Core·Continuum continues its collaboration with the Los Angeles Times to launch a new online, local destination for Southern California - April 2008.

We are extremely proud and privileged to announce the latest in the line of new online products for the Los Angeles Times, the result of a collaboration that began in August 2006 spanning several projects. Since our launch of innovative personalized news aggregation and a completely redesigned Travel section, The Guide represents our latest collective and ambitious effort with the Times. What began as a foundational online platform capable of presenting the editorial depth of the Times staff in a more meaningful web-based experience has culminated in a product that rivals anything that Citysearch or Yahoo! Local has to offer in this area.

The Guide brings together an enormous depth of local resources across familiar categories of dining, bars, local entertainment and performing art events but layered into the complex mosaic of neighborhoods that forms the greater Southern California region. This product is one of the first of its kinds to fuse deep editorial content with location information, user-uploaded material and up-to-date local events and provide them in a manner that caters to the local user population in a manner that only a local and national icon like the Los Angeles Times can. Imagine you’d like to find a Thai restaurant in Hollywood, but one that is known for celebrity spotting, you can find that unique combination in The Guide. (In case you’re interested, that would be Chan Dara on North Larchmont). Thinking of catching the Los Angeles Latin Jazz Festival at the Greek Theatre in Los Feliz, why not stop by the wonderful Tangier Restaurant, just a half mile away for a cheap but delectable combination of Middle Eastern and African cuisine right after?

The depth and local relevance of the product cannot be overstated, and we are proud to have collaborated with the Times’ product management, editorial and technical staff in bringing this vision to reality. The foundational work done during the earlier products was a key element of launching this huge and complex product in an aggressive timeline and with a focus on quality and depth.

Among the various team accomplishments including engineering a state of the art, Ruby-on-rails-based architecture with content management, search, user profiles, maps, reviews, and feed aggregation, what we are most happy about is having played a role in the organizational transformation of the Times technology footprint. In the span of 18 months, the Times organization has since grown its in-house team to become a superlative engineering outfit capable of extending the foundational online platform. While one may conclude that this is bad for the services business, this is who we are. To take a phrase that has been often misused in a number of contexts, “Mission Accomplished”!

We are pleased to include some kind words from Inger Lund, the architect and product visionary behind The Guide, “Core•Continuum was a true partner throughout the project, from building a new platform, executing a complex launch and delivering on the vision. They are a group of talented system architects and developers. Core•Continuum was key to helping us get our product to market and meet business objectives while we worked to grow our in-house team. And finally, I might add, it was a pleasure to work with them.”

We have helped realize a vision of transformation and we are singularly grateful to the Times for placing their trust in our fledgling organization for such an important endeavor. Our role in engineering, architecture, planning and delivery of the product while growing and blending with a local team that did not exist at the start of the project is for us an achievement that is almost more important than the scale and complexity of the software itself.

We look forward eagerly to the continued success of the Los Angeles Times as it continues innovating online, and we are proud to present The Guide as our crowning achievement of our 2nd year in operation.