Spill

Tanagram presents Big Shoulders

The dust has settled, we’ve caught up on our sleep (Rudy is a sleep camel), and now we would like to reflect on the Phizzpop competition. We really had a blast “Phizzing” and “Popping” the challenge. While we don’t usually share intimate project details with the public, Phizzpop was purely conceptual work so there are no lawyers to hunt us down. That said, we’re thrilled to share the gory details with you.

Assignment
Our assignment, from a high level, was to engage teens between the ages of 13 to 18 and get them excited about the 2016 Olympic bid. We were to build a system that would empower them to show their support, build a community, and create momentum showing the world that the 2016 Olympics could be held no where else. The result had to include a rich interactive experience using Microsoft Silverlight technology, three days to design and build it and 8 minutes to present it. You can download the full assignment document here. It’s a great read, very well prepared.

Method
Tanagram, with development partner Geneca, responded to the challenge using the same processes we use to develop social architectures for clients like Tribune Interactive.

1. Understand target demographic and project goals
2. Define quick-convert subset(s), key penetration points and growth/sustain model
3. Prototype, test and evolve

With three days to produce results we didn’t explore the situation with our typical rigor and we didn’t have the opportunity to field test prototypes but initial feedback on the results has been very strong and we’re very satisfied. 

Understand target demographic and project goals
During our presentation I joked that Rudy spent the weekend hanging out at American Apparel watching teens. Truth be told the internet and some high-level research from our friends at Ogilvy provided us with our pool of insights. Obvious findings included teens are extremely socially motivated. They care a great deal about social status, peer recognition, and to a large extent fame. Interesting findings included 97 percent of today’s teens carry a cell phone and do a great deal of connecting via SMS or text messaging. The phones they carry are not rich media devices like the iPhone but instead hand-me-down Motorola Razors, or cheap carrier-branded phones.

Project goals included:

• Building a large community rapidly (the Olympic bid decision is October 2, 2009)
• Designing a system that would be valuable before, during, and after Olympic events (we added 2012 AND 2016 to our goals)
• We added building a system that would capture and execute upon the goals of WorldSportChicago, an Olympic bid leave behind organization dedicated to encouraging youth to achieve athletic excellence
• We added help change the U.S. perception of exercise and athletics including motivating people to get out and burn a few calories
• We added pushing the social networking domain by exploring real-time connectivity experiences

Define quick-convert subset(s)
The key to rapidly growing a social network is to leverage the power of multiples for expansion. This is done by identifying those members of your demographic set that are most easily captivated and converted to use your system and giving them tools to recruit new members for you. We chose “athletically inclined youth” as our champion subset because we found they were most likely to have knowledge of and be interested in the Olympic institution, they were already participating in an athletic program, and likely had some form of basic support network (meaning potential recruits) already in place.

Key penetration points
Key penetration points are valuable offerings that enhance the lifestyle of the champion subset. Key penetration points for our system included:

• A place to record and publish athletic achievement
• A place to voice opinions and build integrity among a community of peers
• A platform that provides easy addition and presentation of text, audio, photos, and video streams
• A mobile component that leverages available technology in ways currently unavailable to our champion subset
• A system that encourages real-time participation and interaction multiple times daily
• A brand association that improves the desired perception of the athlete

Growth/sustain model
We found that one of the keys to the degree of success of an athlete was a strong support network. Friends, family, peers, and even competitors connected to give support and guidance for the athlete in training. We designed our system to enable athletes to recruit a support network by adding fans to their distribution list for their training blog. With a meager goal of converting 1 million athletically inclined youth each recruiting an average of 10 fans we were satisfied that we had a model that would expand appropriate to our needs.

We built a ranking competition / reward system into our model to help motivate the recruiting process. The athlete’s ranking in our system would be determined by the number of fans in their network, the amount of interaction with the system, and donated calories provided by exercising fans.

