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The Changing Landscape of Mobile Apps in a COVID-19 World: Opportunities, Challenges, and Outlook

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As a society, we are experiencing phenomenal shifts in how we are using our mobile handsets even for small tasks, given the social distancing norms levied on us. Consequently, mobile app development is too transitioning since COVID-19 raised its ugly face. While we would love to assume that the pandemic is just a phase, the changes in the world of mobile app development are seemingly permanent.

 

It is common for young entrepreneurs to feel drained during the current stagnation period. Businesses doubt that it is the wrong time to pursue mobile app development in such a volatile global environment. Investing in building a mobile app may seem a rather frivolous move, but we show you what opportunities and challenges lie ahead in the field.

 

A TechCrunch report claims that first-time app downloads will be up 22% from 2019, reaching 140.3 billion in 2020. Promatics is ranked as an industry veteran in the mobile app development space. We want young businesses to see the light at the end of this dark tunnel of the economic slowdown. We know there is a very high demand for reliable mobile-apps that allow users to operate as normal in a fully-remote environment.

 

Let’s begin by diving in deep with into the steep spike in the mobile app usage during the advent and spread of coronavirus:

 

App Use Mania Brought About by COVID-19

The daily time spent on Android apps increased by 20% year-over-year in Q1 2020, according to an AppAnnie report. Treading the thin line between necessity and boredom, mobile apps became the new must-have on the list of users. Even the user spending in both iOS and Android apps grew by 15% and 5% respectively.

 

a.) Video Streaming Apps

Due to the coronavirus outbreak, users are spending approximately two-thirds of their time on video streaming apps. The total number of app installs of platforms like Youtube, Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Disney+, and Roku rocketed up to a high of 33% from January to April 2020.

 

b.) Social Media Apps

Users count on social media apps to stay connected with their family and friends. Mobile apps like Snapchat, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook are ruling the charts with combined installs increasing by 23% from January 2020.

 

c.) Mobile Gaming Apps

People were downloading games to beat the boredom during the lockdown. The global mobile game downloads shot up by 75% in the Q1 of 2020.

 

App Categories that saw Maximum Growth during COVID 19

 

d.) Virtual Team Management Apps

Many workplaces are asking their employees to work from home, making it the new normal. Zoom saw a whopping 266% increase in the number of apps installs in the first three weeks of March whereas Skype experienced a 66% rise during the same time.

 

e.) Fitness & Health Apps

With going to gyms or nearby parks is no longer a safe option, people are opting for fitness and health apps. CureFit, Home Workout experienced a 104.53% increase in daily active users according to a report by Bobble AI.

 

f.) Education & Elearning Apps

Virtual classroom learning apps are the ultimate saviours for universities and students. BYJU’S which has seen a 200% increase in the number of new students using it.

 

This served as the ultimate trigger for app developers to develop new usage patterns in their apps that facilitate communications and other hands-free functionalities. Businesses that are foresighted enough to look through the pandemic and adapt to changes that it brought along can leverage vivid opportunities too.

 

Mobile App Development Challenges The Emerged During COVID-19

Designing mobile apps that match up the pandemic-friendly ideals wasn’t as easy as it sounds. App development companies need to find solutions to unique challenges that surfaced during this time, and it is only then that they can benefit from any opportunities brought along with it.

 

a.) Need for Contactless Apps for Monetary Transactions

Since coronavirus is a virus that spreads through touch, physical distancing is the need of the hour. Is easier to practice social distancing with apps that minimize human to human contact. Ecommerce apps are the perfect examples of such apps that are feasible online shopping options that ease the process of retailers as well as vows of the shoppers. Even contactless payment apps like Google and Apple Pay prevent the exchange of commercials that’s inherent to using paper money or plastic money.

 

b.) Need for Virtual Learning Apps to Aid Social Distancing

If learning is an ever-lasting process, coronavirus has been a significant roadblock for it. Users found that the quality of instruction in a virtual classroom deteriorated when it came to offline learning at educational institutes. There is an imminent need to improve the eLearning experience through reforming platforms. This means an increased implementation of Video Chat APIs in such apps.

 

Challenges for App Developers due to COVID 19

 

c.) Need for Heatmapping Apps in Public Spaces

Usually, stores use heat mapping to find physical “hotspots”. Shoppers stop to view items or interact with the merchandise at a particular location. Heat mapping technology can also be used in other places where people tend to assemble like beaches, malls etc. The use of hi-tech camera systems or geolocation technology can help organizations understand the number of people present at a given location, at any particular time.

 

Coronavirus forced people to comply with physical distancing norms as a greater number of people in an area meant more significant risks. Mobile apps can be built to inform people about the actual number of individuals present at a given location in real-time. Such apps can help users make decisions whether they should visit a place at the given point of time or not.

 

 d.) Need for telemedicine apps to aid virtual healthcare

Patient care has become a nightmare given the social distancing guidelines. Although virtual consultations don’t match up the patient care quality of an in-person visit, telemedicine apps allow certain routines to be performed without any physical contact. For example, mental healthcare where therapy sessions through video or voice chats can be a practical reality.

 

Mobile App Development Trends Post Coronavirus Pandemic

The fast-evolving mobile app world has made way for various trends despite the prevalent pandemic. App businesses that follow these trends can optimize their ROIs.

 

Here are some popular mobile app trends that will transform the way businesses operate after COVID-19:

 

1.) Internet of Things

We are about to see a steep rise in the number of IoT smart apps on the market. Use of IoT involves a network of sensors collecting data from machines and people. This data is then transferred to a central repository for analysis and offers enhanced visibility to the management. Management can assess the effectiveness of policies and aid thoughtful decision making with IoT.

 

IoT smart apps facilitate easy interaction between devices for the ease of users. These apps are designed to have superior security features, reducing the chance of cybercrimes, thus assuring the protection of sensitive information and data to make mobile apps more reliable. Enterprise apps built with IoT technology empower employees with remote accessibility for operating and manufacturing facilities. Developers use standard IoT technologies like Amazon Alexa, August smart lock, Amazon Dash button, and others to stay abreast with changing times.

 

2.) On-Demand Apps

These apps serve as interactive platforms that enable instant access to services provided by businesses. On-demand apps help companies to expand their outreach. These mobile apps also help companies offer their best services or products to their customers. These apps serve as a medium through which brands establish themselves, grow their business, and invite better returns. On-demand mobile apps are built to be more spontaneous and interactive to facilitate instant impulsive purchases and automatic transactions.

 

On-demand apps boost the brand value, drive user engagement, and that is why to remain the most suitable mode for businesses to maintain their cash flow, even post COVID-19.

 

3.) Blockchain Technology Integration

A real future-proof mobile app would be well integrated with blockchain capabilities, mostly post corona. Blockchain app development ensures secure apps with easy, unmanipulated access to data.

 

Apps built with blockchain tech are highly scalable in terms of feature upgrades as well as load capacity. Blockchain induced transparency brings speed and agility to the process of mobile app development. Businesses use blockchain app development to maximize their outreach and visibility. These apps store records easily and make them accessible later on. Developers can ensure a localized user experience for mobile app users with blockchain integration.

 

Future of Apps Post COVID 19

 

4.) 5G Technologies

CCS Insights forecast predicts that 5G connections will reach 1 billion worldwide in mid-2023. Before COVID, there was a lot of buzz about 5G technology but without any substantial developments. Given that 5G isn’t just an upgrade from 4G but an entirely new network infrastructure, it can revamp the way mobile networks function. However, COVID-19 pandemic has pushed the 5G network towards fruition with the need to reduce stress on systems and rising demand for bandwidth. With more people demanding fast-paced data sharing and increased connectivity, there is significant traction in the rollout of 5G technology.

 

5.) Voice Technology

If coronavirus spreads with physical touch, using mobile apps through a touch interface can propel the spread in the wrong direction. With the fear of spreading germs on the rise, the use of voice technology reduces the number of times one touches any surface, including mobile devices.

 

Mobile app users can use their devices to execute tasks like asking general questions, streaming music, and getting updates on sports, traffic, and weather, among other things. Integrating voice tech into your mobile apps means setting it up for mass adoption in the future.

 

6.) Virtual Reality/Augmented Reality (VR/AR)

Pandemic has caused a steep spike in the number of people using VR headsets for activities like playing video games, exploring virtual travel destinations and enjoying online entertainment during home isolation. The use of social VR platforms such as Rec Room, AltspaceVR, Bigscreen, and VRChat to facilitate human interactions is another popular use case of the technology.

 

 

Conclusion

Like other global crises, COVID-19 will also accelerate trends that were already underway before the pandemic. As businesses begin to focus on recovery, investing in digital betterment of their products is the best way to ascertain long term success. For example, leveraging the latest mobile technologies for mobile app development is one way to be foresighted. Businesses that stay updated with emerging technologies position themselves as industry leaders. Investing in mobile app development from a business perspective can help mitigate the business risk associated with the COVID-19 pandemic.

 

We, at Promatics Technologies, value the vision and motivation of our clients. We are a team of experienced mobile app developers who know that industry can only grow when new entrants are appreciated and encouraged. As a mobile app development company, we pursue a holistic approach to help our clients with ideation and conceptualization of their mobile apps.

The post The Changing Landscape of Mobile Apps in a COVID-19 World: Opportunities, Challenges, and Outlook appeared first on The Promatics Blog.


Building UX for an AI application? You need to read this

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We start with two buzzwords of today; Artificial intelligence AI and user experience UX.

 

a.) Artificial intelligence is the ability of a machine to operate intelligently, similar to how a human brain works.

 

b.) User experience ultimately translates into how a particular person responds to and feels about a certain interface, service, or facility.

 

While the two may seem at times at two opposite ends of a pole, they actually go hand in hand with each other.

 

The primary purpose or the answer to why AI exists is because it would be able to mimic human behavior and resultantly perform tasks that require human intellect and decision-making power. User experience serves as the perfect place of application of this modern technology where artificially intelligent systems can perform tasks and work to ultimately improve the end users’ interaction with a certain app, website, or chatbot.

 

What is an AI-driven user experience?

An AI-driven user experience means the engineering and step-by-step construction of a user experience that is based on data about the potential/existing users and is thoroughly analyzed using artificially intelligent systems to produce results. These results effectively end up providing greater value to the user in a more time-efficient and cost-effective manner.

 

How is AI-driven UX time-efficient?

Consider that AI software is used to monitor the activities of individual users on your app. A specific user opens your weather app to see tomorrow’s forecast before going to sleep at around 11 pm every day and the entire week’s forecast every Sunday night at around 12pm. Now an AI-based user experience can trigger the layout in the app to directly show the weekly forecast every Sunday and an hourly forecast every other night.

 

Consequently, now the user does not have to change his view settings daily to see what he desires. Thus, saving his time and energy.

 

How is AI-driven UX cost-effective?

For instance, you have an online store that has a daily traffic of 500,000 visitors. Out of these 500,000 visitors, 70,000 visitors ask questions about the delivery or the quality of a certain product. You have employed 1000 customer support workers to answer these queries. Each one of these has their own systems and occupy an area of 90 square meters in your office. You are bearing the labor costs of your workers, service costs of their equipment, and rent expenses of the office space that they use.

 

Instead, you implement an AI-driven chatbot that answers a customer’s query intelligently within 3 seconds of their question and when things are beyond their limits, the customer is redirected to a human customer support worker. Now you need fewer workers, less equipment and less office space. Most of it has been substituted with a computer in an 8 square meter room. Eventually, you end up saving valuable money that you can invest in other activities of your business.

 

Building blocks of AI-driven UX

The term ‘Ai-driven’ means that the user experience implemented has been concocted by using artificial intelligence not just as a tool but as an ideology. This ideology puts the user and his needs at the center and revolves around it by analyzing the data generated from this pivot.

