Platform

Mercury Flow

The applications we build are all centered around content delivery, be it news headlines, scores, statistics, photos, video, etc. Our platform begins with a very solid and mature content management system that is designed to not only organize and manage the content, but publish and serve the content in a productive, efficient and scalable way – both when the user is connected or offline. The Mercury Flow CMS has an easy-to-use interface that enables editors and publishers of the content to manage it efficiently with minimal training. It is also extremely flexible and open, allowing for easy integration and consumption of content from third parties such as the Associated Press or content systems managed by our partners./p>

Features and Benefits

Flexible storage engine: No two types of content are alike. Mercury Flow allows for easy creation of content types that are unique to each partner’s product. This is important for both productivity as well as stability.
Versioning: Changes happen. Retractions are made. Typos slip through. It is critical to be able to push out changes to existing content that might have already reached a user’s desktop. Using a sophisticated versioning system supported by both Mercury Flow and the Mercury Desktop Client, our applications know whether or not they have the latest version of a piece of content. This helps desktop clients know when content requires deleting, what content has changed and requires updating, and what content can stay as is. Content versioning is especially important when dealing with photos and video, when unnecessary downloads translate to wasted bandwidth costs.
Cache management: Along with serving the content, many publishers must be able to control how long the content lives on the client. Some photos can stay on the user’s desktop indefinitely; others must expire after a period of time for copyright reasons. Still others might simply be moved to an archived state for later usage, preventing a later re-download if used again. Each of those scenarios can be managed, timed, and executed from Mercury Flow.
Manifest: Much of the power in the way the desktop client communicates with the Mercury Flow CMS is built into the manifest. It is a patent pending approach that provides a very flexible, yet very efficient way of communicating between the two to allow for appropriate synchronization.

Editor’s GUI: Mercury Flow includes a very sophisticated yet easy to use graphical user interface (GUI) that allows editors and publishers to control all aspects of the publishing process. This includes creating new content, editing existing content, determining publishing criteria such as content expiration dates, and even content targeting. In addition, editors can create, edit, and preview content within the system without transmitting it to client desktops, providing a “save and finish later” feature that allows for careful content review before publishing.
Automation plug-ins: Almost every product includes some content imported from an outside source, be it AP feeds, RSS feeds, or the content owner’s CMS. Mercury Flow provides a very easy way for our developers to create plug-ins that consume content from third parties and transform that data into Mercury Flow content, effectively plugging it straight into our serving infrastructure. This also allows us to avoid the headaches, red-tape, and possibly show-stopping timelines associated with requiring our content partner’s IT departments to change their systems to support us. Instead, we can support them, maximizing efficiency and making you look like heroes.
Data compression: Mercury Flow can automatically compress many types of data, which reduces bandwidth costs and server resources associated with delivering that content as well as improves download speeds for the user.
Server farm: Scalability is crucial. It is important to be ready for anything, including a sudden onslaught of users. The Mercury Flow CMS is built on top of redundant application servers and scaleable bandwidth solutions that make handling increased and unexpected load easy. As new products are added to the infrastructure and existing products grow, we can deploy new servers into the server farm in 24 hours or less.