Doggelganger - Recognition

Doggelganger has now officially had the most traffic and involved the most hard core hosting infrastructure for a short term campaign site I have produced.

Without getting into boring specifics we're nearing on 2 million visits, 750,000 matches, from over 200 countries. Hosting infrastructure and application architecture has been steadily evolving to meet the needs of the application and interest it's attracting online, in social media, in foreign and domestic media and probably most of all from people who have used it -> loved it -> and shared it.

If it's done one thing for me it's opened my eyes to the possibilities hosting in the cloud will offer truly successful & viral large scale web applications AND more importantly some of the application and hosting architecture planning work that MUST be done in advance to plan for campaigns go nuts like this one.  Retrofitting apps designed for 50,000 Visits to handle 2 million Visits can be a 'mare if you don't have a great team.

It's been great this week to get some recognition:

• At Cannes - Bronze in Direct Response Digital - Check it out
• On The FWAs Public Shortlist - http://thefwa.com/shortlist/doggelganger

Full credit to Aaron, Levi and the team for the idea, Colin & Paul for the build and also Greg at Oxigeno for supplying awesome Hardware and ongoing network support & consultancy to keep the hosting solution evolving. And of course everyone else at Colenso, Glen at NEC, the brave team at Mars / Pedigree. Nice one.

Doggelgänger – a human to canine pairing innovation to help find homeless dogs homes

Colenso BBDO, in conjunction with PEDIGREE, has created a campaign using facial recognition software to connect homeless dogs to their human doubles.

The state-of-the-art interspecies comparison software analyses your facial features and compares them with a nationwide database of real dogs looking for adoption.
Find your match now at doggelganger.co.nz

Evolution is judged Site of the Day by FWA

The Evolution game was judged Site Of The Day by the FWA on October 15th. It was developed for Frucor's V Energy Drink - NZ's most popular energy drink.

FWA stands for Favourite Website Awards, an industry recognised internet award program and inspirational portal, established in May 2000.

FWA is the most visited website award program in the history of the internet, with over 100 million visits as of August 2010.

Check out evolution on FWA - thefwa.com/site/evolution

or play the game itself and help my KPI's (campaign closes on 19th October :-) - vrepublic.co.nz/evolution

Credits
Awesome creative, copy, idea, making it happen - Aaron Turk
Beautiful illustrations and artwork like no other - Watermark
Development - David Colquhoun
Client who trusted us - Frucor
And all the suits on the V account at Colenso BBDO; Jessica, Stefanie, Tim & Angela
Producer - me

Code Blacks win Full Code Press 2009

Yeah baby.

It was hard, it was cool and we did it - winning the FCP2009 vs the Australian team. Towards the end of the 24 hours I realised it was less about the competition and more about doing something great for our clients and team mates. But I still wanted to win.

The test Rainbow Youth website can be seen here (may break once site is live live)
There's a FullCodePress YouTube channel that has heaps of interviews with the teams, and judges and others. Probably really lame unless you're one of them.
And heaps of other stuff floating around the the InterWeb

Selected for the Code Blacks

I am privileged to be a part of the 2009 Code Blacks - The NZ team of Web Geeks travelling to Sydney on May 11th to take part in the 2nd FullCodePress competition.

The rest of the team are/seem to be very experienced and well known in NZ Web circles. Not exactly sure how UI was selected as PM but it may have something to do with my very much fly by the seat of my pants approach to project management. Although I have trained and been involved in many different 'official' or company project management methodologies from Prince 2 to Shift and Intergens fairly solid waterfall methodologies and even dabbled in Agile, I find that if you are working with true professionals who are good at what they do then a more relaxed approach can win every time. Think good communications, visual tools where ever possible and just go for it.

Many people will not agree but it always seems to get the job done - and done well.

Cool Brand Tags

This is kinda cool. The idea is that you are shown a logo and enter a word that associate with that brand and then you can see all the "tags" that others have given that brand in a big tag cloud.

E.g. The tag cloud for Walmart shows that the word "evil" is pretty big - but "cheap" is even bigger!

Brand Tags

Great Extensible CSS, JavaScript, AJAX Article and Examples

I never thought I'd be posting about code but I couldn't resist - the Highly Extensible CSS Interface is a series of 4 articles, tutorials, an awesome working sample website and fully downloadable source code which are too good to ignore. If you're a NZ user interface designer/coder and want to lift your game this is a great place to start.

Links to the full demo site, tutorials and downloadable files are collected nicely on this page .

Here’s what to expect:

• Part One: The Foundation - brief discussion of importance of producing visually rich interfaces with semantic, accessible, and portable markup underneath.
• Part Two: CSS Selectors & jQuery - Articles shift into discussion of code (and start losing me :-)
• Part Three: Adding Ajax Interactivity
• Part Four: Testing for Extensibility

YouTXT no more. Long live YouTXT

My time at YouTXT has come to an end. YouTXT the business continues and I'm sure will grow to be successful under Sam Allen's awesome leadership but I am no longer a Director or shareholder.

Some recent developments.

• YouTXT API
• Mobile vouchers via YouTXT!
  
• Network Status via YouTXT!

Awesome work by Sam and JD. I wish them all the best and will keep a keen eye on their progress.

Find out more about YouTXT on their blog or website.

My boy

My son is one of my favorite topics lately - and I suspect for a long time to come. Now 7 months old - here's some pics.

The Chemical Brothers

Hmm.. I think I'll go to the Chemical Brothers in February.

Get a baby sitter, and a small posse together, and make a night of it.

I am not their biggest fan today but their music is a part of my history growing up in the mid 90's and early 2000's and so many good memories. Their big beat, techy electronica along with the big warehouse and venue trance (shame) parties of the day got me hooked on electronica. My musical taste may have changed (for the better) but I still love hearing the cheesy big tracks like Elektrobank, Hey Boy, Hey Girl and Block Rocking Beats.

I've never seen them live but their live shows are meant to be sick (am I too old to use that word :-) Seeing these videos on YouTube from Glastonbury earlier in the year has twisted my rubber arm.

There's 3 others in the series

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMEoqfw71jE
  
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jM-y9jd69a4
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmBG2HoG5kI
  

Change of tack

I've decided to broaden the content of Web NZ to include some of my other interests. I'll still post on anything I find interesting in the online world, on YouTXT, Usability, what I'm up to professionally and New Zealanders doing cool things - like Dave ten Have and Ponoko making it to TechCrunch. And then, by all accounts making a big splash in a very big pond by getting named "..the most original idea.." by the review panel.

I admit, it took me a little while to get my head around what exactly Ponoko is or does but it is one of the most original ideas I have heard in a long time. In a world where most "new" web businesses are just different takes on existing ideas - done differently and occasionally better, Ponoko is a modern day example of "Kiwi Ingenuity" that sets the bar for NZ software companies. I have worked briefly with founder David ten Have (or Dave5) who was my boss at Trade NZ about 10+ years ago, and John Lewis from Intergen who is a kick-ass coder with serious business nous. They are both really smart guys and I wish Ponoko the best of luck.