For those of you who interact with me professionally, you know that I am a Director at Terralever, an Interactive Marketing company in Tempe Arizona. Selfishly I think we are amazing at what we do and deserve a little recognition.  Ranking Arizona is the outcome of the largest business opinion poll in Arizona.  Voting has begun for ‘Ranking the Best of Arizona Businesses’ and Terralever would love to have your vote this year for us in the Internet Marketing category. We were #4 last year and looking to be #1 this year. Voting only takes a couple of seconds and would be greatly appreciated!

Vote Terralever for Best of Arizona: Internet Marketing

Voting deadline is July 31st!

For those of you who might not have seen our presentation at Mix, Terralever recently completed a second Silverlight game for Miniclip.com called Tunnel Trouble. This game is entirely written against the Silverlight 2 Beta 1 plugin. I am not sure that it has been spotlighted on there web site, but Microsoft has placed it on the home page of Silverlight.net. When you get a chance give it a play we are very happy with how it came out.

Even though Mix08 is now only a distant memory, the inspiration I leave with will last for quite a while.  There is something quite powerful about being around thousands of professionals that are as passionate and enthusiastic about the future of interactive development.  For months now I have had the special opportunity to be working close with Microsoft and the there development of the Silverlight 2 Beta.  We have seen first hand the power and potential of the platform. It was great to share that excitement with the rest of the development community.

In the weeks to come, I look forward to sharing our discoveries as we learned how to leverage the Silverlight 2 framework to build our most recent casual game.  Look for posts on the techniques and methodologies we found most effective.

A month ago Microsoft selected Terralever to conduct a in depth Case Study on our use of Silverlight 2 for creating a new Miniclip.com game Tunnel Trouble. This process was really exciting for Terralever.  I feel Microsoft did a great job of capturing the value we find in Silverlight and how this powerful framework allowed us to create a compelling casual game in less then 5 weeks.

Today Terralevers interactive team released our second game written for the Silverlight plugin.  Zombomatic  was writen for Miniclip and targets the  1.0 version of the silverlight plugin.  Zombomatic is a fun puzzle game that challenges you to swap electrical conductors to connect them into a path for the electricity to flow and bring your Zomomatic 300o back to life.  Give the game a try I gaurantee you will enjoy it.

After 4 incredibly intense days, Microsoft’s Phizzpop LA design challenge is complete and Cynergy Systems is the winner. Congratulation’s Cynergy!  I was certainly disappointed that we did not win, but with only 7 minutes to present your strategy, design and concept everyone had a chance to win.

After catching up on some overdue sleep, I can say that although it was extremely intense (only 20 hours of sleep this past week), it was an incredible experience. My teammates Scott McAndrew and Craig Budwitz were amazing, and I am extremely happy with our Silverlight 1.1 prototype.

LA 2007 Design Problem:

You and your team have just been hired by a consortium representing all of the major Movie and Television studios. Your team constitutes the Office of the President of Products. You are responsible for determining the product strategy for this consortium. While your authority is considerable, it is not absolute.

You must pitch your product solution to the Board of Directors, also known as the Judges.

The media industry is facing an unprecedented set of challenges today. Digital distribution, a dramatic reduction in traditional advertising, the rise of social networks such as MySpace and Facebook and other factors have all combined to force a fundamental rethinking of the entertainment industry.

Your job is to:

• Find new ways to monetize the deep catalog of content that the consortium has. You should specifically be thinking beyond simply pay per download, subscriptions or advertising
• Look for new ways to create fans of our content. Sites like MySpace and Facebook (among others) have shown us that social networks are powerful tools. Figure out how to exploit the principles of social networking, integrate into existing networks, or both
• Look for ways to exploit the Long Tail. The consortium has a fantastic amount of old content that’s very valuable to many people. Figure out how to best help our users find existing content, discover other content, and share this with friends
• Figure out the device & platform landscape. Between iTunes, the iPod, Zune, Media Center, UnBox, Xbox Live, Joost, and everything else, it’s difficult to understand the overall experience system for our users. Explore creating your own, partnering, or both

As you can see from the design problem, it is very deep. Executing on each of these points in a working Silverlight prototype, in a mere 3.5 days, is an impossible task. Terralever put forth a strong effort, here is a series of captures from our working prototype.

Sometime next week I will post a link to the live prototype as well as some posts on Silverlight 1.1 techniques we used to build the appliction.

The PhizzPop Design Challenge pits top interactive, Web, and design agencies against one another to push the limits of technology and creativity in a battle royale. Think Mad Max for design.

The regional teams have been selected and Terralever was selected.  To get prepared Scott, Craig and Myself will be attending two days of training in Los Angeles on Microsoft Expression Blend, WPF and Silverlight.  On December 3rd the Terralever team will be given a design problem and will have 3 days to come up with a solution.  On the fourth day we will return to Los Angeles and present our design to a panel of judges.  The winners will compete at the finals in Austin March 8th 2007 at this years SxSW conference.

On November 14th @ the Tempe Center for the Arts Terralever hosted Phoenix’s first Facebook Developer’s Garage. The event was a great success.  I especially enjoyed the presentations by Chris Johnson  of Terralever and Dave Morin of Facebook. I encourage everyone to look at Chris slides on marketing a Facebook application. For those of you who might be interested in what I spoke about take a look at my 15 min presentation on the “Anatomy of a Facebook App”  With so little time,  I was unable to jump to deep into the platform, but managed to get through the basic steps to create a your first Facebook Application.

Download: Anatomy of a Facebook Application
Date: November 14, 2007
Location: Tempe Center for the Arts