It is with great pleasure that we announce the appointment of Mike Macadaan, recently hired as VP of Product at MySpace, to Strutta's advisory board.

MySpace recently added a number of new executives to their roster, foreshadowing big changes to the social network. With Mike Macadaan as the new VP of Product, we expect that those changes will be coming soon, and address one of the community's biggest concerns about MySpace- design.

Meanwhile, we are pleased to have Mike as a member of our advisory board, especially since he is a man of action and change, and not content to be merely the handsome figurehead that he appears to be (in the photo at right). His input will prove valuable while we continue to develop our suite of products.

Macadaan has been familiar with Strutta since our humble beginnings, consulting on our first ever set of wire-frames all the way back in 2007. Back then, his Twiistup events were already the toast of LA, and he was well establishedas an industry player in the realms of design and usability. And he has come a long way since.

From Mike's own bio:

Mike Macadaan has over 10 years of experience leading companies in the context of Product & User Experience Design. His experience spans product and content leadership for companies such as TechTV, Intuit, GO.com and most recently as Vice President of Design at AOL and Vice President Product & Design for Tsavo. Mike has recently joined the all new rockstar team at MySpace as VP of Product. He is also actively involved with the SoCal start-up community as the founder of Twiistup.

We are looking forward to the changes at MySpace under Mike's stewardship. But no one here seems to know whether it was Macadaan's influence that led 50 Cent to get so excited about a photo of our founder, Danny Robinson.

Strutta was proud to host the online competition for Twiistup5's show-offs, and after seeing the pictures, were are full of regret that we missed the event. The votes have been counted, both on the Strutta-powered site and at the event itself, and the winners are:

Cogi, the Winners of Grand Prize in the judge's vote:

And Totspot, champs in the popular vote both at the event and online:

All of us here at Strutta are proud to partner with our friends Twiistup to bring you this online vote, just as we are to introduce the videos in the contest for its sister event, Launch Party Vancouver 6.

*img of Mike, Brian, Shira, Sarah and Frank by Mike Macadaan his sexy self.

Twiistup 5 is coming soon, but you can already check out the Showoffs in the Twiistup5 video contest.

Strutta is proud to partner up with Twiistup to bring you these 10 contenders, but don't waste any time, click through at one of the links below to vote for:

Cogi

Viewdle

FixYa

Meebo

TheScene

Yammer

CauseCast

eHow.com

GoGreenSolar.com

RoboDynamics

On the night of the event, votes cast be party attendees will tabulated, and the panel of celebrity judges will make their picks as well.

But you too can have your say in who you think is LA's hottest new startup, or make your best guess as to who will take top honors at Twiistup 5. Once your email is verified, you may vote one time for each entry.

Below you will see an embedded version of the video I took while at the event, but I really only used that as an excuse to blog the photo of Mike at right:

Mike was the life of our booth at Twiistup, and wore the white tuxedo possibly better than one has been worn before. Mike is presently recovering from having his wisdom teeth out, but will be back at the helm of developing the new Strutta release very soon.

If you're anxious to see a video tour of the pool area at Twiistup, feast your eyes:

At Twiistup4 last Thursday, we chose the event as the time and place to announce our business model.

To reveal our plan for "white label contest sites for companies," we stayed true to the theme in all-white tuxedos, handing out white labelled instant photos (taken with a Fujifilm Instax camera, as Polaroid's are no longer available). We even had a demo verson of what a contest micro-site might look like, made specifically for Twiistup4. Photos of us at the event can be viewed at this link.

For the new release we're taking the existing technology behind Strutta and adding plenty of customizable options, custom domains, loads of flexibility and just about every feature that companies need to hold contests with user-generated content. 

We've already started discussions with a number of companies who are interested in becoming "Launch Partners" for our new software, but we'd be happy to speak with you if you are interested in working with us to be one of the select few that we announce as partners for the initial launch of our new product.