MorganAlley Bespoke Services

Aside from our work designing and developing web sites, the MorganAlley team has an interesting porfolio of bespoke work we've done for some of our clients. These jobs are always interesting in that they make us come up with creative solutions to the problems we try to solve. The following is not a comprehensive product/service set but rather set out to give a flavour of what our technical team is capable of. These might relate to an issue you wish to discuss or may point you in the direction of a possible solution.

Web Log Analysis

A friend of ours does similar work to us and had a client who was certain that his search engine marketing campaign was being hijacked by former employees. We undertook an analysis of his server log files to try and establish whether the interesting anomalies that seemed apparent to the client did, in fact, exist. After running several types of statistical analysis on quite a few megabytes of server files we were able to demonstrate that what seemed to be anomalous traffic was actually random patterns with no statistical significance.

Secure Communications

A customer of ours needed to be able to communicate with their people in the event they had to use the Internet in an untrusted environment (i.e. an Internet cafe) in an unfriendly place, company or country. It was a big, but interesting, project and we were able to come up with a solution that put layers of encryption on top of their messages and then wrapped the encoded message into a presentation that delivered the message, or an innocuous alternative depending upon behavioural responses. In other words, if the subject was under coercion or duress an alternative message would be delivered instead. The logical next stage was to build in interactivity so a two way conversation could be had between the the company and people in the field. Aside from the requirements of the original customer, several uses for such a system would be situations such as head hunters needing to communicate with high-value clients, country-reps reporting back to HQ from dodgy countries (think oil industry) or journalists needing to get that scoop back to the system whilst being watched or under surveillance.

Online Board Game Platform

After a casual chat about a new Discworld Board Game that had just been released, we asked the proprietor whether there were plans to put it on the Internet. His reply was that they had looked into it and it would cost two years and £2m minimum. We said, "We'll be back in three weeks and show you what we can do!" Two-and-a-half weeks later we demonstrated the first networked version of an interactive, online version of Thud! We got the gig and with it have built the largest online Discworld community in just 18 months. Online Thud was written originally in Java1.1 and is now being ported into Flash, AJAX and possibly a .NET version. The clever bit is the server which controls what each player sees and is the final arbiter for points, clan memberships, official game-skin use, etc. It is written to be able to dynamically load game rule sets for just about any board game and can simultaneously host multiple games for multiple communities. This gives huge scope for people who wish to build gaming communities with the server providing all the tools to help games producers get online quickly.