The vision
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Singularity University offers executive educational programs, a business incubator, and innovation consultancy services. It was founded in 2008 by Peter Diamandis and Ray Kurzweil at the NASA Research Park in California.
They consulted Cheesecake Labs to create the backend and frontend of a global community to connect experts and entrepreneurs with a passion for solving humanity's grand challenges.
To start building a global community platform from scratch, we started working on the Web version to validate the product. We later expanded on to iOS and Android to reach a broader global audience.
Since the beginning of our partnership, our team acted as their technical advisor, analyzing and deciding on the best technologies to adopt and services to integrate.
Single Sign-On (SSO)
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Since SU is a global organization, it needed to manage users across different products and countries.
Our team integrated the authentication with Auth0 to provide a seamless experience to users through multiple apps with just one set of credentials.
Personalized feed
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SU wanted to strengthen local ecosystems, allowing people to share knowledge and solve challenges with exponential technologies, such as augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, digital biology, and data science.
Our developers created a personalized app experience for each user, based on their location and specific profile interests.
In-app chat
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To connect users within the global community, we integrated with Sendbird to offer a full-featured modern messenger built in the apps, providing both 1on1 and group chat.
Scalable search
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Once the number of users increased, we scaled the search feature using Elasticsearch, allowing users to quickly find relevant data in the community such as news, people, and events nearby.
Smart notifications
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To increase users' engagement and retention, Cheesecake Labs implemented push notifications and in-app notifications to inform users about new members nearby joining the community and new events availability.
Data management & GDPR
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Regarding users and app content management, our team adopted the Django framework since it offers an excellent balance between performance, architecture, development effort, security, and scalability.
Later on, Cheesecake Labs went further and implemented the data privacy requirements for GDPR compliance.
“Cheesecake Labs has been a dream development partner. They do quality work and are extremely skilled, communicative, and motivated. They are a seamless extension of our team!
Joseph Abraham
Director of Product Management @ Singularity University
Results
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60k users registered in the SU community world-wide.
The platform doubled the number of chapters SU could support globally.
