PROMOTION, COMPETITION AND
LANGUAGES OTHER THAN ENGLISH

For the “Snap it and win” competition to promote Palm’s new product features, BCP provided clever programming, and conversion of a web site to Chinese. The client was impressed with BCP’s ability to deliver a fully functional, easy-to-use system meeting their requirements precisely on the strength of an initial briefing requiring minimal further input.

Client Need

Palm Australasia required a system to promote the use of the camera function on their new Palm Zire 71 handhelds. They wanted users to take photos that fell into one of three categories with their handhelds, upload to a web site and add a caption to the photo in the hope of winning a new Palm handheld. The promotion was to include a voting system for people to nominate their choice of best photo.

This system was to be used for the whole Asia Pacific region and a separate site was to be developed for each market. Palm’s usual developer for Chinese websites was unavailable, so the site was to be translated to use a Chinese BIG5 character set.

The Solution

BCP set up a system that would accommodate the requirements as simply and cheaply as possible while ensuring that the system was extremely user friendly and ensured that only photos could be uploaded.

Users registered their details and logged into the system. From there they could choose to upload an image or just close down and log back in later to upload their images. An important step was to ensure that users could not upload anything other than a photo - requiring some smart programming.

Once the initial site was set up, work began on the version o f the site with the Chinese BIG5 character set. The system remained the same, but required Chinese characters to be viewed and the forms to be edited on computers with Chinese character sets. BCP configured a 2nd database with the Chinese character set. To display the pages, a translator typed the text using translation software, and then functionality was added so that the pages operated the same way as the initial site, but stored data in the Chinese database.

Conclusion

The client was extremely impressed with this system. It provided everything they needed in a simple and easy to use system. They commented that after an initial briefing, the job was done with minimal further input from them yet it worked exactly as they had hoped.

They were especially pleased with BCP’s ability to translate the system since the company they normally use for their Chinese work was unable to do this.