Angular Development with Docker

Docker is a set of platform as a service products that use OS-level virtualization to deliver software in packages called containers. Containers are isolated from one another and bundle their own software, libraries and configuration files; they can communicate with each other through well-defined channels.

Sounds very technical? OK in other words docker is a virtualization tool, which helps you –

  • Keeping all dependencies / Libraries versions consistent across systems and team spaces.
  • Keeps your system clean from multiple conflicting configuration and runtime setup for different projects.
  • Simplifies the development workflow across the team.
  • Promotes micro-service architecture.
  • Makes it more secure

Now that we know how docker can really help us streamline the development workflow and iron out the setup and configuration discrepancies, let’s see how to implement it into practice.

whether you are going to use docker-compose or not you would need a Dockerfile in your project so lets discuss about it. This is how a typical Dockerfile looks like ( at-least for our case ) –

FROM node:10.16.0-alpine
WORKDIR /usr/src/app
COPY package.json ./
RUN npm i -g @angular/cli@10.2.3 && npm i
COPY . .
EXPOSE 4200
CMD npm start

Lets understand what each line means and is used for –

FROM node:10.16.0-alpine

This simply means we are going to use base node image of version 10.16.0 you may wish a version higher or lower based on your requirement, as far as alpine is concerned it is a smaller version of NodeJs image ( well almost 300 MB smaller to be precise in case of 10.16.0 ).

WORKDIR /usr/src/app

This line means we are setting out application directory or working directory to /usr/scr/app you can set it to whatever you want, if this directory doesn’t exist already docker will create one for you, this directory is important for future reference since this is going to be your application directory and everything else will be referenced from here.

COPY package.json ./

In here we are copying our package.json to our work directory root i.e /usr/scr/app/ remember this from our previous point

RUN npm i -g @angular/cli@10.2.3 && npm i
  • Simple enough we are installing the required dependencies here in below order
    • @angular/cli global installation, you can specify the version required else it would just pick the latest stable version to install.
    • npm I everything else required to run the project, present in package.json.
COPY . .

Once the dependencies are installed copy the remaining code as it is from the repository to the work directory.

EXPOSE 4200

Exposing port on which we are going to run the application.

CMD npm start

To start the start script from package.json

AppsWise Technologies’ Excellence In Developing Mobile Apps Got Listed In the GoodFirms List of Top Companies

AppsWise Technologies Pvt. Ltd works with the latest technologies to devise strategies and develop mobile apps compatible with various devices. So, for rendering exceptional services, AppsWise is listed amongst the top app development firms on the GoodFirms website.

About the Company

AppsWise is a mobile app development firm located in Bengaluru, India. Since its inception in 2015, the company has been providing exceptional mobile apps using cutting-edge technology. They have completed 50+ projects by incorporating the best and most advanced technologies into the application. With the growth of mobile apps, AppsWise has also understood the trends and deliver solutions that can help clients positively. AppsWise works with attention to detail and develops apps with productive ideas. Plus, the hardcore developers leave no stone unturned when it comes to following the right practices and develop mobile apps.

With a team of 20+ developers, AppsWise has made its mark five years into the business and made 30+ clients happy with exceptional services. All the services and solutions offered by them are based on the clients’ business necessities. This makes them deliver premium services that deliver great experiences.

GoodFirms Process

GoodFirms is a platform that connects service seekers and service providers to help them find professional mobile app developers for their business. The research process of GoodFirms is crucial and strict to help the service seekers choose a mobile app developer who can fulfill their business goals and offer them exceptional solutions.

The GoodFirms team evaluated AppsWise on the same parameters mentioned above and found then delivering out-of-the-box solutions in mobile app development, devops, and IT consulting services.

Mobile App Development

The app development team at AppsWise possesses exceptional quality and the knowledge of the latest tools and technologies, applying which they develop apps to help clients reach a vast marketplace. By putting three elements together: product ideas, growth business, and operational efficiency, they work with excellence in this area.

