Glue™

Reduced to practice Fall, 1999

Glue is a patented framework for extracting and adapting data from third-party Web sites. Sometimes, "third-party" has been literal – like when Audi ran a Glue-enabled banner campaign that hit a network of independent dealer sites to setup test drives. Big company folks can probably relate to the fact that "third-party" has also applied to other divisions within the same company – say, when Virgin Atlantic needed in-banner flight bookings faster than their internal IT team could adapt their systems.

Patented aggregation with proven results

We hear there's a bit of "glue" name fatigue out there lately. But it's worth noting that Glue™ from ipi.net is the grandaddy of them all. Look at that "reduced to practice" date above. Was Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg even born then? (Actually, he was...But just 15.)

The idea for Glue came-up after years of doing mostly very large engagements for blue chip companies in our services business. Between 1995 and 1999, we had launched an Olympics site sponsored by NationsBank, the first US Marine Corps Website, the first Kodak online photo site, The Coca-Cola marketing intranet, Bank of America online banking and dozens of others. In each case, we noticed that the more tightly linked the Website was to key operations of a company, the harder it was to make changes to anything after launch. Bank of America's online banking is a good example. It's still good, but the foundation is basically the way ipi.net left it back in 2002.)

"Glue is the quickest way to give past-generation transactional sites a facelift, or to aggregate multiple Websites into a single UX that can be as rich and interactive as you want."

Marketing Director, EarthLink

Glue cuts through the hassles that can stall upgrades because it gives you the keys to almost any transactional system you can access online. Our technology creates an "instant API" from all of the login forms and dynamic data that a Website can serve, and offers it up in a structured format that the latest experience-building tools like Flash, Flex, Ruby on Rails, Java and Python can leverage.

We've pulled out a few deployment summaries in the right column of this page. Please get in touch if you'd like to request full PDF case studies for any of these Glue stories. We have also posted a link to a PDF that shows how we visually architect a Glue solution. Some client-specific text has been removed from this downloadable presentation, but we're happy to answer any questions you may have about it – or to talk with you about specific areas where Glue might be able to help you achieve results.

Glue Segmentation, Aggregation & Transformation

Glue is designed to take existing Websites and give them segmented focus or to aggregate them into a unified offering.