OSF Global Services
Developing complex application for next-generation online service
Huge amounts of web content are coming up each day due to the social media revolution we’re all living. Therefore it becomes harder and harder for users to keep pace and still know what’s “hot” on the web in real time. What everybody else is watching? Thus the need for a service that would pinpoint for both information consumers and publishers what most users access at any given moment. LiveHIT is such a Web 2.0 service and OSF Global Services backed up the complex technology behind this brand new bold project.
The Client
LiveHIT is a dynamic web-based start-up company, headquartered in Foster City, CA, that has recently launched, under the same brand name, a revolutionary Social Discovery Service showcasing who and what’s hot in the moment across the social web. As our client calls it, LiveHIT is a Live Personalized Social Navigation Engine - a Custom GPS System to discover contextually relevant rich media content and people.
Jeanine L.K. LeFlore, Founder and CEO, LiveHIT, Inc.
“OSF Global Services helped design a leading-edge technology solution that is the foundation of our revolutionary web 2.0 initiative. Using this solution, we were able to increase our processing capacity from a couple of hundreds page views per day to millions in less than one year. Their expertise proved very useful in launching our web-based application with robust scalability features and in preparing our debut at the TechCrunch50 conference.”
The Idea
LiveHIT intended to provide a new extension to social search and discovery by using user-powered navigation paths to surface what’s being viewed live in the moment it’s happening. The platform collects valuable cross-network data and uses velocity- based tracking and dynamic-predictive modeling to gauge the propensity of something to become hot. This allows partners to program their sites and target ads in real-time. LiveHIT is an aggregation hub connecting publishers, content providers, ad-networks, and distributers around social discovery and data. The end result is a mission-critical Social Discovery System that drives distribution, engagement, and monetization to partners while providing a core discovery service for end-users
The Challenge
OSF Global Services had to come up with a technological solution that would back up all requirements of this bold project.
Most challenges encountered by our team were related to scalability. LiveHIT means tracking huge amounts of data. The service can actually measure how many users are concurrently consuming content right at the moment as it's happening. In other words, LiveHIT can track down to the song or video level or any other piece of content and can see how many people are interacting with actual pieces of content. Third party sites have a problem with resources and being able to keep up with programming. Most third party sites usually program their content on a daily or even a weekly basis. LiveHIT can actually help them program in real time. Real time means 2 to 5 minutes in terms of how often LiveHIT updates its content.
All these capabilities mean dozens of servers and loads of data in the databases.
The Solution
The OSF Global Services team of programmers and QA testers worked on the two main components of the product: LiveTAG (the data collecting module) and LiveMAP (the rich-media interface showing the most viewed pieces of content in real time).
LiveHIT is designed as a flexible platform that can be customized on a partner-basis and so, when it’s integrated with partners, the solution can help them reorganize content on the website and show it to their users in a more meaningful way, all in real time.
The OSF Global Services team managed to set up the entire complex solution in only eight months to the public Alpha version launch. Based on a methodology of constantly improving the developing, our team had frequent meetings with our client’s one, some as close as two days apart.
Technologies
Java MySQL Amazon S3 & EC2 Lighthttpd PHP Linux
The Results
LiveHIT has been officially and successfully launched at the 2008 TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco, a famous start-up launching event in the United States. Our client has already signed partnerships with major web publishers in the entertainment area like Piczo, Topix or Comedy.com.
Our team is still working on developing further features to enhance the LiveHIT service. It will soon feature a new reporting portal for live administration that will enable publishers and advertisers to access detailed reports on the traffic for each piece of content on their websites and adjust their content and advertising messages accordingly.