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LiveWorld’s Unique Platform

LiveWorld technology provides these advantages:

• Online venues customized to your look and feel
• Seamless integration with your site, registration, and services
• A broad range of applications and features, always being updated: Community Center, Message Forums, Blogs, Groups, Chats, Interactive Web Casts (Live Events), polls and more.
• Proprietary administration and management tools
• Comprehensive reporting tools
• Global/local implementation: American English, British English, Belgian, Chinese-Simplified, Chinese-Traditional, Danish, Dutch, French, Finnish, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Korean, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Swiss, Korean, Russian, Tagalog, Turkish, and Uzbek. Additional languages are available on request.
• 24x7 application server hosting
• Highly scalable infrastructure

LiveWorld’s services comprise a series of applications, tools, and systems infrastructure that provide the best mix of user features, administration, management, reporting and scale—all tailored to each client’s needs. Our systems are a mix of off-the-shelf and in-house developed applications conforming to the open standards model. They provide our clients with the best mix of evolving functionality, flexibility, performance and scale.

Our services are designed to seamlessly integrate with client systems for look and feel, brand, registration, and specialized functions. Totally internationalized, LiveWorld services are currently deployed in Roman and double-byte Asian languages in dozens of countries around the world.

Most importantly, the systems are designed, built, and maintained by expert technical personnel, deeply experienced in the dynamics of successful online communities.

LiveWorld deploys and moderates services in countries and languages worldwide.

United States - American English		Brazil - Portugese
China - Simplified Chinese		France - French

LiveWorld’s Platform

LiveWorld’s platform is a powerful, open architecture, 100% Java-based community product that provides dynamic threaded messaging technology. Used by websites for sharing ideas, information, and opinions, it has proven performance and scalability.

LiveWorld’s platform’s threaded message board software allows dynamic, threaded dialog on websites. It features excellent performance with client-defined "skins" to completely customize the look, feel, and functionality of forums. A plug-in API provides advanced features such as content filters, or almost anything else.

The platform leverages the architecture of server-side Java. Older applications are shackled by programming languages that, while good for many tasks, aren’t nearly as well-suited for large web apps. LiveWorld’s platform’s clean object-oriented design is extensible, scalable, and secure. Widespread availability of server-side Java-enabled web servers means that it will run almost anywhere. The application is a three-tier system consisting of skins, filters and interfaces, and the back-end.

A web skin defines the look, feel, and function of an application. It provides a view of the content so that users can traverse threads and read messages. Most other applications have only one skin, limited to customization of colors and text messages. LiveWorld’s platform allows an unlimited number of totally customizable skins.

The interfaces sit between the skin and back-end. They provide a simple, elegant way to access content. On top of the interfaces, an arbitrary number of filters can be applied at runtime to provide advanced forum services. Some filter examples include syntax highlighting of Java code, translation from one language to another, and profane language filtering. The application is powered by a plug-able backend, meaning that threads and messages can be stored on the file system, in a database, or in some new and novel way. Currently, a high performance database back-end exists.

LiveWorld’s platform User Features (Additional features are always coming and/or can be developed.)

• Simple, intuitive, powerful interface
• Multiple views: Topics can be displayed in threaded, flat or tree mode.
• Search and advanced search
• Personalization and profiles
• Edit posts
• Spell checking: Users can spell-check their messages before posting. Dictionaries are available for English (US and UK), French (France and Canada), German, Italian and Spanish.
• Read tracking
• New posts feature: New posts since the last log-in are flagged for users.
• Popular discussions: Users can easily jump to the most popular forums and discussions.
• Watches/subscription: Users can subscribe to topics and receive optional email updates when the topics are updated.
• Emoticons
• Avatars: Users can add a thumbnail picture, tagline, and biography. Administrators can set size limitations, provide default sizes, or allow users to specify the desired size of their image.
• Who’s online: Users can see who is currently logged-in to the forums. Users can see presence information from a group and/or buddy list.
• Attachment support: Users may attach files to messages. Administrators control who can create attachments, maximum size, and other parameters.
• Inline polls
• Newsgroup/email gateways: LiveWorld’s platform integrates with NNTP newsgroups and email mailing lists. For example, when a newsgroup gateway is installed, messages posted in the newsgroup are imported into the forum, and messages posted in the forum are exported to the newsgroup. So, newsgroup and forum users interact together seamlessly.
• Ratings & rewards system: Posts can be rated and users can be awarded points for participation, quality of ratings, and so on. This provides for a customizable loyalty/status motivation model.

LiveWorld’s platform Administration Tools (Control all aspects through a central administration tool set.)

