com, Archipelago, BMW of North America, The Bahamas Ministry of Tourism, EDS, Gatorade, JCPenney, Miller Brewing Company, Nike, Nordstrom, International Trucks, Lee Jeans, Propel, McDonalds, Radio Shack, RJReynolds, Microsoft, Office Max, Sony, State Farm, Timberland, TIME Magazine, United Airlines, and Virgin Mobil.

His work has received recognition from may respected competitions and publications, including Communication Arts, Graphic, TIME Magazine, Adweek, The Type Directors Club, the Super Reggie, The Art Directions Cub, Clio, the Show Best of Show, Cannes Grand Prix and first ever Titanium Cyber Lion, Kevin is actively involved in the interactive community, speaking at industry conferences and judging notable industry competitions, including The one show, The Art Directors Club and Cannes.

Prior to joining Tribal DDB, Kevin was the Executive Creative Director of Interactive at Fallon in Minneapolis. He was responsible for building an integrating digital creative offering that resulting in a number of notable solutions such as BMW Films. Before focusing on the digital side of communications, Kevin was a Senior Designer with Duffy and worked for Nike.

 

Bryan Jones, Technology Director at Ogilvy One
www.ogilvy.com/
Bryan has over ten years of technology experience leading cross-disciplinary teams, working with clients to define business/marketing objectives and managing the execution of development strategies for clients such as BP, Chicago 2016, CBOE, AMA, Unilever, Allstate, CDW and Kraft.

His experience ranges from large-scale website development to on-line advertising management and campaign optimization. He has extensive knowledge of web development processes, rich media and emerging technologies and consults clients on web implementation best practices across multiple platforms, applications and programming languages.

 

Jeff Smith, CEO of Clarity Consulting
www.claritycon.com/
With over ten years experience in information technology and sciences, Jeff sets Clarity's long-range business goals, and works with the executive team to ensure the goals are met. During his career at Clarity, Jeff has used technology to solve the business problems of corporations in dozens of industries, including construction, financial services, food services, healthcare, insurance, management consulting, nuclear power, retail, software and telecommunications. He serves as Engagement Director on many client projects, playing an active role in the design and implementation of Clarity's software solutions.

Jeff speaks regularly at professional developer conferences throughout the world. He has spoken at VBITS, VSLive, TechEd and Microsoft's Developer Days, and several Chicago-area user group conferences. He has co-authored several books on n-tier client-server application design, and written several articles and white papers on topics ranging from ASP.NET to cryptographic security.

Prior to becoming Clarity's second employee in 1995, Jeff was employed with Lante Corporation where he worked on software projects for dozens of Fortune 500 clients across a wide range of markets, including computer software, healthcare, manufacturing and telecommunications. Jeff also held technology positions with Ottosensors, Inc. where he and a team of ten biologists worked on the development of the world's first real-time blood-gas monitoring system.

Jeff holds a BS in Biomedical Engineering from Northwestern University. Upon graduating from college, Jeff also co-founded a real estate redevelopment firm in Cleveland, Ohio.

Jaclyn Valrose, Communications Manager, Chicago 2016
www.chicago2016.org

Jaclyn Valrose is a communications manager at Chicago 2016 responsible for educating the community on Chicago’s bid for the 2016 Olympic and Paralympic Games through media relations and communications activities.

Prior to Chicago 2016, Jaclyn worked at Edelman and was responsible for strategic public relations activities on behalf of international, national and local clients, including Expedia Corporate Travel and CEMUSA, Inc. In addition to media relations, she managed speakers’ bureaus, award submissions, social media programs and tradeshow activities for client programs.

Jaclyn joined Edelman from TravelCLICK, Inc., where she worked in marketing and communications. Jaclyn was responsible for internal and external communications, including media relations materials, company marketing materials and employee communications. She was also responsible for global customer relations and the implementation of product promotions and launches. Jaclyn earned a bachelors degree in speech communication from Miami University in Oxford, OH.

The Chicago PhizzPop Tour, November 20th

Note, this post has been edited on November 15th, 2008.

We’ll be hosting another PhizzPop Tour in Chicago this year. You can sign up here. This year’s tour has a twist in that we’re doing it with the partnership with a few important groups. Which are:

Ogilvy Interactive, which is currently contributing services to the Chicago 2016 committee, the group that supports Chicago 2016 Olympic bid (Learn more at chicago2016.org). Ogilvy has helped define the design challenge this year and it will be focused on developing strategies to help Chicago land the Olympics in 2016.

 

We’re hosting this event with The Chicago Convergence, an 1800 member grassroots organization dedicated to turning Chicago into the new media capital of the world.

What is the challenge?

PhizzPop Design Challenge was created by Microsoft to bring together top designers and developers from select agencies around the country to compete in an adrenaline charged three-day competition of design innovation, development, and creativity to solve a unique design challenge. This year PhizzPop is visiting seven cities in search of the best design talent in America. The tour kicked off its first event in New York City, and excitement continues to build for the next stop on the tour: Chicago, November 20, 2008.

How does the challenge work?

