Zeus Jones Wins PhizzPop Nationals at SXSW.
Christian Erickson, Chad Hancock and Greg Wurm
Hi, Christian here with only my second post ever to the blog. Back in January, I wrote about us participating in the Minneapolis regional PhizzPop competition. As a result of winning, we moved on to the national final at SXSW in Austin to compete against the winners of the other regional competitions.
There were a couple differences in the rules this time around. First, we were given 2 weeks instead of 3 days. Second, we were asked to present our solution in 7 minutes instead of 8. But the core concept was the same: a 3-person team conceives, designs and presents a solution to a fictional brief in front of a live audience and a panel of judges. As with the local challenge we were grateful to Sierra Bravo for lending Greg Wurm to us as our developer.
We started by looking at the winning presentations from the other 4 regional PhizzPop challenges. Each region had a completely different brief, so the solutions were also varied. Vectorform won the New York contest – the theme was K-12 education – with a great-looking Microsoft Surface-based app. The Chicago brief was about driving public support for an Olympic bid, and Manifest Digital won with a custom social media application. In Los Angeles the challenge was about the music industry (I had actually hoped that would be the theme at SXSW) and Archetype won with an application that worked for both fans and industry professionals. The Miami challenge was more forward-looking, focusing on commercial space travel. Phenomblue won this one with a really awesome idea for creating a 401k-style investment that would help you save for your ticket to space while also investing in the development of the technologies that would enable it.
Compared to the Minneapolis brief, the Austin challenge was much more straightforward and expressed very clearly: Help the citizens of Austin live more sustainably using currently-available technologies. Although that sounded at first like a simple request, we started to get more nervous when we researched what was going on in Austin. The city is universally recognized as a leader in the area of sustainability and green-building practices. And everyone in the community is involved: the utilities, the government, local businesses and individuals.
As with the Minneapolis challenge, we treated this as a real pitch. And one of the worst things you can do in a pitch is boldly march in and tell a client that they should do something that they are, in fact, already doing (I know you know what I am talking about, it happens). So we knew we were going to have to bring something – an insight, an overlooked opportunity – that wasn’t already being covered.
Most people see the concept of sustainability as being about consuming less. But the accepted definition of the term, created by the Brundtland Commision in 1989 is a bit more far-reaching: “[to meet] the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”
This sparked a thought: no matter how much we conserve or sacrifice, we are all sitting on a huge pile of possessions that really don’t get used most of the time. And that is an area that no one in the green/sustainability area seems to talk about much. If I buy things because I believe they have a low carbon footprint, that’s great. But if I don’t make use of those things then it’s a waste no matter where it comes from.
So our idea came from the idea that instead of focusing on using less – something that is important, but well-covered by others – we should focus on doing more with the resources that we already have. And to distance it further from the traditional thinking around sustainability, we gave it a provocative name: USEMORE.
Rather than go into to much detail about how the concept worked, I recommend watching the 6 minute video of the idea. You can see how we translated the thinking into something that is actually do-able right now with existing tech. We got excited enough about it that we’ve discussed the possibility of continuing to develop it and try and pilot it somewhere – maybe even our hometown of Minneapolis.
Zeus Jones Phizzpop SXSW Finale from Zeus Jones on Vimeo.
Net result: we won the PhizzPop final against some really hardcore competition. All the companies were great at design and great at development, but it was this key insight that appears to have put us over the top. It was a lot of work, but great fun to do.
Comments welcome.
Photos from the event up on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/zeusjones
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Tags: microsoft, phizzpop, silverlight, sxsw
