Who doesn’t love good food? Nobody. However, knowing how to cook quality food is a different thing – and that is where Bosch & Siemens Hausgeräte comes into play with their idea for MiClassa – a customised video communication solution. Why flip through a cookbook or search for cooking classes in your area when you can turn your own kitchen into a live cooking class? But how exactly do you do that?

Let’s start with the goal in mind

BSH wanted to create a social cooking application to engage their Kitchen & Home Appliance customers. This customised video communication solution should allow end-customers to sign-up for live cooking sessions with professional chefs. This way, their customers could take part in exciting cooking classes, recreate recipes with others, and learn something new no matter if they’re a beginner or if they have spent their fair share of time in the kitchen. Customers should also be able to ask audio questions, type messages and share photos of their cooking progress with other users and the chef.

And, of course, cook together!

Now we knew what goal we needed to achieve. However, there are always some challenges along the way to the desired destination…

BSH wanted their solution to be supported on iOS devices. What’s more, MiClassa end-users shouldn’t have to download any new software in order to use it. It should be a simple cooking app, which is easy to use, aesthetically pleasing and modern – so that people want to use it and come back to it to attend more cooking classes and engage with other customers. Last but not least, it had to be GDPR and ISO27001 compliant.

A customised video communication solution – Let’s talk requirements

MiClassa had to have only one-way video streaming, allowing only the chef to be visible but not allowing a customer to video-stream themselves. However, the customers should be able to leave audio recordings with their questions and comments and share photos of their cooking progress during the session. This product also had to provide multi-video chat rooms and live chats, and be built on REST API for integration purposes. Of course, future changes had to be taken into consideration, so it also needed to be flexible to allow for those future additions.

Minimum Viable Product (MVP) Development

In order to prove that the solution works and that customers were happy – we started a MVP development project first. Bosch & Siemens required the basic solution to first work and showcase it to their customers for feedback. We spent 4 months working intensively with Bosch & Siemens’ Project Managers using Agile development practices to show bi-weekly our progress, new features and collect their feedback – whilst keeping them up to date on the progress of the project.

So how did Yameo help them with achieving their goal?

Well we delivered what we promised. Based on the requirements we had agreed and by showing every 2 weeks our progress we kept Bosch & Siemens up to date. We launched the MVP into production to be tested and awaited eagerly the results!

Success – now let’s really go big!

The success of the MVP project meant new funding, new impetus and more motivation to expand what we had already developed. To be fair this sometimes felt like a whole separate project since we were focusing now more on business elements like scalability and flexible infrastructure. For the video engine we had decided on a robust provider and how Bosch & Siemens could host the video component themselves. We helped train them in maintenance and management of this component.

We expanded the features to include more complex social functionalities such as custom emoticons during chat, multiple camera angles for the chef and expanded the number of participants for sessions. All in all it was very exciting to know we were developing a solution which had already proven to be a success.

Self-hosting

After development Bosch & Siemens decided to host the solution themselves and maintain and manage the platform internally. We provided in-depth training workshops for their staff to learn how to manage and maintain the solution, as well as the video component. After deployment to their servers we helped with launching the solution and its initial run-time. We couldn’t be more pleased with how the launch went!