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CMDN.com – Much more than a Cricket Portal

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Web 2.0, Facebook Integration, Amazon Cloud Computing and Load Balancing

Building a Consumer Internet Application or a Web Portal is not easy as people think. It requires a great deal of focused effort if you are seriously thinking about going big with an idea/ concept on the World Wide Web. There is so much more than just creating a great piece of software. The real effort is taking the software to market and finding a share of the internet users. Hence the focus should be on gauging how the market responds to various offerings through business and technology innovations.

Working for CMDN.com (digital media venture of Cordiant) has been quite a learning experience. Being on the other side of business, Cordiant understands what it takes to build, market and sustain a Consumer Internet Application / Web Portal. As a testimony to this fact, CMDN.com today is one of top five most popular cricket sites in India featuring Latest Cricket Scores, News, Photos, Tournaments and Blogs.

Unlike Enterprise Application development, building a Consumer Internet application requires a completely different ‘mindset’. With CMDN.com, the focus is primarily on bringing new site users on board, engaging them and increasing the loyal user base. This requires a unique selling proposition for the web portal followed by continuous innovations to offer more value for the site users. CMDN.com USP has been providing the latest LIVE cricket Scorecard always on the www.cmdn.com home page and other features are built around it.

Here is a look at various challenges that Cordiant encountered while building CMDN.com and our approach to address them:

Business Challenges

Challenge Cordiant Approach
Building a User Base through relentless online marketing efforts Advertising in various Ad Networks including Google Adwords
Search Engine Optimization and Website Grade Monitoring Hubspot, Google Webmaster Tools & Alexa Website Ranking
User Engagement Scorecard Options, Social Bookmaking, Clearspring Widgets, FireFox Add-ons & Facebook
Integration
User Monitoring and Analytics Google Analytics
Revenue Management – Advertisements & Sponsorships Multiple Ad Severs Management using Google Ad Manager
Latest News Content Sourcing / Interfacing with AFP and PTI news service

Technology Challenges

Challenge Cordiant Approach
Web Page Performance
  • CSS Spriting, Reducing http requests to the server.
  • Use of performance monitoring tools such as Firebug, YSlow
  • HTTP compression with GZip
  • IIS Optimization
  • Content Caching
  • Ajax, XML and JSON
  • Use of Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Load Balancing & Server Management
  • Hosting in Amazon Elastic Cloud (EC2)
  • Linux based load balancing
  • Web Farms and Web Garden
Browser Interoperability
  • XHTML and W3C Compliance
Security
  • Critical Server back-up incase of Denial of Service (DoS) attacks
  • Sensitive Data Encryption
  • Code Obfuscation

CMDN.com Innovations

Scorecaster_1

  • ScoreCasterTM (Patent Pending) transforms cricket scoring into an easy and pleasurable experience. With a simple calculator-like ScoreCaster interface, anyone with even an elementary knowledge of the game can now score a cricket match. http://www.cmdn.com/ScoreCastingHome.aspx

  • Facebook Integration: CMDN.com is one of the first sites globally to provide a user interface for the Facebook stream, to serve its community of users. It provides enhanced user experience for its community by implementing the Facebook Stream API and Facebook Connect. Using the Facebook Stream API, CMDN.com allows its users to read and create Facebook content whilst they are on the CMDN.com web-site. Thus, CMDN.com can get its users’ stories, comments, and likes, and incorporate this data into the CMDN.com user experience. In addition, CMDN.com can create content directly into their users’ stream, allowing them to post comments and likes from CMDN.com.

To know more on Facebook Integration, follow link
http://www.prweb.com/releases/Facebook/StreamAPI/prweb2743394.htm

To get a first-hand experience of the CMDN.com Facebook implementation, please visi
http://www.cmdn.com/Facebook/FacebookNewsFeed.aspx