14 DAY TRIAL // The biggest winner in the Microsoft PhizzPop Design Challenge is the Redmond company's very own Silverlight technology. The PhizzPop Design Challenge brought together no less than 30 web design and development companies that had to build solutions tailored for the Windows Live platform and using Silverlight. Contestants had to put together "whiz-bang" products set up to "create desire for knowledge and involvement in issues, communities, events, political parties or news," according to the Redmond company. The winner of PhizzPop Design Challenge was Cynergy Systems with a Silverlight-based Rich Internet application.
"The contest brought together some of the best design and development firms in the country. It was interesting to see the creative intensity that was put into creating these applications, and the different approaches each firm brought to creating solutions," said Will Tschumy, Senior User Experience Evangelist at Microsoft.
Cynergy Systems' solution bundled together not only Silverlight but also Windows Presentation Foundation, and even made use of Live Services. Twitter and voice-over-IP (VoIP) technologies were also part of the winning RIA product, which managed to win the vote of the judges but also of the audience. Cynergy Systems' "ben" RIA is essentially set up as a news service, and named after Ben Franklin reflecting ideas of information and involvement. And in this context ben is focused not so much on news aggregation but also on delivering and highlighting relevant content.
"That's what ben was all about," explained Dave Wolf, Cynergy vice president of sales and marketing. "Could we write software that would increase citizen engagement?" "One big problem with news today is there's just too much of it. Feeds become streams and streams become rivers and pretty soon there's more content and more news than you could possibly consume. This is a real problem when you look at a system that selects the news for you."