Fans, once signed up, would receive both blog and statistics (i.e. new best time) updates from the athlete and could respond with messages of encouragement (improving ranking). Fans could also “donate” calories burned doing basic exercises to athletes to further add to the athletes ranking score. It was critical that all of these activities be tied to the Olympic bid. At the very start, sign up as an athlete or a fan includes a digital petition showing support for the 2016 bid. Athletes could also flag themselves as Olympic potentials in the system and in doing so gain additional ranking points and benchmarking capabilities.

Athletic training requires dedication and daily commitment. Our system was designed to be a key component in the training process and because of that it would be very relevant to our champion subset’s daily needs. We designed our system so that athletically inclined youth could capture/monitor their training progress, share it with their supporters and even benchmark it against peers and Olympians. Our system would provide connections between athletes at various levels of training; novice athletes could connect with Olympians for inspiration and guidance, expert athletes could connect with others for support and to share best practices. To maximize the value of the interactive system we built a rich-media blogging platform that enabled athletes to post (in addition to text) audio, image and video streams of meets and other events. The video blogging system was enabled by Microsoft’s Silverlight Streaming cloud service, a system that allows simple upload, conversion, and hosting of video files (up to 10GB for free). Our goal was to develop a system that enabled athletes to build a digital record of their career, a monument of their effort.

Finally and perhaps most exciting to us, we built our system to be fully enabled through SMS. For the demonstration we used a 3G GSM modem connected to an ActiveSMS server to show a small scale version of what our system was capable of. For purposes of the presentation we did not expose the full feature set (even though we sent and received ~300 SMS messages in a period of 8 minutes) but our system was designed to enable subscription, bi-directional communication to multiple subscribed circles (perhaps by sport) for both athletes and fans, performance statistics entry by the athlete on the field, and the ability to send cheers to athletes as they compete. We thought it would be cool if athletes carrying a cellphone on silent could get occasional nudges (vibrates) from fans wishing them well. Testing would determine if this was annoying or distracting. We were on the fence.

Why Big Shoulders?
Carl Sandburg has had his poem “Chicago” associated with far too many initiatives but for us we referencing it allowed us to talk about Chicago without making our concept about Chicago (the Olympic bid is a U.S. initiative) and it also allowed us to talk about a support network in an interesting manner. Big support comes from big shoulders.

A note about athletics in the U.S.
It will probably not come as a shock that athletics in the U.S. are in decline. We found one study tying the decline in athletics to the tripling of obesity in teenagers since 1974. Another study found that today’s teens are less able to get and hold jobs because of lacking athletic experiences. Obviously studies all have their slants, but it’s clear to us that athletics in America need our help. We built our system to allow fans to donate calories with the hopes that if one person did 10 push ups and it wasn’t that hard and did it again, perhaps they might consider a regular exercise routine, maybe even develop over the years to have Olympic aspirations of their own. Physical fitness is a key health issue in the U.S. increasing fitness will reduce health care costs, improve stamina and positive attitudes in practitioners and even teach values like honor and commitment. The value of hard work is a lesson being lost on today’s teens and America will benefit if we can find a way to teach it.

Big Shoulders screen shots

[caption id="attachment_439" align="alignnone" width="150" caption="Big Shoulders home screen with Rudy hot state"][/caption][caption id="attachment_441" align="alignnone" width="150" caption="Big Shoulders home screen with Rudy Stats screen open"][/caption]

Big Thanks!
Special thanks to the folks at Microsoft (Chris, Bob, Josh, Brian, Sara) for inviting and supporting us. Thanks to our team-mates at Geneca for their support. Supreme thanks to Rudy Chou and Matthew T. Boeke for staying awake for three days to develop this awesome concept. You guys rock!

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Posted by Joseph Juhnke on December 2, 2008

Digital provides only marginal advantages during flooding

We, the city of big shoulders, enjoyed more than 10 inches of rain this weekend. It was a gift from our deadbeat friend Ike (so like him to stop by uninvited…). In past posts I’ve talked about how we as a society still have not realized the full potential of our coupling with Digital and unfortunately this story adds further proof. 

