How do you automate complicated calculations and intricate workflow for increased accuracy and speed?

A rapidly growing, successful company was feeling the strain of manually calculating tax, taking into account complex multi-national tax laws. They asked us to help. We worked with them to map their workflow and build a system to automate their complex tax calculations.

The client realised the system we had built could be sold as Software as a Service to their clients. We shifted the emphasis of the project into building an in-house team to take the product forward on a long term basis.

The system has been in daily use, running all their business, for over a year, and the SaaS product is live with customers. We’ve continued to work as advisors to the project throughout, providing expert support to their in-house development team.

We’re going to get millions of visitors a day on our social network - how will we cope?

A growing social network came to us and told us that their address was going to be printed on millions of soft drink cans. They were concerned that their web site wouldn’t be able to cope with the traffic.

We helped them optimise and scale out their web service to cope with the extra demand. We analysed their existing infrastructure and application, identified the critical points which needed to scale, and designed a novel system to overcome the challenges.

Through the process of helping them, we designed an innovative distributed database technology. This technology has now been spun out into a new startup company offering a novel approach to web scale databases. Their patent-pending extension to the leading open source database, MySQL, is creating much interest among web developers worldwide.

www.geniedb.com

Access to our servers over the internet is absolutely vital to our business, how do we make sure they’re always available?

An innovative telecoms company, who provide telephony services over the internet, asked us to help them ensure high availability. Their clients cannot tolerate downtime - everyone expects their phone to work first time, every time.

They asked us for expert advice on creating a high-availability network. We evaluated and revised their network set up, ensuring every piece of the network was redundant. Any component can fail, from a cable to a router, and their systems will still be online. When you’re offering high value services, you need to be absolutely confident that it will keep working. Yet it’s a fact of life that equipment fails, and this resilient setup ensures that the service will keep going when the unexpected happens.

We’re now working with them to extend their service over multiple interlinked data centres, to provide even greater resilience for their service.

Expert Hold ‘Em

I need graphics that my video production software can’t produce!

Sometimes we get rather unexpected requests for help. “I’m producing some instructional DVDs with world leading poker players, but I can’t illustrate the games on screen. Can you do anything?"

Of course, we’ll take on any problem, as long as it involves a computer! We wrote a Mac OS X application to read descriptions of poker games in a standard format, and draw beautifully animated poker cards. Interfacing with video editing equipment, we synchronised the transitions to accurate timecodes. Finally, the software creates Quicktime videos which are imported into the video editing software.

The DVDs have been a great success, with massive sales worldwide. We like to think this is all down to the beautiful animated poker games, but suspect the famous presenters may have contributed just as much.

www.expertholdem.com

Our team is never in one place! How do we share files amongst a mobile team to make it easier to work together?

We don’t just do large projects. We love solving specific problems, quickly and efficiently.

This client was having problems storing their files on a Windows file share, using the built in offline access to handle remote working. This did not work very well!

We evaluated the problem, and with a bit of imagination we decided the best solution would be a tool from the software development world: Subversion. Whilst not the obvious choice, it was exactly the right solution for their problem. Using a friendly front-end, TortoiseSVN, we showed them how to use the system and how they could work together efficiently and reliably.

Many years later, they’re still using it today!

Surely there’s a better way to manage our workload and scheduling?

This services company was using desktop software to organise the scheduling of their mobile workforce. But it could only be accessed in the office, making it difficult to tell everyone where they needed to be.

Being the kind of entrepreneurial client we love to work with, they decided to build a system they could sell to other companies with the same problem.

We analysed their business, designed a user interface to precisely match their workflow, and then built a web based system which allowed them to schedule appointments, inform their workforce of daily tasks, and produce business reports for accountancy and payroll.

Our projects

We love building useful things. As well as client work, we also work on our own projects when we see a need for something that hasn’t yet been built, or just want to flex our technical and creative muscles.

• Loominous: an add-on to Apple’s iCal, making forthcoming appointments more visible. www.fluffy.co.uk/loominous
• Spotmeta: enables users to add custom definition tags, category information, and annotations to files or folders to improve searchability in Mac OS X Tiger. www.fluffy.co.uk/spotmeta
• Box Backup: an open source, completely automatic on-line backup system for UNIX. All data is encrypted with some special tricks to make efficient use of bandwidth. www.boxbackup.org
• Ignite: a web graphics optimisation application for Windows. It cuts web graphics down to size for fast downloads, and is available for free download and use. http://app.ignite-it.co.uk/
• OneIS: a novel information mangement system for storing and sharing information. Taking the best ideas from the semantic web, wikis, intranets, we’ve created an elegant tool which is improving information management in businesses from Harley Street practices to international consultancies. www.oneis.co.uk