For choosing the right technology, AppsWise puts in its effort to develop seamless apps with rich features. With excellence in Stack, MEAN, E-commerce, wearables, and IoT, they have developed numerous professional apps to date. The firm promises to be a part of its client’s success by developing ROI-driven mobile apps for them. Besides only delivering mobile apps, they take care of the efficiency and effectiveness factor of the app. Which in turn makes the app more appealing. Thus, for working hard to deliver feasible mobile apps, AppsWise gets ranked as one of the top mobile app development companies in Bangalore, India, at GoodFirms.

Data Science Solutions

Data is a crucial piece of information, and the AppsWise team utilizes their data science knowledge to enhance the clients’ process of operating businesses. By mining large data sets, the team helps clients to create actionable insights.

By understanding the innumerable advantages of data, the firm draws valuable information from it. Moreover, by identifying the hidden patterns from data, they assist clients in refining their process and target audience by combining existing data and other points.

As a professional data science firm AppsWise analyzes business opportunities and develops a path of success. With data science, they have helped clients from various niches. Moreover, they have also helped clients to manage unexpected circumstances by using statistical data. These all factors have made AppsWise shine amongst the top data science companies at GoodFirms.

IT Consulting Services

The tech experts at AppsWise are talented in applying the right technology and upgrading their business in the long run. The team knows exactly what technologies to apply that can help clients reach their goals. As a professional tech consulting firm, they work beyond imagination to provide them seamless solutions.

With tech solutions, the firm works with the mission to improve clients’ operational efficiency. They do this by reducing the turnaround time. Plus, the AppsWise team believes in growing the company mutually, and for this, they transcend in their work procedure. The tools and technologies applied by the firm are unconventional because they execute proper strategies and implement them well to gain the best solutions out of them.

The exceptional work done by AppsWise has always received a 5-star rating. For going the extra mile in work, they deliver every service with extra resources. Furthermore, the AppsWise team is always in contact with the clients, which is another important reason for delivering great solutions. Plus, by thoroughly researching the business, the firm has helped various businesses obtain a competitive advantage. Due to their committed attitude and dedication to work, AppsWise is on GoodFIrms radar as one of the top IT consulting companies at GoodFirms.

About GoodFirms

Washington, D.C.-based GoodFirms is an innovative B2B Research and Reviews Company that extensively combs the market to find top Mobile App Development, Data Science, and IT Consulting Companies Services firms that offer the best services to its customers. GoodFirms’ extensive research processes help rank the companies, boost their online reputation and help service seekers pick the right technology partner that meets their business needs.

About the Author

Anna Stark is a staff writer with GoodFirms – a Washington D.C.-based B2B Research Company that bridges the gap between service seekers and service providers. Anna’s current role includes gauging companies’ performances and their key attributes and putting them into words. She firmly believes in the magic of words and is always on the lookout for new strategies and ideas that companies have gladly embraced, and then helps them shine a light on those to make their identities shine brighter.

Customer Success – A win win story

In our pursuit to help startup and SMEs in their digital transformation journey, we often come across with very generic sales problems, and most of the problems are due to lack of basic understanding of customer engagement and pitching the solution or product poorly. In this post we have listed some of the points which we practice to overcome these problems –

Understanding the customer –

When you try to help the customer even before tagging them as customers, You should really understand them. That means you need to study the their environment and how they operate in their business ecosystem, their geographical situations and their pain points. We had our success rate increased multifold just by practicing this. To understand this better let’s get into what it means on the ground. One of our client who is an independent career counselor, a typical sales package looks like “A Promotional Website, Mobile Application and a lot of social marketing” at first glance. On a careful consideration it was realised that only doing this will not help them instead might increase operational overhead, hear us out how and why –

A Promotional website need to be targeted to audience and the place this client of our operates from, the audience are still not tech savvy which means their reach to technology is limited to Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram at most and not even to twitter, hence a promotional website is going to be a dead investment for a long time. Same time an app may solve a lot of problem but is costly due to the fee they charge to their customers is very nominal and the profit is not enough to cover the investment. People who know about career counseling will agree that this job is difficult to manage remotely and therefor social marketing through electronic media will attract the leads which will be difficult to convert into sales.

