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.

The Basics of On Page SEO

On-page SEO has never been more important than now. Unique content is definitely the most important factor to position your website better in rankings but Missing SEO factors can drags it down more often than not. For example no or minimal use of H tags, Ineffective use of the bold and italics in SEO optimisation. Since the latest Google update on-page SEO has gained lot more attraction. This small article is geared towards making you familiar with on-page SEO in less than 10 min. So let’s jump into the technicalities

Use of keywords

keywords

Keywords must appear in the title and then it must appear in the URL. You have to optimise the keyword and make sure that it has a nice keyword density of 3-5% in your article with relevant LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing)

 

 

Header tags

tags

Spread of H1, H2 and H3 tags should be nice enough in the article, without the compelling headlines very well researched content might get unnoticed. Keyword must appear in first and in the last sentence of the page. Relevant usage of bold and italics should be there.

 

Internal link

internal-linksThere should be one internal link to a page on your blog/website. Image alt attribute should have the keyword as well if possible. URL should be descriptive which can give the idea about page content.

 

 

Social networks

social-networkGet social. Sharing is caring, have the popular and widely used social network icons for the audience of your post. Post contents to LinkedIn and generate more traffic of intellectual crowd.

 

 

Device agnostic

device-independantPage should render in all devices screen and every popular browser. It should be developed in responsive manner which scales up to any device size easily and smoothly. The current trend is mobile browser so keep that in mind and design your site with “Mobile First” concept.

 

Keep yourself updated

updatesThere are some other measures which should be applied carefully such as quality of links in your page, page loading speed, content length and usage of https. Keep yourself updated with positive and negative impact of google algorithm updates.

That is it, we hope it was simple. Do let us know your thoughts and stay tunes for updates.

Security during development A Wise or Otherwise Decision

Web application security, cyber theft and cyber ransom are some of the most trending security topics in the internet these days. Despite the large number of antivirus companies and security professional out there, still the approach towards this is reactive and this common trend is indicating that the engagement of offensive security mind-set needs an increase of several magnitudes.

All security attacks pose risk to the business and risk can be mitigated with awareness and it holds good for security incidence also. When software developers get education on security which intern enables them to detect and protect their application in advance, when this happens to some extent application can be marked as protected. Though definition of Protected application is the matter of debate in security community as the how protected application is depends on who is attacking and who essentially is providing the protection. Real security would be implemented completely only when developers will be involved from the step one. Without the actual workforce involvement our assumption of having vulnerability free software systems seems very unrealistic.

When developers are writing code they are more interested in the problem solving and logical progression, they don’t want to lose the time in deployment process, most of the J2EE certified application servers when they run on development mode, time taken to publish the changes keeps everything on halt. personally have experienced this in WebLogic, WebSphere. In reality businesses exist to make money, none of them exist specifically to maintain security and fortify them with latest security systems.

2 things have been overlooked in the software development industry generally, one thing is the rapid feedback cycle, developers waste lots of time in deploying and executing their code than in coding, unfortunately there are not many products which facilitates real time deployment and security testing, we must admit that there are few but those too are not supported for every platform, these solutions have long way to go. Another problem that I could think of is vulnerability detection at the time of software development. These things are really fundamental to secure software development cycle and most importantly they should be open and free. Open source community needs to put some serious thought on this area which I feel is overlooked from long time.

Having the development time security detection not only reduces the cost and saves time but it also infuses security vulnerability awareness among developers. Lack of security specific understanding among developers is growing concern of product managers, additionally it enhances time to market your product.

Once we are successful in infusing this thought of writing secure code into the mind of developers, cost of security testing and remediation would eventually become negligible. Training programs that promote this goal will help us realize the positive outcomes shortly. All of sudden making them mandatory might sound like an order and creating compliance verses engagement problem. Management should handle this problem carefully. Initiatives which are started with sole aim of promoting secure coding practices should be fun to learn and implement. This seems the only way of achieving cent per cent security in software development cycle.