PhizzPop Design Challenge was created by Microsoft to bring together top designers and developers from select agencies around the country to compete in an adrenaline charged three-day competition of design innovation, development, and creativity to solve a unique design challenge. This year PhizzPop is visiting seven cities in search of the best design talent in America. The tour kicked off its first event in New York City, and excitement continues to build for the next stop on the tour: Chicago, November 20, 2008.

Who are the contestants?

Contestants are designers and developers from the top agencies in each region. Regional winners will earn acclaim and roundtrip airfare to the national competition held at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas March 15-17, 2009.

For Chicago currently announced participants include:

Manifest Digital – www.manifestdigital.com/

Quilogy – www.quilogy.com/

Roundarch – www.roundarch.com/

Tanagram – www.tanagrampartners.com/

Who are the judges?

Current judges announced for the event include Kevin Flatt, Executive Creative Director at DDB Tribal, David Armano, VP and Creative Director at Critical Mass and founder of the blog Logic + Emotion and Jeff Smith, CEO and founder of Clarity Consulting (And last year’s Chicago PhizzPop winner)

How do I sign up?

Go to www.phizzpop.com and register for the Chicago event.

Something new: BizSpark

Design Thinking Digest has been a bit of a ghost town lately and that’s largely due to two big efforts I’ve been focused on. One is the return of the PhizzPop Design Challenge Tour in the US (which I’ll talk about later) and a new program we announced today called BizSpark.

Some background. It’s sometimes easy to forget the roots and heritage of a company like Microsoft. Like many great businesses of yore it wasn’t sketched on the back of napkin but formulated in a dorm room. It was started by folks with a sense of curiosity—an itch that needed to be scratched. Sure there was ambition, there was also risk, but the founders of Microsoft had something that every great company also had that is seldom discussed. Someone that believed in them and enabled them.

In the case of Microsoft this occurred after Bill Gates called the creators of a new microcomputer called the Altair 8800. Bill and team demonstrated an implementation of the BASIC programming language for the system and afterward the computer maker agreed to distribute Altair BASIC. This enabled (or encouraged depending how you think about this) Bill Gates to leave Harvard and move to Albuquerque, where the computer manufacturer, MITS was located. It was there that Microsoft was founded.

So, how does Microsoft pay this forward as it were? One way we do this is through programs focused at higher education.

One of these programs is called DreamSpark. DreamSpark enables any eligible post-secondary student to download professional design and development tools from Microsoft at no charge during their education. This program is supported by active communities and a global innovation challenge that is called Imagine Cup.

But today Microosft is announcing that we are taking the principles of DreamSpark to a new level and a new audience. That audience is entrepreneurs and the program is called BizSpark.

BizSpark is a global program that will help startups grow into successful businesses through software support and a vibrant ecosystem that will allow new startups to deliver superior business advantage.

We’ll do this in three ways.

1. We’ll help startups receive fast and easy access to Microsoft’s current full-featured development tools, platform technologies, and production licenses of server products for immediate use in developing and bringing to market innovative and interoperable solutions with no upfront costs and minimal requirements.

2. We’ll also help startups receive professional support from Microsoft and BizSpark Network Partners around the world who provide a wide range of support resources for software startups. Network Partners are incubators, investors, advisors, government agencies and hosters who are vested in software-fueled innovation and entrepreneurship.

3. Finally, we’ll help startups get visibility. A dedicated Website, the BizSparkDB, will highlight promising companies from around the world every day. Through their relationship with Microsoft and BizSpark Network Partners, startups will achieve global visibility to an audience of potential investors, clients and partners.

Every great idea needs a little push to be successful.

BizSpark will support startups with a global community of peers, entrepreneurial resources and experts who can help address the unique technical and business development challenges that startups face. 

If you happen to be in Chicago on Thursday you can join me for an event where we’ll discuss what BizSpark means for Chicago.

Please RSVP here or drop me or, if you have questions, drop me an email.

Addendum:

Some great insight on BizSpark.

Microsoft Jump-Starts Global Entrepreneurs With BizSpark

Microsoft BizSpark Puts Startups on the Path to Business Success

Microsoft's BizSpark initiative offers free servers and software to startups

Microsoft offers free software for start-ups

Microsoft launches BizSpark program for startups

Introducing the startup of the day!

http://www.typepad.com/t/trackback/513652/35371200

Looking Closer: The future of the startup

Starting with a post by Jason Calacanis we see that the hangover of our overinflated economy is starting to impact the lifeblood of innovation in our culture, the startup. I suspect things will get a bit worse until they get better but some of the best innovations of our time in business models and products have been borne of grim economic realities. Regardless if you’re in a start-up or not there are some important things to consider.

If you’re a startup it’s time to give up the bread and circuses approach to running the business. Provable revenues matter more that share right now and leveraging technology, frugality, and business acumen to get to them quickly are more important than ever. There’s still a lot of capital in private hands right now that is looking for a great place to be. If you can demonstrate that you’re a good place for that exciting things can happen.

If your a service based company or a larger company think about what kind of services can you provide that can help startups overcome many of the obstacles they face in technology adoption or business market validation. It will be interesting to see what companies to do address these realities and continue to enable startups. Startups that can leverage accelerators to get there businesses spun-up and generating revenue will be the only game that matters soon.

