Parallax Streamlines Goal.com For Apple News

Delivering Breaking Football News to Fans

Parallax is excited to announce the launch of Goal.com’s football channel on Apple News. Made possible by technology we developed in-house, all the latest football news from the goal.com website can now be funnelled directly into the main Apple News app.By working in close partnership with the editorial team at Goal.com, we were able to create a truly innovative solution that delivers seamless integration, giving football fans across the world instant access to all the latest news, opinions and other updates via their iPhones and iPads.With easy-to-digest breaking news, the new Goal.com channel for Apple News launched just in time for the 2018 FIFA World Cup™ in Russia, with everything now firmly in place for the start of the 2018/19 Premier League season. Facilitated and underpinned by our development work, users can get in-depth sports articles, transfer rumours and club analysis fast-tracked straight to their mobile.

Giving 110% to Make It Happen

This desired outcome was technically difficult and required all hands on deck from our development team. “Goal.com had been looking for a presence on Apple News for a while," explained our project manager. "But due to other internal development priorities, they never quite managed to find time to make it happen." This is where Parallax came in - our brief was to take the news feeds that power Goal.com and ensure they could be published seamlessly on Apple News as branded articles.Apple News articles aren’t created the same way as traditional web pages. The most unique and challenging aspect of the entire project was figuring out how to take the regular webpages on Goal.com and convert them into something that synced up perfectly with the Apple News platform.Working closely with Goal.com, we quickly identified the need for a reliable solution. They required a third party application that would monitor their news feed via RSS and publish it directly to Apple News. All content needed to be transposed into JSON - a format compatible with Apple News - then pointed towards Apple’s API. Due to the sheer volume of articles, this all needed to happen reliably, and within 60 seconds or less. A welcome by-product of the finished solution means articles now appear on the Apple News app before the Goal.com.This entire project had to be turned around within 2 weeks to make sure it was ready for the 2018 FIFA World Cup™. Fortunately, our strong knowledge of Amazon Web Services and our test-driven development approach meant we could pull out all the stops to get everything finished in time.

Teaming Up For The Win

Parallax have partnered up previously with Goal.com’s parent company - the "Perform Group":http://www.performgroup.com/ - on a number of exciting projects. Over the years we’ve worked together on wide a range of high-profile sports solutions, supplying the technical know-how to help them deliver the goods for their big-name clients.Having developed prominent sports apps and websites independently, Perform really values our experience in this area. Over the past few years, we've delivered work for the likes of PlayerTek, Yorkshire County Cricket Club and the Professional Squash Association. All this led to us teaming up with Perform to create an interactive website for Chelsea FC and Delta Airways and - perhaps one of our most exciting and challenging projects to date - an infinitely scalable web app capable of recording a million people for David Guetta's official UEFA Euro 2016™ anthem.,We’ve worked with Perform across a few projects before. We know when they come to us, it’s always a complex problem they need help solving. This is what makes working with them so fun - each of their requirements is at scale, so they always need a really robust solution.,Working for UEFA in conjunction with Perform, "This One's For You" was built with Serverless and CloudFormation technology, meaning we could build and orchestrate the entire platform in code with a totally scalable architecture. The app allowed us to invite thousands of football fans into a virtual recording studio and have their voices included on the final song, whilst also creating personalised album artwork for them to share online.With our strong track record and firmly established working relationship, we were naturally Perform's first choice for making the Goal.com and Apple News integration a reality. And, thanks to our talented development team, clear focus and previous sports experience, we were able to bring it home in time for the world cup - even if England couldn't quite manage the same!

Pushing the Limits

We’re always looking for ways to test our creative minds at Parallax, looking at unique ways we can work with companies in different industries to develop brilliant products that deliver. If you’re in need of an innovative technical solution or product and want to discuss your ideas, please "get in touch":https://parall.ax/.