Yea I haven't been doing much for the past few days. Catching up on homework, catching up on sleep, watching some MV's and eating real food!!!
Today was the start of our 3rd and final challenge. I still remember when I just started E3 just 2 months ago. Time passes by so fast and now its already almost at the end of E3. This will be our final challenge and I will make our team become #1. Not only will we be better than the rest of the teams but we will impress these Microsoft folks for this challenge.
Our 3rd challenge was from Microsoft but before we got to start our challenge, we had to get to their headquarters which was located at Mississauga. It took over an hour for us to arrive there because of the traffic and we also got lost as well. The Microsoft headquarters were not that big actually and we were led to a conference room which could hold around 50 people? And this person, Joey Devilla, a developer evangelist from Microsoft is our presenter for our E3 Challenge. He was a very funny guy and he even said that he was a better presenter than the guy who was supposed to be presenting today. Someone else was supposed to be presenting today but this person was on vacation so he was their back-up. Throughout the presentation, he related everything to his own life and told many funny stories as well. Instead of those long, boring lectures where the presenter always kept reading off the slide and presented in a monotone. This person had so many things to talk about. First off, we learned about who he was. He had been working as a computer programmer and had been working in another company prior to Microsoft. This company had lived and died in the internet. Because of the financial crisis in 2008, his company was one of many others that had to closed down but their company did not immediately close down after the crisis. He was getting paid to sit on his bum for 6 months before the company had told him that this was not going to work and fired him. However just after 2 weeks of getting fired, he was able to land a job at Microsoft even during the financial crisis where many people were dying to find a job. It was all thanks to his blog and his social network who had gained the interest of many people and helped him in finding a job. To this date, he says that he still receives phone calls that want to hire him. Although he has found a nice job at Microsoft, he says it feels good that many people still phone him. Another thing I found out from Microsoft is that there are rooms for people to relax and game on the 2nd floor. I don't mean a room with a couch and a TV but a gaming room where there is an xbox and people can actually play the xbox during their breaks. How lucky is that?
A very funny story that he told was about a competition to win the opportunity to design the xbox 360. Apparently before the present day design of the xbox 360, the xbox 360 was a big black box which had the word XBOX 360. It was not appealing and it was downright ugly. No one had wanted to buy this gaming console and the controllers were massive and it did not fit on your hands. So, the competition had narrowed down to three competitors. A company from Kelloggs, a company from Nike and a snowboarding company. This sounded so random, I mean a company that designs cereal boxes would design the case for the xbox 360? Then it got even more weird, a company that designs shoes would design the xbox 360. Well this Joey guy was present as they presented their ideas to the xbox 360 company. This is what happened, Kelloggs and Nike had went up with a powerpoint presentation and presented their ideas very well. Then a representative from the snowboarding company came up to the stage with a black marker and a cardboard paper box. What was he thinking? Bringing up a black marker and a cardboard paper box for a multi-million contract. Well I guess you would have guessed the winner. Either the Kelloggs or the Nike company right? Well I should just continue telling the story, this representative got up on stage and wore the cardboard paper box and said, "this is how the xbox 360 looks". Then he took it off and threw it down. "BUT!, this is how we want it to look" and he starts drawing on the whiteboard with his marker. Guess who won the contract? The snowboarding company!!! and so if you look at the xbox360, it looks like a snowboard.
I hope this story was good because I really liked it. It was one of the things that had really stuck out from the presentation as well.
Another funny part was, when he was presenting the structure of our challenge, we had to incorporate a guerilla event/competition. However we didn't know what this was and one of our E3er's asked the question to Joey. Joey couldn't think of an example at that time. But after 3 minutes he said, "Here's an example, lets say a bunch of people walk in a bar handing out free samples of milk. This would be a guerilla event because it is something out of the ordinary. It is something that people would never think of, but at the same time, its a very good marketing way to promote your product" I was like WOW, although his example seemed insane, it was relevant and we could understand what he meant.
So what is our challenge? Well, our challenge is to find some way to promote this product, the windows phone 7 to post secondary students which are aged around 18-21. Quite a challenging challenge eh? Well we had better get started because we would need to present this idea in 2 weeks time. We got to play around with the new phone for a bit and try things out such as the touch pad, the touch keyboard and the applications. It is very different from the Iphone and it was still a prototype. There are only 6 of these phones in Canada right now and I was able to put my hands on it and feel how it was like.
And that concluded our Microsoft E3 Challenge #3 Session. My carride back home was really smooth and it took only 30 minutes compared to the one and a half hour before. Our car was really low on fuel and at some time, I was a little worried that we would end up on the middle of the highway without gas. I would see cars wooshing by on both sides of the car and maybe, we would end up dead if one careless driver did not see us. That was the only part when I felt kind of scared.
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