Solving the real problem –

Now once we understood the customer portfolio, it is important to solve the real problem and one should identify it before that. The pain point is, it is not going to be obvious and customer wouldn’t be able to tell you the exact problem. If we rely on customer, almost all the time, all the customers have one single generic problem and that is “Sales not happening or Sales is not increasing as expected” that is it. If you take that problem and try to solve it, you will not succeed because that is never ending pursuit, it is a symptom not a problem. The actual problem may be wrong market segment, non-scalable business model, a generic product or non innovative solution, hence it is important to understand client really have sales not happening is a by product symptom of it.

Keeping the business always in context –

You understood your customers, you identified the problem too, you have a solution just right, however have you consider that make sense for business or not? For example there are all the great equipments and machines to do the farming, you get that to the farmers with subsidised rate all set to work and plow the field, but if the most fertile land and farms have water logging problem all your investment will sink into it and for sure that wouldn’t grow into any kind of corps, what could have been a better solution is to create a sustainable ecosystem of animal husbandry keeping livestock such as cattle, poultry and fish will yield better result and can be utilised in the fertile farms to do farming for double profit and that is what it means to keep the business always in context.

Offering real value –

Work towards the common goals and don’t promise unrealistic non-practical benefits. A website in any forms only has certain goals to achieve, it is not a silver bullet and can not make the business succeed overnight. As we always say “Technology is a business enabler” , it can only enable business to grow and sustain, for example, without proper research on main objective and content of a website,  which is to have engaging content and services to offer. it doesn’t make any sense to throw out a lot of add-ons like SEO, SSL mailbox and other because these doesn’t have any individual value of its own. The point is don’t sell technology in the name of solution. Offer them real solution which adds value to their business and let the technology facilitate and help achieving that.

Train them to utilise it for maximum gain –

Offering technology solution is just not enough. It is important to train the customer to use it. Not always your customers are going to be tech savvy and technology might be only solution in such case it is better to teach them how to use it effectivity. For example which phone would you suggest to a 60 + years of indian customer ? The answer is there is no phone which target this segment specially and this segment have their own challenges i.e touch screen phones doesn’t give them taptic feedback out of the box so they don’t know the action they took happened or not, on the other hand phone which gives taptic feedback i.e the phone with keyboards have really small display and due to their poor eyesight that means by the time they realise who is calling the call would be dropped. In this case the only solution is to teach them enabling taptic feedback present in the touchscreen phone with vibration and key tone and help them to adopt it.

5 Important elements of a successful website

“The time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining.

[State of the Union Address January 11 1962]”

― John F. Kennedy

 

When it comes to designing or planning for a website it is important to plan it carefully, a poorly planned and designed website doesn’t yields the desired result, despite of being important and crucial it is very simple and quick to start. We will share top 5 of the most common and most important element of a successful websites in this post.

Target Audience –

Do you know who are your target audience, this is the single most important factor and everything revolves around it. The logo, Navigation, Color and Shape, The content of your website and everything else depends on the target audience.  Always remember “You can’t please everyone”. It is better to focus only on whom you care most i.e your target audience and your market segment at large.

The Logo –

Logo is the second most important aspect of your website, we can not advocate enough of the importance of it. Just a google search of “Most costly logos” is enough to reveal the worth of these little colorful piece of art. This is created to create unforgettable, lasting impression on your target audience’s mind. It is about what story you want the audience to pursue  without event telling a single word about it. The logo is identity of the brand and if you are the brand of your business, which is in some cases i.e a lawyer or a freelancer e.t.c It is your identity too, so better craft and design a right identity because most of the time “First Impression is the last”.