Bottom line is run time security issue detection and rapid feedback cycle is the demand of hour and software industry and open source community need to come up with serious plan of implementing and building frameworks where secure coding practices can foster and result into protracted software systems.

Local SEO Utility Or Commodity?

Local search engine optimization is more important than ever in this age of neck-to-neck competition. Most often it seems like a commodity however, depending on the nature of business it can be most beneficial utility. Scope for any business is very wide and practically covers almost all business sectors due to variety of benefits it can bring. In the actual means it’s no longer an add-on, businesses who are serious about their web presence are considering this as mandate and implementing it at the earliest. Here in this article we rest our case by addressing the most asked and pressing query i.e. why do we need local SEO?

 

To show your existence in the top –

ExistenceWe have to tell the customers that we exist and available when they need us. This is the digital revolution era and customers are using very sophisticated hand held devices and wearable gadgets, as a modern generation business we need to publish the important business notification to the subscribers, this has become very important. Who does not want to gain customers confidence by leveraging low cost technical solutions.

 

 

 

 

Are we recognizing the growing mobile searches?Searches

Smart phones are computer with ability to make calls, Mobile based search has increased with several magnitudes, what it says is, mobile has become the preferred search device and customers would like to take its help to locate you, when you are not appearing in the mobile search you are clearly missing some serious gains. When smart phone user searches for product or services Google shows result which are close to the user, Mobile phone GPS makes it possible. This is technology and when you do not take advantage of Local SEO most likely you will miss customers who is very close to your business proximity.

 

 

 

So how to approach it?

Approach iTKey Information about our business like address, offering, service name and important tags in the web are not consistent, managing these effectively is the first step towards being SEO equipped. Not having SEO is as good as not having the presence, you are hiding yourself and keeping distance from the potential customers. This becomes important especially when your competitor leverages feature of local SEO. It becomes fairly easy for them to turn the internet traffic towards their business and eliminate other competitors.

Maintaining the local search engine optimization is not the rocket science provided we follow some guidelines and more to the point, google does automatic listing as your consistency across all the references ages and with every search your business listing improves

 

 

Important steps to consider

  • Name, Address and Phone Important Stepnumber consistency across the digital marketing websites and advertisements.
  • Local reviews for your product and service is must in order to top the chart. This includes google reviews as well.
  • Choose correct categories for your business.
  • Upload relevant pictures.
  • Having an embedded google map to locate your business.

 

 

 

There are lot more on this. This may sound simple; however, this is not as easy as it looks. Professional who have good command over the local search engines functionality and who knows how to make your business top the chart can be real help in improving the ranking of your business. If you need any help about fixing your local SEO remember we are always within reach.

Swift as Open Source Language

“Have you ever heard about the evolution of language Have you ever wondered how does the language get adopted world wide.”

Let us confront that we at AppsWise love the open source community, After staying confined for long time with objective C, iOS & OS X development, apple’s decision about making the latest programming language swift as open source filled us with the joy and excitement. This is first time ever that apple has made any of its proprietary language open source. It is needless to say that swift has been widely accepted and loved by many of the programmer’s since the day it was introduced, we think it was mainly because the Objective C was not that easy to get adapted by new developer’s, hence Objective C scored last on the comparison list of most popular technology whereas Swift stands out at #1 with flying color in Most Loved Dreaded and wanted programming language. Let us see what makes swift #1 in most loved, dreaded and wanted programming language and how the business owners and SMEs can benefit from swift.

1 – Swift is easy to adapt

Swift language and its java script like syntax is easier then most of the programming language and since the swift complier is open source now swift program can run on windows and Linux platform as well , which means more and more developer’s would tend to learn it and the learning curve is smoother then the objective C, which means there won’t be shortage of skilled developer’s and the application developed in swift. There is high probability of finding an iOS developer or pre – build application for your business at less cost and better ROI.