 

Following are the stages of development of a UX and each of them employs AI in a unique manner and helps you present the best adapted-to-the-user interface.

 

I.) Design and development stage

II.) Testing stage

III.) Presentation to user stage

 

Let’s breakdown the above three stages and see what AI has to offer as a part of each:

 

  • I.) Design and development

Design is always an important stage of any app or website. It can make it buttery smooth for the user to navigate through the screen or it can be the deciding point of whether the user continues with his activity or leaves the platform right away.

 

The UI and UX both work together in coordination with each other to bring the ultimate output. Now the UX is all about the users’ feelings and needs and the design or user interface is about blocks, the content they enclose, and the colors they are shaded in.

 

What if the two come together by means of AI software that can work both the bits out and do the designing and development just like how it is directed by the designer? That is possible and is in fact a reality.

 

AutoDraw is an AI-powered software that converts your untidily scribbled images into a perfect shape that is pleasing to the eye and might as well fit into the design that you are looking for.

 

That’s one way of how AI can improve the design and development stage. In the above instance, we totally ignored that the design has in fact to be coded as well. This code will run behind the screen when a user uses your app.

 

Exactly what teleport is doing in this video. Observe how the person simply draws onto the board and it is automatically converted into lines of code that you can easily use in your app.

 

3 Main Components of AI Driven UX

 

  • II.) Testing stage

The testing stage is very important in the life cycle of any software. It allows the company to keep up-to-date with the latest trends and keep an eye on the potential problems that may arise in a specific scenario.

 

Now, this testing can include A/B testing as well where you are testing a specific trait and alternate two possible scenarios to get the user’s response.

 

This entire process can be made more efficient with AI. AI can help to shuffle design features to create new possibilities that can be of great use to the user.

 

There can be two aspects to it:

  • The AI simply redesigns the interface and does the laborious work for you and then you can implement it to get the user’s response.
  • The AI can train the user’s behavior by learning from the available data and can provide feedback on how the user may approach it.

 

In short, you can use AI either on the tester’s side or the tested side. While all of it may not be possible today, there are practically uncountable possibilities of implementing the concepts. This will ultimately contribute to a more improved user experience.

 

  • III.) Presenting-to-the-user stage

Human beings have a very characteristic trait of being unique. More than 7 billion humans walk on the earth and roam space today and while they may share traits and behaviors, each one of them still remains unique in their physical and behavioral qualities.

 

It is unjustified to believe that you can make one set of rules in your app/website’s UX and they are going to be perfect for every user out there. In this situation, you need a dynamic UX that can adapt to the user in no time and your user gets the customized experience.

 

This is precisely the manner in which cookies and recent searches can be put to use. When a user visits a website, this data can be transferred to the AI engine behind the platform. The AI performs analysis on the data and returns a customized webpage especially designed for the user. While the concept is implemented in form of ads that a user sees on the internet every now and then, it can be taken to the next level by using the same data and pulling effective information about the user out of his internet presence.

 

Google’s ideology behind the Clips

Google created the Google Clips that takes AI to the mobile device and helps to capture the perfect shots out of your precious moments without you needing to do literally anything.

 

Clips have been trained to capture a video clip under certain circumstances and then extract the perfect moment from the clip.

 

Following are the key points of Clips:

i.) It has been designed to address the user’s needs. Photography has often been regarded as a hindrance for a person to live in the moment. If you have a special moment in front of you, you would want to save it on your phone as a remembrance. You take out your phone, open the camera and try to take the perfect shot.

What just happened is that you took the picture but you forgot to live yourself at the moment. Clips address this dilemma of whether or not to take the picture.

 

How Google is using AI Driven UX to power Google Clips

 

ii.) Clips have a very open policy regarding the privacy of the user. Everything stays on the user’s device unless he/she allows it to be transferred elsewhere. This is particularly important to bust the myths that exist around AI and has led to an entire school of thought that considers AI as a menace and is not ready to accept it as part of their lives.

 

AI is at its very early stages and your user should know both; that it cannot harm him and his privacy is not intruded, as well as the fact that AI is there to assist him.

 

More on Google Clips here.

 

Implementations of Intelligent UX

We have learned till now that an AI-driven user experience is one that has the ability to respond to the user in an intelligent manner and not just zeros-ones or yes-no.

 

  • Chatbots

Many of us have at least once regarded on any random site as some mechanical crap that has preset responses and will respond correctly only if we ask the appropriate question and not what we want to know about.

 

The good news is that today’s chatbots have evolved to be more responsive and will offer to actually answer what you are looking for. These are strongly related to natural language recognition and learn from how humans interact with each other in their everyday life.

 

These are especially helpful at points where your user is confused about making a decision and the chatbot can hop in to address his confusions.

 

Intelligent UX - Popular Examples

 

  • Digital Marketing

Facebook and Google ads are perhaps some of the most enhanced forms of AI today that we experience daily in every feed we scroll, whenever we open Facebook or search on Google.

 

Digital marketing has been practically revolutionized by these AI engines that once again focus on the experience of every user that uses social media. While it may be the perception that these tech giants are just marketing companies and all they want to do is flush ads down your mind.

 

The reality is quite the opposite indeed. Facebook and Google both analyze an ad on the basis of whether it is worthy to be shown to a particular user. It includes his need for the product, social proof of the product in form of post likes and engagements, and even an average user’s viewing experience. These metrics combine together to decide on the worth of each and every ad listed on Facebook.

 

Ultimately, Facebook Ads is trying to strike the precise balance between the needs of the business running the ad and the Facebook user viewing the ad. The same goes for Google AdWords as well.

 

In the nutshell….

We see the trend of UX assisting AI to accelerate in 2021 and beyond. Artificial intelligence and user experience are deeply rooted in one common objective, to make every product of the best use to the user. As AI progresses to become a strong enough technology, the user experience will further increase because machines will learn about the man and how he works and will work to bring the best utility to him.

The post Building UX for an AI application? You need to read this appeared first on The Promatics Blog.

The Dummies Guide to NFTs or Non Fungible Tokens

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Think about it, you have a bizarre picture that you painted on your laptop using paint and looks something like this:

 

Can this be a NFT

 

No way. Who would buy such a thing? Let alone that there is no point in this mess that I just created 5 minutes ago, this thing cannot be sold. It is not even printed on paper. They have no form; you do not have a possession over them and what is stopping me from having it on my computer by simple downloading it, even if it gets sold and someone else owns it.

 

Well, this is where your understanding about such art is about to undergo a catastrophe because this is actually possible and is happening as we talk (read/write, obviously).

 

In fact, a digital painting by Beeple got sold for nearly 70 million dollars. He is the third most valuable alive artist today and he sells images.

 

How?

So, first things first, how is this even possible. I mean everything on the internet is open-source and things like ethics of ownership respect or privacy are just some terms unknown to the digital world.

 

This happening of a miracle was made possible as a result of blockchain. Yes, the very technology that all cryptocurrencies use. The digital assets that are traded are referred to as ‘non-fungible tokens’ or simply NFTs.

 

What are NFTs?

Non-fungible tokens or NFTs are assets that can not be replaced by any similar asset. Non-fungible primarily means unique. This implies that if I own an NFT, only I own that particular non-fungible.

 

This might help you understand things a little better. I own 1500 bitcoins (I wish, but let’s just assume for a moment). These bitcoins have my digital initials recorded in their transaction history. Now if I decide to exchange 50 of my coins with a friend, I eventually end up with the 1500 bitcoins, no more no less. All of these will worth the same and no matter how many similar transactions I make, they just remain the same.

 

NFTs are different in this part. They are unique. If I own 1500 NFTs, each one of these fifteen hundred are different from one another. If I exchange 50 of them with a friend, I end up having 50 different NFTs from what I previously had.

 

Is NFT a new crypto?

Certainly not.
To help you understand, let’s take the example of 50 limited edition Bugatti Chirons. Each of them will be an asset that you can use and drive around town. On the contrary, if you have 5 million dollars, it is just the money that you have. You own it, thousands of others own it, nothing unique about it.

 

In short, cryptocurrencies are digital money and non-fungible tokens are digital assets that you can own.

 

How did it all start?

While there a few older mentions of NFTs, non-fungible tokens distinctly began after the launch of Crypto Punks and Crypto Kitties

 

 

Crypto Punks were 24×24 images of male and female misfits, obviously ‘punky’ looking. A total of 10,000 of them were sold.

 

Same is the case for Crypto kitties. People purchase digital pets online. Each of these kittens had unique patterns and designs specific to that one particular piece. In fact, one of them even costs around $390,000 or 600 ETH.

 

Crypto Kitties

 

And there we have it as for today. Anything and everything is being sold as an NFT, from tweets to the most expensive digital piece of art ever sold for 69.34 million dollars.

 

Characteristics of NFTs

NFTs being part of the crypto world, inherit many of their traits from the crypto world, particularly Ethereum. Ethereum was the first to introduce NFTs so why not. While others can also implement their own NFTs, it is a feature primarily limited to Ethereum these days.

 

1. Security

All non-fungible tokens are secure, perhaps even more secure than the portrait of Mona Lisa. Like the Ethereum coins, you have them in your wallet which is already secure. Since it follows the ERC-721 standard, the information is permanently stored and can not be changed or else destroyed and so is the NFT itself.

 

2. One-whole

Non-fungible tokens are like literal things in the real world. There is no use of having a car in which you own the steering and the seats. The guy next block owns the engine and someone somewhere is the midlands owns the chassis.

 

Same is the case with NFTs, you own them in whole and can not rip a painting into bits like a coin. Though I am still not sure, if there will be days when we are trading parts of a painting, as if we ripped apart the Mona Lisa to sell it in some 1000 separate bits.

Anything can happen.

Basic Characteristics of NFTs

 

3. Scarcity

The uniqueness and scarcity of NFTs is undoubtedly their most important feature which is the actual cause of deriving its value.

 

You purchase a game skin for $100. Only 100 of these skins were sold and now they are gone. Just like a limited edition of La Ferrari, it is a unique digital good. You might be able to sell it for well over $1,000.
This will depend upon the demand and supply, simply economics you see.

 

Artists have been keeping the number of similar tokens to very limited, to the extent of exclusive. This helps to raise the worth of the piece and eventually, they end up getting paid more for their work.

Are NFTs any good?

NFTs are a very cool thing if you think about it from a technological advancement perspective. Humans have moved from scribbling things in caves to creating a virtual image in a virtual world but how does this actually make any difference and is it of any benefit; let’s look into it a bit further.

 

1. As an Artist

In the past 100 years, everything changed from how me move to how we eat, drink and work every day. We invented cars, microwave ovens, mobile phones and even vacuum cleaners. Things changed drastically but the art remained the same.

 

It continued to be drawings on a canvas with liquid paints generally and continued to be concrete. Although graphic designing had been around for a long time, there was no actual way of selling it as a piece of art.

 

This was before NFTs were a thing. Now with NFTs, artists can create and sell digital artwork without dealing with the hassles of copies and duplicates. There are thousands of artists who are now selling their work as a ‘non-fungible token’ because of these benefits:

 

a.) NFTs are built around blockchain. Using the Ethereum ERC-721 standard, the artist and the owner can be tracked very precisely. So, unless the artist created more than one copies of the piece, there is no other of getting your hands on it.

 

b.) NFTs have resolved the problem for the artists who sold their pieces for nothing and then all of a sudden, their work got famous and there was no way to get the benefit because they had already forfeited their rights for dimes.

 

With NFTs, a certain percentage of the amount goes to the artist every time his masterpiece changes hands. In this way, they are able to reap the fruits of their work in the long term.

2. As a Collector

If you are someone who truly wants to appreciate the artwork in the modern-day, NFTs provide you a great opportunity to do so while still staying digital. Obviously, you would not want to go all old-school and spend thousands of dollars just to see an art show.

