Leapian
Making the most of cutting edge technology to make research faster, easier and enjoyable.
Meet Leapian
Leapian are the makers of Zenreader, a smart research assistant. Available for Windows and Mac, Zenreader uses intelligent algorithms to help extract key features from research documents so that researchers can jump straight to the most important bits instead of trawling through documents and structuring them before starting the actual research. It also makes organising the research effortless with intuitive tagging, commenting, highlighting and dozens of other clever features. It is designed to reduce stress, time spent on low value activities and to get research work done in less time with better quality.
The Opportunity
Leapian recognised that in order to make their product even better, they would need to go beyond the application and into the cloud. That would immediately open up two huge opportunities:
1. Automatically syncing all research material to the cloud so it's safe. Accidents happen, laptops get lost so it's important that all that precious research doesn't just reside on the device.
2. Providing collaboration opportunities so that researchers could collaborate on their research together in near real-time. Think Google Docs for research.
They were looking for a partner to set up the cloud infrastructure for their application to use. That's where we came in.
The Solution
For this project we proposed using AWS as the cloud platform. It's been tried and tested numerous times for similar solutions so that was an easy choice.
Firstly, we designed the architecture and provided advice about best method for handling synchronisation between the application and the cloud. Once the architecture was agreed, we got to work and set it up: everything from servers to databases and in between. Finally, we wrote the code which provides synchronisation logic and helps the data travel around safely.
The Outcome
The solution laid the groundwork required for Leapian to integrate their application with a modern cloud infrastructure and implement new features.
