Minnesotans advance to nationals in Microsoft web design contest

Finance & Commerce, by Arundhati Parmar

Gregory Wurm, a programmer and analyst at Web development firm Sierra Bravo, has always wanted to attend a technology conference, but his job title generally doesn’t afford him that opportunity.

Now, thanks to Microsoft (and to his own coding skills), Wurm will be traveling next month to one of the nation’s largest interactive conferences – South by Southwest, in Austin, Texas. The South by Southwest conference began as a music festival, but in 1994 it added the interactive (and film) element and since then has gained a strong following among Web developers, designers, entrepreneurs and new media professionals.

Wurm and two local designers from digital marketing agency Zeus Jones won the right to attend the show on Microsoft’s tab when they won a design contest hosted by Microsoft in mid-January. In Austin, the Minnesota team will compete in the grand finale of the contest – named PhizzPop – against winners from other cities.

Microsoft’s decision to bring the PhizzPop contest in Minneapolis was an important acknowledgement for the local interactive business community; in 2007-2008, Microsoft held the contest in San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston and New York, but “we just didn’t have money to go everywhere we wanted,” said Chris Bernard, user experience evangelist for the Seattle software company.

The contest, which this year is revisiting all the original cities except Boston, plus Minneapolis and Miami, pits local design agencies against one another; PhizzPop’s goal is to engage designers and developers in a challenge to showcase design and innovation. 

But Bernard readily admits an ulterior motive.

“We want to reach an audience that doesn’t really know what Microsoft does in the (design) space, or is uninterested in it, and then to try to do it in a way that is engaging to those audiences,” Bernard said.

Microsoft has eschewed using its name in the branding of the PhizzPop contest, mainly because most designers don’t think of Microsoft when they think of design software. (Adobe is a market leader in that field.)

“One of the reasons why they created this (contest) was really to put their own tools that are out there competing with Adobe …in the hands of design and development companies that are doing interesting things,” said Christian Erickson, partner at Zeus Jones, member of the winning team. 

In Minneapolis, as in other cities, teams of three were selected to participate in the contest. The selections were largely subjective, as Microsoft’s Bernard did some of his own research and listened to recommendations from the Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association before extending the invitation to five teams.

Those teams were Zeus Jones, (and because Zeus Jones lacked programming expertise, the firm asked Sierra Bravo’s Wurm to serve as its third team member) space150, Colle+McVoy, Moov Worldwide and Hanson.

In the test, a fictional big-box retailer called Indigo, owned by a foreign company, has two stores in test markets in Minneapolis and Denver and an online presence. How does it compete against Wal-Mart, Target and Best Buy?

“Our first reaction was that basically what you are asking for is the holy grail of retail business models,” Erickson of Zeus Jones recalled last week.

The team decided that Microsoft had left the task deliberately vague and decided to interpret it on its own – they determined that the challenge was about how to leverage technology to establish the Indigo brand in the marketplace, but before that could be achieved, a business model needed to be built.  

In their presentation, Erickson and his team focused on the challenge’s online component – how to effectively compete online against traditional big-box retailers as well as the Amazons of the world. Indigo would need to offer both a huge selection of merchandise and a complete set of solutions, provide expertise across categories, include social media features allowing customers to find their own experts, and finally, create a store that enables customers to decide whether cost, convenience or expertise is the most important factor for any purchase. 

Doing all of that from the ground up is a “steep climb,” they informed the contest judges and audience. So the team refashioned Indigo as a “retailer of retailers” by combining the technology and customer-service expertise of name brand retailers to create a virtual superstore. Users of Indigo Live, as they rebranded the company name, would be able to keep track of products they want, as well as where and how to get them. 

Consider, for instance, “Philip,” a small-business owner who needs everything from skim milk to Ethernet cables. Indigo Live can tell Philip that there is a Wal-Mart on his route home, which is convenient for picking up grocery items. For technology purchases, Indigo Live can alert a partner retailer such as Best Buy that Philip is interested in a particular product and have a Best Buy employee contact Philip through Indigo Live Chat to help him with his purchase. 

After all five teams presented, judges decided that Indigo Live and the team from Zeus Jones and Sierra Bravo had the winning concept.

“There were several other companies there that had really, really nice-looking things – but it was made clear by people in the audience and the judges that what the differentiator was that we actually approached the business problem in a totally different way,” Erickson said. “We looked at it as a real business pitch.”

Having won the regional challenge, Erickson, Wurm and Chad Hancock, the other team member from Zeus Jones, are getting ready to do it all over again at South by Southwest in Austin. 

Wurm, the programmer from Sierra Bravo, may have his prayers answered a second time in a year if the team wins again. The grand prize of the PhizzPop finale in Austin is a free trip to yet another conference – a Web interactive design conference in Orlando.

And this time, they’d get to just kick back and relax. No more contests.

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