You are smart and you do it online and you own digital artwork. NFTs are the way ahead in this regard where you can build your own digital world, an online museum of your own in Decentral Land. You can even earn from it by placing a ticket on the museum-like they have a La Louvre in Paris.

 

NFTs from Different Perspectives

 

3. As an Investor

All investors are looking for feasible opportunities and NFTs are surely one good opportunity to consider. Digital art has just begun and an investor can benefit from the opportunity.

 

There have been instances when people bought art from $1 and got an offer of $50,000 with a week. That is the kind of profits an investor is looking for and NFTs sure is a promising area in this regard.

 

Similarly, you can do it in games. There are many games that offer game assets like swords and skins that you can buy and later on, trade them for their market worth. Games like Decentral Land allow you to trade assets and you surely can get a decent return on your investment.

4. As a Player

I am one of those people who think that in-app purchases in games like skins and weapons are useless when you can do the same with the ones you unlock as you progress in the game. Plus, when you spend the money, there is no way to get it back but not now when you can trade skins and weapons as NFTs.

 

(Maybe, I should consider buying the cool gun that just dropped in last night)

What are the risks that you face?

NFTs are still a relatively new idea that has begun to make its way into the headlines with the recent trades of Tweets and a $70-million painting. Still, it is a novel idea and there are risks associated with it till it makes its way into mainstream trading.

 

1. Demand

The price for any commodity depends upon what someone is willing to pay for the product and how many people want to buy it. Trading of digital commodities is a new idea and there are two problems associated with it:

 

i.) You may not find enough buyers for your NFT.

ii.) The buyers you find are not willing to pay enough.

 

Both of these aspects somewhat reduce your chances of making a profit of your possession.

 

2. Acceptability

While there may be a lot of people who love to improve and learn new ways of living, there might be schools of thought who would not appreciate the idea and create hindrances in its successful development.

 

Major Uncertainties Associated with NFTs

 

3. Laws and Regulations

This aspect of NFTs should be considered very keenly because it is built very closely with blockchain and cryptocurrency technologies. While governments around the world have finally begun to acknowledge their existence and importance, there are still countries where they are legally banned.

 

NFTs also might have to face such sanctions before it is appropriately recognized.

 

4. Uncertainty

The uncertainty of the crypto market is also an important aspect to consider here. Bitcoin as the first cryptocurrency is the primary trendsetter and all others including Ethereum, Dogecoin, and many others follow suit.
Similar can be the case for NFTs. Additionally, there have been instances of digital thefts in the past when people’s wallets were emptied. Though digital security on these wallets has improved lately, there still are threats and it will be important as to how NFTs wallets cater to those risks.

 

In short, NFTs are a novel idea even in the digital world. Many of us were astounded by the idea of a $70-million-dollar digital painting when we first heard about it. Let’s keep our fingers crossed and see what this new unit in the digital world has to offer us.

The post The Dummies Guide to NFTs or Non Fungible Tokens appeared first on The Promatics Blog.

How to Conduct a Perfect Design Sprint?

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Are you one of those people who are working in a bulky organization with managerial layers and hierarchies and yet you find yourself individually as well as collectively as part of the organization that you are in some sort of a decision-desert?  You are confused about what to go ahead with and what to leave behind, it could literally cost you millions of dollars.

 

If you are not one of these people but still face the same dilemma, you have an idea but you have no idea how it will end up, once again you are no different from the mate we talked about above.

 

Both of you face the same problem, you do not want to and can not rely on your intuition and your own ideas about the product you are working on. It is the users who make the product successful. Hence, their contribution towards products is of utmost importance. You need a quick, agile and responsive method that works like an ATM machine, you put your card in and your money gets out in a matter of seconds.

 

What should you do?

Lucky for you, Google Ventures came up with this marvelous idea to test their potential startups for investment and did away with all the risk of losing money and wasting resources. The process is called ‘Design Sprint’ and you must learn it if you are involved at any stage of the product development process.

 

What exactly is Design Sprint?

You can call a design sprint a fast-paced method of evaluation of ideas and implementations of a product to validate it, learn from it, or simply reject it, and all this without the precious time and valuable resources.

 

When we say ‘fast-paced’, how fast are we exactly referring to? Well, we are talking about thinking, designing, implementing, and testing an idea in a total of 5 days, just one working week. In the end, you will be holding a decision of what to go ahead with and what to leave behind.

 

What-is-a-Design-Sprint

 

It seems surreal when you think about all the lengthy discussions and meetings that departments have for months, highly qualified professionals all trying to win each other and they are unable to decide. It is only natural to question the credibility of this approach but stick along till we unravel the little bits of the process ahead.

 

How do you execute a design sprint?

Now that you know what design sprints actually mean and how much more efficient can your decision-making process be using design sprints, let me take you through the entire process of completing a design sprint and successfully concluding with a well-supported decision.

 

Till now, you must have understood that a design sprint takes 5 days or 1 business week to complete. Each day has been dedicated to certain nature of tasks that the team will be performing and at the end of 5 days, you will have not a probabilistic but an absolute idea about what to do and what not to do.

 

Building your team

The sprint aims at developing a product in 4 days that will be trial tested by your existing or potential customers on the 5th day. You would want to develop a practical product that your organization can provide, at a price that your customers can afford and with features that solve an existing problem or increase the customer’s convenience.

 

For instance, you want to develop a game and launch it on the App Store. You bring 5 graphic designers into the room and execute your design sprint. On day 5, you will have perfectly designed graphics for your game that your customers would want to see in the future. On day 6, you gave those graphics to the developing team and it turned out that such a game would need the most high-end computing machines. Later that day, the marketing team told you that audience for such a game is very limited and thus, you would not be able to sell it for long.

 

What was the flaw in this situation? Did the design sprint fail or is it just not suitable for your type of work?

None of the above. In pursuit of developing a game with the best-in-class graphics, you forgot to consider that the game should be playable on all possible devices and that you need to sell it to make use of the idea. Basic decision-making, right?

 

Actually, it might not be as simple as you think. You see, in any organization, small or large, a number of departments are collaborating with each other on daily basis and successfully execute a task. Every one of these departments looks into their relevant aspect of the product. Resultantly, you get a product that is feasible in the market and interesting for your customers as well.

 

Involve all representatives from all departments

It is important that you take representatives from all departments in your organization. These can be the heads of these departments, from lower hierarchies, or even people irrespective of their hierarchies; it does not matter.

 

What does matter is that each one of them should bring their part of the plan and their sets of unique ideas to the table so that when you complete the exercise, you have a product or an idea that is practical to sell and just needs to be fine-tuned to develop it into an actual marketable product.

 

The Actual Process

The 5-day design sprint exercise aims to magically transform your decision-making process completes in 5 different stages:

 

i.) Understand the problem

ii.) Generate ideas to solve it

iii.) Decide on the ideas

iv.) Build a prototype

v.) Customer trials

Step 1: Understanding the problem

Welcome to the design sprint! Gather all the people that you have selected in one room and tell them why they are here, why do they need to develop a product.

 

This perhaps is the most vital step of all. Your team needs to be aware of the actual situation. Half of the problem is solved itself when you have a proper in-depth understanding of the issue, at what point it occurs, and what inconvenience it causes. It is vital to the overall success of the project that each member of the team is on the same page from day 1. The goal for this step is to create a shared knowledge about the problem that needs to be worked on.

 

It is advisable to bring every member of the team together and let the ideas flow in a way that all of the team’s knowledge about the problem is somewhat unpacked. This session can also use the help of “Lightning Talks” which is the process where knowledge experts use 10-15 minutes to share their specific knowledge about the problem in question. Members of the senior management should also deliver precise presentations about the problem as part of the lightning talks.

 

As a result of the understand session, the team should be on the same page about the problem itself, the overall process lying ahead, and the goals that the team has to work to achieve.

Step 2: Generate ideas to solve it

Assuming that everyone is on the same page about the problem in question and the goals that are to be achieved, it is best to split the team up and get them to start coming up with the solutions.

 

Sketching is an integral part of Day 2 as it is a quick and efficient method to rapidly jot down ideas and make changes to them if necessary. Moreover, every member of the team can contribute their ideas by sketching as you don’t know any technical wireframing knowledge to do so. It is at this point that the team might want to break up a large problem into small-sized manageable chunks that the individual members can efficiently work on.

 

Before you go into the third day of the sprint, it is an advisable step to reduce the total number of ideas down to a few that you think the team can work on going forward. Having a clear vision of the ideas and the results you want to gain from those ideas is an integral part of step 2.

Step 3: Decide on the ideas

As you might expect, the third day or the third step in the process is all about making a decision, but it is not quite as straightforward as that. Firstly, the team has to decide which idea or ideas they have to work on going forward, and which ideas they need to drop because of their lack of feasibility.

 

The decision should be taken keeping in view a number of factors that are to be considered for the short and long-term success of the project. It is best to review each idea individually and look at the conflicts it generates vis a vis factor-like budget, users, technology capacity, and business drivers, etc.

 

At the end of the decision day, the team has a final idea or a list of best ideas that they want to take forward into prototyping.

 

The-Five-Elementary-Steps-of-a-Design-Sprint

 

Step 4: Build a prototype

On Prototype day, the objective is pretty straightforward. You need to create a prototype in a single day that your users can test on the final day. As this is a pretty big task due to time constraints, it is important to leverage the whole team on this day and take advantage of everyone’s expertise in order to get the best results.

 

The first step should be to build a storyboard of some sort that would reflect the user experience in a simplistic way. It is important that you use tools that you are already familiar with, and do not attempt to learn something new on this day. All the members of the team should be involved in some way or the other, in order to alleviate some of the burdens from the engineers creating the prototype.

Step 5: Customer Trials

As the name indicates, this is the day of the trials where your idea will be validated. The key to the validation of your idea is to bring in a group of customers or end-users to test the prototype that you created the day prior. It is critical to the success of the project that the entire team gets to observe the whole interaction of the customers with their prototype.

 

There are a number of ways this particular step can be conducted. The team can make use of cognitive walkthroughs or brief usability tests to gauge the overall response of the users towards their prototype. It is also possible to bring in experts and management stakeholders to provide a unique perspective on the trials.

 

It is crucial that everyone on the team make notes and record whatever they feel that they have judged from the trials. At the end of day 5, the team should get together and review these notes to decide what aspects of the project need improvements or changes.

 

Conclusion

And that concludes how you will complete your design sprint. The design sprint approach is especially relevant when you are trying to do something new but do not have enough data about whether or how to do it.

 

This idea of design sprints has risen from startups and helps you to decide in the most agile manner. Best of luck!

The post How to Conduct a Perfect Design Sprint? appeared first on The Promatics Blog.

Progressive Web Applications Are Everywhere: What’s Fuelling its Rise?

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Web Applications

Web applications can be regarded as a piece of a program that a user can access through his browser. During the past few decades, especially after the technological revolution, web applications became easier to access leading to more user interactions. A web application runs primarily on a web server that is hosted and maintained by the owner of the application. All the users interacting with the server act as a client and they communicate with the server by sending and receiving requests and information. This two-layered architecture is regarded as the “Client-Server” method.

 

What are PWAs

In the late 2000s after the mobile market started growing, all the big companies started developing their websites and applications to launch on the mobile OS. This led to the growth of the Google App store and Apple’s App Store. Over time, the majority of the business started shifting towards mobile because of better accessibility, which paved the path towards the development of Progressive Web Applications.

 

Progressive Web Applications are a shortcut of websites that you can keep on a mobile home screen and they give the usability and feel of a natively developed mobile application. The PWAs act just like a mobile application except that they are developed on Html, CSS and interact directly with a web server.

 

Progressive Web Applications bridge the gap between mobile applications and web applications and are a combination of both.

