Air New Zealand: Home Sweet As

Posted: June 17th, 2008 | Author: Ben | Filed under: Uncategorized |

At work today we launched the new Air New Zealand website, Home Sweet As.

If you’re a Kiwi living in Australia you can highlight your ’sweet spot’ and have it added as a edible dot to a virtual cake in the shape of New Zealand. This follows from our previous campaign last year we just won the Creative Showcase for.

Here’s the video we made promoting the site:

Technically the site enabled me to play about with a few new ideas. Geographic clustering is a completely new area for me. Because of the rise of Google Maps, clustering tends to be done in the browser front-end. This offered no benefit to me as the whole purpose for clustering in this instance was to reduce the data load being downloaded by the client.

I settled on the DBSCAN algorithm, which was simple enough to implement and clustered the data pretty well. It does fall down in that the epsilon value is predetermined in the code, and does need some ‘tinkering’ to get the best results. However, it seems to do the job. At the time of writing this (17th July) the current live version of the site doesn’t use any data clustering. We’re planning on releasing an update to the site later this week.

Also, we LOVE how on the day of launching a new site, Mozilla launches FF3. It’s a Flash site, so we’re not expecting any issues at all, but we would still have preferred not to launch a site on the day a new browser is aggressively launched with a world record for the most downloads firmly in its sights.

The site’s been up for a good 12 hours now and traffic seems to be flowing in quite nicely.

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