Blockchain – Bubbling Trend

“Blockchain” is one of two “B” words that are all the fuming lately — the other being “Bitcoin.”
While Bitcoin is grabbing most of the headlines, many people are mistakenly lumping “cryptocurrency” into the same category as “Blockchain.” True, the two are certainly related, but they’re not one in the same.

What is blockchain doing?

Blockchain, helps us imagine a world in which contracts are embedded in digital code and stored in transparent, shared databases, where they are protected from deletion, tampering, and revision. So, a blockchain is simply a digital ledger, much like what’s above your chequebook in your wallet. By allowing digital information to be distributed but not copied, blockchain technology created the backbone of a new type of internet. Blockchains use cryptography to process and verify transactions on the ledger. Encryption and coding improve transparency, efficiency and trust in information-sharing.

What makes blockchain unique and really cool?

Instead of some company having it stored on a server somewhere waiting to be hacked, the blockchain exists decentralised. This means anyone running a full node( a special type of wallet that hosts the block chain essentially) from their computer at home is storing every transaction that has ever occurred on that blockchain. Its network lacks centralised points of vulnerability that computer hackers can exploit. We all rely on the “username/password” system to protect our identity and assets online. Blockchain security methods use encryption technology.

The basis for this are the so-called public and private “keys”. A “public key” (a long, randomly-generated string of numbers) is a user’s address on the blockchain. Bitcoins sent across the network gets recorded as belonging to that address. The “private key” is like a password that gives its owner access to their Bitcoin or other digital assets. Store your data on the blockchain and it is incorruptible.

How is transparency and incorruptibility maintained?

The blockchain network lives in a state of consensus, one that automatically checks in with itself every ten minutes.  A kind of self-auditing ecosystem of a digital value, the network reconciles every transaction that happens in ten-minute intervals. Each group of these transactions is referred to as a “block”. Smart contracts are “conflict-free” ways to exchange money, property and shares or anything of value via Blockchain. These contracts define the rules and penalties for each agreement and also enforce obligations automatically. Two important properties result from this:

  • Transparency data is embedded within the network as a whole, by definition it is public.
  • It cannot be corrupted altering any unit of information on the blockchain would mean using a huge amount of computing power to override the entire network.

Who and where all will the blockchain be used? Some instances –

  1. Finance: – Currently, finance offers the strongest use cases for the technology. International remittances, for example. The World Bank estimates that over $430 billion US in money transfers were sent in 2015. And at the moment there is a high demand for blockchain developers.

  2. Health Care: – An example: MedRec, an MIT-backed initiative designed to be a digital family history of medical records, uses Blockchain to create for patients a family medical history that can be passed down from generation to generation. MedRec was implemented using Ethereum blockchain and uses that technology’s smart contracts to execute scripts on the blockchain.

  3. Music World: – Myceria’s Blockchain-based platform has created a way for musicians to push smart contracts for the sharing of free-trade music, ensuring that profits go back to the artists. These contracts allow artists to sell directly to consumers without the need for labels, lawyers or accountants; and royalties are paid out automatically.

  4. Human Resources: – San Francisco-based company, Bitwage. Bitwage operates on a Blockchain-based payroll system to facilitate cross-border payments through Bitcoin. This allows the company to pay employees, contractors, even vendors, worldwide in their preferred currencies. What Blockchain can do is simplify the process and eliminate these middle men, making investment in the technology attractive.

Any instance of Benefits achieved?

By adopting Blockchain-as-a-service (BaaS) the tech giant is investing in enterprise systems that leverage cloud infrastructure. The launch of this service in February of 2016 helped create opportunities for IBM to transition to cloud services and to use them to build custom blockchains for its customers.

Why will blockchain transform the global economy?

Similar to how the internet changed the world by providing greater access to information, blockchain is poised to change how people do business by offering trust. The benefits of blockchain for business are numerous, including reduced time (for finding information, settling disputes and verifying transactions), decreased costs (for overhead and intermediaries) and alleviated risk (of collusion, tampering and fraud).

