Keen Research Helps Overhaul the Back-End Technology for Educators Corner, an Entrepreneurship Resource Web Portal Provided By the Stanford Technology Ventures Program.
The Stanford Technology Ventures Program (STVP) is the entrepreneurship center within the School of Engineering at Stanford University, offering programs, resources, a lecture series, and conferences to advance technology entrepreneurship research and education for engineers and scientists worldwide. As part of its global outreach program, STVP provides a collection of free entrepreneurship resources through Educators Corner, a web site that offers podcasts, course outlines, video clips, research papers, and presentations. The popular site serves users from more than 100 countries, and its podcasts alone have been downloaded more than 600,000 times in the last year. Visitors include educators, students, entrepreneurs, and members of the general public.
The Educators Corner was developed several years ago by an outside contractor and maintained in house by Stanford engineering students. In June, 2006, the STVP team introduced a sophisticated new user interface for the site, which employs some of the latest multi-media technology. This resulted in a substantial increase in traffic and visibility. It soon became clear that the site could benefit from a technical upgrade to accommodate traffic growth and the capacity demands of the new multi-media technologies. In the summer of 2006, Forrest Glick, Director of Educational Technology at STVP, decided it was time for an overhaul and contracted Keen Research. After completing a code review and making recommendations for infrastructure and software upgrades, team from Keen Research began to redesign and code a new back-end application for the site in August.
Within two months, the Keen Research team completely overhauled the technical infrastructure of Educators Corner. The goal was to rewrite the application within a new framework that leverages the latest open-source technologies (Spring, Hibernate, Ajax). Keen Research also added several new features to make the application more user friendly and easier to maintain, including RSS feeds and a new administrative interface. In addition to the software upgrades, Keen Research also recommended hardware upgrades and oversaw the installation of a new server provided by a third party vendor.
With the initial work completed, Keen Research and STVP are planning to continue improving the site's technical infrastructure. One idea is to create a collaborative environment that will make it easier for Stanford students to maintain and upgrade the code. "The open source world has some cool technologies and tools available that we can leverage for this project," says Ognjen Todic, founder of Keen Research.
Mr. Todic, who obtained his MS in Electrical Engineering from Stanford in 2000, knows first-hand how important it is for students to work on real-life engineering projects. He fondly recalls attending STVP lectures on entrepreneurship as a student at Stanford and later while working for Ordinate Corporation in Menlo Park. "It's been fun to come back after all these years and meet the people behind these terrific programs," Todic says. "While revamping the site wasn't a big project, comparatively speaking, it has had a profound impact on performance and ease of maintenance. It's rewarding to know that we were able to improve a service that helps entrepreneurs worldwide."