 

a.) Progressive Web Applications utilize the same code written for websites for functioning. It means a single code can lead to multiple outputs like a website and a PWA.

b.) PWAs work on fast APIs for effective communication of data and information. They are easy to install and use in most cases.

 

PWAs have gained huge popularity over the last couple of years and many big brands have launched their PWAs and have largely benefited from it. The three main characteristics of any Progressive Web Application are:

 

i.) Reliability

ii.) Fast

iii.) Engaging

Why are PWAs Getting Popular?

In today’s stacked market where brands are trying to exploit every possible resource to gain more customer engagement, PWAs offer a full package to not only attract customer’s attention but also improve the brand’s image. PWAs are getting famous among all the big brands because of the solid foundation and multiple advantages PWAs provide for the growth of a company. Brands look for better traffic on both website and mobile applications and PWAs do the same. The main benefits of using PWA are discussed below.

 

1. Easy to Use

Progressive Web Applications are built just according to the needs of the user. A customer needs a ready to be used application that can be downloaded and installed easily. PWAs skip all the hassle of going to the play store, checking requirements, and installing the application. Rather, PWAs can be installed with just a single click and they are immediately ready to be used. This saves the time of the customer and resultantly improves engagement in the application.

 

2. Easy Updates

All the people working in mobile application development know the struggles and hardships of pushing an update to an application. Since PWAs are not connected to any foundation like the play store, they are very easy to update. In fact, the web servers respond with the updated information to any request hence making it real-time updating of application. This ensures 99.99% uptime of the PWAs making them more reliable compared to native mobile applications.

 

3. Faster Functioning

Typical native applications work on a three-tier setup whereas Progressive Web Applications work on two-tier architecture. PWAs offer much faster functioning and lesser loading time than mobile applications. This leads to minimal packet loss with almost zero bounces in loading a page. It makes an application not only fast but also smooth which makes it overall better than other applications.

 

4. Take Less Space

Mobile phones have limited storage and native mobile applications generally take larger space since they have more integrated plugins and frameworks in them. On the contrary, Progressive Web Applications take lesser space in mobile’s storage. They work in a similar way to deferred components where the data not to be used all time is accessed only after a request from the user. Due to lesser space occupation, they work smoother and faster with a better response time.

 

How PWAs hit all the right notes

 

5. Minimal Requirements

Progressive Web Applications are just a single click away from functioning. They do not have a set of requirements essential for downloading like mobile applications in app stores. They often work on all android versions and have no minimum requirements of storage, RAM etc. This is a very beneficial factor for people trying to access PWAs from lower specification mobile sets. It increases the traffic and engagements on and Progressive Mobile Application manifold.

 

6. Offline Mode

This is a unique feature that comes with all Progressive Mobile Applications. Offline mode enables the user to surf through the application even when there is no active internet connection available. It works on the head of cached data that loads the components of any Progressive Web Application. This increases the interactions of single PWA exponentially. In some of the advanced PWAs, your choices and changes made to PWA in offline mode are reflected after the internet connection is established.

 

7. Platform Independent

Platform Independence depicts that Progressive Web Applications can be used on all mobile sets. Because they are not built on the dependencies and frameworks of mobile applications, they usually are deployable on all mobile phones.

 

8. Security Feature

Security is a top-notch distinguishing feature of all Progressive Web Applications. All the requests generated and received are secured through the “HTTPS” security panel. This leads to minimal data breaches and data leakage. Native mobile applications also have good security but the fact that data is processed through third-party frameworks and plug-ins, the data is not relatively secure which leads to packet losses or even leakage of packets making the entire data flow faulty.

 

9. Other Notable Features

There are many other bright aspects of Progressive Web Applications which give them the feel of almost a native mobile application. Most of the PWAs have a feature of push notification to highlight any new content or news. PWAs also have an icon that represents them like any other mobile application. PWAs are built in a fashion to give the experience of a native application. Their page loading, data representation, opening, and closing of an app, data caching is similar to mobile applications hence making them alike.

 

How are Big Brands Adopting PWAs

In recent times, everything is going digital. There is an online war between brands to establish superiority over others by providing better online services. Progressive Web Applications make a huge difference in the campaign of any brand. They are more customer-friendly in a lot of aspects and gain you a huge edge over other brands in terms of engagements and marketing. Brands use Progressive Web Applications for their growth in certain ways which are described below.

 

Increasing Customer Interactions

Getting more leads and engagements on your page or application helps you in securing a better page rank and revenue. Progressive Web Applications help you in getting tons of traffic on your web server that helps in improving the outlook of any brand and keeps it ahead of competitors. This automatically makes your brand more searchable and the interactions increase exponentially. This factor contributes a lot to the long-term growth of any brand.

 

Almost a native application

In today’s time, mobile applications are a better way for the progress of any brand. Progressive Web Applications look almost like any native mobile application and give you a real-time experience of mobile applications. This escapes any brand from the hassle of building a mobile application from scratch.

Effective Use of Resources

Any brand or start-up works on limited resources and can’t always go all out on expending resources on the development. Progressive Web Applications solve the issue by giving an alternative to a mobile application. It saves brands from investing money and time in the development of a mobile application. Furthermore, there is no need for maintenance of the application since it is controlled through the website. A single code can be used both as a website and mobile application saves a lot of money, time, and labor.

Why Big Brands Love PWAs

 

Saves Customer’s Time

With a lot of options in the market, an application must be inch-perfect and flawless. When an application takes time to load or is poorly built, the customer instantly looks for other options and leaves the page. Progressive Web Applications are faster and smoother to give customers the best experience without wasting their time. Brands capitalize on this fact and make PWAs as efficient and effective as possible. A comfortable environment is provided to the users for the best experience and indeed gaining their trust and satisfaction.

 

Reaching Wider Audience

Scalability is the ultimate goal of any brand or start-up. Progressive Web Applications are the foundation on which the growth of a business can be mounted. PWAs automatically work with SEO to help create more engagements and leads for the business. It is less effort, more reward in the case of PWAs for the progress of a brand.

 

What Brands are Leveraging PWAs

Examples of a few of the most common Progressive Web Applications are discussed below

 

Starbucks

Starbucks is a popular brand for ordering food, especially coffee. They launched their PWA which was highly efficient and user-friendly. Starbucks PWA allowed surfing through menus, customization of orders, putting the order in cart – with and without an active internet connection. All the changes are stored in the cache and once the connection is restored, the changes appear in PWA. Their app consumes 99% lesser space as compared to native counter-part whereas is about twice the faster.

 

Uber

Uber is a leading company for booking rides for your trip. Recently, they built their PWA keeping in view the users with low-end devices and poor internet connection. The use and feel of the PWA are quite similar to a native application. However, it works perfectly fine for 2G and 3G networks and devices with low RAM. This PWA alone gives uber a huge advantage over other competitors by facilitating low-device customers. The PWA mainly works on an active internet connection. Its size of 50Kb is even much lesser than Uber-lite which is 12MB.

 

MakeMyTrip

MakeMyTrip is a commonly popular application primarily in South Asia used to manage your tour and transportation. It has an overwhelming amount of around 8 million users per month mainly from mobile devices. It launched its PWA and the results show a big spark. The engagements on the web page tripled while the loading time was reduced by around 40%. It significantly lowered the bounce rate and traffic on the page went exponential. This PWA worked hugely in favor of MakeMyTrip and barely cost them any amount.

 

Spotify

Spotify is our favorite platform to listen to all types of songs even with property rights at a minimal cost. The company went on to make its PWA after a rift with Apple’s commission and the PWA gained them big success over time. The PWA has a unique and blending UI that changes progressively with time and the working is a lot faster. The PWA of Spotify is easily accessible and indeed is a win-win situation for both Spotify and its users.

 

BMW

The leading car brand, BMW is the number one favorite of all car lovers. BMW always keeps up with technological advancements and improvises accordingly. Their new PWA is just fantastic. With high-resolution images and videos and large data, the PWA still loads four times faster than its website. They have massively gained an audience with their PWA as the report claims around 50% increase in clicks on mobile PWA and a 50% increase in their audience.

 

Pinterest

The social media platform, Pinterest has all sorts of things all over it. The PWA of Pinterest was formed on the poor performance of its mobile application. The development of PWA proved as a charm for Pinterest as their engagements went up by 60% and time spent on the application also increased massively. It led to an overall 44% increase in revenue. The load time and the response time of the application also got better as more and more audiences got attracted to the PWA.

 

In Short…

Progressive web applications have done wonders for companies in all industries and are surely an opportunity for you as well. At such a minimal cost, the results are marvelous and surely worth a shot.

The post Progressive Web Applications Are Everywhere: What’s Fuelling its Rise? appeared first on The Promatics Blog.

How do Popular Serverless Architecture Providers Stand against each other?

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With the advancement in technology, everything started to transition from the physical to the digital world. Bulky and difficult to use machinery reduced to compact small-sized chips. This brought a great revolution in machines and server architecture as well. In the previous generation of application deployment, physical servers were used with real-time space occupation and high maintenance. But now the architecture of servers has been shifted from physical nature to digital with high output and low maintenance called serverless architecture.

 

Serverless architecture is an application of cloud computing where the host of the cloud provides you multiple services like backend, database, security, etc. dynamically based on your request. This allows you to focus more on the development of the application rather than deployment. Going serverless is becoming a trend in popular brands as it allows them to invest resources in a more profitable way. The basic thing of serverless architecture is it mostly provides you service in form of FaaS “Function as a Service”.

Traditional vs Serverless

Traditional servers were the go-to of most start-ups in previous times but with the popularity of cloud hosting, the latter has out-classed traditional servers in every possible way and manner. The serverless architecture along with providing services like database, servers, and security, gives you the freedom to scale your application with minimal changes. The features that differ serverless computing from physical servers are explained below:

Pricing

Serverless architecture only charges upon the utilization of the services. It means that you are charged on the basis of the usage of your application or website. The traditional servers charge you once a month or annually and it doesn’t matter if they are used or not in the time, you’ll have to pay money. Cloud hosting is actually a “Pay as you go” service which helps a lot in financial stability.

 

Elasticity

Cloud hosting is elastic as it can easily manage a large audience whereas the physical servers are not so elastic making it difficult to improve the setup without spending extra money. Cloud hosting thus helps a lot in the horizontal scalability of any company.

Distributed Computing

Although both traditional servers and cloud computing utilize distributed computing, cloud-hosting does it in a better and efficient way. The distributed power of cloud hosting is much stronger than traditional servers making it a viable option.

 

Traditional Vs Serverless Architecture

 

Event-Driven

Serverless architecture works on the principle of “Event-Driven” where all the services activate when a user tries to access certain things. It is the main principle of “FaaS” whereas traditional servers are up all the time regardless of being used or not. The up-time of cloud deployment is also 99.99% because whenever a user accesses it, it is available.

Maintenance

Physical servers have high maintenance and cost money and labor while cloud servers have low maintenance because they don’t actually exist. This allows cloud hosts to focus more on the services rather than maintenance.

 

Easy Deployment and Latency

The deployment on the cloud is just a few clicks away and boom! Your application is visible worldwide. Since they also provide more locations for deployment, they are fast and have very low latency. On physical servers, it is a long and hectic procedure to acquire them and deploy your services on them. Since they are not in the place of your choice, there are chances they have high latency.

 

POPULAR SERVICE PROVIDERS

With the popularity of cloud computing, big technology giants came in the market with cloud services of their own. Some of the famous are Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud (GC), Microsoft Azure (MA). All of them have their own features and setbacks and usage in different fields. Nonetheless, they make up to 90% of total cloud hosting providers worldwide.

