A Web application to help connect single men and women-not by applying a one-size-fits-most approach but by using solid science to pair people who might be genuinely compatible

How TechEmpower brought it to life:

eharmony had developed a complex mathematical model-based on 30 years of university research—to match men and women more appropriately than could any existing matchmaking engine. TechEmpower turned the model into a working algorithm and built an entire matchmaking site and community around it. While other sites such as match.com, matchmaker.com also attempt to match people, they are much more of a beauty contest. eharmony.com uses dramatically better matching technology.

The most challenging aspect of the system is a nightly match run that automatically generates matches for users. By its very nature, this algorithm tends to grow more computationally intensive as the number of users in the system increases. TechEmpower has worked closely with eharmony to design ways to filter candidates quickly, move computation to memory, and make other optimizations to allow this algorithm to scale to very large numbers of users.

The technology:

We built eharmony.com upon our proprietary Gemini infrastructure-a Java-servlet- and JSP-based Web-based application that runs on Windows NT, using SQL Server 2000 as its database backend. The site also integrates with three third-party components and numerous other technologies, including XML and JavaScript. The heart of the site is a sophisticated psychometric matching algorithm that surpasses competitors in match quality.

The results:

eharmony launched successfully and to impressive initial reviews. eharmony's reputation has now been established, allowing for a business model that produces more income per paying user than does any other matchmaking site.

Already in the hundreds of thousands, the eharmony user base grows at an astounding rate.