Please introduce your company and your role within the company.

Click Labs was started about 5 years ago. During that time, we observed that a lot of smart phones were beginning to be used as mainstream. Our thesis was that because of smart phone penetration in the market, new companies are getting an opportunity to scale. So, on that basis, our calculations were that in near future many companies will develop in the B2B market with the help of smart phones. This motivated us to focus our intentions on developing our services in the technology sector. We started as a service company and then we channelled our focus on the niche of on-demand software. So, we are not like a generic service company, we mainly focus on the on-demand products and services.

What is your company’s business model– in-house team or third party vendors / outsourcing?

Everything that we develop is developed in-house and at the same time, we have a decent set of Intellectual Property. By that I mean, we have built a lot of products like Juggernaut and Tookan in-house. We use these products as a starting point to develop an application. They are then customized to take care of individual application requirements. So these products are utilized in every project that we develop.

How is your business model beneficial, from a value addition perspective, to your clients as compared to other companies’ models?

As we have developed a lot of Intellectual Property and we focus on one domain only, it helps us in delivering products faster. This becomes possible as a lot of things are already built so we don’t need to build everything from the scratch. That is how we are able to deliver faster and much cheaper than any other company.

What industries do you cater to? What ratios of your clients are repetitive?

We have a decent set of clients from the Beauty Industry like salons, Hospitality Industry, Trucking and Logistics industry, Food Industry like restaurants & hotels and B2B delivery.

Since we have a very niche product our repeat ratios are very high, as high as 80% of our clients become recurring for us. As we are focusing on a smaller niche, we own it completely and so it becomes easy for us to create a remarkable value addition for our clients.

Mention the objectives or the parameters critical in determining the time frame of developing an application.

In our case we have two aspects; one is to understand which IP will be utilized to develop the project and what exactly we want to build, because we always use a lot of products that are already built. The second parameter would be to estimate and understand the kind of customization required to develop the application.

How much effort in terms of time goes into developing the front end and back end of a mobile application?

Typically, both the front end and back end development process work parallelly while building any project. So, roughly 60% of the resources will go on developing the backend and 40% on developing the frontend.

What are the key parameters to be considered before selecting the right platform for an application?

We focus more on the business use case of a project. Since we do not do custom development, we do not change the product’s platform like other developers do and will not suggest on the choice between PHP and node JS as a platform. From a business perspective, we have a fairly standard stack, we have a node stack, angular stack, we have mobile apps in native code. So it does not change a lot because we don’t want to keep focussing on the different stacks but rather on the business use case side of things that we are solving.

Native or Hybrid — which platform is best to use to build your app? What are your recommendations?

All our applications are based on the native platform. Native apps are advantageous because the experience you get is better than the hybrid apps. The only advantage of using hybrid apps over the native apps is its cross-platform functionality. The kind of work we do is very much GPS sensitive and because of that we don’t try to go for hybrid apps. Hybrid apps work well when there is pure UI and data showing application. However, while working with GPS apps extensively, native apps are beneficial.

Which platform do you suggest your clients to begin with when they approach you with an idea and why?

We generally start with the business use case i.e. what is the problem they are trying to solve and then accordingly we’ll try to find the best and cheapest way to develop the application.

What are the key factors that you consider before deciding the cost of a mobile application?

We mainly have two components one is the IP that we’ll be using in the project, whether there is any licensing fee or IP transfer involved. Another important factor is time & material that will be utilised for developing the project.

What kind of payment structure do you follow to bill your clients?

We have three types of models – one is fixed cost model for project basis, another one is a T&M model and lastly, we have monthly recurring licensing fees for some projects. So based on the client requirements, we are flexible to let them choose a payment model.

Do you take in projects which meet your basic budget requirement?

We do not have minimum budget requirements as we are also a SaaS company i.e. Software as a Service wherein we have completely free plans also available.

What was the cost bracket of mobile app projects your organization did in 2015?

The average is around US $100,000 and the maximum we have worked on a project is for US $2,00,0000.

Which business model do you suggest your clients use to generate revenue from mobile applications? Why?

We work mostly on a subscription model because according to us that is the most efficient model. This model is a little difficult to sell in the beginning but they are much more logical when it comes to retention.

Earlier this year GoodFirm named Click Labs as a Leading Software Development Firm 2016.

Samar Singla, founder of Click Labs

The post GoodFirms interviews Samar Singla, founder of Click Labs first appeared on Click Labs.

When Data Exploded

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that we are, in fact, in the digital age for all purposes. The stratification of income and class simply dictates the amount of access we have to the digital realm – but access exists on all levels, from the mobile-phone operating everybody to the techie sitting in front of an ultra-powerful machine.

The reasons for going digital were manifold – the fact that data was occupying more tangible space than it was worth being a major one. Imagine the differential engine, or the cassette player – it takes a fraction of that tangible space now to store that amount of data in a drive, or virtually on cloud-based servers. This age ushered in the storage of data in virtual realms whose space we cannot really define in terms of everyday units. The world-wide ‘web’, for that matter, is a densely interconnected mesh of pure data, stored from innumerable sources.

This is precisely where Big Data comes in. The simple understanding of big data is exactly what it says – a huge amount of data, both structured and unstructured. Now, this data comes in many forms. You’ll be surprised at the sheer proximity it has to you. Your smartphone, whenever you do access the social media pages, update Facebook, like a page or even go through your YouTube playlist for the day – is generating data that is merging together in this huge, amorphous mass. Every system, sensor and device generates Big Data – which is where the three ‘V’s’ of Big Data come into play.

