Ecommerce Data Platform For a Consulting Company

How developing a secure platform for sharing ecommerce data between companies became the last puzzle of a trailblazing data processing solution that empowered a German consulting organization to level up their market proposition and take on digital transformation projects.

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Challenge

The customer turned to us for help in implementing its idea of an eCommerce data platform for data exchange. The idea was to develop a platform where different companies can exchange data sets on a paid or free-of-charge basis.

The platform had to comply with the Industrial Data Space Association’s standards for sharing data in data spaces.

Solution

To solve the issue, we offered and developed:

UX/UI design
web application
server side and API development based on Yass microservices

Key features

share your photos with friends in social networks

personal or company account creation and editing

creation and management of closed user groups

data sets creation and setting access rights

searching for items by filters and display of results

notification and shopping functionality

Technologies

Web technologies:

Server-side technologies:

Risk Management Traveling Platform For a US Startup

How building a traveling app with real-time monitoring and analysis of potential threats in any given area enabled a US-founded startup to take the international market by storm, with one hundred thousand active users worldwide downloading the app in the first post-rollout month.

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Challenge

The company’s current portfolio consists of web client and mobile apps for iOS and Android, while a more complex and functional version of the platform for corporate travel managers is being currently developed.

The main goal of the project was to build a functional backend and a web application, as well as a mobile app with a simple, user-friendly UI. Data exchange speed and security were the key requirements for the app since it would need to quickly update maps and enable users to download threat updates, even in remote areas over slow mobile connections.

Solution

Due to the innovative nature of the product, it was initially assumed that many of its aspects would be designed and formalized in parallel with the development process, which made *instinctools recommend Scrum for flexibility and optimal performance.

The use of the agile approach enabled the company to quickly start developing the skeleton of the future solution and to add extra details and features in subsequent iterations.

The mobile clients were built using Angular 2, Ionic 2, and Typescript. The desktop-based management dashboard for Windows and Mac was based on the cross-platform Electrons.js framework – the same framework that was used for developing the desktop version of Slack. In addition, a special Windows service was developed to enable the product to send push notifications to mobile devices.

The solution with all of its components heavily relies on a RESTful API, which ensures future scalability, reliability, modifiability and portability.

Result

Several months of hard work resulted in a successful release of the first version of the product, an online service based on a unique concept and possessing a number of outstanding characteristics. The service provides recreational and professional travelers with a reliable source of trustworthy information about threat levels at any global location and helps them travel with confidence about their safety. This partnership was a gratifying experience for *instinctools and its customer. Not only has the team delivered a powerful and functional solution, but it has also established a friendly relationship with the customer. Thanks to the team’s valuable input, the solution included multiple new features that were not part of the original specification.

Scalability

Real-time updates about emergencies, crime-related or potentially life-threatening situations that may take place or have taken place at a particular location

Tracking of the movement of people and/or their property

Plotting of the safest routes

Tips about local culture

Direct communication with service members and growth of the network of contacts

Near-instant updates about crises arising in the user’s destination area

Technologies

Live Translation App For The Rio 2016 Olympics

Live Translation App For The Olympics

How creating a translation service app with real-time communication between users and language professionals instead of manual prompting and machine translation empowered an Australian startup to target Rio 2016 Olympics visitors and strike 6.6 million users in the first month after the rollout.

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The software is invaluable for everyday situations:

Bargaining with sales people overseas

Negotiating prices with taxi drivers

Asking strangers for directions, etc.

Challenge

The customer was looking for software development experts capable of creating a certain kind of solution – Uber for interpreters. The greatest challenge of this project was to create a search system which could quickly and easily find the best interpreter according to language, rating and price.

Solutions

The team worked with a task router, which made the search very efficient. While working on this project, *instinctools closely cooperated with the remote front-end team. Due to the nature of the product and constantly changing requirements, many product aspects had to be designed and formalized in parallel with the development. Therefore, Scrum was chosen to make the development process flexible and efficient for all of the parties involved.

Key features

The software that was developed has the following features:

Possibility to connect the user with an assistant who speaks the required language by clicking the Call button

Live interpreting services offered by the solution. The person on the other end of the line does everything possible to make sure that the original message is understood

After the conversation, there’s an option to rate the interpreter

Result

The work on the translation service application was a great experience for *instinctools. As a result of productive cooperation, the customer received a robust, high-quality product that met their requirements and was ready for launch. This application was widely used during the Rio 2016 Olympics.