The Olympics Tipping Point: Why Television will never be the same.

I think the 2008 will be looked at as the year that television and how we think about broadcasting begin to alter into something that would be unrecognizable only a few years ago.

The catalyst for this? NBC's broadcasting strategy for the 2008 Olympics. It's easy to look at what's disappointing about this effort (The lack of access to this great tool outside of the US and the somewhat challenging process of identifying your local NBC broadcaster but the benefits of NBC's actions and consumer demand will, I suspect, make these constraints go away in the future too.

NBC is basically conducting the largest online media event that has EVER been done on the Web. They'll offer up over 3,600 hours of video coverage and highlights that will reach tens of millions of viewers and enable hundreds of thousands of viewers to CONCURRENTLY watch events live or after the fact in the most mainstream Web browsers available for Windows PCs and the Mac. Below is a screen capture of the enhanced player with LIVE commentary.

The site is about far more than just streaming video. Enhanced modes in the player provide a wide screen experience, picture in picture and what I like to call the 'Elvis' mode which lets you go into a control room and watch 4 events at one. This is couple with commentary integration and a rich interactive navigation structure that lets truly see how much content is available.

There are three ingredients that were necessary to make this happen. One was a business rationale and way to monetize this experience. Truthfully this is where the regulatory structure of broadcasting and business models have work that must continue and it's also where existing online models fall short. The cost of the infrastructure and bandwidth and the regulatory environment of broadcast rights have been historical barriers. More cost effective technology and new service-focused advertising scenarios are what rationalized this effort for NBC.

The second was the technology that can make it happen. In this particular case NBC chose to use Silverlight because it was the most cost effective and scalable media presentation technology that could be used for this event. Silverlight made what NBC was attempting to do possible where just a year a ago it wouldn't have been possible from a cost and scalability perspective. Just like Tivo changed how consumers consume and watch traditional broadcasting I think Silverlight has the ability to change how we consume content as a connected social community online.

Finally, NBC focused on the experience and brought the 'long tail' of the Olympics to consumers. Gymnastics clubs across the US for example can now see everything that occurs at the Olympics, from training and trials and warm-ups to the entire event without having it crosscut with other competing events.

If you want to see the Olympics and everything that makes it a truly breathtaking event check it out at http://www.nbcolympics.com/video/

If you like what NBC is doing let them know about it at feedback@nbcolympics.com

Expression Studio 2 Ships

One short year after Expression Studio was introduced at MIX 08 was announced we're seeing a major update to the suite with Expression 2, which shipped last Friday. See here for information on some of the great new features such as PHP support in Web and Silverlight support in Blend as well as things that make Expression easier to install and update and even own via new subscription based pricing.

Expression Studio also has great support via the Expression Community with active forums and great articles, links and training about how to integrate Expression Studio into your design studio.

Follow MIX2008 from home

Sadly, MIX2008 is sold out. But don't let that stop you from following all the announcements and sessions that are happening at MIX. We'll be live streaming all keynotes and sessions will be hosted online within 24 hours.

Starting the day of the event (March 5th) you'll be able to see content at: http://sessions.visitmix.com

Also be sure to check out the MIX Flickr feed.

You'll be able to see presentations from Steve Ballmer, Ray Ozzie, Scott Guthrie, Guy Kawasaki and Dean Hachamovitch unveiling the latest web-oriented products and technologies.

To see what sessions are coming you can browse a comprehensive program of sessions for designers, developers and business strategists led by industry experts.

I'm especially excited because Guy Kawasaki will there. Check out his blog and some of his thoughts on Avenue A | Razorfish's Digital Media Outlook Report. Great Stuff. BTW, also check out www.alltop.com. Great for those of us not on the RSS/ATOM bandwagon yet. I'd love to get in the ego category but of course if you have to ask...

Technorati Tags: Guy Kawasaki,Scott Guthrie,Steve Ballmer,Avenue A | Razorfish,MIX08

The Ultimate Mash-Up: Stephen P. Anderson and Design

Technorati Tags: Stephen P. Anderson,Design,Star Wars,The Force Behind Star Wars,George Lucas

Any one that is active in local communities such as Refresh or IxDA or has attended an Adaptive Path conference has some passing experience with Stephen P. Anderson. Stephen just went out to start his own thing recently after a tenure at Sabre and I think he's one of our most cogent thinkers in the design space. But he also knows how to have fun in going about that inspiration. See the presentation below for example. Back in December I had a chance to see George Lucas speak in Chicago at the Chicago Economics club and Stephen does a pitch perfect job of telling this story the same way that George does but also includes his design focused spin. I'd LOVE to hear Stephen give this presentation.

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In Microsoft many of my peers and I spend an inordinate about time developing the stories that talk about the importance of design. We spend a lot of time catering these messages to different audiences too. Now, more often than not, I point people towards some of the thinking Steve has done on this subjects, I'm not sure there's anyone out there right now that can put a more human face on design and it's value in such a delightful and accessible way.

If you get a chance to hear Steve talk, don't miss it.