Project: Intranet for the Renessans Strakhovaniye / Renaissance Insurance Company.

Customer
Renessans Strakhovaniye a leading company in Russia’s modern insurance market.
Renessans Strakhovaniye has an A++ rating, the highest possible, from Expert RA, a national rating agency assuring its financial stability and solvency.
Renessans Strakhovaniye is licensed for all types of insurance and offers clients a full range of products backed by more than 10 years of experience in the Russian market.

Task
The initial idea was to develop a modern corporate portal, which transformed into the development of full a corporate intranet, in accordance with the design concept proposed by the Design Bureau Artem Gorbunov and with the full support of Renessans Strakhovaniye’s HR unit.

Solution
The intranet is integrated with multiple in-house information systems, including personnel, documents, information guides, and implements the majority of the functions specific to corporate portals.

Major competitive advantages from the new intranet include

• a new, integrated telephone directory combined with the other information that helped the company streamline the data on the administrative structure and various units of Gruppa Renessans Strakhovaniye / Renaissance Insurance Group LLC;
• simplifying and assisting new employees in learning the company;
• organizing and improving accessibility of corporate information, including current internal projects, competitions, career opportunities, etc.; and
• facilitating efficient communications between management and staff.

Technologies
A separate portal platform (portlets, integration elements, etc.) was developed for the project based on ASP.NET/MS SQL. The portal platform provides better usability and target functionality than the standard implementation of MS Sharepoint.

Client: MediaPro, Inc., a US-based company

Description:
A web-based portal application designed to help optimize, manage, and measure (evaluate) coaching and mentoring initiatives.

Technologies: ASP.NET 2.0, AJAX 1.0, MS SQL Server 2005
 

Client: Rainbowfix.com

Description:
The initial website was developed by a different outsourcer and contained multiple bugs and malfunctioning features.

The client’s priority task was to clean up and improve the code, as well as implement the new functionality. To do this we

• fixed bugs indicated by the client and others found by the NTR team;
• converted database-related calls to an object-oriented wrapper resulting in a fluid, data-centered collection of classes;
• increased protection to the system from SQL-injections;
• introduced page caching with Memcached that speeded up page load time and reduced database load;
• amended image storage structure, so that more files can be stored with substantially less stress to the server’s file system;
• integrated Userplane webmessenger;
• improved user’s session management;
• added search-by-interest function;
• improved “more like him/her” feature in the way that a CMS admin can manage the allowable variance of search parameters to broaden/narrow search results (matches);
• added periodic recalculation of matches with email notifications and RSS updates.

Task:
Develop an application that 

• provides browsing a Point-Of-Interest (POI) on the mobile phone;
• searches POIs by category, subcategory and keywords;
• searches for driving directions for specified locations; and
• provides a way for users to rate POIs.

Functionality: 

• The application consists of two parts: a server proxy (SP) and j2me smart client (JSC). The server proxy works under JBoss and provides floating-point calculations and all specific communications with the Google server.
• The client works on the user’s mobile phone and provides a representation of map images, POIs information, search facilities, POIs rating and also maintains a history of user-entered data and maps caching.

The zest of the project is that it has been developed long before the launch of the official Mobile Google Maps product.

Technologies: MySQL, J2ME, JSP under JBOSS server.

Client: Asia America MultiTechnology Association (AAMA)

Description: Working partners NTR Lab and Square Two Design have completed the development of the Asia America MultiTechnology Association new corporate website. AAMA is one of Silicon Valley’s leading business networks, with a three-point mission of fostering business growth and networking; facilitating Pacific Rim business; and leadership/management development. A key element is a detailed events calendar for both the AAMA and partners such as Red Herring, VC Taskforce and others. The events promote information exchange, resource sharing, networking, investor connection, and locating talent.

http://fotochatter.com/

Description: A website to exchange photos taken with mobile phones.

Client: VC Taskforce

Description: Redeveloped the site, adding an easy-to-use CMS for constant changes and updating. Site is in process of redesign with plans to add podcasting, forums, blogs, and other social networking enhancements, including a robust "Members Only" area, with a number of special features.

Client: Mobilography

Description:
Internet community dedicated to ‘Mobilography’ - a new form of photographic art using camera-equipped cell-phones.
Mobilography allows users to share their mobilographies with friends and send them to the mobilography.com website.

Functionality:
The J2ME midlet allows the user to

• Create a mobilography;
• Save mobilography to the application’s Gallery together with a comment in order to send it later;
• Edit the text to be sent together with the mobilography;
• Delete the mobilography;
• Send the mobilography in one of two ways:
  • Upload to the user’s mobilography website account by a single click;
  • Send the mobilography to a friend by email and to the Mobilography website by a single click. The application maintains a list of recently used emails and allows users to select from it;
• Select default mobilography size: 160×120, 320×240 or 640×480;

Compatibility:
Mobilography midlet is intended for J2ME enabled mobile phones (MIDP 2.0+, CLDC 1.0+) that support image capture (JSR-135) and wireless messaging (JSR-120).

Technologies: Sun Java Wireless Toolkit for CLDC

Compares various credit cards by different parameters, such as interest rate, payment requirements, etc.

Site is not functional anymore

Customers post and search comments about poor quality, bad service, etc.

Site is not functional anymore