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Mediastores and ELC Technologies Use Ruby on Rails and Amazon’s European S3 to Launch E-store In Time for Christmas
Newly Launched E-commerce Platform Driving Charity Revenues from Holiday Sales with Highly Scaleable and Reliable Online Storefront
LONDON (November 26, 2007) – Mediastores, a new start-up company that allows anyone to build their own online store to sell books, DVDs, and CDs for a commission, and ELC Technologies, the leading consulting firm delivering commercial and enterprise applications using Ruby on Rails, have joined together to launch a new holiday sales program that takes full advantage of the flexibility and scalability of the open source Ruby on Rails platform, and the lower latency and lower cost of the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for Europe announced earlier this month.
Mediastores launched its online storefront November 1 with its “Double Gift” campaign for Christmas 2007. The Double Gift campaign allows online shoppers to buy books, DVDs, and CDs as gifts for friends and family from www.mediastores.com, and donate 20 percent of the purchase price to one of five selected UK charities: Meningitis UK, ActionAid, The Everyman Campaign, Guide Dogs, or Women’s Aid. With the aid of ELC Technologies, Mediastores was able to get its online storefront ready for the holidays, and by standardizing on Amazon’s S3 data storage services, Mediastores can be assured of a low-cost, scaleable web storage solution that minimizes latency and can handle the anticipated holiday web traffic.
“As we continue joint marketing with our charity partners, we can expect floods of traffic at unexpected moments in the weeks running up to Christmas. With a robust Rails-based web site and local services from Amazon’s European S3 center we know we can handle any traffic load,” said Mike Jackson, founder and managing director of Mediastores. “With the help of ELC, we were able to shorten development time to bring Mediastores.com in time for the holidays – something no other group was able to do. And with the launch of Amazon S3 in Europe earlier this month, we were able to migrate our web data storage to a high-quality local resource with lower latency and greater capacity. It’s a winning combination for Mediastores.”
In planning Mediastores, Jackson had been sold on the value of using Ruby on Rails and agile software development to bring the new e-commerce site to market quickly. After initial disappointment with external contractors, Jackson turned to ELC for fast, guaranteed deliver of the new e-commerce site at a reasonable price. With the aid of ELC Technologies, Mediastores has undergone a transformation, using Ruby on Rails to shorten development time and create a new site capable of handling a much higher volume of transaction traffic. Working closely with Mediastores’ team using agile software practices, the ELC team started delivering weekly code iterations for review, then twice weekly, and finally daily revisions to speed the official launch of Mediastores.com on November 1.
“Our work with Mediastores demonstrates the power of combining Ruby on Rails with agile development practices,” said Jonathan Siegel, founder of ELC and newly appointed Vice President Sales and President, United Kingdom. “Rails is a highly scalable platform that can handle millions of transactions per month, and using agile development allowed us to shorten development time without sacrificing quality for speed. We were deliver a robust, versatile platform that can expand with Mediastores’ business.”
When they learned of the new Amazon S3 web storage service for Europe, ELC recommended Mediastores migrate data storage to Amazon S3 to reduce latency for web images and data, and increase storage capacity. Amazon S3 is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers, and provides a simple web services interface that can store and retrieve any amount of data. It’s also affordable, since developers only pay for the amount of memory they consume and there are no up-front or minimum fees.
About Mediastores, Ltd.
Founded in 2006, Mediastores Ltd. is a start-up company that allows anyone to build their own online book, DVD and CD store for free and earn 20% commission. Mediastores.com came online November 1 with its “Double Gift” program offering books, movies, and music as gifts with 20 percent of the proceeds going to specified charities. In the spring of 2008, Mediastores will launch its “Build Your Own” website program that will allow anyone to crate their own online media store and realize 20 percent on each sale. For more information, visit www.mediastores.com.
About ELC Technologies
Founded in 1991, ELC Technologies ( www.elctech.co.uk) is powering the hottest Ruby on Rails web applications. From Cisco to TuneCore to Live Nation, ELC Technologies is bringing Ruby on Rails to business-critical applications. The company’s team has years of technical experience and more than 75 years of team Rails experience. The company has assembled developers who are Rails Studio Alumni, Scale with Rails Alumni, Advanced Rails Studio Alumni, Enterprise Rails Studio Alumni. ELC Technology is also a RailsConf Sponsor in the U.S. and Europe. The company has one of the largest and most experienced Ruby on Rails teams, tuned in to the latest web technologies and aesthetics, with a broad palette of agile practices to help client projects succeed. ELC Technologies has its headquarters in Santa Barbara, California, and international offices in London, England.
