As you all have seen, we had a great deal of positive buzz coming out of SxSW this year. Microsoft’s investment in SxSW has been growing year after year, with more and more resources both coming to and participating in the event.
PhizzPop National Finale
Partnering with the local web creative group Refresh Austin on outreach, attendance exceeded 400 people at the event with live digital HD feeds servicing satellite events in Chicago and Minneapolis. The Minneapolis satellite event itself hosted 100 fans cheering for their hometown heroes, Zeus Jones. The event drew a veritable who’s who of web design luminaries – including Frog, Avenue A | Razorfish, Neudesic, Thirteen23, Round Arch, Projekt202, Sapient, and the competitors themselves: Zeus Jones, Manifest Digital, Vectorform, PhenomBlue, and Archetype.
The competitors did not disappoint! This year’s design challenged focused on the theme of environmental sustainability for the city of Austin. The designs exceeded all expectations and were widely considered the best work seen at a PhizzPop event. This year’s winner was Zeus Jones. Their winning entry, UseMore, can be viewed HERE. Besides being crowned as the national Phizzpop Design Challenge winners for 2009, Zeus Jones won a trip to the CRE8 Conference in Orlando, Florida, and tickets to MIX09, and each team member received an HP computer package.
In addition to having incredible talent showcasing incredible solutions, we also had some incredible judges. These included Jon Roskill, Microsoft CVP; David-Michel Davies, Executive Director of the Webby Awards; Gaston Legorburu, Chief Creative Officer, Sapient; Howard Tulman, President and CEO, Flashpoint Academy; Dave Wolf, VP Cynergy; and internet celebrities Julia Allison and Meagan Asha.
Buzz
The buzz and after-image of the event are resonating even now…
Over 168 pictures can be found HERE.
“I think Phizzpop is a fantastic idea for a competition. It really showcases the incredible possibilities that are possible great design is teamed up with thorough research and brilliant strategy. There was a huge amount of talent presented tonight, and we are very flattered to have made it to the finals. Winning was a fantastic feeling, and a solid reassurance that a smart and simple idea can prevail.
Zeus Jones was founded with the goal to ‘modernize business,’ and we are using the combination of great design with honest strategy to create flawless executions. A special thanks to Microsoft for putting this all together.” Chad Hancock, designer of PhizzPop solution, Zeus Jones
| Twitter – over 80 tweets (50% - 70% positive impressions, zero negative) “Saw invention, agility and commitment at the Phizzpop final (www.phizzpop.com) last night that will fry your eyes. and all done in two weeks” -- PaulBurcher “sxsw - phizzpop pretty dope. maybe silverlight is legit.” -- projectc “Microsoft's party makes up for the red rings of death” -- futuretuesday |
All of the Red Couch Interviews can be found HERE.
Noteworthy videos: [Mark Hindsbo] [Joe Olsen (Phenomblue)] [David Michael-Davis (Webby Awards)]
Press
Reporters from a number of organizations, such as the Austin American-Statesman and San Antonio News, were in attendance at the event. CNet covered the event as well. Zeus Jones was welcomed back with an article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
Sponsors
Great events are all about bringing great partners to the table and delivering excitement. We were fortunate to have some wonderful partners who brought incredible value to the table, most notably Red Bull. Besides bringing liquid energy, they brought an outstanding DJ in the form of DJ Tina T (pictured below). In addition to Red Bull, Lucid Absinthe, and Austin local Tito’s Handmade Vodka were also sponsors.
Sensorium
Sensorium served as the official PhizzPop pre-event and VIP reception. Done in collaboration with Darren Mc Cormick at Microsoft, this event exceeded its 70 attendee reach target and landed 94 attendees from design powerhouses such as Frog, Avenue A | Razorfish, Neudesic, Schematic, and others in addition to customers and partners such as Dell, Catapult, Freescale, Ovation TV, Allianz, Convio, FlashPoint Academy, and many more.
Attendees were exposed to a number of new ideas in NUI computing from Joe Olsen of PhenomBlue. They also got to see a number of innovative and exciting solutions from David Lucatch of Intertainment Media who showcased IttyBitty – a system that was highlighted at SxSW as a unique and entirely new way of building brands leveraging social media and new online user experiences. Dave Wolf and Shawn Broxson of CynergySystems (last year’s PhizzPop winners) demonstrated a series of new designs and thoughts about touch computing and the potential for NUI to impact the market.
Icing on the cake!
In addition to this, we had other fantastic things result from our participation at SxSW:
· We gave away 1,000 copies of Windows 7!! That means one in every 12 people at the event walked away with Windows 7!
