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TradeCapture.com
TradeCapture.com, Inc. is a company that develops and provides software packages geared toward the energy derivative commodities markets. They have offices in London, Stamford and Houston. Their software provides a transaction management system that enables commodities trading companies to negotiate trades, manage portfolios, and schedule commodities delivery as well as handling front and back office administrative functions. Although the company had emerged as an industry leader through the production and distribution of their desktop application, they also wanted to expand usability by incorporating the Internet into their existing technology.
CodeFab was chosen for their critical project because of its record in providing advanced architecture and technology consulting. In the first phase of the collaboration, CodeFab created the TradeCapture.com Exchange, an on-line marketplace website that enabled traders to complete commodities transactions over the Web. After testing the product in the marketplace with real traders, the company decided that they did not want to compete directly with established exchanges like NYMEX and Enron Online for online market liquidity and that they were not, in fact, prepared to operate a trading system. Therefore, they decided to turn the trading exchange system into a customizable tool that could be sold to companies with commodities exchanges. By licensing the software tools rather than managing a trading system directly, they were able to substantially increase their coverage within the trading community.
During the second phase of development, CodeFab engineers worked together with TradeCapture's engineers to develop both an HTML browser-based version of their exchange tools suite, and also a companion pure Java desktop tool. The feature-rich Java application, launched from the central TradeCapture server or the desktop, updates in real time, sends orders and makes completed trade information instantly available to all traders, thereby allowing an up-to-date view of the marketplace at all times; something that was not previously available in the on-line marketplace. The Java client that CodeFab developed in concert with the client's team was not only more responsive than the HTML version, but also provided a higher quality user interface, while using much less space on the desktop. In addition to the Java client tool, CodeFab implemented a sophisticated trade negotiation feature similar to a chat room that allows for private discussions between interested trading parties. Due to the close collaboration between the two teams, CodeFab was able to complete the initial strategic consulting within 45 days and completed the first version of the TradeCapture.com Exchange system, from concept to delivery, in less than 90 days. As TradeCapture expands their market and extends their product line, they continue to work closely with CodeFab in a highly successful partnership.
Noggin
Noggin.com has emerged as an innovative high-profile collaboration of Children's Television Workshop and Nickelodeon, for Viacom Interactive Service. The reason for developing Noggin was to create, in tandem, an interactive website, and a broadcast television channel for children, with a target age range of 8-12 year olds. Noggin hoped to provide games and activities on the website that children would not only play, but would also incorporate into personal Noggin web pages and create content that would be used on-air in place of commercials on the Noggin cable channel.
Though Noggin had created content for children in collaboration with several companies, they needed a strong infrastructure to coordinate the many activities and vendors. With all of the interactive activities on the site, Noggin required a centralized means of saving scores, storing and retrieving activity statistics, and managing activity-specific content. Noggin also required a robust and scalable platform that would provide the flexibility to complement their television broadcasting as tightly or as loosely as necessary. Additionally, while wanting to provide children with a rich and creative online experience, Noggin needed to take into account both intellectual property law and the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act.
Noggin turned to CodeFab for analysis in planning their infrastructure as well as for the engineering required to design and implement it. During the first phase of the project, CodeFab engineers met with Noggin management to determine the boundaries of the technology Noggin needed to achieve their goals. They designed an overall activity center with comprehensive database access that allowed a child to easily search and navigate the site. CodeFab'-s engineers also designed home page capabilities that allowed a child to construct a homepage containing personal animations, music clips, and stories created on the site.
In the second phase of the project, CodeFab engineered the activity and game center. In addition to integrating the games, CodeFab supported and mentored game developers who needed to incorporate their content into the Noggin site. CodeFab engineers developed a registration system that allowed parents to approve the use of the original content created by their children. The registration was co-developed with Nickelodeon engineers, allowing their site, Nick.com, to share registrants with Noggin.com. Because Nick.com comprises an older user base, this allowed both Noggin and Nickelodeon to target a younger user base, while allowing for the seamless sharing of users between the two separate sites.
To make the site truly dynamic and allow for content to be easily changed by non-technical resources, CodeFab developed a high-performance content production and scheduling tool. This tool provided Noggin with the ability to approve or reject every work created by children to ensure that no works were displayed on the site that were either inappropriate or divulged personal information. In this way, Noggin was able to maintain a measure of editorial control over the content produced by children on the site. The tool also enabled Noggin staff to update the site with new content and provided a means of managing and gathering information from the site's database. CodeFab additionally developed a tool that allowed Noggin to choose child-authored content to be pushed out for broadcast on the Noggin television channel.