2 – It is backward compatible

For the businesses which already have applications or API’s developed with earlier version of apple framework it is much easier to migrate to swift for the reason that it is fully backward compatible. The old Objective C code and even api’s can be easily used within the swift code. The code written in Objective C are compatible with Swift and vice versa. Which means you need not to re-invent the wheel to keep it rolling. It is much simple and easy to accelerate the business growth with the application built in swift.

3 – It is future proof –

Swift is future proof and we can say that confidently since apple has made the swift language open source, which in turn means there would be developer’s from across the globe who will keep innovating and improving the swift language for the reason it is most wanted dreaded language, and the developer community including us love it most.

It is highly unlikely that it will get out dated and left alone. So if your application are developed in swift or you are planning to migrate to swift your future is secure and safe.

4 – It has better ROI –

Swift has better Return Of Investment (R.O.I) among most of the programming languages because it is a language of apple which is open source now which means you might find the swift language running on server as well or in client side web applications which also means you can reach out to your every potential customer’s pocket (iPhone) wrist (apple watch) home (apple TV) and even the car (car kit) along with windows and Linux devices as well. More customers mean more revenue and more profit which means better return of investment with every application.

5 – Highly maintainable and Robust-

With wide customer base and lot of skilled developers Swift is highly maintainable and robust means if your iOS developer leaves even without any knowledge transfer it is easy to find another developer who can understand and take over the job to maintain the application. Which was not so easy and smooth with the old Objective C language.

With our expertise in device specific development we can help you to chose right mix of technology and tools for the trade. We would be glad to assist with any queries you should have on the subject.

 

Design your web presence Its Now or Never !!

Internet era has opened many channels for customers to connect with businesses signaling opportunities to engage large customer base. With the advent of new technologies, the list of platforms and devices supporting the online business channels is growing and expected to grow in future. An interesting yet useful survey conducted by The Economics Times (India’s leading business news paper) uncovers online presence of small businesses and the factors that contribute to the reluctance of small and medium startup to come online and be a part of larger e-commerce marketplace. With this article we are trying to focus on the problems that small startups face, in order to get into the e-commerce domain and potentials that it can unleash if done effectively.

Most of the startup feel that they are too small to be on online platform. This is myth, rather a mistake to be precise. Many things like marketing, social connection and communication are very important and crucial to the success of any small business. One thing that every business owner would agree with is – No small business is started with the aim of being small. With right strategy in place all small businesses are aimed towards becoming big, so it is safe to say that it is a transition phase, a change in progress, only question is how fast is this progress.

It is the faith, vision and mission of owners to expand their business. So, transition is the key. With that point of view, it becomes clear that no matter whether you are a small or big business, you need to have an online presence. It is not a supporting function nor a fad, rather it’s an integral part of your business and perhaps will become the most preferred channel for your customers. If your website is not part of the foundation, the whole fort that you build is incomplete.

It is extremely important to pay attention to how technology works in general and what you need to make it work for your business. Small businesses are usually not armed with tools, technologies and skill set to produce and support such online infrastructure. As a matter of fact, more often than not, technical capacity is the dragging factor. The science of website development simply seems out of scope for them. Due to this problem many of them keep themselves out of the online domain boundary or have poor presence with some workaround.

A fair argument presented by business owners is that their customers are not tech savvy and generally don’t use computers and mobiles to connect with them. It is true at certain extent and no one can deny, however without shifting the focus from the other business drivers, small businesses have to place a serious thought process for online tech savvy customer’s inclusion, as they are the future. Real estate available in the physical world cannot house all your offerings but the real estate in the web can certainly host all of them resulting in a self-service mechanism where customers comes, analyses and makes an informed decision. This kind of customer experience if rendered will become a favorite online spot where customer tend to frequent. One can argue that strong online business presence might not guarantee high speed progress but non-availability does guarantee slow progress for sure.

