SingTel chooses Silverlight for Grid Girls site

John Chan | Aug 20, 2008

Visit any site with fancy effects and moving images and you'll most likely expect it to run off Adobe's Flash technology. Well, Singapore operator SingTel is bucking that trend and decided to go with Microsoft's Silverlight technology to power its Formula One (F1) Grid Girls site.

First, a little bit of background. These Grid Girls are actually participants in a reality TV contest to find three that will appear at the opening of the race. SingTel is the organizer of this contest and has created a Web site to feature the final 20 contestants.

So, is there a big difference whether the site uses Silverlight or Flash? To the user, not much apparently. One thing most people will notice is the need to download a plug-in, whether you are using IE or Firefox. It's a 4.7MB download and we got the site to work seamlessly with both browsers.

According to a report from ZDNet Asia, Crayon Digital, the company that built the site, claimed that it is quite "light" and so doesn't require the end-user to have lots of bandwidth. It also said that Microsoft had invested financially in the building of this SingTel site.

In any case, what will matter to most visitors (read: men) to the site are the wealth of pictures and even a zoom-in feature. By the way, don't get your hopes up if you are using Linux or the Opera browser--compatibility for those is still not perfect.

Filed under: PC & Peripherals
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