Digital Marketing roadmap for startups

How should a startup prepare for their digital marketing roadmap?

Once you have an idea in place and you have got the necessary legal protections for it, the logical next step is to get an MVP done ( more on MVP and Legal Protections on follow up blogs ). Let’s assume you have your MVP done and you are all set to start promoting your idea/MVP or services. But wait did we talk about promotions, you bet we did, and these promotions are very key thing for your idea to takeoff from the ground, in other words this is the escape velocity which makes or breaks the launch of your startup. That is why we are covering this very important topics in this blog.

Website –

The very basic of online promotion is to have a website of your startup. This is absolute must, it serves the purpose of base address something like an online permanent address for your startup from the existence of the startup can be proven. This is a place where you are going to pitch your product or idea to prospective customers, the investors or even your consumer ecosystem. A solid platform for your product or services. It is very important to get this basic fundamental concept right any compromise in this can cost you a lot. A very common dilemma the startup founders often face is Custom vs Ready Made Themes, It is always recommended to get a custom tailored website designed and developed to suite the idea or the product you have, we understand that each idea is unique and different from other and that is why it is in business, however if you believe that your idea is not so different or unique there are so many readymade themes available but make sure you get those tailored from experienced UX designer and get your branding done correctly in one of those things. A custom basic website costs ranges somewhere around 250 to 750 US Dollars at the time this post has been written.

Social media sites –

The next online promotion tool are social media sites, which is a secondary mean of putting the word about your startup or idea out there. These social media site can serve up to a great extent and can be very powerful if used wisely and correctly. The idea is to put out little info about the actual source or in other word micro blog about the actual blog. Let us explain how this works, Social media site is for socialising where your connections and connections of your connection and so on gets connected now this opens an opportunity to get the review and feedback from the real people who are one way or other connected with you so the authenticity of this information is debatable and subjective, how do you filter this into real insight, and that is where a primary source of information comes into picture you can filter the web traffic into real insight in your primary source of information. The cost of social media promotion ranges from 0 to infinite based on your marketing budget. 0 cost for your organic promotions.

Mail Campaigns –

Mail Campaigns are the third way of online promotions which are a good way to keep your existing subscribers engaged and and informed about your product or idea. This has compliances and laws associated with it depending upon the operating locations and countries i.e you need to have a proof of subscription or consent from the subscriber’s that he/she willfully subscribe to your mail campaign. You should also be registered as bulk mail sender for sending these emails the limit vary from one mail service provider to other.  Generally a zoho mail costs about Rs 99 annually for standard packs, while mail-chimp provides rates of $10 per month. These are quite reasonable and make your startup ready to handle clients and projects.

Content Marketing – Blogs, articles and white papers –

Blog is as necessary as a website. No business can get by without a successful blog. From 2009 to 2012, the percentage of respondents with company blog grew from 48% to 62% – don’t be left behind. It’s the core of a modern, ‘social’ marketing and communications strategy.  To support and drive the company’s web presence and social media marketing activities a digital PR and partnering program needs to be kicked off.’

It should enhance the company’s strategic positioning, promote its product/service category, define credentials, messages, and benefits as well as drive a successful thought leadership and ‘challenger’ framework. The blog is your marketing front foot – make sure it strikes out for you. Blog sites should be set up properly, designed professionally and managed tightly. Editorial strategies need to be developed, writers appointed, guest programs implemented and content carefully planned and produced.

Crowdsourcing campaigns –

“A friend in need is a friend indeed.” Yes, with time this popular adage has come true again. For a startup, getting funds is the biggest impediment. But with social media and the emerging concept of crowdsourcing, getting funds for your startup has become an easy job.

Crowdfunding is a super hot formula to win over funds. The basic idea is you need to get popular wherever you trend. Develop your product in its MVP stage and sell it among your network. Once you get popular half the deal is done.