Technologies

Content And Messaging App For a Multinational Conglomerate

How developing an application with top-tier security helped an international industrial and technology company safeguard searching of the CMS-stored documentation and allowed for encrypted instant messaging within the company.

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Challenge

The concern wanted to provide the software for their PR department.

Application tasks:

Look through documents on policy of the company;
Search of necessary contacts (intra corporate and external);
Encrypted instant messaging in public relations department.

Solution

The software product for iPad has been developed which allows:

Sending Instant Messages according to the XMPP protocol through ejabberd;
Looking through documents which are stored in CMS system;
Looking through lists of contacts (on categories or all at once);
Sending email from own device.

Technologies

Fishing App For a Norwegian Startup

How rolling out a mobile app with detailed real-time bathymetric maps and social network features helped a Norwegian startup to attract 20,000 users in the first three months of the product’s existence.

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Challenge

The service needed some reworking. It was necessary to funk the app up and make it convenient for customers. At the same time, our team had to fix all the bugs.

Solutions

Update of the credit system logic
Update of bathymetric maps

Integration with social networks
Development of discount & subscriptions systems

Key features

share your photos with friends in social networks

download friend’s pins on your own maps

add new hardness of soil layer

get exact and detailed bottom topography data

check the road to the lake, parking places and boat’s availability

Technologies

DITA Standard Adoption For a Multinational Software Company

How switching from their proprietary XML standard to DITA with automatic link validation and metadata synchronization allowed SAP Education to simplify and speed up documentation preparation by 10–15 times.

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Challenge

Despite the significant efficiencies gained with XML, in 2009, SAP still needed new tools powerful and elegant enough to manage the transformation of roughly 200 traditional education courses into almost 20 000 different, smaller “chunks” of dynamic learning content to be delivered in multiple formats, nine different languages and customizable to any client brand.

Selecting DITA

SAP chose to evolve from a proprietary XML format to the DITA open standard. DITA allows users to establish a simple and structured way of writing and organizing information elements, text and meta-data. It facilitates minimalistic writing and creates efficiencies in production times. For SAP it became clear that DITA would become the reference for efficient content management and production.

Learn more about DITAworks

Time-saving features

Time-saving features include automatic link validation, metadata synchronization and automatic categorization. As SAP manager in charge of the project noted that they expect to significantly reduce the time writers spend on preparing documents for production and focus far more time on content development. Componize/*instinctools own benchmarks demonstrate publishing at 10 to 15 times faster than traditional pipeline implementations.

Scalability

The Sap team expects to be producing more and different kinds of content in more channels to more target groups. The system can handle 20 000 chunks of content, used and reused in potentially dozens of contexts. In nine different languages and customizable to thousands of customers’ specifications.

Fast Facts

300 000 learners

40 countries

10 to 15 times faster than traditional pipeline implementations

DITA instead of proprietary XML standard

Componize/*instinctools Solutions

Pure DITA

Efficient Features

Easy to integrate

DITA instead of proprietary XML standard

Online Website Builder For a Software Company

How rewiring the architecture of a website builder helped a software company boost the system performance under high load and maintain 99,95% availability.

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Business needs

Online website builder Saitodrom required new software and hardware architecture to support growth requirements. Old platform couldn’t handle increased number of users, websites and huge traffic.

New platform should ensure:

High performance under high load

Easy-to-Scale solution to support further growth

High availability (99,95% SLA)

Other crucial requirement included preserving the core architecture based on Java.

Challenge

The old platform was single host oriented and reached its maximum capacity. The new platform should be based on a distributed architecture to meet load requirements and should be highly available with downtimes avoidance.

The main challenges:

Enable distributed architecture preserving the core

Build highly available platform

Avoid downtimes during updates and unexpected failures

Solution

Proxmox High Availability Cluster

Proxmox Cluster is built on 3 physical hosts and ensures high availability functioning of virtual
machines. If the physical host fails the virtual machines running on it are automatically started on one of the remaining cluster nodes

Highly Available Storage

Highly available shared storage is built on 2 physical hosts using DRBD, heartbeat and NFS technologies. Only one host acts as an active storage providing read/write access to data that is replicated to the second passive host by using DRBD. If the active host fails it is detected by hearbeat and access to the storage is switched to passive host transparently

