TechCrunch Disrupt Finalist ToVieFor launched this week to much fanfare. vOfficeware developed this project in concert with All Day Everyday‘s design team and of course the great minds of the co-founders of ToVieFor.

ToVieFor is a social game / e-commerce website. It is a reverse sale model where members can sign up and participate in a sale event. Each event has a few retail items (high end designer shopping bags and accessories) and can attract hundreds to thousands of people to participate. The price of the sale drops every few seconds based on the number of people actively participating in the auction. Thus, as more people join an event the faster the price declines. The catch however is that once the limited inventory runs out – the sale ends and to participate in a sale one must pay a small fee of $0.99 to $4.99.

Working with startups is always a challenge as requirements are rarely well fleshed out. However throughout the process, we never forgot our own roots as a startup, and appreciated the candid, “can do anything” attitude of the TVF team. This project twisted and turned the minds of our smartest engineers however when all was said and done we produced a system that combined the challenges of a realtime system.

The system supports the ability to scale to thousands of concurrent users in a particular auction. Using only AJAX and JQuery the system tracks the decreasing price of the auction, captures the winner(s), and processes the sale. The system is based on the PHP / MYSQL development stack.  It connects with Facebook and links with other APIs like Gmail and Yahoo.  An extensive amount of XHTML/CSS tweaks were needed to get each page to look just right. Our web designers may not have slept for a few months to make this happen, but at the end of the day when TechCrunch and its prestigous panelists: Don Dodge (of Google), John Ham (of Ustream.tv), Loic Le Meur (of Seesmic), Sukhinder Singh Cassidy (of Polyvore) compliment the work, we feel it was all worth it.

There is still a lot of work to do for ToVieFor. URL Rewriting, page cache optimization, further leveraging content delivery networks and the cloud to name a few. We look forward to supporting them as their marketshare explodes.