Crowd Sourcing can be done by these few ways:

  • Create hype with pre-sales
  • Stating ROI
  • Proposing right Workflow
  • Proper test before go-Live

Large brands and SME’s are tapping into the power of the Crowd for contest based campaign ideas as well as viral content development and marketing. Crowdsourced campaigns have become another key arrow in the Social marketing quiver. Crowdsourcing can also be used for cost effective business development, market research, opinion gathering, customer service support and more.

Developer Survey 2018 and forecast for Startups

Developers are the people who live and breath in technology. They are the people who implement the technology you imagine.

Here is the Survey of the developers and their behaviour which leads to a detailed analysis about the latest trends towards growth and demand of technologies.

The stats of last year and forecast for year ahead –

The Developers Survey from Stack Overflow is out for 2018 and here is what it means for Your IT Strategy for 2018. Stack Overflow or SO is the largest Developer community and their Survey is what mostly determines the IT resource management for IT Industry, Tech Startup and SME’s dealing with IT. Though it is mostly statistical analysis and graphical presentation of data, In this post we will translate it for you and give a clear picture of the market situation.

  • “57.9 % among the community are backend developers.”

– This helps us to forecast that depending upon the technology stack the backend developers will be easily available and cost effective. So if you deal mostly with api driven platform, analytics and backend frameworks it is a good news for you. On the other hand, you should be ready to invest more on frontend developers and mobile developers if you deal with complete technology stack.

  • “48.2 % among the community are full stack developers.”

– This helps us to forecast that almost half of the community is full stack developers, and that means, right mix of these guys in your team can significantly reduce the cost and have better ROI, however the caveat is you may reduce the experts on particular area.

  • “56.4% of professional developers contribute to open source.”

– This helps us to forecast that developers now would not be dependent on much training & KT which leads to lower Learning & Development cost, to be within budget. Yes you got it right if you are a Open Source Technology stack consumer and contributor you can safely reduce your L & D budget.

  • “24.8% of developers learned to code within the past five years.”

– This helps us to forecast that the it is easier and less expensive to find developers for slightly newer technologies i.e Ruby,Javascript,Node,Mongo etc. Thus making it useful for the SME’s to use the trendy and handy coding language and experiences with new techs in place. The optimizations needed from future perspective would be much lesser giving best ROI.

  • “48.3% of developers prefer Linux.”

– This means the software cost for the running the operations are going to be less costly usually the linux free flavours are quite popular for the client machines on the other hand the enterprise variant and event the free ubuntu flavours are popular on server side which makes it almost free.

  • “85.4% of developers use Agile development methodology and now moving to DevOps.”

– This helps us to forecast that Businesses implements DevOps only if it’s directly contributing to the company’s increased productivity, effectiveness and, profitability. The way that it’s possible for SMEs is when the IT and Operations teams work in sync and streamlining the provision of tech solutions that solve the business needs.Thus this shift from Agile to DevOps seems faster.

What is the new key from business perspective ??

For the tech startups full stack and backend developers are cheaper, frontend developers will still be costly. Learning and development cost along with the softwares to run the technology operations are going to be less expensive due to open source contributions. Newer technology with the DevOps are going to be right choice for building faster Go to Market strategy. The survey also concludes that a very few percentage of developers are working in the field of Machine Learning only around 3.5%. Among professional developers looking for work, a higher proportion of machine learning specialists and data scientists were looking for jobs compared to other occupation types. That said, only 14.3% and 13.2% respectively are active. But they are also the highest paid professionals in industry. Also a certain portion of ML developers work remotely. But more and more people are are getting attracted to this niche field. ML development is getting easier and widespread with the development of newer and newer libraries and packages in the field.

DevOps – Value Proposition for SME’s

DevOps is a methodology which solves the operational and logistics challenges of technology Delivery.