Highly Available Database

Highly available database is organized by using two physical hosts and MySQL cluster with replication. Interaction with database is performed through HAProxy that provides access to and checks availability of the master database. If the master database fails HAProxy automatically switches to the second database

Application Cluster

To support increasing number of users instinctools has built application cluster based on Nginx load balancer and Tomcat web servers. Nginx is used as a high performance reverse proxy, HTTP cache and load balancer. It is based on event-driven, asynchronous architecture that makes it fast, lightweight and robust under high load

The following features of Tomcat Cluster help to avoid downtime:

Session In Memory Replication
By using in memory replication session information is synchronized across cluster nodes allowing users to continue work transparently even if one of the web servers fails
Parallel Deployment
Effective zero-downtime solution for deploying new version of the system. Users with active sessions can continue to use the old version and new users will be routed to the new one

To ensure overall high availability of the system:

Zabbix monitoring system is used to monitor the system, detect failures and apply automatic recovery

Results

New scalable and fault-tolerant platform allowed the customer to:

serve growing demands (new users, websites)
increase overall performance (especially under high load)
ensure near-zero downtime (essential for providing high-quality services)

Hardware infrastructure was implemented by using Hetzner hosting provider.

Roommate-Finder App For a US Startup

How enriching an existing app with a tenant screening feature and integration with social media enabled users to find roommates with similar interests and even mutual friends and allowed a US startup to leapfrog their competitors.

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About the Customer

The company provides their customers with the ability to find potential roommates, whether they have a room, are looking for a vacant room or want to go in with someone to search for a new apartment. A proprietary algorithm will match the user personality, lifestyle and preferences with other roommate prospects and then will display personalized best matches.

Challenges

The customer asked for few small adjustments on the website and the implementation of one big feature – tenant screening.

We were requested to:

develop a design for tenant screening, elaborate and test the RRD API and Stripe Integration, implement layout, page style and report requesting
develop features for indication of Facebook mutual friends and for Facebook verification
integrate the Diggz database with MailChimp
implement some fixes and improvements of the current version of Diggz
add a page/popup for users for the possibility of inviting their friends.

Key features

For users:

Find out if you have mutual friends on Facebook

Review a questionnaire about a potential roommate before renting

Find roommates that meet your interests

Invite your friends through an email, Facebook, SMS, WhatsApp or personal URL link

For service:

Tenant screening is a feature that allows the user to check potential roommates before renting. It was realized as an independent function on the website. Thanks to this feature, the company receives income from every request for a tenant screening report.

There is an auto-update on the MailChimp list when the user signs up, deletes or deactivates his/her profile on Diggz.

If the user has not registered on Facebook, he/she can log in to Facebook for account verification only.

Technologies

Impact Measurement Platform For a US Startup

How rolling out a platform for real-time tracking and measurement of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) programs’ ROI with easy-to-grasp dashboards helped a US startup hit a 14% conversion rate from demo requests to subscribed customers.

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About the Project

This platform is intended to support work with grants for both funders and grantees. The customer provides a range of practical performance measurement tools for investors and social service providers to help quantify the social, environment, and business benefits of their philanthropic community investment and grant making activities.

Benefits

The customer makes grant reporting easier and more valuable for both grantees and funders, enabling them to:

Prove Value

Standardized outcome metrics quantify each program’s social value, and roll out the aggregate impact of whole portfolios.
Automatic calculations tell each funder how much of the impact they can claim.

Improve ROI

Common metrics enable cross-program bench-marking and best-practice sharing, guiding investment and management decisions.

Save Time

Grantees create and update a single universal program report, automatically updating each funder’s copy.

Challenge

Responsive design

Export/import CSV file

Tree drag&drop tags

Drag&drop uploading images

Wizard “step by step”

Tracking page by Google Analytics

Product Features

Create funder/grantee account

Create portfolio/investments/program

Export/import CSV file for investments

Tag support

Report data for programs

Notify user about creation, invitation

Technologies

Real-Time Bidding Platform For an Advertising Company

How redesigning the Demand-Side Platform and improving its real-time bidding component helped an advertising company gather valuable information on external user engagement and reach the latency level of less than 100 ms.

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About the Project

*instinctools company was involved in the Real Time Bidding project that uses the Personal Retargeting technique. It is about showing ads to users, who have visited an advertiser’s site, however, failed to perform the conversion action. Personal Retargeting brings them back and shows each user a specific scenario,
depending on their previous action: viewing an item, comparing an item to other modifications etc.

