Oct 2012 - July 2013

Helpa is a personalized search and discovery service.

Helpa's key function is to help consumers search, shop and discover the best of the internet, without being stalked and spammed by annoying ads. Helpa has an ad-blocking algorithm embedded so it helps in safer browsing the web. Helpa’s founders are Colin Fabig, Ari Klinger and James Gilbert. They had a vision where consumers take control of the marketing that targets them, putting an end to annoying and disruptive ads and instead opting into ads that meet their needs. They quickly raised seed funding to build the company, and at the start of 2013 set up offices in Silicon Beach Los Angeles, Silicon Beach Sydney and Silicon East Belgrade.

Helpa has secured $2 million in seed funding from investors including Bridge Lane Group, Nextec Strategic Capital, Right Click Capital, and angel investors.

Our work

Helpa.com was online service but also offline accessible via a browser extension.

It communicates with Back-End when online. The extension has 3 components: Helpa Homepage, adBlocker, and cookieMooncher. AdBlocker is part of the app that recognizes and blocks all ads on websites while surfing the web. CookieMooncher is a product that doesn't allow marketing companies to track your behavior on the internet while surfing.

Helpa Homepage is one page JavaScript application. You can use it simply to search the web (we're collecting results from several search providers and aggregate it), but also you can use it to check the weather conditions, play games, read the news, watch videos and more. The extension is written in JS. In order to run Helpa-web-application via extension, we had to rewrite the entire web application using nothing but native JS and jQuery.

Tech facts & challenges

Web: Same application was accessible via extension but also as via website while you were online. It was written using a custom JavaScript framework, enriched with some jQuery helpers.

Backend: Back-end platform was delivered using custom PHP MVC frameworks. Behind, there were several databases including MySql, MongoDB, Redis

Integrations: YouTube, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Weather Channel

Mentioned on web