Power Learning 21

Web Development Challenge:

Promet was approached by a pair of seasoned entrepreneurs with an idea for a web start-up. The website idea was to create an educational intermediary—allowing teachers to upload videotaped lectures on any subject and students to download and view those videotaped lectures for a small fee. The fee is then split between the teacher and the intermediary. They needed an experienced web company to bring them to market quickly.

The challenge lay in creating a complex site which would have a video upload capability, a social networking component in creating teacher classrooms and students, and an e-commerce capability which would lead to a private playback of the purchased videos in an online learning environment supported by documentation and student notes. This was a challenge in that this project required complex web development but on a limited budget and a short timeline.

Solution:

To quickly create a an e-commerce system we utilized a rapid web development methodology using cakePHP, which allowed us to build a proprietary system for our client that provided them with the capability of licensing the technology in the future.

We utilized open source technologies such as FFMPEG to convert video into the preferred format. Working together with our system admin team from Promet Host, we tapped pantherexpress CDN to speed video content delivery. Finally, we created a best-in-class distance learning environment where each student may view class materials, take notes, rate the content and playback the video lessons.

The e-commerce capability was a custom web development build in a very secure and PCI compliant environment.

Despite the project complexity, we delivered the beta site on time and on budget. We worked closely with the client, meeting often during the web development cycle. This is emblematic of our complex web development capabilities: building an application from scratch, integrating several separate components into a single functional web site.