 

AMAZON WEB SERVICES

Amazon Web Services commonly known as AWS is a cloud-hosting service provided by Amazon, one of the biggest tech-savvy in the market. AWS provides all the services that one needs to not only deploy but also to upscale his application. AWS has completely revolutionized cloud hosting by providing facilities like none else. Many of its services are also free to use up to a limit so that you get to know the actuality of them. Some of the popular and most used services of AWS are:

 

Computing Power

AWS servers allow you to use their computing power in your application. There are a lot of frameworks for that purpose. Amazon “EC2” is their computing power server.

 

DataBase

AWS gives a large variety of databases to work with including SQL and non-SQL ones. MySQL, PostgreSQL is among the most commonly used databases.

 

Storage

AWS gives you different types and amounts of storage including 5GB base storage and other dynamically used storage options like DynamoDB.

 

Machine learning

AWS has powerful servers letting you effectively work and deploy Machine Learning models on them. It is called “Sagemaker”.

 

Security

AWS has high security for not only protecting your data but also strong protection against threats and viruses. It is called “GuardDuty”.

 

API gateway

AWS provides you with the service of API gateway for the secure transition of data from the user to the server end. It lets you customize API according to your needs.

 

Much more

The above are just a glimpse of services provided by AWS. In reality, there are tons and tons of more valuable services that you can utilize for your own benefit. Some even consider AWS a must-have tool for startups.

 

Benefits of AWS

The main benefits of using AWS as your fundamental are following:

 

i.) AWS ensures a secure approach for not only your data but also for the protection of their servers and infrastructure including machines and Virtual Machines. There is high-end-to-end security and minimal data beaches.

ii.) AWS is highly elastic and helps you to gain more audience and giving services according to them. There is “Elastic Load Balancing” in AWS dealing with horizontal improvement in your application.

iii.) AWS makes your application high horizontal and vertical scalable by its services. You can scale up or down and can opt to use the services accordingly.

iv.) AWS is easy to use with a user-friendly interface allowing you to easily navigate between tabs and use its services. Tracking an existing application and adding new is also very easy.

v.) Since it is built on the “Pay as you go” model it is very cost-effective. There is no down payment and you pay for only the services you use.

Drawbacks of AWS

There are not many disadvantages of services like AWS. Most failures that occur under its name are due to a lack of knowledge or less understanding. The main setbacks of AWS are:

 

i.) The billing can sometimes be difficult to understand due to some taxes and other stuff.

ii.) The EC2 servers can be less helpful if you are doing something highly complex.

iii.) You need to pay AWS if you need immediate technical support.

 

 

GOOGLE CLOUD SERVICES

Google has always been a leading technology maker in society. Similarly, in the case of cloud computing, Google hopped in early and launched its own cloud hosting platform under the name of Google Cloud Services referred to as GC. GC has all the services necessary for cloud hosting in a single place and is mostly used in medium-ranged applications. GC is the host for many big companies and provides you virtual services in 82 zones and 200+ countries making it a number one choice for many consumers. The main services of GC are explained below:

 

Computing Servers

GC provides a lot of options for computing servers. There are small-scale servers to larger scale depending on the complexity of the problem. These include “A2, C2, E2” etc.

Cloud Storage and Database

GC provides storage for your application either in form of HDD or SSD. There is a base limit of storage that can be scaled up at any time. There are plenty of databases like “CloudSQL” for better management and retrieval of data.

AI support

There is a lot of support for Artificial Intelligence in GC including Virtual machines, servers, and frameworks. The basic platform for it is called as “Vertex AI”.

 

API management

There is strong API management in GC that helps you to move data from servers to users in your own way. The “Apigee API platform” is all in one place to look for API gateways in GC.

 

Next-Gen services

GC has taken a step up and gives you support for upcoming technology advancements like Big Data termed as “BigQuery”. It has wide support for data analytics and data management as well.

Other Services

There are a lot of other services provided by GC including developer tools, Cloud containers, Healthcare, etc. In short, Google Cloud has all that one needs to deploy and smoothly run their applications.

 

Advantages of Google Cloud

The main advantages of using GC as a cloud host are explained below:

 

i.) Google Cloud provides its services in a better price-effective way than its competitors. It allows you to spend money in a more useful way.

ii.) Google Cloud uses a better and strong network for its services making it fast and consistent overall regions of the world.

iii.) Google Cloud allows the shifting of virtual machines among different regions making the use of VM more effective. It allows patching and repairing to happen easily.

iv.) Google cloud gives an overall better performance than its rivals because of the state-of-the-art infrastructure being used in its backbone.

v.) Google Cloud has a strong security setup for protecting your data and machines from data leakage and virus threats

vi.) Google Cloud has backups of your data at multiple places. These redundant backups allow the smooth running of applications even in server failure at some places.

 

Disadvantages of Google Cloud

The advantages of Google Cloud overwhelm its disadvantages. The main setbacks of GC are:

 

i.) The options of programming languages to be deployed in GC are limited.

ii.) There is no free support available in case of some emergency situation.

iii.) The pricing of Google cloud is a bit complex than other cloud hosts making it difficult to use.

iv.) The SDK APIs used in Google Cloud is slower than its competitors.

 

How Serverless Architecture Providers Stand Against Each Other AWS vs Google Cloud vs Azure
MICROSOFT AZURE

Microsoft launched its cloud hosting services back in 2008 when cloud computing was not so popular. Microsoft Azure is a platform that gives small level to high-level services with customization according to users’ needs. It is very popular in big industries due to its effective support and ability to bear high loads. The main services of Azure are:

 

Virtual Machines

Azure provides you with the services of virtual machines on both windows and Linux. These VM let you solve high computing problems easily.

Storage

Azure gives storage of different kinds to the users. There is file storage for your data and “Blob storage” where you can even place your unstructured data.

 

Databases

Azure has support for many databases like SQL severs and complex ones like “MySQL” and “PostgreSQL”.

 

Azure App Services

Azure App Services are the ones that makes it different from the competitors. It has support for web applications as well as mobile applications. Programming languages like Node.js and PHP are supported.

 

Analytics

Microsoft Azure provides detailed analytics for your application being deployed. It has charts and graphs of days and months based on the performance for your convenience.

 

Advantages of Azure

The main advantages of using Microsoft Azure for your application are mentioned below:

 

i.) Azure is more scalable as compared to other cloud hosts. It is perfect for small as well as complex businesses.

ii.) Azure provides “Infrastructure as a Service” and “Platform as a Service” for better growth of enterprise-level businesses. It tackles the problems of web and mobile applications easily.

iii.) Azure has high security for its infrastructure as well as servers. The API gateways being used are also very secured making the data of users less likely to be leaked and manipulated.

iv.) Since Microsoft has other services like Office365 and outlook. Its Azure Services can be easily linked with them and the combination of both result in a better application.

v.) Azure is a very cost-effective solution for deployment. A lot of its services are free all the time while some are free for the first 12 months of registration. There are free credits every month making the financial condition even better.

Disadvantages of Azure

The main problems one can face while working with Azure are following:

 

i.) The pricing structure of Azure is confusing. There are no fair indications before termination of services before credits run out.

ii.) It is slightly slower than other cloud hosts which results in high latency and abrupt performance at times.

iii.) Using Azure, requires high expertise because of technical terms and is a bit difficult to understand nature.

iv.) The support system of Azure is weaker as compared to others like AWS and GC. So sometimes you get stuck in a problem for a long time.

 

THINGS TO KNOW BEFORE BUILDING SERVERLESS APPLICATION

Since serverless applications are a new trend and it is also not highly optimized, there are a few things you need to know before going serverless.

 

a.) You should be ready to make the jump from physical servers to cloud computing. The application should be built as ready to be deployed.

b.) Be aware of the fact that Cloud Hosting is expensive than physical servers. Although it is worth it, you need to plan things according to your financial condition.

c.) There is a lot of configuration and integration involved everywhere in cloud computing. You need to have expertise in this field to make things work.

d.) A proper workflow is needed to be built before the deployment of the application. It helps in tracking the error or information within the system.

e.) There is not much documentation available for cloud computing yet. Some of the hosts also give very less information about errors, so you need to be really careful while working in the cloud.

FUTURE OF SERVERLESS ARCHITECTURE

The future of serverless architecture is indeed very bright. Almost all the big companies have their data and application hosted on the cloud and those who haven’t are shifting towards the cloud. Cloud hosting does a lot of work itself and saves you from the big hassle of security and deployment. Furthermore, there is no risk involved if servers get down or are destroyed because clouds are digital and have backups at places like Antarctica. In short, serverless architecture is much better than the traditional system in all aspects and all the new businesses should fully focus on the development of their applications because deployment and accessibility will be taken care of by the CLOUD!

 

The post How do Popular Serverless Architecture Providers Stand against each other? appeared first on The Promatics Blog.

What are Last-Mile Delivery Apps? Where Role do they Play in Order Fulfilment?

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Many people have been reluctant to go out shopping, but the percentage of individuals who are not reluctant has significantly dropped ever since the covid pandemic started. With the constant fear of being infected, even after getting vaccinated, people would rather have someone drop off their consignments to their homes rather than have to go and buy them. This opened a whole new set of opportunities for businessmen to start last-mile delivery apps. Now, the market is almost saturated, so if you are thinking of launching such an app, stay with us till the end of the article to know all about how to make your venture a success.

 

What is Last-Mile Delivery:

You must have all the basic knowledge about last-mile delivery before we start a conversation about how to build a profit-making last-mile delivery app. Last-mile delivery, also called final-mile delivery, is the last leg of a supply chain operation. It is the final part of the product’s journey in which it is delivered to the customer.

 

An error-free delivery takes place in these 5 steps:

 

I.) Placing the order: The customer places an order through the app or website. The order is then entered into the company’s centralized system.

 

II.) Shipping to transportation hubs: Once the order is confirmed, the consignment is shipped to a nearby transportation hub from where it will be delivered to the consumer.


III.) Scanning the orders:
To double-check, the warehouse staff scans the orders before loading them into the delivery vehicles so that the orders do not get mixed.

 

IV.) Finalizing the routes: According to the delivery address, the packages are loaded in the right vehicles. All the products to be delivered to nearby areas are assigned to the same vehicle, after which the drivers follow the most efficient routes.

 

V.) The final delivery: Once the order reaches the customer’s home and is personally delivered to them, the proof of delivery is recorded.

 

 

Five Stages of Ecommerce Order Fulfilment

 

Problems Faced by Retailers During Last-Mile Deliveries:

If done without any hiccups, last-mile deliveries can work wonders for your business. To stay alive in this competitive market, especially with giants like Walmart and Amazon Prime, you can not afford any mistakes. Here are some of the obstacles that you might face while shipping your product to a target customer so that you develop a plan to counter them timely:

 

a.) Lack of logistics visibility: Modern-era customers have this non-negotiable demand for complete transparency where they want to know the exact details of where their product is along with an accurate expected delivery time, even for same-day deliveries. But, sadly, this kind of transparency is difficult for most businesses to adopt.

 

b.) Delivery delays: Delivery delays are a retailer’s worst nightmare. And what’s even worse is, most of the time, there is nothing that the company can do to prevent a delay from happening. A flat tire, terrible weather conditions, or traffic issues are a few common reasons a package does not get delivered on time.

 

Issues Faced by Retailers During Last Mile Delivery

 

c.) High delivery costs: According to statistics, the last-mile delivery alone costs almost 1/3rd of the entire delivery cost. Driver salaries, vehicle maintenance, fuel costs, long routes, and unsuccessful deliveries make things even more complicated. These challenges can sometimes become too much for a company and can even, in the worst-case scenario, lead to bankruptcy.

 

d.) Environmental hazards and harmful carbon emission: Last-mile deliveries involve heavy vehicles to deliver the products to the customers, which greatly contribute to environmental pollution. With the increase in environmental hazard awareness, customers demand carbon-neutral drivers and eco-friendly deliveries to curb pollution.

