eWEEK content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.
Remember the old days of trading cards and swapping them with friends? Well, they’re digital now, available on your smartphone and powered by MongoDB.
MongoDB announced that its NoSQL database powers the digital trading card platform from The Topps Company, the classic American sports card company and recent creator of innovative mobile apps.
The digital trading cards market is hot, with some reports noting that Topps was selling them at a rate of one pack per second during baseball season. Enter MongoDB.
Built in partnership with mobile apps developer Dog on a Horse, the MongoDB-based platform currently includes the popular apps Topps BUNT, Topps HUDDLE and Topps KICK—the company’s baseball, football and soccer apps, respectively.
Digitizing card trading allows the next generation of sports fans to collect and trade cards and interact with like-minded collectors inside these apps’ unique social communities. Dog on a Horse selected MongoDB to re-engineer Topps’ original MySQL-based platform, which was difficult to scale and unable to handle the apps’ high-volume, complex social networking requirements.
“Social networking apps can be difficult to scale with relational databases,” said Erich Wood, founder of Dog on a Horse, in a statement. “MongoDB allows us to focus on building new features and getting to market quickly. More and more people are enjoying digital collecting, and thanks to MongoDB, we can now efficiently and cost-effectively meet that demand by extending the initial investment with only marginal costs for new apps.”
For the development team, MongoDB proved easy to use and develop on, enabling developers who had never used the NoSQL database to create their first app, Topps BUNT, within three months and to later write Topps HUDDLE in under a week’s time. MongoDB’s flexible document model and scalability ensure high-performance during peak app usage, and enable real-time data analysis that contributes to card valuation based on live sports action.
During the 2013 baseball season alone, Topps sold more than 5 million packs of digital cards, putting Topps BUNT consistently in the Top 5 Grossing Sports Apps in the U.S. With the launch of Topps KICK, which expanded the apps beyond North America to a larger fan base in the U.K., China, Middle East and Western Europe, users are now acquiring two packs of digital trading cards every second.
“Digital card collecting is so new that it was difficult to predict and model user behavior for our apps,” said Michael Bramlage, vice president and general manager of the digital business at Topps. “Fortunately, MongoDB has met our demands, and given us confidence in our ability to continue scaling up in this rapidly growing space.”
MongoDB has a thriving global community with over 5 million downloads of its open-source database, 100,000 online education registrations, 20,000 user group members and 20,000 MongoDB Days attendees.
Officials of the database maker said all over the world, thousands of organizations use MongoDB for its agile and scalable approach to data management. Common use cases include operational and analytical big data, content management and delivery, mobile and social infrastructure, user data management and data hub.