• Filter systems: Message content can be dynamically formatted by any number of filters. Examples of filters include stripping out HTML, converting URLs to clickable links, syntax highlighting of Java code, and eliminating words that would be inconsistent with the client’s branding and image. Third parties can easily create and distribute their own filters. The filter system coupled with skins makes LiveWorld’s platform truly extensible.
• Additional advanced filters : Better display of forum content.
• Creation and deletion of forums
• Moderation support: Administrators can screen and (at client’s option) edit messages before they are posted. (Create, Edit, Add, Move, Remove).
• Forum categories: Admin can organize forums into topic categories and hierarchical structures, or designate categories within categories.
• Forum content management (including moderation)
• Public and private forums: Combined with the group management and security features, each forum (as well as folders and threads) can be made publicly available or available only for those with specific permissions.
• Permissions management
• Role-based administration: Designation of multiple users or groups as system administrators, forum administrators, or moderators. Users see only admin functions they are allowed to access.
• Group management : Organization of users into groups and assignment of permission levels to the groups for a highly flexible entitlement-based system.
• Importing or exporting forum data (to email lists or newsgroups)
• Setting locale settings (such as a global locale, time zone, and character encoding to support the display of other languages)
• XML interface

Reporting

Comprehensive weekly and monthly reports in Excel spreadsheet format to allow for further manipulation - include data as well as graphical representation with a comparison to the last 13 weeks, upper signal, lower signal and a 5-week average - provide the following data (but not limited to):

• Page Views
• Page Views Content vs. Utility Page Views
• Post
• New Users
• Active Users
• Logins
• Unique Visitors
• Watch Emails
• Active Threads
• Most Popular Category by Page Views
• Most Popular Category by Posts
• Most Popular Forums by Page Views
• Most Popular Forums by Posts
• Most Popular Threads by Page Views
• Most Popular Threads by Posts

Integration

LiveWorld’s platform integrates with your existing systems—user log in, registration, and authentication.

Total Customization

• Skins technology : Clients customize the entire look and function of forums and integrate them anywhere on their sites. LiveWorld provides seamless branding with direct access to design fully customized headers, footers, background, font styles and colors, buttons and icons. Ads and product offerings are easily integrated.
• Integrated registration: LiveWorld’s platform integrates with client’s own registration system or LiveWorld’s registration system.
• High level of security
• XML support (allowing integration into legacy and CRM systems)
• Internationalization (European & Asian characters)
• Flexible revenue and/or marketing promotion venues

Additional System and Architecture Features

• Proven performance: LiveWorld’s platform has proven its stability and speed on major community sites such as eBay, HBO, Campbell Soup, A&E/Biography/History Channel and Mini USA. LiveWorld’s platform easily scales to millions of page views per day.
• Hosted: LiveWorld’s Platform is a hosted architecture that offers a highly reliable and scalable infrastructure that covers all needs for hardware, software, network, and storage and bandwidth usage.
• Based on Java standards: LiveWorld’s platform is a 100% Java application that leverages server-side Java technologies such as Servlets, JSP, and JDBC. Java provides great performance on a wide variety of platforms.
• Database back-end: A database backend gives LiveWorld’s platform excellent performance and scalability. The database schema has been carefully tuned to work with a wide variety of products. LiveWorld implements with mySQL. The platform is capable of supporting Oracle, mySQL, DB2, Microsoft SQLServer, Sybase, Interbase, Hypersonic SQL, Pointbase, Informix, Postgres, and Cloudscape. Further database support is being added all the time. Built-in database connection pooling gives maximum database performance.
• Caching: LiveWorld’s platform aggressively caches data in memory for maximum performance. Cache settings are adjustable to tune for highest performance or minimum memory usage.
• Fast, indexed searching: LiveWorld’s platform uses Lucene for fast, powerful searching. Search single forums or all forums at once. Searches can be done by forum or for selected forums, by subject or message text or both, as well as author and date range.
• LDAP support: LiveWorld’s platform can use your existing LDAP directory for authentication and for storing all user data.
• Full internationalization (i18n) support: The default skin is fully translatable and time zones and number formatting are locale-specific. LiveWorld’s platform supports foreign language character sets. Users can also choose a custom time zone and locale for displaying dates and times.
• XML support: Import and export LiveWorld’s platform data as XML for back-up or for converting legacy forum data.
• Security: Permissions for reading forums, posting threads, and posting messages are fully adjustable on a per-user basis. Users can be organizedinto groups for easier permission management. User passwords are stored securely to protect against password stealing. LiveWorld’s platform also inherits the security architecture of server-side Java, which makes hacks and exploits much more difficult than in other programming languages.

LiveWorld Technology platform

• Open architecture and standards
• Java, JSP, JDBC, XML
• Separation of look & feel from functionality (API based)
• Straightforward integration with external authentication and authorization systems
• Integration with external applications and databases
• All data are stored in a “standard” relational database
• High reliability, very scalable and/or distributable
• Modular, extensible, and customizable
• Data easily exported (typically XML)
• LiveWorld has full source code access/control

LiveWorld Operations Infrastructure

LiveWorld has substantial experience in managing network security. For physical security, our network is housed at a secure tier 1 data center with physical access to authorized LiveWorld personnel only. LiveWorld’s network is housed behind redundant firewalls. We also implement VPN using two-factor SecurIDs for authorized user access for administration and operations.

Having operated very large sites, such as eBay, AppleLink, eWorld and Talk City, LiveWorld has gained substantial experience in dealing with issues experienced by highly visible sites, such as denial of service attacks.