Technical Director’s Christmas Update

19 December 2011

The Christmas Update

For the Localstars technical team, the past six months have been fairly intense to say the least. We have rebuilt from scratch our core application, as well as adding in a number of exciting and powerful features to enable new formats, more intuitive advert and campaign building, mobile, and strong integration capabilities.

A lot of our customers have been asking us to support new ad unit shapes, new formats (including print), an ever-growing list of booking / ad-server integrations and new campaign targeting points including, but certainly not limited to, the Localstars network, YouTube, social media sites and mobile applications. We realised that whilst we had a working platform it would not give us the foundations that we would need to support such a comprehensive set of features, so we tore everything up and re-designed from scratch by asking ourselves “what would we have built from day one knowing what we now know?”

It was important that we took a fresh look at everything in our product feature set, adopting outside-in thinking – consider first how the user is going to interact, then make that happen in code rather than trying to graft a user experience after the internals have been built. Also, over the past few years, we have had the opportunity of listening to much customer feedback, which has allowed us to see things more from a user’s perspective, and I am pleased to say that our application has really improved as a result. Out of all of this came a new Localstars advertising platform, Localstars Advance, including a new advert builder with image library and asset vault capable of building video, mobile, display, directory and print ads in a single simple interface.

How did we do all this? Good technology comes second to good people – without the right team in place I knew we would have a limited chance of making Localstars as good as it could be; it was critical to ensure that we hired and promoted the best talent we could, as well as restructuring our development operation. Great –we now had the right people, next we had to choose and develop the best technologies in order that we could provide a great user experience with a rich feature set and a stable, scalable and secure platform. We have always made use of the best-in-class open source technologies and our new application would be no different.

We bravely decided to ride the noSQL wave using 10Gen’s MongoDB to power our advert delivery network, later having our decision validated by 10Gen themselves. It turned out that the CEO and CTO of 10Gen are Dwight Merriman and Eliot Horowitz (of DoubleClick fame), and they built MongoDB to be the database they would have used if they founded DoubleClick again! We couldn’t be happier – each node in our cluster can deliver 3000 ad impressions per second whereas our previous total capacity was 25, and we can keep adding capacity by plugging in more and more machines, meaning we can easily scale to grow and support our domestic and international customers. Other new Open Source technologies we introduced include redis, node.js and the nginx web server.

One area in which we decided against the available Open Source projects was the core MVC application framework called ‘Brunel’, pioneered by Application Architect Peter Hall. We wanted so much out of our new framework including, but not limited to, scalability, rapid development, templating, i18n, l10n, security and shared enterprise data models, that we decided the only way was to build our own.

Localstars are still on the look out for exceptional talent, especially because 2012 is going to be our most exciting year to date. Our roadmap includes better adverts, formats and tools across the board (digital display, mobile, print, directory), integrations with all booking platforms, CRMs and ad-servers, network growth and more tools to help out publisher clients effectively monetise advertising.

I am also committed to listening to our customers even more in 2012. I want to involve all of our clients in the development and shaping of our roadmap, and I’d like to make sure we meet frequently so I can hear your thoughts, ideas and concerns and share our vision with you in order that we can work even closer together to make local digital and print advertising better.

Nick Lester
Technical Director

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