A key factor in the success of the project was CodeFab's well-developed engineering and project management process, utilizing Issue Center - the early version of Intent. By making use of this refined issue-management tool, CodeFab was able to track problems and develop solutions quickly throughout all phases of the Noggin project development. Furthermore, use of this tool allowed CodeFab to coordinate the efforts of over forty people including CodeFab engineers, Noggin developers, content creators, and users in deploying and maintaining the quality of the site. This tool enabled CodeFab to assign tasks, track the progress of issues, receive feedback and resolve problems. In this way, CodeFab enabled Noggin to create a strong online presence that continues to provide quality online content to children.
Noggin has been highly successful: two years after the initial deployment the site is receiving well over a million hits per day and has close to half a million registered users.
Ukibi
Ukibi, Inc., founded in 1999, and headquartered in Paris with offices in New York and London, has focused on developing contact management systems, such as address books, to be customized and stored on the Internet. Ukibi provides consumers with an address book solution that may be used as a central repository for all contact information. The ability to synchronize information between the Ukibi website and traditional contact managers, such as Outlook Express, offers the advantage of allowing customers to enter contact information into a variety of address book tools and "sync" or merge the data across all devices.
Technology has brought a proliferation of new contact devices, such as the Palm Pilot and other handheld devices. Many of these contain contact managers that are unable to synchronize with each other or with the Ukibi system due to disparate data formats. Because these proprietary differences are erecting barriers for wireless communication, several pioneers in wireless technology worldwide formed the SyncML Consortium in an effort to develop a universal standard for data synchronization. This group has provided its supporters with a specification and a developer tool kit to be used for all types of data synchronization. Ukibi understood the value of a standardized synchronization solution and therefore sponsored the SyncML consortium. By utilizing the SyncML standards, Ukibi would be able to easily expand their service to include calendars, email, and website bookmarks.
Ukibi approached CodeFab for a solution to the engineering problems that the emerging technology and the constraints of the SyncML standards presented them. Previously, data updates were realized through the importing and exporting entire databases. This is problematic because it often results in duplicated data, and it requires large memory capabilities that the new handheld devices do not possess. The new solution transfers only new or updated data, thereby reducing the time required to "sync". To achieve this, Ukibi engineers joined CodeFab engineers on-site to create the tools required for a more streamlined transfer of data. While the Ukibi engineers developed the client adaptors (unique software for each type of address book), CodeFab engineers created a synchronization engine. The "sync" solution would be realized through the communication of data between these two tools.
In less than four months, CodeFab and Ukibi realized a breakthrough "sync" solution that provides users a complete range of address book tools, without introducing any reduction in flexibility in accessing contact information. CodeFab mentored Ukibi engineers, allowing them to take over CodeFab responsibilities, and freeing the CodeFab engineers to work on expanding the applications for the sync technology. Late last year, the work that CodeFab did enabled Ukibi to become certified as fully SyncML compliant by the SyncML Consortium.
Atomic Pop
The Atomic Pop site was a one-stop jump off point for a music-centric pop-culture convergence. Atomic Pop provided a place where music, television, radio, and video games merged into a seamless world of pure digital media. The Atomic Pop label put the artists back in control of their music, and the Atomic Pop platform brought them closer to their audience through a variety of broadband marketing and content platforms. Atomic Pop was founded by Al Teller, the former head of MCA Music Entertainment Group, President of CBS records, and CEO of Alliance Entertainment. Atomic Pop was an Internet centric music company committed to leveraging the digital medium to change the way music is acquired, marketed, promoted, sold, distributed, and experienced.
Atomic Pop hired CodeFab to develop a complex and multifacetted site. They first needed a custom e-commerce solution to provide an on-line store for music, games and pop-culture items such as Japanese manga (comic books) and black lipstick. The Atomic Pop Shop eventually grew to offer 400,000 products delivered through four different fulfillment firms. Atomic Pop licensed the 4AD music catalog in digital form, allowing customers to purchase individual songs or whole CDs for direct download over the internet. CodeFab developed a custom digital rights management solution for Atomic Pop to manage the license restrictions on what could be downloaded and by whom. CodeFab implemented an integrated shopping cart that allowed customers to purchase items for physical delivery, like DVD movies, and digital delivery items such as individual song downloads.
CodeFab integrated the All-Music Guide database into the Atomic Pop site, which provided on-line liner notes for the titles in the Pop Shop music store, along with a cross-linked artist and band discography. This afforded easy browsing and purchasing of other titles related to the CDs in the customer's shopping cart.
