Two of the guys behind the innovative site the Las Vegas Sun -- where Rob Curley and Chris Jennewein have landed -- gave a presentation on some of the cool features of their site. The theme was how they had to, or perhaps better, were able to, build it from scratch.
Take a look at it. The masthead changes depending on the weather and the time of day, going dark at night, snowing when it snows and even shows the Las Vegas sign melting on particularly hot days. They have some state-of-the-art features: awesome video player, slideshow and audio slideshow gizmos they built from the scratch.
Among the projects they showed were this Flight Delay Calculator and Prescription Narcotic Indicator. I was most impressed by this package on the history of the strip, Gamble in the Sand, with its fun and iconic map of the hotels providing a fun interactive feature.
They also have a good family of desktop widgets and a mobile site that is not just an RSS feed but more tailored to the experience. The company is big in TV, with four daily TV news broadcasts and an All In One Las Vegas sports scene show.
They do offer some lessons in building tools that allow for agile development and swift innovation, building tools once and using them for many applications. (They use Ellington as their CMS and Django as their development tool.) And they had a good organizational concept of three connected pods: production, editorial and programming.
But when asked if they were making money, the most specific response was "We're in start-up mode." And when I asked if they planned to try to capitalize on all the stuff they're putting on YouTube and Flikr, they said that would be up to Jennewein to figure out.
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