What is DevOps –

Imagine these scenarios –

  • Scaling up your Technology infrastructure and Landscape for another geographical region
  • Scaling up your Online Marketplace for Thanksgiving or Black Friday sale
  • Recovering from a massive data center failure
  • How to improve Go To Market Time, to improve customer satisfaction ?
  • How to improve delivery time to the customers?  
  • How to get faster ROI ?

To address above points what is your game plan? How much is automation involved here? How much manual effort and time does it cost? Is there a way that these all can be optimised? Answer is DevOps. If you have it in place you are already ahead of most competitors. To get the details on how these questions get answered by DevOps keep reading ..

DevOps In Business

Why is DevOps important ?

Advancement today has set for a world which is full of new technology that change at fast pace like Big Data, Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and so on. Inspired by these just-in-time development and business process improvement, DevOps has become a global trend in the tech industry.   

Advantage of DevOps –

DevOps is a culture,  where as the term suggests Development (Dev) and Operations (Ops) teams align much closer together and share in-between knowledge in improved ways. But DevOps is much more than this – it is a ‘state of mind’, a common approach to a problem. Businesses today has a point in implementing DevOps only if it’s directly contributing to the company’s increased productivity, effectiveness and, profitability. The only way that it is possible for small and medium enterprises is when the Development and Operations team work in sync and streamlining the provision of tech solutions that solve the business needs. Moreover Unbounded collaboration is achieved with notably higher rates of employee loyalty and engagement.

How to improve delivery time to the customers?

Analysis- DevOps methodologies when implemented in business models enable to break the complex and big projects into smaller modules of functionality that can be delivered on a steady rate. Hence the clarity and speed up of the release schedules and delivery timeline are reduced, allowing to create a buffer for any future changes on the same project.

Recovering from a massive data center failure

Analysis- Research also show that DevOps companies have an almost supernatural advantage of 30x the deploy frequency of their non-DevOps peers. Meantime to recovery process of DevOps also reduces 168x reduction to recover customer failures.

How to get faster ROI ?

Analysis- DevOps allows a business to release twice as fast, they can effectively double their annual revenue.Getting Paid for Faster returns in DevOps Is basically, reverse-chronological order of importance for an ongoing business:

  • Get money after you bill.
  • Bill after you deliver benefit.
  • Deliver benefit after you ship.
  • Ship after you’ve made the product.
  • Get money to make product.

Over a mid to long term duration there is 20% increase in annual revenue would be on par with enterprise averages, thus definitely a better ROI.

 

How to improve Go To Market Time and improve customer satisfaction ?

Analysis- Failure in DevOps is a mandate notion which is taken as a must to happen in real world. DevOps provides embracing the notion that you will fail and that you should even practice failing, this is a key mental step to focusing on meantime to recovery (MTTR). Moreover the process of Continuous deployment = continuous feedback allows  a chance to test users’ satisfaction in real time, adjust their products to customers’ needs, thus shaping a tighter market-product fit. Hence reducing failure factors in business models.

 

Realisation of the Hour!

DevOps for business

Currently Agile teams used automated build, test automation, Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery.

With DevOps that is extended further to “Infrastructure as Code”, configuration management, metrics and monitoring schemes, a toolchain approach to tooling, virtualisation and cloud computing to accelerate change in the modern infrastructure world. DevOps brings some tools on the block as well like configuration management (puppet, chef, ansible, cfengine), orchestration (zookeeper, noah, mesos), monitoring, virtualisation and containerisation (AWS, OpenStack, vagrant, docker) and many more. This makes the SME’s prosper with clients much better.

It makes ONE team with an objective to delivery software fully to the customer. So DevOps becomes the need of the hour for an organisation aiming to stay ahead of the competition. Get in touch with us if you would like to implement DevOps within your organisation or simply need any consultation or advice on it.

Technology as Business Enabler

We strongly believe that technology is an enabler for business Here is how we think technology can help to gain momentum for the business –

Real life implementation Challenge

An ordinary artist with extraordinary craftsmanship, a living embodiment of the miraculous fine portfolio of paintings, pottery and jewellery, yet sadly have painful need to knock each door, just to sell his valuable, handmade articles. Imagine how far can his feet can walk, each step forward results into loss of energy and his most valuable possession i.e “Time”.

