Last night around dinner time we launched a voting widget for BostonPizza.com's Designer Pizza Sale, where voters choose their favorite of six new pizza recipes and are entered to win free pizza for a year. You can also receive a free appetizer from Boston Pizza if you join their email club.  

In a later post, we'll dissect the functionality of everything we built, and for now I'll simply say that the whole thing is hosted by us, and is nested on the Boston Pizza site in an iframe.

In the meantime I thought I would just share these screens along with a few words about voting, because if you're reading this before November 8, 2008, there's still time to enter! Oh, and don't miss the "Share with a Friend" button on the bottom left. 

When you first visit the voting "page" you see the six pizzas rotating around in a circle, with changing perspective as they come into the foreground. I know what you're thinking, but no- there is no flash, and you can tell because it loads almost instantly (We'll have the smart dudes explain the javascript magic later.When you click any pizza, it rotates to the very foreground, along with a description for that pizza:

When you're convinced that you've found your fave, you click the "Vote for this Pizza" bubble and then you see the form:

For me, the best part happens AFTER you vote. A colored pie chart showsyou the results of the nationwide vote. At the time of the posting, the Canadian Classic was enjoying a healthy lead, but not a majority government. 

This is the first of many examples of Strutta-powered contests that we'll be featuring over the next little while, and I will make good on that promise to share more details of the technology that makes this all possible very soon, with the help of one of our (presently very busy) developers. 

Thanks for voting! If you have any feedback about this or future contests sites, feel free to leave it in the comments below. 

The newest version of Strutta, with an entirely brand new feature-set, is set to launch early this Fall.

While we ramp up to that release, I though it would be fitting if I shared a few of the details about how we arrived at this point, and share some of the user feedback that drove these changes.

While we were tracking the feedback that we received from the beta contact form (link only available in logged-in view), and the actions of users on the site, we also began to notice trends in the "in-person" feedback that we received from our friends and the local tech community.

Players, Voters and Viewers, "Oh My!" 

Most people's first question was "What do you win?" People wanted to know whether there was more at stake than just the bragging rights that come with staking one's claim as the best in the world at (insert category that previosuly had no forum for competition here). We are delighted to find that with just exposure and a little online rivalry as motivation, people were quite willing to put their talents on diplay, and let the community decide a favorite.

But that momentum was hindered some, and after a while we discovered a few trends in our stats that helped explain why that is. Some of the more popular games and videos on the site got plenty of views, but voting was proportionately low. Bragging rights were up for grabs for the folks that came out on top in any given game, but voters weren't flocking to those games en masse in support of these players.

We had always known that Strutta had to have an incentive plan for voters as well, and we embarked on building a points system that bring voters as much into the competition as the players themselves. The initial launch tracked voter scores, but we were well aware that the voting currency needed to have more emphasis, and had always planned to build it out; it was only a matter of how. 

While we pondered this challenge, we started to notice another trend in the feedback we received about the site. Companies started enquiring about how they might be able to access our technology to decide the winners of their own competitions. From day one, we had a plan about how to incorporate sponsorship of games while remaining true to the community we were building, but these questions really got us to thinking about the needs of those companies, and how we could help them. 

And thus we began work on this new concept, which as you've probably already heard, will combine all of the elements that people enjoy about Strutta, and enable companies to offer prizing in their own competitions. Our goal os to provide the tools that allow personal users, companies, ad agencies and marketers the ability to structure their own user-generated content contests, with their own rules.

Over the next few weeks leading up to our launch, we'll share a few contest case studies like the one Mark has already blogged. By exploring the current online contest space, we're helping ourselves better understand what works and what doesn't- and why not share our findings with you, the reader? Stay tuned...