This section contains information about some of our recent clients.
Breaking the Mould is the Performance Improvement Process created through the lessons learned from the book of the same name written by Peter A Hunter.
Goldcross Data converted the existing "Breaking The Mould" Flash site to a standards-compliant, HTML-based, content-managed version. Now Peter can update his own site instead of having to hire a developer every time he wants to change the text on a page.
Ish Jewellery are a wholesaler of fine Jewellery from India. The website is fully dynamic, enabling changes to content and uploading of products from an easy to use interface.
Last Thursday is a business and social networking online community.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
Last Thursday is a Social Networking organisation for business people. The emphasis on social networking means that business people spend more time getting to know one another and building solid friendships that ultimately lead to business generation and support.
Launched in August 2005, Last Thursday is one of the fastest growing second generation socio-business networks. Its Drupal based community hub provides an environment for members of the Last Thursday network to keep in touch between regularly held local and national meetings in the UK, Eire and beyond. From the hub each member can publish their own Blog, join a range of special interest clubs and exchange messages with fellow members.
Meetings are held on the last thursday of every month, these are a relaxed affair, held in pleasant surroundings and there are no expectations to work the room delivering an Elevator pitch to each new person you meet, this new concept of so called slow networking* is rapidly gaining in popularity and stands Last Thursday and networks like it to become the new chamber of commerce for the 21st century.
Visitors to the site are able to access all public content, but must register in order to contribute to discussions.
Last Thursday began life in August 2005 and quickly recruited around 150 members; just three months later - in November 2005 - it has over 750 registered members and is ranked around 16,000 in the world, serving a staggering 500,000 hits a week.
* Slow networking is a new concept in social and business networking. No pressure is made to do business and instead participants take time to get to know each other and nurture friendships first, this provides a solid underpinning to potential business relationships.
Based in Newport Pagnell, Buckinghamshire, Mobius Dynamics is one of the leading companies exploiting the powerful approach of modern Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) to analyse operating problems associated with health, safety and the environment in the energy sector, serving the offshore oil and gas, onshore hydrocarbon processing and power generation industries.
Mobius Dynamics also provides analytical services to model major hazard events and their consequences, such as dispersion of flammable and toxic gases, fires risk analysis and smoke logging and flammable gas explosion analysis.
Mobius Dynamics already had a website, but wished to bring it up to date both in terms of conformity with their other marketing materials, to be more accessible and to conform to modern web standards. Initially, Goldcross Data was asked to analyse and report upon Mobius Dynamics existing site. The report recommended rewriting the site to remove it's heavy reliance on frames and the use of CSS for site layout and presentation. Upon receipt of the report, Mobius Dynamics asked Goldcross Data to rewrite the site.
Mortgage Adviser UK already had a website, but it had some serious flaws. For one thing, it made heavy use of graphics, resulting in long loading times on all but the fastest connections. Since graphics were also used for much of the site's content, this also made it impossible for search engines to index a large portion of the content. This is A Very Bad Thing -- if your site doesn't appear in search engine indexes, it might as well not be there. It was also very difficult to use for visually impaired people or anyone using non-graphical browsers.
Mortgage Adviser UK wanted their website to be quick to load, easy to navigate, and search engine friendly. In keeping with Goldcross Data's Web Design philosophy, considerable effort was also put into making sure the site was as accessible as possible to people with disabilities by: Reducing the reliance on graphics; Ensuring that all font sizes can be increased by the user; Keeping links are clearly designated and well delimited; Using W3C standard HTML and CSS to ensure the widest compatibility; Using a high-contrast colour scheme; Testing the site in text-only browsers to make sure it remained usable; Making sure appropriate navigation appeared before the main body when style-sheets were unavailable or disabled and making sure there are quick-links to the main sections of long pages.
The new page can be found here.
siHelp is a mutual support site for family and friends of people who harm themselves.
Systems Union are a major Software House based in Farnborough, Hampshire.
Goldcross Data provided consultancy and programming services for the conversion of their flagship product SunSystems from SQL Server to Oracle.
SunSystems is a flexible, financial and business management software solution used by a quarter of the Fortune 500 and 75 of the FTSE100. During the past 20 years, SunSystems has been implemented in over 18,000 sites in more than 190 countries. Details correct as of September 2003.
SunSystems version 5 could only connect to and use SQL Server databases. Systems Union asked Goldcross Data to provide Consultancy and Programming services to enable it to also use Oracle databases.
