For those of you who did not get a chance to see the session I presented on behalf of Terralever, please check it out. It’s titled “Creating a Great Experience on Digg with Windows Internet Explorer 8” and you can watch the whole thing online. I think I cover a whole bunch of cool stuff and I demo a slick little Silverlight 3.0 webslice. (P.S Look closely at the video player…it looks a lot like the one I posted on CodePlex…..go open source!)

This year I will speak about our experience using Internet Explorer 8 and how we leveraged some of the new and exciting features like the Accelerator and Web slice to build a great solution for Digg. Here is the abstract for the session.

Abstract

Come hear how Terralever was able to use the powerful new features of Internet Explorer 8 to change how users interact with the Digg Web site. Learn how using Accelerators and Web Slices changed the way users are able to discover, as well as simplify submitting stories. We look at how taking advantage of these exciting features can improve a users experience, while increasing the number of users visiting your site.

I am very excited to represent Terralever in this opportunity. If your attending Mix, make sure to attend our break out session .

Thursday March 19 |2:30 PM-3:45 PM | San Polo 3501

Presenter: Scott McAndrew, Director of Strategy, Terralever
When: Tuesday, November 18, 2008, 2:00pm Eastern (11:00am Pacific)
Duration:  60 minutes
Includes Live Q&A

As the world of marketing continuously changes, organizations of all sizes must take a critical eye on where their prospects and customers get information about the industry, your brand and how they make buying decisions on the web.

Customers and prospects want to be reached with new marketing tools that involve the use of social networking sites and Web 2.0 technologies. Bottom line: businesses that have online marketing strategies have an edge over the competition.

Join Scott McAndrew, a strategic marketing guru with Terralever, an interactive marketing agency who’s clients include Red Bull, NBA, Facebook and Microsoft. In this webinar, Scott will help lay out your Marketing Playbook with the 7 Online Marketing Methods that will give you competitive advantage and change the way customers find you online.

During the webinar you will learn:

• Key challenges facing marketers today–and how to navigate the many options out there for you
• Tools you can start leveraging today in Social Media and Social Networks to build a community of brand advocates
• Demystifying vertical search. What is it? And how B2B, B2C and niche marketers are seeing benefits
• What’s possible–what is the benchmark
• How to measure, test and mature your online marketing program
• And much more

Vote Terralever for Best of Arizona: Internet Marketing

Voting deadline is July 31st!

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.

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.