 

What are Last-Mile Delivery Apps? And Where Do They Lie in All This:

Since every aspect of our day-to-day business has started to rely on software and technology for increased productivity, why should eCommerce stay behind? A last-mile delivery app helps you make a streamlined process for timely and convenient deliveries.

 

Using a last-mile delivery app can prove extremely beneficial for your business, especially compared to conventional means and legacy systems. For this reason, last-mile apps are taking the world by storm. We recommend that if you have not made the switch to a last-mile app yet, now is the time to do it. Otherwise, you will surely miss out on these benefits:

 

i.) Better visibility and transparency: We talked about how a lack of logistics visibility can hurt your business. With a last-mile delivery app, you will not have to worry about that. Your customers will be satisfied by the enhanced shipment visibility and complete transparency regarding their package. As a result, their trust in you will undoubtedly increase, which will surely play a big part in retaining customers and attracting your competitor’s clients.

ii.) Increased flexibility: With the old-school system in place, it was almost impossible to track the delivery accurately. Many companies face a significant setback financially due to order returns, especially when the customer is not there to receive the order. None of this happens with the increased order flexibility of this system. Your customer knows where the courier is and makes necessary arrangements timely so that the courier does not face any inconvenience. Or, the customer can even change the drop-off location, and the delivery guy will instantly know it.

 

iii.) Enhanced productivity and reduced risk of error: Unplanned errors are the worst because one can not stop them from happening. But, with an efficient last-mile app, you can most certainly reduce the risk. Most savvy business models thrive off the fact that their truck drivers, couriers, and delivery guys are on the best route that will get them to deliver the product in the minimum amount of time. As a result, you will see a significant boost in productivity that will undoubtedly benefit you, your drivers, and the customer.

 

iv.) Better data management: When each business model component gets connected to the rest, it automatically makes it easier to collect data and organize it. Moreover, digitization at every level plays an influential role in keeping tabs at the warehouse, better inventory management, and data tracking. Hence, it is almost imperative to get a robust last-mile solution.

 

Important Features of a Last-Mile Delivery Platform:

To have a last-mile delivery platform that becomes a roaring success, you have to have these features in your app:

 

  • Smart tracking: We have talked about this time and again about how critical and fundamental smart tracking is. If you are about to launch your last-mile delivery app and have not included a smart tracking feature in it, delay the launch date and make a real-time tracking system a part of your plans.

 

  • In-app payment integration: Many customers get an anxiety attack after realizing that they do not have any cash at home to pay for the delivery. For this purpose, you need to have an in-app payment integration so that customers can pay for COD parcels digitally.

 

  • Appropriate substitutes within target categories: Your last-mile app can target any of the mainstream categories of your convenience and liking whether food, groceries, medicinal items, or apparel. To make your platform better than the others, you can add a feature that provides appropriate suggestions if anything in the customer’s cart is out of stock or unavailable. For instance, if someone wants to buy Chinese food from a specific restaurant that is closed, your app can provide the customer with similar Chinese restaurants that are open and available. All food delivery apps have this feature nowadays.

    Popular Categories for Last Mile Delivery

 

 

  • Online chat and customer feedback: Customer feedback is one of the most important features of any business model. Having reviews and feedback allows you to improve your business model and deal with the flaws and shortcomings noted by the customers and users. Online chats improve your retailer-customer relationship by providing a platform where your customers can get their queries answered.

 

Some Popular Last-Mile Apps to Look Up To:

If you are about to build a last-mile app from scratch, take a leaf out of these apps’ books:

 

  • Postmates:

Postmates is one of the most successful, if not THE most, delivery apps globally. It has an around-the-clock surface that allows you to order anything anywhere and anytime.

 

Postmates has a strong financial model in which they charge a specific amount of money, depending upon the bulk of the order, which is then split 80/20 between the delivery guy and Postmates. In addition, they also demand a 9 percent convenience fee on every order, irrespective of the basket size.

 

There are several reasons behind their success. They hopped on to the on-demand delivery trend early on and set their aim high. As a result, they instantly got the return on their investment and started counting dollars from day one.

 

  • Delhivery:

You can be as critical as you want, but you will end up labeling Delhivery as one of the coolest startups in this space! Delhivery is a third-party delivery farm that is not just a logistics company but is also a supply-chain enabler.

 

It is tough to stay in the market with other eCommerce giants such as Blue Dart and FedEx, but their cheap rates and reduced delivery time make it an excellent economical choice. The company has a great business platform based on several delivery flights within a day, ensuring that most of the orders take less than 24 hours to get delivered. Their technological advancement makes sure each order finds its way on the earliest flight and takes the fastest route.

 

Moreover, they are against the “hub-and-spoke” model that can cause significant delays. Instead, they implement a distributed model where each branch functions as a hub and routes the package directly to the customer.

 

The success of their last-mile delivery setup speaks volumes as they, according to statistics, generate monthly revenue of Rs. 8-8.5 crore, with 40,000-50,000 orders delivered per day.

 

  • Shadowfax:

It takes a tall order to beat the leading 3PL service provider, or the “Dad” of all businesses, as they call themselves.

 

The main crux of Shadowfax’s mission is to provide top-notch courier services at a reasonable price with the help of a simple process. And it does not end here. Their turnaround time is so quick, which gives them a seat at the table with other eCommerce tycoons.

 

Their revolutionary idea of bringing Kirana stores into their business model has tilted the balance to their side. According to them, using smart tech for tracking the orders and keeping tabs on them in real-time pays dividends.

 

Moreover, their business model incorporates intelligent parcel allocation and demand-supply optimization to make the most of their last-mile deliveries. They have even initiated a method in which their customers can pay for their cash-on-delivery orders digitally with the help of an in-app UPI integration.

 

Conclusion:

Last-mile deliveries are rapidly becoming more and more common. To keep yourself at a level above your competitors, you will have to be aware of the complications and problems that can occur during last-mile deliveries. You can do that by building an exceptional last-mile app that not only makes things easier for you but also provides an extra level of comfort to your clients. Shadowfax, Delhivery, and Postmates are examples of successful last-mile delivery apps that you should look into before making your app.

 

The post What are Last-Mile Delivery Apps? Where Role do they Play in Order Fulfilment? appeared first on The Promatics Blog.

Why SMEs should Embrace Emerging Technologies?

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Small-medium enterprises are the backbone of any economy. Starting off with the most important aspect, the statistics about the small-medium enterprise, today, SMEs account for the majority of the businesses worldwide. They are the most important contributors to job creation and global economic development. Talking about their financial standing in the economy, SMEs represent about 90% of businesses and more than 50% of employment worldwide.

 

Taking this into account, it is essential to understand that SMEs must embrace emerging technologies. Day to day, year to year, technology is advancing; there are multiple ways to solve the usual traditional problems. Ways that are efficient, problem-solving techniques that require relatively lesser time and flows that reduce human dependency – but in the end, it all comes to businesses having to adopt them.

 

This article focuses on why small-medium enterprises should embrace emerging technologies and gives a detailed understanding of them. The article is structured and focuses on each aspect of emerging technologies at a grass-root level.

 

Emerging Technologies | What are These?

Before we try to understand the relationship of SMEs with emerging technologies, it is essential to look at what emerging technologies really mean? What they are and how they are helping the day-to-day activities step up the ladder.

 

Emerging Technology basically is a term that refers to new technology or a continuing development in the existing technology. This term gives a glimpse of the developing technologies to become more efficient or introduce a new segment into society. While we understand that these have played a vital role in generating new opportunities and giving rise to new features, they have created more problems too.

 

Understanding this through examples, consider the development of new digital communication technologies such as Whatsapp and Facebook and media channels. Where these have made communication and information availability easy, they have given rise to new legal challenges that include issues related to copyrights, trademarks, patents, royalties, and licensing. Secondly, machine automation is a significant example of emerging technology. It has made different processes smooth and has increased time efficiency, but it has majorly cut up the job market. This reflects lower jobs for unskilled labor, which has increased poverty issues.

 

SMEs and Emerging Technologies | The Importance

Today, we all understand that emerging technologies are essential for every business out there, be it established businesses or small-medium enterprises. But apart from their usual benefits, no one understands why SMEs need to take this step; let us focus on the grass-root level.

 

Emerging Technologies today make you make or break the deal; they level up your business game and let you do more of what you do at a reduced cost. Technology at the start may be an expenditure for your business but think of it in the long term, how you can make this expenditure an investment.

 

Markets today are becoming more competitive than ever; what your business offers may be offered by hundreds of other companies operating in the same market. Here comes the point, how can you differentiate from the offering? What is your unique selling point? Before you think about these aspects, you must ensure that your business is in the same standing as the other businesses in the market. Today, adopting emerging technologies is the bare minimum for SMEs. Small and medium-sized enterprises are readily adopting technologies today to transform and stay relevant in the market.

 

To stay up to date with market trends, SMEs are continuously looking for ways that can stop them from lagging behind. They are attempting to maximize profits without compromising on quality, cost, and efficiency.

 

Here are some points on why we think that Small and Medium enterprises should adopt emerging technologies:

 

a.) Reducing Operating Costs

One of the significant expenses of any SME is their cost to function, the cost to carry out its day-to-day operations, which is known as the operating costs. Consider an SME working on designing and selling daily wear outfits. In this example, the business has appointed a manager that is responsible for reaching out to customers and maintaining a log of orders manually. The operating cost in this scenario is the salary of the manager and the paper expense – not to mention the extra time that is required to get the job done.

 

This SME must embrace emerging technology such as an online presence such as a website with an automated backlog to keep track of orders. This way, the brand will reach out to more customers having higher brand recognition, and it will automatically maintain a log of orders on the website. This may be an expenditure for the business at the start. Still, it will significantly reduce the monthly operating cost of paying the manager and will cut up on the excess paper waste as well as expenses. This is how emerging technologies reduce operational costs for small businesses!

 

b.) Take Forecasted Decisions

Modern-day technologies such as the use of big data and ML can help businesses have insights into ongoing consumer interests. This allows SMEs to structure their offerings in a way that benefits the customers and, in turn, increases their revenues. That’s precisely what businesses aim for!

 

Consider an example of a small grocery store that uses big data. This particular store keeps a record of every incoming customer and their purchasing habits. They know how many customers from each income class come to shop there and what their interest is – this helps them design deals that increase sales and attracts more footfalls. This includes sales near celebration days such as Easter, Christmas, and Eid or sending out promotional messages to a particular consumer segment.

 

c.) Contributing to Business Development

Integrating emerging technologies into small and medium enterprises is one of the most significant growth drivers for business revenue. This helps entrepreneurs be more focused on working on bringing new advancements rather than looking toward redundant business flows.

 

New technology tools help SMEs reach a broader target market and explore new horizons for the existing business. For example, integration of bookkeeping in business helps one-person show, the entrepreneur, to look upon new business opportunities rather than keep working on maintaining accounts.

 

Best Emerging Technologies | 2022

Some of the emerging technologies that have changed the business dynamics of today and made small and medium enterprises efficient include:

 

i.) Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing is the delivery of different computing services that include servers, storage databases, networking, software, and analytics. Cloud computing helps store and process data in a location that is online and separate from the end-users. AWS’ cloud products and services have been rated as the best by SMEs.

ii.) Automation and Resource Planning

Automation and resource planning is a strategic approach that ensures resources are being utilized in the right way. This may be a single portfolio of work or a single project which provides a smooth flow. When executed properly, resource planning helps in achieving maximum efficiency and optimization without under or over-utilizing any one resource.

 

iii.) Internet of Things

The Internet of things refers to a rapidly growing network of connected objects that can collect and exchange data in real-time using embedded sensors. These include thermostats, cars, lights, and many more appliances that can all be connected to the IoT.

 

Emerging Technologies for SMEs to Look at in 2022

 

iv.) Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence is the simulation of human intelligence processes by machines, particularly computer systems. Artificial Intelligence optimizes the customer experience by providing personalized recommendations to people based on their searches and purchases or cookies.

