HOTorNOT Case Study
Extending existing functionality into the mobile world
HOTorNOT (Eight Days Inc.) was founded in 2000 by two friends from San Francisco, James Hong and Jim Young. The idea came from a simple comment made by Jim that a girl they had recently met was a perfect 10. The rest, as they say, is history. The website www.hotornot.com was developed and launched within a matter of days and word quickly spread through friends and then the media.
HOTorNOT has now become an internet-wide phenomenon, spawning numerous parody and copy cat sites. The concept is simple. HOTorNOT users rate each other's photographs as "hot or not" on a scale of one to ten. They can also submit photographs of themselves to the site and receive their score, as voted by other users.
Subscription fees for membership provide the site's main source of revenue, however HOTorNOT wished to expand their offering to existing subscribers, attract additional users, and therefore increase revenue. It became apparent that this could be achieved by extending the website to mobile phones, so that people could:
- Rate users "hot or not" wherever and whenever they wanted
- Submit their own pictures from a camera phone
In May 2005, Embrace Mobile was tasked with making this possible using their platform of mobile modules. The key requirements for the project were:
- An interface to the main hotornot.com site from mobile phones
- A utility for mobile phones to enable interactivity
These programs would achieve HOTorNOT's goals by allowing users to:
- Submit photos to the site from a mobile phone
- Automatically create an account if need, based on phone number
- Receive a score for their picture as voted by other users
- Download images and photos to rate
- Invite the user to enter a rating
- Submit the rating to the server to be counted
- Show the picture's average score along with the next picture
Experience in the mobile application arena as well as extensive experience in Java programming for the desktop for clients such as DeltaXML made an Embrace the ideal partner for seamlessly integrating HOTorNOT's existing back end functions with mobile technology.
The technology bit
Embrace Mobile developed two separate MIDlets for the project; an interface to the website and a programme for phones to allow the interactivity. In order to make the software compatible with as many phones as possible it was decided to target the Mobile Information Device Profile (MIDP) on the Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition (J2ME). A development period of two to four weeks was agreed upon, with one engineer focussed solely on the task, and backup from quality assurance and systems support staff where needed.
The development process bit
Embrace's engineers understand the importance of quality control and testing throughout the development process. With tools such as J2MEUnit - a J2ME version of the popular Java test framework JUnit - and the code coverage tool JCoverage, as well as tools for automated GUI testing, the HOTorNOT applications were thoroughly tested.
What the customer says
"Embrace understood what we were trying to do in extending our website to mobile
phones, and were quickly able to design, develop and deliver the applications we
needed to achieve this"
Jim Young, co-Founder of HOTorNOT.
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