The Disney Frontier Blog

Today at MIX07 (a large web development conference), Disney rolled out a strategy of putting a Window’s Vista widget on computers shipping to China. The goal of the widget is to get the Chinese familiar with the Disney brand and drive visits to the Hong Kong resort. Since China hasn’t had the 50+ plus years of the Disneyland mystic combined with movies and television shows, their Disney brand affinity is far less than other parts of the world.

You can read ReadWriteWeb’s take on the widget here. Sounds like it will have some pretty neat features including RSS feeds, itinerary planning tools, and long-video.

You can also jump over to the VisitMix blog to see a video of the keynote by Edward Kummer, Senior Vice President and General Manager for Walt Disney Parks and Resort Operations. If you watch the keynote, it’s very cool to see what can truly be done with these desktop widgets. By interacting, you can see park maps and view ride videos right on the desktop. The content is constantly being updated on the computer, meaning it doesn’t require a broadband connection to load the content each time it’s interacted with. It happens in the background.

BTW, you can hunt for eight pins in the gadget. After you find all eight, you can print out a coupon for a free pin in the actual Hong Kong park…very cool!

I hope they release a version for the US and one for the Mac.