Navigation –

A directionless navigation is nothing less then a nightmare. Bad navigation design confuses your audience and leave them frustrated to never return back. On the other hand a properly designed navigation is like flight navigation system, which is accurate and guides the user to exact coordinates where he want to land by conscious choice to takes an action which generate lead for business and start an engagement with the user to make him come back for more business every single time.

Colors and Shapes –

The colors used in the website plays a crucial role in the user engagement, use a lot of bright and shiny color and that will reduce the audience’s attention span significantly and make the user leave your website as quickly as possible on the other hand excessive use of dark color and serious tone will leave the user depressed and make your website look dull and boring. It is also important to consider the age group and other UX Design factors before making a choice of colors.

The shapes used in your website also engage the user’s subconscious mind, every shape has a different story and triggers a different sense, which influences the decision making power of the user i.e an oval or circle gives the user an impression that you are smooth and balanced in your approach but may be a bit less on the stability front at the same time square shape tells the user that you are balanced straightforward and sharp at times in your approach. So it is very important to use shapes in website wisely or be ready for otherwise consequences.

Content –

Last but not the least content is the hero of whole story, it posses the power to engage the user in your website and keep them coming back for more and also to drive them away. As discussed in previous point the content has to be very user focused and targeted. Stop writing generic content and wasting time to please everyone and just to be with the tide, i.e if you search for AI and Machine learning or Deep learning you will find tons of useless blogs and post written by so called wannabe data scientists, who fail to address one single point that Machine Learning and Deep Learning are subset of umbrella topic of Artificial Intelligence.

A World with Chatbots and AI

With recent technological advancements in chatbots and artificial intelligence (AI), neuro-linguistic programming, machine learning, internet of things (IoT) and web speech APIs, it is now possible to streamline interactions between computer and human languages more effectively. Everyday practically we see a Google Home or Alexa add on social media and on television, and this widens our vision about its application. So let’s have a glimpse on it.

A brief about chatbots

A chatbot is a service that people interact with via a chat interface. You can ask questions using your voice or by typing in the same way you would ask a person. The chatbot will usually respond in a conversational style, and it may carry out actions in response to your conversation (for example, order something for you). It often runs inside a popular messaging application, such as Facebook Messenger, Slack, or SMS. It answers your question, rather than directing you to a website.

Can the applications be replaced with Chatbots ?

To the end user, it may appear that systems of Chatbots like Alexa have replaced software applications (apps) when we ask them to book meetings in our calendars and purchase train tickets for us. In reality, they will encapsulate the apps and sit on top of them. While we may see fewer app icons on our smartphones, we will still need apps in the background for fulfilment and as data repositories.

Why should we discuss about chatbots ?

Eventually, the goal of a futuristic chatbot is to be able to interact with users as a human does. As the saying goes, “the best interface is no interface.” Voice chat is trending with the introduction of smart speakers like Amazon Echo, Google Home, Apple HomePod, etc.

How chatbots can help Small/Medium businesses ?

Bots are a glimpse into the future of business, and they have powerful implications on the business ecosystem. They have several advantages:

  1. 24×7 availability – A bot exists digitally unlike a human being, and can thus be pressed into service continuously without any interference.
  2. Highly Customisable – Bots are capable of carrying out a wide array of tasks because of their inherent flexibility.
  3. Affordable and Powerful – In the current scenario, chatbots can be developed for a small amount. Many options already exist, with the most popular being Facebook’s Messenger bot.
  4. Saves Resources – Employing a chatbot to handle basic customer interactions can free up valuable human resources without a decline in productivity.

