myPicks Beijing concludes
The 2008 Summer Games had a spectacular Closing Ceremony in
Beijing last night. It has been said
that these were the most memorable Summer Games since they were reborn
in Athens in 1896. The Games were remarkable not just in how the
athletes participated (43 new world records and 132 new Olympic records
were set),
but in how technology was used. NBCOlympics.com,
supported by more than
160 SunFire X4450 and SunFire X4150 servers, allowed delivery of
digital content to viewers including live streaming of events, video
archives of completed events, blogs and more. More information on the
use of Sun technology to drive the site can be found here.
I am told that NBC
Universal had set themselves a goal of 1b page views. A quick check
reveals that they either met or exceeded this goal.
These were also the first
"Social Network Olympics" or "Web 2.0 Olympics" - with athletes having
blogs and pages that fans could interact with, leave comments, etc. I
have included a few sample blogs below (nothing like hearing directly
from the athletes!):
This brings me to the myPicks Beijing application. With the conclusion
of the Summer Games, we will be shutting down the application in a
week. The data will be viewable for another week, until August 31st.
I finished in third place in the Individual Leaderboard. Not bad -
considering that I went with the crowd in many events by selecting from
the Favorites tab. As can be seen in the Game Summary, the Gold Medal
was won from among the athletes in the Favorites tab 82% of the time.
Congratulations to Victor Guido of Venezuela for securing the top spot.
The best compliments that we have received for the game came from the
players of the game. Here is a sampling of what was said in the myPicks
Beijing discussion board:
"We are all WINNERS and have done absolutely marvelous at
this
Olympic
prediction game :D. Will be missing this application for the next 4
years and I hope Sun would reintroduce this awesome game for the 2012
Olympics!", Maya in Malaysia
"The game was excellent", Victor in Venezuela
"I just love to take part on games like this. Thanks a lot,
I had
great fun.", Robin Blikle in Germany
"This game was the best experience I've lived, because I
played
with people of other countries similar to the true Olympic games",
Carlos in Columbia
I had mentioned in an earlier
post that I will talk about the strategies we used to scale
the game to allow 300,000 users to make predictions simultaneously.
This document is being worked on. I will post a link to it as soon as
it is completed.
Monday Aug 25, 2008
