There are two big reasons to avoid video contests that let “the public” pick the winner.  The first is that registering for those contests is always an annoying time-suck.  You can only get your friends to go through that kind of hassle a few times before they come down with a serious case of voter-fatigue.  The other problem with vote-based video contests is that none of them are cheater-proof.  No matter how many legitimate votes you get there will always be some other contestant who is willing to stay up all night registering fake accounts and voting for himself over and over.  Those two problems lead to a kind of catch-22 scenario.  The easier it is to vote in a contest, the more cheating there will be.  And the more safeguards and ID checks there are, the harder it is for real people to cast legitimate votes.  This is a problem so complex that only one person could come up with a solution; Ironman!

The Tony Stark Innovation Video Challenge was created as a tie-in for the new Ironman movie and it has a neat concept.  Contestants were supposed to create videos that showed off an idea for an invention that could make the world a better place.  First place is $15,000 towards making your idea a reality.  The deadline to enter was yesterday though so if you have any world-changing ideas you might as well just forget them.

Friend of VCN and multi-contest winner HappyJoel entered this contest and e-mailed me his submission.  It’s quite good and features some very fancy, professionally made effects:

Voters don’t determine the winners for this contest but star-ratings do make up a percentage of a submission’s total score.  Joel’s video is currently in third place so if you’d like to help him out, click here to vote.

That link is worth clicking on just to see how The Tony Stark Innovation Challenge handles online voting.  Their system is quite ingenious.  Maybe you’ve heard a bunch of grumbling on the web about Facebook’s new privacy controls.  Facebook now lets websites access users accounts for a fee.  It sounds a little insidious but it’s mostly harmless.  You can opt out of this program by changing your facebook page’s privacy settings.  Anyway, the Tony Stark contest utilizes this new feature to register people to vote for their contest.

If you have a Facebook page and if you want to vote for a video you just have to click a button and poof, your facebook page is connected to the contest site.  Now you can rate videos once every 24 hours.  The once-a-day voting kind of thing is annoying but overall, the whole system is very impressive.  You register in one mouse click and its incredibly difficult to register fake accounts.  If you wanted to cheat in this contest you would have to:

1. Create a fake e-mail address
2. Create a fake Facebook account
3. Use a proxy server to disguise your IP address
4. Visit the contest site and cast your vote

That’s a ton of work.  And since votes only count for 20% of a video’s final score, it’s definitely not worth the trouble to cheat.  So if you see Robert Downey Jr, tell him he designed a really nice video contest voting system.  He won’t know what the hell you’re talking about but after playing Ironman he’s probably used to dealing with crazy nerds so I’m sure he’ll just smile and say thanks.