Jordan Brand Leverages Silverlight to Invigorate and Find Enthusiasts

Jordan Brand, a division of Nike, Inc., is celebrating its 25-year anniversary during NBA All-Star Weekend to take place in Dallas, TX from February 11-14. With the help of Wirestone, Jordan Brand is leveraging innovative Microsoft technology to engage consumers through rich experiences. Jordan Brand’s use of such technology enables them to creatively market their new “Air Jordan 2010” collection across a multitude of channels.

One example is the Mosaic 23/25, also known as the “Social Mosaic”. This is an innovative Web application that allows enthusiasts to personally connect with the Jordan Brand by allowing them to upload photos of themselves with their Air Jordan shoes. Collectively those photos will form a ‘mosaic’ (containing thousands of images) that construct a holistic master image. That way, each enthusiast is part of something greater and more ‘social’, enabling participants to easily reach out and engage friends and family on other social networks like Facebook.

Powered by Silverlight 3*, the Social Mosaic leverages both Deep Zoom, whichprovides the ability to interactively view high-resolution images, and Multitouch capabilities. Once the consumer uploads their photo(s), they are sent a photo ID so that they can visit the mosaic to find their photo. Silverlight Deep Zoom allows the consumer to pan and zoom deep into the mosaic to see their picture and experience their own contribution to the Jordan Brand community. With Multitouch, they can interact with the mosaic through touch screen functionality, if supported by their hardware, to further enhance their interactive Jordan Brand experience.

In addition to this innovative user experience, the ability to quickly develop the Social Mosaic and host it in the cloud was of paramount importance to the Jordan Brand team, so they turned to the Windows Azure platform. The Windows Azure platform allows them to easily calibrate the number of Web Role instances needed to support traffic bursts, but it also allows the Jordan Brand team to scale out backend Worker Role instanced used to construct the Deep Zoom mosaic, especially as photos are continually uploaded. This provides the ability to generate a new mosaic in about 10 minutes, employing up to 40 backend, parallel instances… rather impressive when you consider that a typical mosaic is constructed with over 5 billion pixels! If just one instance were processing (generating) the mosaic, it would take about 5 hours.

Check out the Social Mosaic site here to experience it for yourself!