When it comes to healthy competitive Eco system, Business is all about being ahead, just keeping a forward thinking approach can take your business to the next level. Website and your online portal gives you that extra edge over your competitors and helps you to stay ahead in competition and also in business.

50% of the consumers use Google search to buy commodity or to utilize the services they go and do google search. This number is more in the developed nations such as American and European countries and fast growing developing nation. When your information is not available on the web it clearly corners you from the large pool of potential customers. Even if you have a website and it doesn’t appear in the search result serves no purpose, it is another issue that we will address. Basic information of the business and contacts helps customers to locate your business and connects you with them. Online order processing is not the only reason of coming online it is equally important to help your customers to locate and connect with you.

Your website facilitates the collaboration among your customers and business where they can talk about the quality of product and services. Rapid feedback cycle emerges out of this collaboration. This gives you a predictable measure with fair amount of certainty that you should make radical improvements about how you sell your product and deliver your services. This is possible only if you are open for the feedback 24*7 around the clock.

That being said poor online presence is as good as no presence. We have subscribed to the view that website is the gateway and front door of your online shop, it is imperative to build elegant design and pump valuable content for the portal. It reinforces your brand and identity. Content quality, visual aspects and how frequently it appears in the result of various search engines is the crucial factor. While many of the things can be covered by the amateur web designer quite a lot of hidden parts which governs the Search Engine Optimization (S.E.O) and visual appeal can only be enabled by professionals who can share your vision and your passion.

Hence, if you are not engaged with professional who can give you an outstanding online portal design and consulting experience you are missing something. Operational cost for website maintenance is nominal and negligible if you compare it with the benefits it brings to the table.

Your website is your space in the web. It is a marketing tool, sign of your business availability and much more. Make it your style statement!

Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) – Testing

Never stop testing, and your Product will never stop improving.

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One of most important phase of Software Design Life Cycle is testing. If not planned and executed properly the product will fall flat no matter how much development effort & cost is invested in it. Infect testing itself is consist of various lifecycle phases known as Software Testing Life Cycle (STLC).  To continue with our metaphor of Clay Stove to Induction cooktop following would  be the steps we perform in Testing phase –

  1. We test against each provided requirement whether it suffies all of them.
  2. STLCWe test each integration point which is called System Integration Testing (SIT) and covers the point mentioned below –
    • if the charging unit supplies the power required in given time.
    • if the Batteries able to take required load for given time frame.
    • if the timer works as expected and switch off power supply after given time.
  3. We test the product with the end user and ensure the adaptability of the product which is called User Acceptance Testing (UAT).

Once the product is tested it gets shipped to the end user and a further improvement analysis is performed for next version of product. We are going to cover the evolution phase in next and last part of this series till then stay tuned and let us know your feedback by commenting below.

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Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) – Implementation

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At the Implementation phase we do execution of the blue print Technical Specification (TS) prepared in design phase. Which means care fully developing each and every component of the product as per the given specification. These developments get performed by different developers or engineer depending on the project size. To continue our previous metaphor below are the exact steps which we perform in this phase –

  • We create rechargeable energy cell and assemble it in a way that it takes minimum space and maximum energy.
  • We build the adaptor to convert ac to dc to charge the battery with exact power required.
  • We start building the overall products shape of circle and build other component in such a way that after complete assembly it gets into round shape.
  • We procure heat sustainable light weight glass and cut it in round shape.
  • We prepare the over all circuit with the capacitor timer, AC to DC adopter and battery so that it provides constant heat for given time and power.

After building each of above component we test each individually and make sure it passes the test and if not we fix it. This is called Unit Testing of individual components. Once we are done with unit testing we assemble the component to give it final shape and test the overall working of it. This is called Integration Testing (I&T).

Digital_Induction_Stove

Once integration testing is finished this phase completes and we ship the product for next phase which consist different regress testing steps.