 

v.) Big Data and Business Analytics

Big Data Analytics is a complex process of examining big data to uncover information. This includes hidden patterns, correlations, market trends, and customer preferences which help organizations make informed business decisions.

 

vi.) Mobile and Payments

The world has progressed, and now you can make mobile payments sitting at home without having to go somewhere. This includes making money payment made for a product or service through a portable electronic device which includes tablets or cell phones. Applications include PayPal and Venmo etc.

 

SMEs | Benefits of Emerging Technologies

I.) Intelligent Data-driven decision making

Big data helps businesses in making informed decisions that enable SMEs to boost revenue and make profits. It helps design packages that attract customers and increase footfall. This information helps in making data-driven decisions making using facts, metrics, and data to guide strategic business decisions.

 

II.) Increase in Productivity

Emerging Technologies help businesses increase productivity levels as there is more time for entrepreneurs to invest in different business dynamics. Reduced work redundancy means more business ideas and exploring opportunities.

 

III.) Better Customer Experience

Emerging technologies help understand customers and their demographics which helps in a better customer experience. Customer feedback helps develop an in-depth understanding of customers. Enabling technologies and implementing a system is the key way to collect feedback, analyze it, and act on it regularly. Emerging technologies help to bring personalization of customer experience to SMEs which were earlier the forte of big players only.

 

5 Ways Emerging Technologies Benefit SMEs

 

IV.) Increase in Margins and Profits

Emerging technologies help businesses increase productivity levels, reduce marketing costs, help in time tracking and hence reduce overall costs. This helps increase margins and profits, which are critical drivers for the business to excel.

 

V.) Compete Globally

A good organization with an excellent system enables emerging technologies to help businesses in competing globally and release their product offerings at an international level. Technology allows increasing a company’s ability to coordinate its activities regionally and nationally and create a competitive advantage.

 

To say it in a nutshell, emerging technologies have leveled up the game for small and medium enterprises as they are the economy pioneers today. It comes with its own set of advantages and disadvantages. Still, emerging technologies are essential for SMEs to ensure that they compete globally, increasing job opportunities – the need for the hour!

The post Why SMEs should Embrace Emerging Technologies? appeared first on The Promatics Blog.


How to Implement Content Personalisation in Your Website?

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This is the first in a series of articles in which our primary focus is laid on content personalization with a great amount of emphasis: What is it, what are the benefits, and how can you include it into your current business strategy? Please ensure the metaphoric submarine is securely fastened because we’re about to embark on a deep-topic dive!

 

Things are more delightful when they match our likes, opinions, ambitions, and objectives. It’s like going to a frozen yogurt shop: You may select flavor or taste combinations (strawberry and cheesecake!) and a selection of embellishments, syrups, or sauces (I recommend putting on all fruit options and drizzling with chocolate sauce). Delectable and precisely what you desire. It’s as if it was made for you by you because, well, it was.

 

That is essentially the concept of content personalization: Marketers aim to personalize messaging as much as practicable to capture your curiosity and persuade you to sign up for a newsletter, purchase a product, or participate in a demonstration. But it’s not just about communications: content customization is about tailoring a consumer’s whole experience.

 

Personalization of content is more than just a clever marketing technique; it is quickly becoming the standard. Providing a tailored experience for your audience is the key to unlocking more: more sales, trust, and Profitability. You can better relate to your customers with your digital marketing efforts if you know who they are. You’ll be certainly well enough on your way to a more significant ROI when you do.

 

Yes, there are hurdles to implementing personalization properly (which we shall address later), but it is not unachievable. And as marketing automated systems develop, it will be much simpler to determine what form of personalization our demographic reacts to (and through what mediums and networks).

 

The Content Marketing Institute defines content customization as “a method that incorporates visitor data to offer relevant content based on audience interests and intentions. It’s a usability evaluation bypass that links your audience with the information they need faster, increasing the likelihood of landing the lead.”

 

Personalizing that material and providing that experience to clients was tough until recently. While many companies take the opportunity to provide individualized information and experiences, according to the 2018 Evergage, Inc. Trends in Personalization data analysis, just 31% of advertisers feel it is done successfully. According to the data, 55 percent of marketers do not think they know the necessary to tailor their content in the first place appropriately.

 

Part of the perception of a lack of information derives from customers’ differing perspectives on what personalization is and could be. Frequently, modification is required to tailor the offer to the consumer’s preferences while observing surfing activities and following purchase trends are needed.

 

Each consumer reacts differently to various sorts and intensities of customization; thus, it is the advertiser’s responsibility to figure out what they are so that their personalization strikes the point.

 

When you consider your own buying experience, the necessity of personalization becomes evident. Do you appreciate tailored suggestions and incentives when visiting a company’s webpage? What about material that is personally meaningful to you or is linked to an item or brand you’ve just procured? Like other customers, you may have learned to anticipate it as a standard aspect of your online experience.

 

Consumer expectations for relevant, personalized, and convenient experiences have reached unparalleled heights in the digital era. Simply put, customers have grown capable of obtaining what they desire and are leaning toward businesses that treat them as individuals at every point of the customer journey. Fulfilling those aspirations falls entirely on marketers’ shoulders, who must employ sophisticated personalization methods if they wish to keep customers interested and returning for more.

 

For your better understanding and convenience, our team of experts has devised and assembled all the key essential benefits we find important and certainly think that would play a pivotal role in bringing ease to the lives of our readers.

 

Major Benefits of Content Personalisation

 

I. Creates an Established Connection

Your marketing staff will not have to persuade individuals with useless verbiage if you maintain track of user information, preferences, and behavior. You may provide consumers with relevant content, products, and services that will keep them engaged for longer.

 

II. Improves Lead Nurturing

When a publication tailors material to a specific person’s behavior and interests, they build potent linkages and convert the increasingly high leads into MQLs (marketing qualified leads) and sales qualified leads.

 

III. Higher Engagement Likelihood

As a firm reaches a potential customer with the perfect information at the right moment, the possibility of conversion improves when compared to when a customer receives an irrelevant message, particularly at an inconvenient time. If a corporation tailors an experience for that unique person, the prospective consumer will likely become a paying customer.

 

Top 5 Benefits of Content Personalization on Websites

 

IV. Increased Revenue

Knowing a consumer’s favorite channels of contact (Facebook, Instagram, Emails) allows marketers to focus their efforts on those channels to drive a purchase.

 

For example, if a consumer often checks your brand’s website and other social media presence, you may concentrate your efforts on capturing their attention through those channels. You may personalize their experiences and propose products based on their specified preferences.

 

And, when customers appreciate what a brand provides them (in terms of user experience and product), they are more likely to return to the site and buy a product, increasing the company’s ROI.

 

V. Enhance Meaningful Relationships

Consumer purchase choices are influenced by the user’s emotions and how they feel at the time. As a result, many organizations employ content personalization as a differentiating tactic to retain existing consumers. If your content can strike an emotional chord with your target audience, adding a veneer of data-driven personalization can boost its effect.

 

Marketers have divided their consumers based on age, gender, and region criteria in recent years. This segmentation enabled them to tailor their messaging on a somewhat more intimate level.

 

Effective content personalization, on the other hand, has progressed beyond this.

 

Marketers can now evaluate customer journeys to acquire more facts and construct a tailored picture of each consumer thanks to content customization tools, rich customer data, and newer technology. Newsletters, case studies, blog posts, web page portions, resources, photos, news stories, CTAs, body text, and other engagements often used by content marketers may be tailored. All of this contributes to a stronger emotional connection with the end consumers.

 

As a result, they can raise conversion rates, improve campaign performance, and encourage participation. Because it changes in real-time and provides customized user experiences, personalized content is known as ‘dynamic content.

 

Now, you may be wondering that all these intricacies have left you befuddled but don’t worry, we’ve got it all covered. To give our readers a better understanding of the concept, we have written down content personalization tools that would certainly give you a heads up and a pat on your back to get things started.

 

a.) Customer Data Platforms

A Customer Data Platform is a type of tech that combines customers’ information from several interactions and organizes the real-time data into individual customer profiles. CDPs create these “customer profiles” by gathering information from several first, second, and third-party sources (social media activity, web forms, website behavioral data, CRM, emails, and transactional systems).

 

How a Customer Data Profile is Created

 

b.) Google Tag Manager

 An aggregation and analysis variable in Google Tag Manager (GTM) is used to trigger personalization. Marketers may enter practically any material into this database layer and show customized content to various target segments. In other words, publishers may utilize Google Tag Manager to create a more personalized environment for their audiences, enhance on-site user experience, and boost conversion rates.

 

c.) Data Management Platform

A data management platform collects, organizes, and engages all audience data from various sources (first, second, and the third party) (online, mobile, offline, and beyond). Because they enable organizations to obtain unique insights into their clients, these technologies have become the backbone of data-driven and personalized content marketing.

 

How do You Create a Content Personalization Strategy? 

If you believe in the benefits of content personalization, it’s time to understand how to do it effectively.

 

i.) Address the user’s requirements 

Consider your prospective audience’s pain issues before you begin tailoring information. Consider all of the concerns that your product, service, or content can answer. Your customization approach should focus on satisfying the demands of your customers rather than bragging about how fantastic your product is. As a result, regardless of whether they will buy from you or not, focus on providing something beneficial for end customers.

 

ii.) Address individuals: 

Maintain a human-centered perspective at all times. When speaking to a potential consumer, make them feel like they are the only one in the space. Talk to them as persons, not as numbers. This will pave the way for genuine partnerships that will subsequently be advantageous for your company.

 

iii.) Personalization depends on the customer’s journey.

Customer journey maps are required to transform wide-ranging material into information appropriate to each customer touch point experience. The map should address different audiences at various points of the trip. In other words, your content should be aligned with each step of the user experience. This will aid in delivering material relevant to a customer’s stage in their journey, ensuring they proceed towards the next step.

 

Effective Tips to Build your Content Personalization Strategy

 

Data is the Key

Personalization entails employing audience and data analytics to fulfill a user’s unique wants. Begin by utilizing your data to understand the specifics of each of your consumers, their objective at any given time, and where, when, and how they’ve formerly connected with your business.

 

Data is the key to getting to know people well enough to meet their requirements and predict what they might desire at a future point of interaction.

 

So you know you want to provide tailored, contextual experiences to your consumers and that a 360-degree perspective of their interactions is required – but how can you accomplish it? A digital experience platform, such as Sitecore Experience Platform, might be beneficial. Because of its integrated database and machine learning, it is capable of real-time, always-on personalization at scale. You can also see how Sitecore customization helps to narrow the gap.

 

Expectations of customers are significant. People know what they want and anticipate having it whenever and however they want it. To achieve these expectations, marketers must produce incredibly individualized, meticulously crafted messaging, promotions, and experiences — while being non-intrusive.

 

There are methods to demonstrate to your customers that you’ve heard their concerns and fully understand what they’re seeking without exceeding the line. For example, data may reveal that a specific client prefers gluten-free items. You can then use that knowledge in a way customers will enjoy by tailoring your website content to offer a gluten-free spaghetti meal recipe.

 

More isn’t always better when invading a consumer’s personal space. Please pay close attention to what your consumers say, then utilize appropriate methods to provide them with individualized experiences.

 

Why we Believe Content Personalization is the Future

The main point is that consumers are tired of being bombarded with nonsense. Your website will become more appealing when appropriate material is delivered consistently, resulting in more engagements. In summary, investing in content customization may reap significant benefits for companies. When it comes to content creation, you can’t afford to personalize it. Among the most successful strategies to improve engagement is to personalize content. Tailored messaging is the only way that 72 percent of customers will engage. Throughout this article, we looked at what content personalization is, why it matters, and how you can get started right now.

