Michael Jordan jumps in to Microsoft’s cloud

As a kid, that was the logo to have on your shoes (aka sneakers). I was a fully fledged Jordan fanatic and still have several pairs of the famous footwear. Some things never leave you I suppose….well, maybe apart from my ability to jump that is.

Well our friends at Nike have a site that if Flash rich but this week they made the jump to Silverlight and Azure as they celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Jordan partnership. Mosaic 23/25 calls on the trusty deep zoom capability of Silverlight to bring you a photo of his Airness that is made up from user submitted images. Mosaic also uses Azure to deal with traffic bursts and scale the application with our cloud platform. Azure enables the site to create new mosaic in about 10 minutes, employing up to 40 backend, parallel instances… impressive when you consider that a typical mosaic is constructed with over 5 billion pixels

I also just read over on Brandon’s blog that during the NBA All Star Weekend in Dallas, the Jordan folks will have large flat-screens that will be running a Windows 7 multitouch experience to let you interact with the history of the Jordan Brand over 25 years. They’ll also have Microsoft Surface units that allow multiple people to have fun with the brand…I’m not sure what the app is but I have high hopes from the Surface team.

I sort of lost interest in basketball at the end of MJ’s era…good to see the legend lives on though.