Case Studies
Case Study 
Social Networking for Sports Fans
Q3's global sourcing model gives the maximum benefit to customers in terms of cost savings, improved quality, access to highly talented professionals, flexibility of operations and reduced time to market.
Company Profile
The client is a US based company which wanted to create a sports website with a social networking aspect providing cleanly displayed content for sport fans all over the world.
Business Situation
The client's requirement was to provide a platform to people where they can search and communicate with friends or people supporting the same teams.
A platform on which sports fans could view information related to activities/events of any sports team or league of their interest. Also, users could support any sports team(s) and/or explore facts related to those team(s) by visiting the team page and becoming a fan of that team. A fan supporting a team could post comments and interact with other users doing the same, regarding that team's activity. Various teams were divided into leagues and divisions which made searching for a team easier for the users.
Uploading data is another significant feature of the website that allows users to upload their photographs and video clips. People can also post comments on the uploaded photographs or videos to share their views.
Challenges
- Integrating this application with the XML FeedFetcher software to fetch and display live scores, stats, news and transactions in real time was the major challenge.
- Integrating twitter API to fetch a player's recent tweets was another challenge as there were limitations with search API of twitter.
- Integrating online messenger with Public team chat.
Technical Solution
Q3 developed a social networking application that allow users to register on the website and search for friends, post links, videos, photos on the wall, upload pictures, manage profile, chat etc. Also they can see live scores, event stats, league standings, transactions, injuries, rosters of NBA, NHL, MLB, NFL, college Football and College Basketball. The application was developed using cakephp framework and mysql database server to save the data. XML FeedFetcher software was used to fetch live sporting feeds and save it into the application database server using XML reader. Q3 setup multiple cron files to keep updating the database at regular intervals. Q3 fetched recent tweets of sportsmen from twitter using twitter API and an open standard called json to save tweets into database. The usage of Ajax jQuery was done throughout the application to display information without page refreshing for end users. Q3 also provided a zip code search functionality to find users within certain miles using the radius algorithm.
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Customer Speaks
In this difficult economic environment, Symfo decided to outsource one of its most critical developments to Q3 Tech. We were definitely reluctant doing so at the beginning of the project. But rapidly we understood that Q3 had the necessary skills and professionalism to bring the project to a successful realization. It was not always easy primarily because of the differences of culture. However once we understood each other, things went much better. We also understood that such a difficult project needed intense communications between Q3 and our company. Our company works on two time zones (Europe and East Coast North America) and we were amazed by the availability of the Project Manager and his team. It really contributed improving communications between us.
Phase I of our product is now ready and we are quite happy with it. We are definitely ready to start Phase II with Q3 and we highly recommend them.
CEO, Symfo SA, Belgium.