Types of Chatbots –

  1. One operates based on a set of rules. It can only respond to very specific commands. If you, as the user don’t use the right command or words, the chatbot doesn’t know what you mean.
  2. On the other hand the other type uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to provide the best response. We’ll call these AI-powered chatbots.The AI aspect in a chatbot is based on machine learning. It is known as Natural Language Processing; it has the proficiency to understand a conversation and mimic human speech. An artificial intelligence (AI) agent in a chatbot achieves the goal through the ‘sense-think-act’ cycle.

How Chatbots can Revitalize Customer Engagement for SME’s?

Broadly Chatbots powered with AI can be used for two purposes:

  • For Enterprise – Today’s chatbots are powerful personal assistants. They can call an Cab, place a lunch order, make a hotel reservation, order office supplies when you get low and even help manage your calendar. Let’s face it, just scheduling a single meeting can take 15 minutes or more and when you add up how many meetings you schedule, it’s a significant time commitment for a small business.
  • For Consumers – Chatbots provide better service to users. Mainly in these following ways:
    • Quick Response time – Compared to a human being, a smart computer program will answer queries much quicker. This, coupled with an AI chatbot’s machine learning and multi-tasking abilities make it a highly efficient virtual assistant that can revolutionise customer interaction metrics.
    • Improved Conversions – Chatbots can study past search data and offer more personalised shopping options via retargeting. The AI is constantly learning, and it can pull up multiple options that will be more appealing to the user based on their search history and captured data points. This can lead to increased conversions for you in the long term.

How does Chatbots improve ROI?

Some instance where bots have worked out really well and undoubtedly have cleared the points regarding ROI as they turned out to be a boon in the industry.

  • Chatbots in Finance Industry- Chatbots found their way into the Finance industry as a virtual assistant within Mobile Banking Apps. Bots act as a platform were customers can make the payment of Bills, and transfer and deposit funds. According to a survey done by Abi AI, one of the top most IT firm could save 360,000 hours of manpower by deploying bots which helped them analyse complex legal contracts faster than a human could do.
  • Chatbots in Restaurants and Retail Industry- The idea of introducing chatbots in restaurant and the retail industry proved to be a smart one, as it has been helping famous food chains in reducing the order time of the customers considerably. Bots also help in saving several employees working hours as well, which in turn made them more efficient.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) – Can it boost ROI?

Robotic process automation (RPA) is actually the use of software with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) capabilities to handle high-volume, repeatable tasks that previously required humans to perform.

These processes can include queries, calculations and maintenance of records and transactions. Some industry experts believe it may be even more transformational than cloud computing. It is sometimes called a software robot or bot, mimics a human worker, logging into applications, entering data, calculating and completing tasks, and logging out.

Glance at the Benefits of RPA – 

  1. Enabling better customer service for all SME’s by allowing processes to be completed much more rapidly.
  2. Ensuring business operations and processes comply with regulations and standards.
  3. Providing improved efficiency by digitizing and auditing process data.
  4. Creating cost savings for manual and repetitive tasks ultimately benefiting SME’s.
  5. Enabling employees to be more productive.

Applications of RPA –

  1. Customer service Sector: RPA helps SME’s offer better customer service by automating tasks, including verifying e-signatures, uploading scanned documents and verification of information for automatic approvals or rejections.
  2. Accounting Sector: Organizations can use RPA for general or operational accounting, transactional reporting and budgeting.
  3. Financial Sectors: Companies in the financial services industry can use RPA for foreign exchange payments, automating account openings and closings, managing audit requests and processing insurance claims.
  4. Healthcare Sections: Medical sectors also have the use of RPA for handling patient records, customer support, account management, billing, reporting and analytics.
  5. Human resources : RPA today automates HR tasks, including on-boarding and off-boarding, updating employee information and timesheet submission processes etc.
  6. Supply chain management Sector: RPA is used also for procurement, automation of order processing and payments, tracking shipments and monitoring inventory levels.

How can an SME benefit from RPA technology (in general and specifically regarding your business)?

SMEs can use robotic process automation (RPA), or put more simply – software robots – to automate their business processes, for example, back-office functions in HR, finance, procurement, IT or other core processes. By automating time-consuming, repetitive tasks SMEs stand to improve productivity which will help them gain competitive advantage.