Just then he learns startups also shares the same passion of serving customers, but ofcourse, in a much better way. The nerves of technology powers the machinery of supply chain. With these startups at his disposal and great technology as a leverage, success comes by design not by luck. Selling products online and meeting the demand of customers becomes a super sustained, self managed affair.

 

Plan to make the business always ready for market ?

Shopping Cart for MarketTechnology today is the foundation for all success. Falling behind the Technology Curve, that compares the linear growth of technology and the rate of change is simply not possible. Today industries have become obsessed to achieve maximum efficiency at minimal cost. Modern businesses can’t afford to be technology laggards. Bridging the gap between today’s technology and tomorrow’s innovations is essential to transitioning seamlessly.

 

 

Keep a track of latest technology trends?

Tracking Device Improving ROI by infusing technology has always been a primary purpose for any business. Starting with the goals we want to achieve, and then plan backwards, finding a suitable technology that supports and improve performance to expected benchmark. This is what makes business and technology work hand in hand. After all “Technology doesn’t drive success: people using technology do”. Staying abreast of the latest trends allows a business to pivot before competitors can react.

 

 

Strategy Shifts and plan to adapt changes

Change by wrench Today Enterprises can no longer afford to think only in terms of efficiency and the 10-year plan. The new business model relies on fluidity: a company poised to pivot is one that’s best prepared for the future. We need to focus less on tomorrow and live in the present as that would make an impact.

The technical shifts today can no longer be limited to upgradation of system being done once. Trend says this era “Change is the only constant”. Oracle which was once known for its database models is towards being outdated, as today the cloud is becoming the core paradigm for delivering business technology, with an aspirational promise of “zero infrastructure which says anything-as-a-service”. Since the workers and management in the zone of business become more dependent on tech, they are increasingly able to help out with the process of digital change and transformation. So for business the digital transformation is required, however, it may be complex, time consuming, and expensive, and it affects every aspect of the enterprise.

 

Correct Go To Market Strategy?

Head thinking about go to market strategyA careful crafted plan on approach of marketing product and services, is the need. Do we need a website and if yes what kind of website? Is having mobile application at this time is right thing or should we wait? Worry not we would soon cover this topic in detail about what needs to be done and exactly in what order ?  Since the commercialisation and use of technology became more widespread throughout the world, the adoption of advanced products can generate new business opportunities and various benefits.

 

Pricing and decision before choosing a technology

The market today stands long-term visible capability of the decision makers.The wise ones choose a developed product with considering below points –

  • Should encourage designers to explore Creative Routines and apply them in work.
  • Should encourage developers to explore Understanding Routines and apply them in work.
  • Should encourage parents to study Visible Thinking and encourage their children to try them.
  • Should not only develops solution for SME’s but also provide a supportive system for their backup.

 

Checkpoints for latest technology trends

Remember CheckpointsFew Instances of technological boost is once there was an era where it was all cash, then it was credit cards, and now it’s time to start to accept mobile payments. These make daily transactions much simpler. Similarly today current tech can help business keep track of all the necessary documents, invoices, deductions, and expenditures and made that all a little less painful by generating and tracking invoices way more better than manual work. Hence the best business growth is with trending techs, you need it you get it.

To help progress and success thrive, the first step is research to check whether there is a more recent, advanced program, app, or tech development that can aggregate multiple needs into one process. Thus the latest technology trends can make your job easier and will also show the customers that business is modern and evolving. What’s needed is to keep up with what’s hot in the industry and make the effort to integrate the technology that’s best for your business.

 

Here in AppsWise we try to solve a business scenario in most optimised and efficient technical way, by keeping all the edge cases in mind for any SME’s to grow. Get in touch with us for any challenges you deal with in technology scope or even if you just want to optimize your technology operations.