Atomic Pop published extensive in-line commentary on music, games, performing artists, new releases and the pop lifestyle, facilitated by an integrated publishing and content management system developed by CodeFab. The Atomic Pop Site Editor allowed the client staff to manage store inventory and special deals as well as regular updates to news and stories published on the site. CodeFab worked closely with Atomic Pop from the launch of the first site in February 1999 until the company went out of business in September 2000.
CatStrike
CatStrike was a company dedicated to the creation and operation of a unified marketplace for derivative financial products a completely integrated electronic platform where both clients and dealers would trade over the same network. CatStrike's system would have allowed dealers to trade directly with other dealers ("D2D") as well as with their clients ("D2C") over the same network infrastructure, much like a traditional exchange but with greater flexibility and efficiency.
CatStrike hired CodeFab to develop the system software, starting with a proof of concept system for demonstration to CatStrike's target partners in the foreign exchange trading world. This initial implementation was capable of trading only plain-vanilla OTC FX Options, but showed CatStrike's innovative and flexible market information display. CodeFab's engineers worked with the client to produce a system with both a web based interface and a pure Java desktop application client that provided real-time market information to each trader's computer via the Internet. CodeFab completed the first planned phase, which covered everything from the initial concept design meetings to the point of being able to perform live, fully functional demonstrations, in fewer than four months.
The management of CatStrike engaged CodeFab prior to receiving their initial funding in early 2000. Despite creation of a compelling prototype, CatStrike was ultimately unable to complete the partnering deals needed to take their exchange live and the firm ceased operations at the end of July 2000.
Warner Music Group
When we were asked to contribute to this site, it was the umbrella site for all of Warner Music Group's record labels. CodeFab developed a CenterStage section of the site to promote artist events -- everything from Chat events and album releases, to upcoming Tours.
A particularly effective part of this project was the administrative tool that allowed non-technical people to update the event information. We built a sophisticated tool that allowed our client to schedule the promotion of future events on a minute by minute basis. This tool included logic to give the client the ability to assign a few "sets" of event information per artist that automatically changed and "rolled over" on specified dates and times.
As the Warner organization evolved through a series of mergers and acquisitions, this site was superseded by a site which addressed different business needs.
Reid Tool Supply
The Reid Tool Supply site is a business to business, e-commerce site that houses over 40,000 machine part and tool products.
One of the most challenging aspects of this site was designing the product hierarchy and structure. It had to meet the needs of a wide range of consumers from the most novice Internet surfer to the most savvy. The final design gave the user an intuitive and exciting browsing experience while still meeting the needs of a very directed consumer. In particular, the customer could specify machine tooled customizations for many products in the catalog during the order.
As with many of CodeFab's projects, this site required administrative tools for content management. In this case, the client's staff added several thousand products to their catalog each year. They needed a solution that allowed them to add many products to the site easily with no technical skills.
CodeFab worked closely with Reid Tool Supply to design a comprehensive dynamic website whose database was also capable of producing their printed catalog. Reid used the detailed blueprints produced by CodeFab to build the site using in-house staff.
Standard and Poors
S & P Personal Wealth was a unique online service offering tailored investment recommendations to its online users. It combined the best of the McGraw-Hill Companies' internationally recognized financial, investment and news services including recommendations, market-moving news, and advice from Standard & Poor's, the most respected source of independent investment knowledge.
Development of the Personal Wealth web site was originally assigned to two consulting agencies, one on the West Coast and one on the East Coast. Late in the project CodeFab was asked by one of these organizations to provide expert help and assist with development to deploy this system.
CodeFab designed and built the interface layer between the WebObjects application (built by the West Coast team) and the underlying database engine (built by the East Coast team). Through the use of this layer, the user interface team was able to develop the application without having access to the database engine. Likewise, the database engine team was able to build the logic for the site with a testing environment that simulated the working application. The interface layer was also used as a quality assurance tool to automatically validate the type of the information passing between the interface and engine layers.
A few months after deployment of the site, CodeFab was callled back to provide emergency development services; Standard & Poors had been offered the opportunity to provide stock quote services to one of the most heavily trafficked sites on the Internet. This opportunity was offered under the conditions that Standard & Poors could provide the service under the requesting site's look-and-feel and meet the exceptionally high traffic rates required within two weeks of the offer.
CodeFab created a new application from the codebase of Standard & Poors original site to provide the stock quote service. In order to meet the requirements, CodeFab optimized this latter application to increase its efficiency approximately 100 times in both response times and resource usage. Many of these optimizations were ultimately folded back into the original site to help Standard & Poors serve the needs of their customers more cost effectively.
McGraw Hill, parent company of Standard & Poors, has since consolidated several of their online offerings so that this site no longer exists as "S&P Personal Wealth".
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