PHP

Online community of global citizens who take action on the major issues facing the world today

Avaaz.org is a community of global citizens who take action on the major issues facing the world today. The core of the model of organizing is the email list, operated in 13 languages. By signing up to receive the alerts, you are rapidly alerted to urgent global issues and opportunities to achieve change. Avaaz members respond by rapidly combining the small amounts of time or money they can give into a powerful collective force. In just hours Avaaz can send hundreds of thousands of messages to political leaders telling them to save a crucial summit on climate change, hold hundreds of rallies across the world calling for action to prevent a genocide, or donate hundreds of thousands of euros, dollars and yen to support nonviolent protest in Burma. The main challenge is millions of registered users who create a huge load. By pre-generating some pages and some statistics we achieved significant performance growth. As a result we are able to raise millions of dollars during 2 days of some campaigns.

Social shopping community

DealBundle is social shopping community created and supported by members for deal fanatics. At DealBundle you can find quality deals submitted by members from around the world. The community determines what deals will be included within DealBundle based on ratings and popularity. Deals that have been promoted to DealBundle can still be rated and commented on. In-fact, you can view the "Most Popular" within DealBundle from the homepage (it is populated in real-time, so check it often for the best of the best)! The web site has a powerful admin part with intensive use of AJAX. QArea Inc. has created plug-ins for FireFox and Internet Explorer for the quick deal postings. Users can share their deals, post comments to the posts, can communicate via integrated webmail. The site has unlimited categories nesting, stars rating (like yahoo has), tags (like gmail and docs.google.com have), power search engine, black list words filtering. Dealbundle also uses XML and a lot of JavaScript to make the site quick and user-friendly.

The internet Newspaper: news blogs video community

The Huffington Post portal was launched May 9, 2005 and very soon it became extremely popular.

While one reason of the apparent success of this portal is that their contributors are popular journalists and well-known personalities from politics, business, and entertainment, the other reason is that the development team has been able to provide a technical solution that was up to the challenge.

Task:

To implement a news portal capable of sustaining heavy load, including peak load, and convenient for both visitors and authors of the entries.
 

Challenge - making definite entries appear among the results of running search engines queries, SEO optimization; - simultaneous maintaining of a large number of users; - quick generation of pages that contain dynamic and static data.

Solution

The portal is based on the MovableType platform, which has been modified to minimize the number of database queries and to improve performance. To load a server in order to process pictures, CSS and other statistic content, Amazon S3 is used.

To ensure stable and efficient work under heavy and peak loads we have used the memcache technology, which is a general-purpose distributed memory caching system that allows speeding up dynamic database-driven websites by caching data and objects in memory to reduce the number of times the database must be read.

QArea developers have implemented a rather serious new functionality for this site: basing on Google Maps API it was created our own custom map that operates a large number of images generated by our team, works with large amount of data (about a million rows) and supports a huge number of users.

A powerful statistics system has been implemented in the back-end: there is a statistics of tracking of entries, statistics of visits referred from different search engines. There is also statistics of the sites referring to huffingtonpost.com and general tracking of keywords/key phrases which can be used to refer the users to the site.

Result

The site has been featured on the main page of Yahoo several times. The site lives perfectly with 200+k visitors per hour.

http://qarea.com/news_pages/news76/news-details.php

Development of services and API for partners of iPharmacist using MVC-based, Rails-like own system using Perl.

iPharmacist is a complex system, which helps pharmacy staff, managers and owners to track working hours, calculate pharmacists' bonuses and many more. Part of the system are mobile device applications (Palm, PocketPC, etc), another part is web interface for administering pharmacies, pharmacists, working hours, building graphs and many more. Handheld devices are synchronized on a regular basis with the website, new updates are downloaded, and user activity is uploaded to website. Created WSDL modules for exchanging data with canadian pharmaceutical companies. Developed web-based part of the iPharmacist project. Implemented PDB export/import to/from handheld devices.

Social networking community creation

MyLoki is a service offered by Boston-based SkyHook Wireless . Skyhook can determine your location based on the nearest WiFi routers that it picks up through your computer.

MyLoki location enables social networking. As you travel around MyLoki can automatically let your friends know where you are using your favorite platform - Facebook, RSS Feeds and badges for your blog or even Jaiku. You can pick and choose how and where you want your location to be displayed. MyLoki gives you total control over the posted location and who can see it.

Your location can be delivered with the help of Loki toolbar, which is downloaded on your browser from any place nearby WiFi hotspot. This information can be reported in a number of ways. You can get your own MyLoki page that shows people your exact location, or you may have a constantly updated map on your blog which displays your current position. You can add the map as a Facebook app or create an embeddable badge and append it to your e-mail signature. You can also create a location feed integrated with any GeoRSS service, such as Google MyMaps, Jaiku and Yahoo’s Fire Eagle.

QArea team has implemented the project from the scratch. It’s built using Symfony 1.0 framework. QArea was also responsible for redesigning Loki.com site and its integration with MyLoki.

The major challenges:

• Google Maps;
• Facebook application (users’ profile FBML box, posting to the feed and a standalone FB application which allows the users to set their location while surfing on Facebook);
• The web-site (authentication, users’ privacy setting, history and groups locations viewing, generation of badges examples, RSS feed);
• Loki.com channels (developed own XML DTD for generating HTTP requests);
• iPhone API (own XML protocol as well);
• Updating of users’ location using Ajax technology (we have created a centralized database which stores and shares the information about users’ location between Facebook application and MyLoki standalone application);
• FireEagle, Twitter integration.

QArea team has united separate projects into one by developing and implementing the following features for Loki.com:

• Channels: specific links to various LBS (location-based services) sites with your current location in themselves. There’s no necessity to enter your location manually if you want to rent a flat or looking for a cheap gas station.
• Loki JS API subscription: Skyhook's Loki allows other location dependent sites to place special JavaScript code which fetches users’ current location from Loki toolbar (installed on your computer). Loki.com site provides JS API registration and some examples for developers.
• FindMe page demonstrates the power and preciseness of Skyhook's technology. Users can view/set their location and try all available channels there. • Blog, downloads page, main page tell the users how it works and allows downloading Loki toolbar.