Microsoft rewards NZ digital agency for BBC mobile app work

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New Zealand-based digital agency NV Interactive has just been recognised (again) in this year’s Microsoft Worldwide Partner of the Year Awards. 

In a record seventh showing in the global awards, the agency was named as a finalist in the Media & Communications category for its latest project for the BBC in the UK. 

The global awards will be celebrated at the Microsoft Inspire conference in Las Vegas next month, and the local winners will be announced in Auckland next week.

The Microsoft Worldwide Partner of the Year Awards recognise Microsoft partners that have developed & delivered exceptional Microsoft-based solutions during the past year, and garnered over 2,600 entrants from 115 countries.

NV’s recognition was for a highly acclaimed cross platform mobile app for BBC Good Food. Good Food is a large food brand in Europe with over 22m users accessing its extensive collection of 12,000 curated recipes every month.

“Our ecosystem of partners is crucial to delivering transformative solutions, and this year’s winners have proven to be some of the finest among their peers,” said Gavriella Schuster, corporate vice president, One Commercial Partner, Microsoft Corp.

“We are pleased to recognize NV Interactive for being selected as a finalist in the 2018 Microsoft Worldwide Partner of the Year awards.”

The NV team delivered the new BBC Good Food app across iOS, Android and Windows, leveraging the cross platform Xamarin mobile development framework. The reimagined BBC app provided full access to the 12,000 strong recipe collection, was deeply integrated with the shared My Good Food membership system allowing users to start saving & organising recipes on one device, resuming on another. Users could also rate recipes & submit their own recipes for consideration for publication by the Good Food team.

The new app needed to deliver a unified experience across all mobile platforms, both phone & tablet, within a tight budget & an even tighter timeframe – the pending release of iOS11 meant that there was only had 6 months to deliver.

“The global awards will be celebrated at the Microsoft Inspire conference in Las Vegas next month, and the local winners will be announced in Auckland next week.”

“We’ve worked with NV for five years now and knew they produce high-quality work,” said Marc Humby, head of partnerships at BBC Worldwide. “We wanted to take a more strategic approach to our digital business going forward, and we felt that a collaboration with NV would support our vision.

“It was truly a collaborative project, across our respective Product, Design and Development teams. We’re proud of what has been accomplished & the recognition our app has garnered. It’s a real testament to the quality of NV’s work & the consultative way in which they have approached the build.  We now have the platform & processes to continue to offer new apps & better technology quickly to more BBC Worldwide properties.”

This year’s gong means NV has now won three global partner awards and been named finalist in a further four, after registering two worldwide spots in 2017. It also comes on the back of a recent Silver in the British Media Awards for the same BBC app.

“We’re absolutely delighted to again be globally recognised by Microsoft for our work, and proud to be representing New Zealand on the world stage,” said NVs managing director Matt Pickering. “It’s a real validation of our user-centric, design-led approach to large scale technology projects.

“Validation on the world stage like this has been game changing for our business,” he said. “We’ve been able to leverage our consistent recognition in the global level to build out an enviable roster of amazing clients including Time Inc, USA Today, English Cricket, and obviously BBC.

“And we get to bring this global experience to our awesome New Zealand clients”

This award comes in a big week for the agency, which was also named as five times finalists in the Microsoft New Zealand Partner Awards, the second largest haul of all partners.

The local recognition was across the big categories of Data & Artificial Intelligence, Transforming Products and Optimising Operations for their recently launched cricket technology platform, NV Play, which is currently running over 500 top end recreational games of cricket across the UK every week, and in the Engaging Customers and Apps & Infrastructure categories for a joint project with Spark-owned Revera, for collaboratively reimagining CloudCreator, their self-service customer portal.

The global awards will be celebrated at the Microsoft Inspire conference in Las Vegas next month, and the local winners will be announced in Auckland next week.

“I think there will be a few sore heads over the next couple of weeks” said Pickering. “It’s been quite an exciting few days!”

Case Studies of awarded projects:

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