The rains started falling sometime Friday night. By noon the next day, our basement carpet was soaked by water that was coming in through the outside walls. I, in my typical “I’m on a mission” manner, went out to Home Depot to purchase a Wet/Dry Vac and a sump pump. To my dismay, Home Depot was enjoying a run on all things flood related. People were fighting for bags of leveling sand. There were no vacs or pumps left in stock. 

So I think to myself, “Here’s where we test Digital!” To maximize my effectiveness, I logged onto consumer reports on my iPhone (the site works well except for Flash callouts) and found out who made the best Wet/Dry vac for the money. It turns out it was Sears / Craftsman. So off to Sears.com I went. (I’m doing this all in my idling minivan in the Home depot parking lot). I was able to determine that Sears did have the model I sought in stock at a location that was 6 miles away. Yay Digital, I’m now more informed than the hordes of shelf stormers rampaging through Lowe’s down the street. Unfortunately this is where Digital falls down. Sears.com crashed my iPhone before I could purchase the equipment online. I was attempting to purchase the items with in-store-pickup because Digital (Sears really) promised me a special entrance intended for the Digital elite and a dedicated attendant to help me load my minivan. No such luck, however. Digital failed me again when the online store lookup became unavailable. Imagine this drama unfolding at slow-mo EDGE network speeds…painful. I decided to ditch Sears.com and try 411. Perhaps AT&T’s Digital could help? The number the system gave me (even with operator assistance) was a fax line. Not willing to give up I had called my wife, had her look up the store phone number online and read it to me and then called them directly. About halfway through the call with my wife, I start driving to the Sears location hoping to get one of the last items before the hordes pillage the entire place. I dial the number she reads me and I get a computer (hello Digital) telling me that they are experiences call problems and to call back another time. I call three more times and get the same thing. 

When I finally get to the store, the hordes are just showing up. The store manager has got all of the pumps and vacs they have in stock and out on dollies ready for the mayhem. I grab my stuff and get in the line for checkout (starting to get long). When it’s my turn to pay I mention that the phone system is having problems and the register clerk tells me that it’s not the phone system it’s that there are only 4 people in this department and they are being overwhelmed by calls for vacs and pumps so they stopped answering the phone. 

It’s clear that natural disasters stress all systems, especially digital. It’s also clear that Digital is still too brittle to be relied upon and is only providing marginal benefit when it works. I won on Saturday, but not without an extreme amount of effort. We at Tanagram are continuing our quest to make this better, but we need your help. Please? 

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Posted by Joseph Juhnke on September 14, 2008

The City That Works!

Lance has been giving “The City that Works” presentation to college students for a while now. I think it’s an inspiring illustration of how Chicago could be seen and I wanted to talk about an opportunity that may just give us the chance to change the minds of the world about our favorite city. I’m talking about the 2016 Olympics.

Carl Sandburg accurately depicted the world’s view of Chicago when he penned, “CHICAGO – HOG Butcher for the World, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler; Stormy, husky, brawling, City of the Big Shoulders…” Chicago is not seen as a center of passion and innovation. Instead we are the city that works. A blue collar bastion of hard work ethics and fattening (although delicious) foods.

This isn’t exactly a bad thing except this view all to often overshadows and stifles the creative talent that flows from our wonderful city. 2016 is an opportunity for us to change that. It’s an opportunity for us to show the world that great new ideas thrive here. So the question is how do we start? Start dreaming up that Next Big Thing (NBT)! Dare to innovate a new way to share thoughts or dreams with the world.

On April 14th we find out if we are the U.S. contender. The race isn’t over then, but if it happens all eyes will drift our way. Let’s put those comfortable brown loafers in the closet and get out our shiny black shoes. I’ve already got a list of things I want to try. I hope you do too!

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Posted by Joseph Juhnke on March 28, 2007