The differences between SQL Server and Oracle mean that many queries written for SQL Server simply will not work in Oracle, and vice versa. Our task was to convert all SQL-enabled modules to work both with SQL Server and Oracle, whilst still maintaining the same source code for both.
The-Emailer asked Goldcross Data Limited to build a website and to provide a set of automated tools to handle their Financial Advice mailing list.
The system is designed to handle subscribers for multiple different IFAs; Each subscriber will receive emails personalised so as to appear they are coming from his own IFA.
IFAs and Subscribers sign up to the service via the Web, and after confirming their subscription by replying to an initial email, regular emails are sent on a scheduled basis.
The system also includes a set of custom-written tools for maintaining the IFA and subscriber database.
Based in Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, The Mortgage Partnership provide Mortgage Administration services for Mortgage brokers. Goldcross Data were asked to design and implement a simple Web site to advise potential clients of the services they provide.
TNS are a global company, providing market research information to a large number of blue-chip clients. Market research thrives on one thing: data, and lots of it. In order to provide accurate, timely and above all useful information, data collection must be fast and reliable. Goldcross Data Limited have provided a number of data collection solutions for TNS, many of which are summarised below. More details are available in the individual project pages.
TNS' TV research system, COMTEL, uses a high-performance Oracle database. When they decided to switch from an Oracle Forms based front-end to the database, TNS asked Goldcross Data to build a web-based front-end to replace the forms version.
Retailers often offer special prices when customers purchase more than one of an item, or purchase one item at the same time as another one, for example "Three for the price of two" or "Buy one of these and get one of those at half price". It is important that these special offers are taken into account when analysing shopping data, otherwise the results will be inaccurate. Netspend is the name TNS give to the process of capturing and applying special offer information.
Originally, such special offers were captured by having field workers go into retailers and write down the special offers on paper forms. Information to be captured included the following:
The completed forms were then faxed to TNS where they were keyed in to the system manually. This was time consuming and the potential for incorrect data entry either in the store or at the point of data entry was relatively high.
Goldcross Data designed and implemented an automated system. Fieldworkers are now provided with a hand-held Symbol Palm barcode scanner with which they scan the affected items' barcodes and enter details of the offer. This data is send by FTP to TNS's data centre, where it is automatically loaded into the system.
The new method has several benefits:
Symbol Palm data scanners dial in to an ISP and deliver data files to an FTP site. Goldcross Data Limited designed the overall system, and developed the client software which transfers the data files from the FTP site to TNS' central servers. Goldcross data also developed the software to decode the binary files returned by the Palm device and reformat them into flat files ready for import into TNS' database.
The diagram below shows the overall system. Contrast this with Superpanel Polling which requires multiple poller processes to collect the data, and a Polling Monitor to control the activities of each poller. In the FTP based system, all that is required for data collection is an FTP server.
Palm FTP is now in place and is delivering data from several thousands of Palms installed in several countries around the world.
TNS and BSkyB joined forces to create a TV viewing panel of BSkyB digital subscribers [press release]. TNS asked Goldcross Data to provide consultancy and programming services for the project.
The system will process digital TV viewing data for around 20,000 homes in the UK. TNS will provide approximately 8,000 panel members from their existing buyer panels, the rest being recruited from BSkyB's own subscriber database.
BSkyB subscriber Set-Top-Boxes (STB) will return data regarding viewing activity to BSkyB. BSkyB will reformat this data into XML and pass it to TNS for processing.
Goldcross Data are responsible for the specification and implementation of several subsytems handling panel member recruitment, data delivery, station modelling, viewing inference and attribution and synchronisation between a number of TNS and BSkyB subsystems.
Market research thrives on one thing: information. Without the means to collect large amounts of information, a market research company has no product to sell. Superpanel Polling is designed to automate part of the data collection process. Around 15,000 households across the United Kingdom participate by scanning all items of their shopping using a Symbol barcode scanner.
Superpanel Polling dials out to each of the homes on a scheduled basis, collects the data, and uploads configuration information to the terminal.
The Polling system consists of a large number of Poller processes operating independantly, but controlled by the Polling Monitor. The Pollers dial out to the participating households and collect the data. This data is then posted to the Superpanel database.
The Polling monitor controls activities of the pollers, telling them what to do, which home to contact, using which modem, etc. The Poller connects to the home, collects the data, records the data and logs the call.
Superpanel Polling has two modes of operation. Originally, the system would dial out to the terminals. Later, we redesigned the system to be a dial-in system, whereby the pollers listened for the terminals dialling in. Of the 15,000 terminals in the UK, approximately 5,000 use this new Dial-in system.