DSP (Demand Side Platform) makes each 1 click cheaper. While using Trading Desk, advertisers adjust bids according to the value of their target audience, as well as to the desired impressions and clicks volume. The platform compares the data with the information on traders and bids, buying impressions as cheap as
possible and selecting the best matching audience. The whole process takes a split second: while the page is still loading.

Challenges

Support existing system functionality with lack of documentation and original developers’ knowledge.
Provide high-availability system to process a large amount of requests coming from SSP and advertiser sites. Each request should be executed with the lowest latency possible (less than 100ms).
Refactor and redesign the existing system in Microsevices manner. It provides scalability opportunities to process a large amount of requests. It also gives additional capabilities to optimize the costs of production environment usage and support.
Implement means of monitoring to measure system performance and track errors in real-time.

Solutions

The existing platform has been maintained and augmented with the Demand Side Platform, a system that organizes auctions for advertisers, and a user data management system. The platform has been integrated with the largest SSP platforms, such as Facebook Exchange and Taboola, employing HTTP cookies to gather information on users.

We have done an analysis of existing components and put together technical manuals. Having revealed and eliminated the failure caused in the course of maintenance, we achieved stable system’s operation.

We also have:

redesigned the system;
managed infrastructure hosting, data storage and data sharing using Amazon Cloud services developed components in the up-to-date programming languages;
gathered a huge amount of data using SSP and DMP components;
integrated several database management systems;
gathered valuable information on external user engagement;
Implemented a user metric processing system carried out continuous integration processes;

Technologies

The system design was based on wellknown Amazon cloud technologies like Elastic Compute Cloud, Elastic Load Balancer, Simple Storage Cloud, Elastic MapReduce, DynamoDB, etc.

Aggregated reporting included processing of huge data amounts received from SSP and DMP components. It was implemented using Hadoop jobs executed in Amazon EMR. The results were aggregated in Amazon Redshift databases.

As a part of asynchronous operation processing, the several messaging platforms were used. NSQ provided distributed queues for high amount data processing. Sidekiq was used to implement business logic messages processing through the set of components written in Ruby.

Application metrics were processed using Graphite and were shown by Grafana.

Continuous integration processes were implemented based on Gitflow by using Github + Travis services.

For the needs of infrastructure hosting, data storage, data sharing the following services were used: Amazon EC2, Amazon ELB, Amazon S3.

The components were developed in modern programming languages. Go language capabilities gave an opportunity to implement performance critical items. Scripting functionality which included component integration, configuration and deployment were completely implemented with Ruby and related technologies.

Multiple database management systems were used based on the required functionality: DynamoDB and Aerospike used to collect huge amount of data related to outside user activity, Redis databases satisfied the needs of temporary data keeping, PostgreSQL and Amazon Redshift provided strong consistency storage and processing of data related business activity and reporting.

Rollbar service was used to track errors occurred in a production environment.

Key Features

The client has obtained a stable version of the platform together with the build products, as well as an option to solve integration issues quickly and at a low cost in the future.

The augmented platform benefits are:

Tracking the system in a real-time mode
Integrating with other systems within its own framework
Performing the expected functions fast and accurately

The client was pleased with our fulfillment of the requirements and the recommendations of advertising partners. We are currently continuing to maintain the stable operation of the platform.

Ecommerce Data Platform For a Consulting Company

Challenge

Solution

Key features

Technologies

Risk Management Traveling Platform For a US Startup

Challenge

Solution

Result

Scalability

Technologies

Live Translation App For The Olympics

The software is invaluable for everyday situations:

Challenge

Solutions

Key features

Result

Technologies

Content And Messaging App For a Multinational Conglomerate

Challenge

Solution

Technologies

Fishing App For a Norwegian Startup

Challenge

Solutions

Key features

Technologies

DITA Standard Adoption For a Multinational Software Company

Challenge

Time-saving features

Scalability

Online Website Builder For a Software Company

Business needs

New platform should ensure:

Challenge

Solution

Results

Roommate-Finder App For a US Startup

About the Customer

Challenges

Key features

Technologies

Impact Measurement Platform For a US Startup

About the Project

Benefits

Challenge

Product Features

Technologies

Real-Time Bidding Platform For an Advertising Company

About the Project

Challenges

Solutions

Technologies

Key Features

Technologies

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