Is this game-changing technology all that new?

Any BPM user with a sense of history knows that RPA has been around for a long, long time. For example, inbound call centers have been using Interactive Voice Response Systems (IVRS) for years. These systems employ robots to guide customers, accept key tone or voice-based responses, and pass on instructions to the underlying application to complete a transaction.

Moreover, the industry has always used internet BOTs (short form for Robots) for auto-posting of data. Software Testing industry has used similar type of automation in applications to manage functional, integration, user and more significantly regression testing.

What is different about the latest wave of RPA is the maturity of both technology as well as the business processes?

In our view, this transformation will be driven by a pursuit of five outcomes:

  1. Cost reduction: Software robots are typically at least one third the price of an offshore FTE.
  2. Efficiency: RPA can operate 24X7 without breaks provided the underlying core applications are available.
  3. Accuracy: Human FTEs make data entry mistakes, whereas robots perform the same task the same way every time provided processing transactions.
  4. Improved audit and regulatory compliance: Robots can provide a detailed audit logs enabling advanced business analytics and improved compliance.
  5. Ease of change management: Robots preserve application and data integrity by leveraging the existing application presentation layer and re-using existing application logic, databases and validation without deep understanding and re-engineering.

Feature List Comparison among the trend setters or top RPA Vendors :

  1. Learning : Basic developer approach is followed in Automation Anywhere, Whereas Uipath has Visual design as a learning approach and thirdly BluePrism has its own ability to develop and control.
  2. Re-usuality : Automation Anywhere,Uipath and BluePrism are all highly resuable.
  3. Cognitive Capability :  Automation Anywhere has still a quite better and medium level of Cognitive capability in comparison to UiPath and BluePrism which have quite low feature of this cateogory.
  4. Accuracy : Reasonable accuracy across mediums is there in software of Automation Anywhere , whereas Uipath shines in citrix automation designed for bpo automation and on the other hand in BluePrism desktop, web and citrix automation are available.
  5. Robots : Automation Anywhere and Uipath both offers front office & back-office robots, unfortunately BluePrism offers back office automation only.
  6. Operational Scalability : Large scale robot deployment is limited in case of Automation Anywhere. Limitation of Uipath being it frequently crashes in medium project. BluePrism however has Good features And Execution speed is very high.
  7. Macro Recorders : Automation Anywhere and UiPath both have faster process mapping whereas for BluePrism they say this is due to security constraints but a recorder is just a useful tool that you can choose not to use.
  8. Architecture : Client server architecture is followed both in Automation Anywhere and BluePrism but Uipath follows web based orchestrator.
  9. Access : UiPath control room – The Orchestrator – is web based, you can access it from the browser or mobile. Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism on the other hand have client based servers, accessible only through their apps.
  10. Process Designer : UiPath and BluePrism on one hand have Visual process designer whereas Automation Anywhere has Script based.
  11. Base Technology : Automation Anywhere follows Microsoft Technology whereas Uipath follows Microsoft – sharepoint wf , elasticsearch and BluePrism is based on kibana C#.
  12. Realiability : BluePrism till date is leading with high reliable features though has a tough competition by Automation Anywhere but Uipath lacks in this.
  13. Pricing : On one hand Automation Anywhere has higher cost of deployment,UiPath has Aggressive, attractive entry level pricing but for BluePrsim the high cost of acquisition being a problem in addition to limited training available.
  14. Certification and education : Automation Anywhere has been launched recently with certifications, whereas Uipath has Free online training and certification and BluePrism although have certification program available.

Why is it important to embrace emerging technologies, like RPA, in the era of disruption?

We like to think of us all being part of a huge ‘digital river’ where technology is changing so fast, and changing the way we can operate and do business each and every day, that if we don’t embrace it then we will be swept away.

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.