 

Unfortunately, too extensive registration pages or lengthy contact forms are more likely to turn people away than to boost your chances of obtaining the information you want. These clients are new to your business at this point in the process, so you’ll need to devote time to getting to know them. To start, probably ask more manageable questions. Then think about including a market analysis solution like Clearbit, which enhances data with 100+ credible firmographic, demographic, and technological factors. Conversely, you might go out of your way to enhance your data. Consider posing a question in your following email to your contacts. When they click on an answer, Otto collects it using UTM parameters and adds it to the user’s record. This information may then be used to create your following email or even a tailored customer experience.

 

If you’re ready to use personalization to boost the success of your content, we’d love to assist you. Data is the foundation of personalized marketing, and the more data you have about your clients, the more tailored your branding will be. Once you begin tailoring your content, you will see benefits throughout your marketing function. Conversions will rise, more interaction with your efforts, and prospects will perceive you from a brighter perspective.

 

And it might mean the difference between a prospective consumer choosing you or your rival.

The post How to Implement Content Personalisation in Your Website? appeared first on The Promatics Blog.

The Power of Open AI: 8 Ways to Transform Your App

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Currently, one of the hottest topics on the internet is Open AI. Almost everyone wants to integrate features with Open AI into their Apps because it enhances web application performance. Do you know what Open AI includes in your App?

 

OpenAI is a team of experts and developers working to advance AI technology. Open AI offers various services, tools, and use cases to help businesses, developers, and researchers bring AI into their operations. It shows how AI may be used in many fields, from chatbots and autonomous vehicles to healthcare and robotics.

So do you want to add Open AI to your App? But don’t know the ways Open AI integrates into your App? We are here to give the most exciting ways of using Open AI that you can integrate into your web application.

 

Best Features to Add to Your App By Using Open AI

 

1. NLP ( Natural Language Processing)

OpenAI has made significant advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and can be integrated into your app to enable it to understand and respond to natural language queries from users. In short, this technology allows machines to understand human language.

 

Open AI also brings some more advanced features to this technology. They are:

 

a.) Open AI improves conversational AI systems. So this AI system can chat with a human and respond accordingly. Which great for any service platform.

b.) Open AI also works on AutoML(automated machine learning). AytoML can generate accurate predictions that help in solving problems. This can be very helpful if you are building a medical or fitness application.

c.) This system can provide you with more accurate and detailed user-related information. It is possible for people to get the exact information that they need. It can be added to your platform to resolve customer issues or provide information to clients.

d.) Transfer learning may fine-tune the pre-trained model for specific tasks.

 

You can use NLP in many ways in your App. They are:

Text Classification

The fundamental part of NLP is to classify text. It analyzes the text and labels the text according to its topic. NLP also finds any relevant keywords within its content.

Machine Translation

Without the help of human translators, AI can convert written text across languages. Deep learning networks translate words in the original text according to the locale and context in which sentences are used.

Recommender systems

Content-based recommender systems depend on two strategies: item-item similarity and user-user similarity. Recommender systems determine which recommendations will be the most useful to a given user.

Chatbots

The term “chatbot” refers to artificial intelligence software that can replicate human communication through an online chat interface. In chatbots, NLP is used to comprehend human language.

Question Answering

Using data stored in a given repository, you can use an NLP-powered system to respond to user queries.

Sentiment Analysis

You may evaluate the overall attitude about a product, service, or business by analyzing user reviews and comments with this tool.

 

Six ways you can use Natural Language Processing (NLP) in your apps

 

2. Image and Video Analysis

Open AI’s video and image analysis automatically analyzes and interprets visual information in videos and photos using artificial intelligence algorithms. Activities like item identification, picture categorization, scene analysis, and action recognition are all included.

 

Open AI also adds advanced features like AI-driven Video Analytics to improve video analysis. These capabilities make use of deep learning and computer vision. It helps you in the following ways:

 

a.) OpenAI can be used to generate captions for images and videos, including describing the content of the image or video in natural language. This can be useful for visually impaired users or for providing additional context to content.

b.) With OpenAI, you can search for images and videos based on specific criteria, such as color, object, or content. This can be useful in applications such as e-commerce, where users can search for products based on their visual features.

c.) An image or video can be analyzed using OpenAI to identify positive, negative, or neutral emotions. This can be useful in applications such as social media monitoring, where businesses can track customer sentiment towards their brand.

 

3. Speech Recognition (Whisper)

Using AI methods, Open AI can automatically transcribe spoken words into text, a process known as speech recognition. To translate speech into computer code, you can use NLP software. Using Whisper, OpenAI claims to be able to generate “robust” transcriptions and translations from multiple languages into English. A variety of file formats is supported, including M4A, MP3, MP4, MPEG, MPGA, WAV, and WEBM. As Open AI improves speech recognition, it can help you like:

 

a.) By using Open AI, you can boost the voice recognition tool’s performance. With the help of Open AI, you can have a more extensive dataset that’ll handle a greater variety of speakers, languages, and dialects.

b.)The model may benefit from speaker adaption strategies to better distinguish speech from varied speakers and situations.

c.) Audio signals, prosody, and speaker identification may all be determined using these forms. You can integrate into your app to translate and transcribing different languages.

 

To include voice recognition in your web project utilizing Open AI, you should look at its potential applications.

Voice Metrics

Accessing online applications is now easier and safer due to voice recognition authentication.

 

Speech-based Search

You can use your voice to convert inquiries into texts to search for them.  OpenAI can be integrated into voice assistants to enable speech recognition, natural language processing, and even generate text-to-speech responses. This can be useful in applications such as smart home automation or voice-activated customer service chatbots.

 

Voice-controlled Virtual Assistants

With the help of this feature, you can now use your voice to navigate and interact with your favorite online applications because it can translate and understand spoken instructions.

 

4. Machine Learning

In recent years, machine learning algorithms have seen widespread use. Facial recognition and NLP are just two examples of how machine learning is used. However, Open AI includes a new feature in machine learning that adds a new dimension. That is GPT 4. It can help developers in many ways, they are:

 

a.) Because of Open AI, it is now simpler and faster to execute a machine learning project. As a consequence, developers may now launch their products at a quicker pace without losing quality.

b.) Developers can easily construct and deploy their applications because its open-source tools allow them to access and analyze data from any source.

c.) This platform has allowed developers to design more robust and trustworthy models for machine learning applications, increasing their accuracy and performance.

 

So the way you can integrate ML by using Open AI are:

Question & Answer Bot

You can use this feature to add a “Question & Answer Bot” that can answer any questions based on existing data.

Grammar Correction Tool

With the help of ML using Open AI, you can add grammar correction tools to correct sentences.

Voice Interfaces

Websites now have speech interfaces built using Open AI technology. It can comprehend user queries made in natural language and provide them with the most relevant results.

 

5. Predictive Analytics

In Open AI, predictive analytics is the process of analyzing data with the help of machine learning and statistical methods to predict potential outcomes. Regression analysis, decision trees, random forests, and neural networks are all subfields of predictive analytics.

 

By using predictive analytics, you may refine your use of available information to reach more informed conclusions. Therefore, including it will guarantee that your business will benefit from those features. So here are some advantages of using it.

 

a.) Open AI includes more advanced machine learning algorithms, which has led to more precise forecasts.

b.) Because of its compatibility with other data management and visualization programs, you may get a complete answer with it.

c.) Open AI enhances computing capacity to deal with more significant data volumes and complex calculations.

 

So the use cases of predictive analytics in your Apps by using Open AI are: 

 

Churn Prevention

Predictive analytics algorithms examine customer unhappiness and pinpoint the portions of the customers most likely to leave your company.  Predictive data allows companies to make adjustments that will keep consumers delighted and, in turn, safeguard earnings.

Customer Lifetime Value

It’s difficult to pinpoint the kind of consumer that will spend much and regularly over a lengthy period. With this information gathered from a predictive analytics use case, a firm may fine-tune its marketing efforts to attract new consumers who will likely become loyal supporters.

Supply Chain Management

SCM automates the movement of items and services across the supply chain in response to predicted demand.

 

6. Fraud Detection

With the help of machine learning and artificial intelligence, fraud detection can spot and stop financial crimes in fraudulent tracks. Using Open AI’s detection technology in fraud detection will scan large datasets, such as transaction data, using predictive analytics and pattern recognition to spot suspicious activity. Therefore, it lessens the possibility of monetary losses, safeguards the company’s reputation, and provides a safer experience for customers.

 

So what are the benefits of using Open AI for automating fraud prevention processes?

They are:

 

a.) Organizations benefit from the availability of these potent tools because they can automate the fraud protection process and cut down on the time it takes to identify and solve fraud. You can add it to your security app or software.

b.) The software can swiftly filter through massive data sets in search of suspicious trends. With this data, it can automatically identify fraudulent activity and notify the proper authorities.

c.) It can also flag suspicious transactions. In this way, it can analyze risk quickly and identify high-risk consumers. Companies can minimize the possibility of fraud-related damages. It also helps to reduce the cost of fraud prevention and detection.

 

Let’s explore possible ways to integrate fraud detection using Open AI in your apps.

Credit Card Theft

Online criminals may steal credit card information via phishing and other similar scams. Such concessions may be avoided using Open AI machine learning to detect credit card fraud. It can be used to bank on websites or platforms.

Identify Theft Detection

When a user’s information is being used illegally, such as when a criminal creates a new account using a stolen identity, Open AI will flag the activity.

eCommerce Fraud Detection

Open AI can identify fraudulent online purchases using stolen or fake credit card data.

Advertising Fraud Detection

When it comes to online advertising fraud, like when someone creates fake clicks or impressions to make more money from ads, Open AI can help find suspicious patterns.

 

4 ways to integrate fraud detection using Open AI in your apps

7. Intent Recognition

It’s a real-time tool for understanding the motivation behind a customer’s search or request. It’s being used in things like chatbots and other virtual customer support to provide a more pleasant and satisfying experience for the user.

Open AI also includes many valuable features that benefit your business in this section. The advantages are:

 

a.) Open AI uses more advanced natural language processing algorithms that help you accurately recognize a user’s intentions.

b.) The ability to analyze large amounts of data will help you achieve quicker and more accurate intent identification.

c.) Open AI has the background and data to adapt the user experience via intent detection. This includes things like customer behavior and preferences.

d.) Open AI now provides better multilingual intent recognition capabilities.

 

The use cases of intent recognition are:

Chatbots

It allows chatbots to understand and respond to user questions more effectively.

Customer Support

Reduce the time spent on repetitive tasks such as manually changing addresses and sorting frequently asked questions. CRM records include a treasure trove of user information that can be used as training data in many companies.

Sales Prospecting

By using intent detection, email campaign answers may be automatically sorted into categories such as “out of office,” “incorrect contact person,” and “not interested,” allowing you to concentrate on the most promising prospects.

 

8. Virtual Customer Service

Automating customer support interactions is a crucial component of AI and NLP technologies, which virtual customer service platforms will use. Using it can be quick and easy since it eliminates the need to involve a human agent in solving a problem. Therefore, Open AI reduces the budget and time spent on customer service for the young company. It also adds some magic to virtual customer service.

 

a.) Open AI adds advanced natural language processing algorithms to handle consumer requests and provide more accurate answers. You can add it to app and attend customer 24/7

b.) Open AI uses consumer behavior, preferences, and history to customize replies and improve customer experiences. So you can analysis and make marketing plan according to the report.

 

Conclusion

Open AI is a powerful artificial intelligence platform with online apps. It helps developers create user-friendly web applications. However, you must not add many features to your apps; otherwise, they will become more complicated and enhance your building app costs. At the end of this article, we hope you understand how Open AI can be integrated into your App.

The post The Power of Open AI: 8 Ways to Transform Your App appeared first on The Promatics Blog.





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