Since you are with us so far we are sure it started making sense, if so please share your feedback with us in comments section or even you think otherwise. We would be covering the testing phase of SDLC in followup post, stay tuned.

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Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) – Design

This is the followup post for previous post about SDLC where we discussed about the Requirement Analysis Phase, you might want to visit before continuing, and if so please visit Requirement Analysis.

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In this phase we do systems design: Describes desired features and operations in detail, including screen layouts, business rules, process diagrams, pseudocode and other documentation. Not simple enough ? Let us continue with the previous example from Requirement Gathering & Analysis phase.

So now by statement of work we know requirement is to design and develop a smokeless light weight stove with automatic timer and consistent heat generator. To suffices the requirement we decide

  • We evaluate different source of energy like
    • Can we build it with electric battery, we think it won’t be a good idea battery will run out eventually and wouldn’t be good for long run.
    • Can we build it with electricity, we think that it wouldn’t be portable enough if we go with this option and what if there is no electricity or at power cut.
    • We decide to use both rechargeable battery which can be charged by electricity would be a good idea.
  • We also look for form factor whether it is going to be square or circle.
    • Square would require more material and unnecessary material would add cost, weight and logistic effort to final product.
  • Material for cook top
    • We evaluate stable & heat sustaining cooktop for surface. We evaluate glass, stone and fibre for same purpose and find glass as our best bet due to high melting point lighter in weight then stone.
  • Electric components & circuits
    • We also identify the electric and electronic component required for our product like ac to dc adaptor to charge battery for stove.
    • We need capacitors and resisters to provide consistent energy for heat.
    • We need timer to keep track of the heating time.

In Above exercise we design the complete, to be architecture and technologies we are going to use. Which summaries the design phase. The takeaway of this phase is a technical blue print of whole to be product called Technical Specification (TS). The TS would be passed to development team, who will execute it and come up with the final product.

Are you with us this far? Does it sounds interesting? Please share your feedback with us in comments section. We would be covering the design phase of SDLC in followup post, stay tuned.

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Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) – Requierment Gathering

Can you articulate Software Design Life Cycle (SDLC) to your child?

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The answer to above question is yes if you have a metaphor, simple enough and easy to understand I often get asked what is Software Design Life Cycle (SDLC) and what exactly we do in this complete cycle? To explain in plain simple words I share an interesting metaphor and here it is

The very first phase is requirement gathering and analysis. This phase helps in evaluating the customer on his understanding of the process and requirement to come up with the agreed Statement Of Work (SOW). This is the first contract document between customer and service provider. We also educate the customer to clearly outline their requirement in this phase, for example customer comes with the requirement of a stove because they are sick of the conventional clay stove.

Clay Stove
Conventional Clay Stove

At this point we ask what they want or what were their pain points with previous experience and we list it down

  • It shouldn’t produce smoke, because the traditional one was a pain in  the eyes due to smoke.
  • It shouldn’t need to be watched continuously, so that the person cooking can also do something else while cooking.
  • It should’t over cook or under cook the food should be smart enough to know once food is cooked.
  • It should be portable and easy to clean for obvious reasons.
  • Should be energy efficient.

Provided the above facts we underline the requirement as below

  • It shouldn’t burn the fuel that is the only way to completely eliminate smoke. We need alternative source of smoke less energy.
  • It will need a time counter or timer and an interface to capture the time.
  • Needs a temperature regulator and should be able to provide consistent temperature.
  • Should be made of lightweight heat resistant material.
  • Should consume energy wisely.

Customer need to be educated that it would require consistent source of un-conventional energy such as electricity instead of wood and charcoal. Once agreed and SOW is signed deal is sealed.

What is your metaphor of SDLC let us know in comments, We would be covering the other phases of SDLC in subsequent follow ups of this post stay tuned and share your understanding of it did we succeed to simplify it for your children or we confused you more share your thoughts in comments below.

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