Social Media Analytics and Reporting for Thousands of Customers
Modernizing Poultry Farms with Internet Connected Feed Level Monitoring
Little Bird Systems approached Lofty Labs to create a customer facing application to allow users to monitor data generated by their innovative audio-based sensors for feed bins in the poultry industry. The team had deployed sensors on multiple farms and were storing data in a database, but had no user interface for analytics, reporting, or even internal oversight. The team also anticipated large scaling challenges with their architecture in the short term future as they prepared a large go-to-market strategy for their IoT (Internet of Things) enabled sensors.
LOFTY'S APPROACH
Little Bird Systems team during a discovery workshop at Lofty Labs Lofty Labs worked with the team at Little Bird Systems to re-architect the pipeline of their sensor data using a standardized API (Application Programming Interface) over the internet, allowing their devices to passively push data into the cloud. The API became the standard interface for retrieving data as well, and Lofty developed an interactive reporting interface to surface insights to Little Bird System’s customers. The API and analytics application support an ACL model that allows for flexible governance of data access where Little Bird's employees and customers can access only the data they are granted, without compromising the confidential data of other customers. LBS On ScreenLittle Bird's IoT infrastructure is now poised for massive scaling and sensors are being rolled out to multiple commercial farms. The API powered dashboard is in use by LBS employees, farm employees, and integration partners to efficiently monitor and replenish feed levels. Native mobile applications are now in development, taking advantage of the API at the architecture's core to provide consistent experience across devices. These applications can be developed at a substantially reduced cost as they leverage a pre-existing cloud architecture and data access. Little Bird Systems is now confidently approaching some of the largest poultry integrators in the world with the knowledge that their automated systems can scale to meet demands of any size
Each of WEHCO Media's newspaper holdings operates a full service digital marketing agency branded Flypaper, totaling many hundreds of clients and over a thousand unique social media and website analytics accounts.
When the executive team launched an initiative to double the agency division's business by EOY 2017, the challenge was met with enthusiasm. One problem, though, the off the shelf reporting tool they used was priced per customer and had already climbed into low 5-figure monthly licensing fees. At that price, WEHCO Media believed it could have a solution designed that better suited the needs of the business and paid for itself in the near-short-term future.
Lofty Labs engineers designed a robust system for gathering metrics from analytics APIs. At its core, the system leverages a distributed Celery task queue to asynchronously fetch large volumes of analytics data. The raw API responses are stored in a Cassandra database cluster that serves as a canonical data store, allowing WEHCO to replay past API fetches to calculate new metrics without having to go back to the source service. On top of the ingest layer is a Python and Django API layer which serves aggregated analytics over a RESTful API. This API powers the internal and customer facing web dashboard as well as automated reporting tools.
The dashboard is powered by Ember which results in an extremely fast UI to access analytics. The application has deep access control built into it, allowing the UI to be shared between employees of the business as well as their clients--with careful filtering of data (by client and geographical market) so that every user sees exactly what they are supposed to see, and nothing else.
The software, branded Bird's Eye by WEHCO, is able to handle all of their existing customers with the scalability to grow to meet their goals for 2017. Bird's Eye includes a thorough API and framework for connecting new social services so that the Lofty Labs team can quickly add new data sources as WEHCO Media's capabilities change over the coming years. WEHCO Media expects to see full ROI on the product within 12 months, and long term savings in the six figure range.
