Case Studies

Professor S. is LudInc's first interactive learning game for fourth-grade students. It links the fictitious world of history with the everyday world of the pupils. The students are part of an adventure led by the teacher. In the complete digital rebuild of LudInc's Professor S, we took on the role of lead development and coaching, together with our partner UpStream.

To match the complex needs of the software — used by pupils, teachers and parents — we developed a strongly distributed service-oriented architecture (communication via REST/JSON APIs). The architecture made use of a range of technologies including Angular.js with Jasmine unit tests in the front-end, several Rails 4.x back-ends (with PostgreSQL), a custom live messaging architecture using MongoDB, and the pub-sub library Faye, which allows users to upload, share and play images, sound and video messages across different clients of the platform.

Blipcard sends beautiful postcards to your friends and family by turning your pictures into real, printed postcards. With the powerful editor you can build fun collages and customize them with stickers.

The iOS and Android mobile applications allow users to send physical postcards created directly from their phone. Our job was the development and ongoing support of the back-end / JSON API (built on Rails 4) consumed by the mobile app. To analyze the use of the Blipcard app, we also built Blipcard Dashboard, a near-real-time statistics interface with intelligent aggregation in MongoDB and asynchronously loading widgets and charts built with Angular.js and Chart.js.

Fraunhofer Fokus acts as a supplier- and technology-independent agent between industry, science and the public administration. It combines long-standing scientific expertise and experience from various branches into optimal solutions, focusing not only on the technical infrastructure but also on practical concepts, prototypes and applications.

For the relaunch of their corporate website — and to benefit from the customization features of the CMS Scrivito (from Infopark) — the web-team of Fraunhofer Fokus needed an introduction to Ruby on Rails. We spent several days with their team pair-programming together, enabling their independence so they could work on future challenges without us. Following our 'learning by doing' philosophy, we settled on the following features and enhancements together:

Subdivision of the website into 11 Competence Centers, each with their own layout and content; events promoted via teasers or independent sub-domains; every page easily translatable into any language and accessible via button or URL; contact-form integration on any page with an easy-to-use interface to define the form fields; and a search engine with filters for the articles of the website (projects, news, events, etc.). Thanks to Rails Connector and a Rails app we built ourselves, we also imported most of the data from the previous website in a short time.

The DJ Challenge, powered by Intel, was a joint social-media and online campaign by the manufacturers Asus and Intel, with the goal of locating Germany's most ambitious DJs.

We created a Facebook app for Asus and Intel that allowed its users to upload music to SoundCloud. The contributions could be rated by other users, and one winner was drawn from the lot.

Text Provider is a text-broker platform.

For Text Provider we developed an electronic editor that gives authors live quality feedback on syntax and semantic style requirements — for example identification and markers for modal verbs, clauses, anglicisms and statistical data. We developed a parser for natural languages and used the Python framework NLTK. The UI was built in JavaScript using WYSIWYG editors like TinyMCE and Mercury.

If we are lucky, a film takes us to another world — intoxicating, confusing, or inspiring. After this feeling, we are addicted to Moviepilots! Moviepilot's mission is to invite fans into the process of talking about what they love and value in a passionate and knowledgeable way, ultimately building the most unique entertainment destination on the world wide web. Created by fans, for fans.

For Moviepilot we developed a stand-alone editorial system that strictly mirrors the internal workflow — from researching ideas for articles, through review by chief editors, up to social-media propagation (Facebook API) after publication. The system is based on Ruby on Rails, using RabbitMQ to communicate with the Moviepilot back-end, and provides a customized markdown editor with live preview, auto-save and many more useful features.

Justplan allows users to share their future plans. To support each other, they can connect with the plans of others and form teams.

We bootstrapped Justplan from scratch in an iterative, lean process. Based on Ruby on Rails with an Angular.js front-end, we developed a complex social-network application including all expected features. The core of Justplan is a calendar that allows querying for overlapping events. In a later stage we added mobile-application support via a back-end API.

Collaboratory was a political-discourse platform for IP rights, run by Google in Berlin.

We developed a high-performance content management system for Google Collaboratory based on various Google APIs like Spreadsheets, Disqus and Calendar. For the Google-initiated association Internet & Gesellschaft Co:llaboratory we also created an election app for the parliamentary elections in 2013, called the Co:Lab Netz-Radar — a guide for citizens to the parties' programs in terms of net politics. The app is published under an open-source license and available on GitHub.

Whitebox provides financial services — that normally only premium clients have access to — to everybody.

We supported Whitebox from a pre-launch stage with a multiple-developer team to speed up their development process. The platform includes banking gateways and complex algorithms to optimize their users' portfolios. Among other features, we worked on the reporting.

Social networks for several UNICEF campaigns.

For UNICEF we worked on the development team of the open-source social-network platform Crabgrass. Originally developed by a small group of social-impact activists, we helped adapt Crabgrass for the campaigns UNICEF was running, mainly in African countries. It was a constant challenge to combine the highly democratic approach of the social network with the requirements of the UNICEF project teams.

Sennheiser is an internationally recognized manufacturer of audio equipment. We supported their team in building their website on Ruby on Rails.

We worked integrated into a team of external supporters, developing features planned by Sennheiser's marketing department. The biggest challenge was the heavy internationalization and localization, with different products and prices in different countries and languages per country.

With its multiple features, KweekWeek was the best place to book and sell tickets, or promote the best music festivals, concerts, art exhibitions, comedy shows, dating events and more — for attendees and hosts alike.

Together with our partner Live-Line we built a social event calendar, including a native iPhone app based on PhoneGap and Backbone.js for KweekWeek — a new app for discovering local activities and events suggested in real time.

For the wallpaper designer Extratapete we developed a Ruby on Rails online shop based on Spree Commerce, in which we implemented the unique design of the Berlin agency BANK. To emphasize the visuals of the products, we built a custom full-screen image slider: visitors can choose to display a product as the background of the page and use the arrows on the left and right sides of the screen to navigate between products.

Quabb has a unique solution for sending physical letters over the internet, innovating through a sponsoring system that lets users save money on the price of the expeditions.

The back-end was developed with Ruby on Rails, complemented by JavaScript UI widgets and Twitter Bootstrap as the CSS framework. We also included a PDF generator, a text-recognition system and address labels. All of these features run in the background via Resque jobs to improve performance and the user experience. We also solved the problem of running bulk text recognition with a distributed system.