A few weeks ago we decides to up heads up against NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) and track Santa on Christmas. For over 50 years NORAD has been the biggest tracker of Santa Claus and had the largest following on Christmas tracking Santa throughout the world on his journey. Now that NORAD are being backed by Google they will probably get even bigger and much more publicity.

Many people would have heard “Google” and headed in the other direction. Not us… After thoroughly looking at what they have to offer didn’t impress us much. For 50+ years of “tracking santa” and backing such as Google, Verizon, and the military… they should actually have a fat man in a red suit flying reindeer around the world delivering presents. In stead, they have a few low quality animations of Santa flying through various cities around the world. I’m not even going to lie… thats exactly what we’re going to do! So whats the difference between us and them? The most obvious things would be about 50 years and publicly traded companies behind them. Other then that not really that much…

Their website isn’t half as nice as ours is. Their mixture of vector and 3D graphics make the site look cheesy and unappealing. Their website is easy to navigate through due to the fact it only has four pages to it, but once you get into those four pages it becomes unclear of where to go from there. The page you are taken to after the uncomfortable introduction is a bit sketchy unless you read the directions at the top of the flash box. If and when you find a link in the town, everything loads into that flash box. Once you click on something, to go back to the town you must hit the “return to menu” link at the top. Now personally i wouldn’t call the town a menu… with brains behind their operation like they have, i think someone would have been a bit more creative then that and names the link something pertaining to the website.

My partner introduced me to NORAD in late November so i haven’t been able to check out their Santa Tracking system yet. Judging by the videos on youtube, their presentation seems appealing. Being that we have about 15 days until Christmas to complete our tracker, we probably won’t have as many videos as they have wheresrudolph.com will be tracking Santa on Christmas eve this year. It is set up now using Yahoo! Flash maps and we will be plotting Santas position live all day and all night long until he reaches your neighborhood. From what i have heard, our tracking system is much more sophisticated then the NORAD tracker is. In addition to tracking Santa, we are able to pinpoint your location (give or take a few miles) and determine how many miles Santa is from your house. Throughout the night we will have “Santa sightings” posted from different cities around the world.

Combining a kid friendly website, games, activities, and the Yahoo! maps for the tracker has stirred up a lot of attention so far. For a three week long project we have gained more exposure already then we expected at all. Locally it has created a huge buzz with a few major sponsors in our area. We have already also been in contact with Yahoo!, who possibly wants to partner up with us for Christmas next year.

I can’t exactly say that wheresrudolph.com is “better” all around then NORAD (although we think it is), but considering this whole website went together in about three weeks… i think we’ve done pretty well. Factoring in that it is already December 10th i’m going to make a safe assumption and say that we don’t have a shot at competing with NORAD this year… Let it be known now that we’re coming for them in 2008!

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