BigPond Music - MP3
BigPond Music - one of Australia's largest online music retail stores - required the provision for sale of MP3 alongside the existing Windows Media files.
Over a 4 month period, Mammoth developed the additional functionality required, created and executed an extensive set of test cases, and provided the necessary Project Management expertise. Mammoth Media's MP3 functionality was delivered on-time and on-budget in mid-August 2008 to much media interest in Bigpond, who are now offering an alternative purchasing point for MP3 content.
In Other News
July 2008: Unified search deployed to BigPond Games, Music, and Movies.
June 2008: AusGamers.com redesign is launched.
February 2008: MMORPG billing, installation and patching system released on GameArena.
November 2007: GameArena server rentals are now available.
October 2007: GameCreate.com leaves beta.
Recent Projects
Massively Multiplayer Publishing system
In late 2007 Bigpond acquired the rights to a Massively multiplayer game for exclusive sale in Australia. However due to the right holder in other regions being Sony Interactive, the games developer did not have their own distribution, billing, or publishing system to offer. Mammoth Media were called in with the task of creating a complete end-to-end Massively Multiplayer backend system from scratch in just 3 months.
The projected entailed developing a billing system that allowed interaction between the Bigpond Games website and the developers game system, an installer for the game that was pressed onto over 100,000 cd's for distribution, and a sophisticated delta patching system that allowed the user to only patch changed data. Mammoth achieved the impossible, and were able to deliver all these components out of 3 different individual teams within Mammoth within Telstra's marketing timelines.
Bigpond Games - Game Server Rentals
Mammoth utilised its state of the art game server delivery technology - GameCreate - to introduce a new revenue model to Telstra. Game Server rentals allow any user of the service to pay a nominated subscription amount - reoccurring each month - in return for the dedicated use of a game server on Telstra's Game infrastructure.
The service provides a secure and simple interface for users to interact, create, modify, and stop game servers as they require. The game server rental industry has been growing significantly around the world over the last two years; Mammoth Media had GameCreate rentals running in a prototype system for over a year before the service was migrated to Telstra.
Mammoth Media intent to offer similar services in other countries around the world in early 2009.
GameCreate
GameCreate is Mammoth Media's powerful game server management software solution, allowing game service administrators to manage all of their services from a single web interface. GameCreate is now available as a centrally-hosted solution free of charge to all customers.
BigPond Games Consolidation
Mammoth recently undertook the massive task of consolidating three different sites - built with significantly different technologies - into a single site which encompassed all of the functionality. This undertaking was done on an extraordinarily tight timetable and involved working closely with the business and design in order to satisfy a large number of requirements. The project was delivered on time and has been performing solidly, generating a lot of positive feedback from the user base.
>> Visit the GameArena site. >> Read more about Mammoth on this project.
BigPond Music
Mammoth Media recently redeveloped the BigPond Music site, a project that took over 8 months to complete from start to finish. BigPond Music was relocated from Singapore to Australia in the process and rebuilt completely with a new interface and data model. Mammoth Media was required to work closely with many different Telstra divisions to ensure that all parts of the Telstra infrastructure were in place to support the newly developed site. The new site is designed to be single point fault tolerant, and makes use of AJAX and other current technologies.
BigPond Weather
Mammoth Media developed BigPond Weather in just over 2 months in 2006. The goal was to develop a ambitious "Web 2.0" site without the use of Flash requiring zero maintenance. A sophisticated auto-update mechanism built with a variety of components built in C++ and C#/.NET ingest XML data from a variety of sources to populate the site with data and ensure it is reliably kept up-to-date with the latest weather information.
BigPond Games Shop
Games Shop was the latest in a series of digital download technologies integrated into the BigPond Games solution by Mammoth. Games Shop allows users to purchase the latest AAA PC games and download them directly and securely to their home. Games Shop was a project that took 9 months from inception to completion, and Mammoth spearheaded the design and development in all stages, being responsible for the feasibility study for BigPond and ultimately recommending the DRM solution that was used for the service. Mammoth also assisted with defining the business goals and authored the entire Solution Definition documentation for the project.
Mammoth Media are responsible for managing all aspects of Games Shop service, including handling encryption of titles provided by publishers so they can be sold on the service.