Three V’s

The watchwords often used to describe Big Data in data analyst parlance are: Velocity, Volume and Variety. The easiest way to imagine it is in the form of a large, virtual ocean, lapping at an immense coastline during a storm.

Velocity is the sheer speed with which the waves of data come in, and indicates the real-time nature of this data. It suggests that this is not a static dataset that we are trying to define, it is dynamic and fluid, which is one of its most important characteristics.

Volume is the sheer amount of data coming in – since the data is not limited to static datasets that are generated after a period of time and since it continuously tracks everything, it has immense volume. The size of the data is used as a characteristic ‘big’ in Big Data.

Variety is quite self-explanatory. As mentioned, a smattering of devices are currently in the process of generating Big Data. So it is a no-brainer that this data comes in all forms, from simple numeric entry based data to text documents, audio and video. Everything you can possibly imagine, in that sense.

The Big Deal

So what is the big deal, really? We knew that there is Big Data available all around us – sure, the sections above may have defined it for us, but so what? What is it used for? More importantly, who is using it?

The answer can fluctuate with your chosen profession – but the big data user is now present in almost every business that wishes to remain ahead of the competitive curve, every business that wants an edge. We at Click Labs specialize in mining and then analysing this data for several purposes, primarily for businesses that seek our optimization services. Big Data helps entrepreneurs, corporations, governments and several others make decisions – and believe us, they are often big decisions.

We often liken a business idea, or a business to the organic human body. If there were an external technological process that continuously monitored everything in your body – your eye condition, the state of your lungs, memory capacity and so on and so forth, you’d be assailed by a daunting amount of information. That information comes in the form of big data for businesses, and if it were to come in it’s raw, unstructured form, then it would mean trouble – someone needs to make sense of it.

All of this goes into one important thing: Decision Making. With Business Intelligence, the first step is to collect data in a sufficient, dynamic manner – collecting Big Data, in fact – and then subjecting it to rigorous analytics using cutting-edge technology. This data is then synthesized in a way that makes sense – software can now present it in graphic forms that are easy to read and understand.

Decision Making Processes – Made Synaptic

A synapse is the space between two neurons – a synaptic signal is meant to bridge that gap in one electric moment. Our nervous systems work on this simple, defining moment, taking decisions that are crucial to our functioning. Click Labs believes that in the realm of business optimization, the right technology can process that mess of data and help in making these decisions that will not only save businesses, but also help them surge ahead of the competition.

The realms of Banking, Education, the Government, Healthcare, Manufacturing, Retail and more – all use Big Data to enhance their customer services, and have immense potential to be part of the techno-organic ecosystem that Click Labs can set up in terms of analysing Big Data to make comprehensive decisions. Governments, for example, can be digitally aware of where resources are needed the most, where infrastructural developments need to be implemented, to even tracking down crime and remedying it. Healthcare can be optimized with remote access to patient records, treatment plans and diagnostic information on the fly – crunching that data can relegate appropriate resources to the appropriate regions, improving patient care. There is virtually no industry that cannot be optimized with the help of this invaluable, torrential resource – all you need is the right kind of analytics, with the right kind of decision-making to tap into the immense potential Big Data has.

Awareness is key to understanding the virtual world, a world we cannot necessarily fathom with our senses. Entire firms exist to analyse and interpret the data streams from this world for a reason – we specialize in surfing this tide for you, the concerned businessman. So dive into the world of Big Data, and dive into the future of smart decision-making.

The post The Big Deal: Big Data Simplified first appeared on Click Labs.

The on-demand economy we have today is but a glimpse into the paradigm-changing future. It is slowly but surely encroaching on conventional businesses, and roping in more consumers to participate in its lucrative mechanisms.

To understand the future of this ‘on-demand’, or gig economy, we need to go through a few other concepts and deal with what it means to be a part of this economy in the first place. The name itself speaks volumes. Consumers today exhibit an interest in a different type of service provision – they do not want to own, as much as they want the service in itself.

What this means is pretty simple – ownership of a car, for example, as compared to a transportation service that moves you from one place to another without the hassles of owning a car – that is what the ondemand economy is all about.

Gone are the days where ownership of such assets are thought to be invaluable and elevators of personal status – the new generation seems to want the service and not the hassles that come with the service itself, all at the touch of a smartphone button.

That’s the second characteristic – a huge, specialized labour force that is now acquainted with the smartphone platform where the on-demand economy has made its home in the form of app-based services and marketplaces.

The digital platform has been developing since the mid-2000s – right after the widespread application of the internet – and has grown exponentially since. It is but obvious to suggest that the sharing economy could only come about because of the rapid technological growth accompanying it, enabling platforms of this sort.

However, this is not all – the apps themselves, along with the optimization of many of these platforms is enabled because of the process of Automation.

AUTOMATION REDUX

Automation, from the Greek word ‘Automos’ is the process of introducing something that acts according to set protocols – and hence, does not require external interference for its operation.

Automation exists in all aspects of the industrial process, from manufacturing to selling, from maintenance to repair and from design to optimization. The cell phone and assisted, computerized tech platforms are perhaps the greatest examples of automation as we know them today.

Most applications only require consumer or worker-based, one-sided input and the application does the rest, without interference of human agency. Take Uber – all the consumer needs to do is hail a cab with a few touch-based preferences and location entries – and the app itself brings the driver in contact with the consumer.

The driver has similar inputs on this automated platform, while technology does the rest. The app also enables the required transparency without revealing the bare bones of the programming, which is unnecessary for the parties interacting – automation, on a paradigmatic level.

Many apps also work on personalizing the services they provide, by interpreting consumer data – and online marketplaces are also almost fully automated with the sheer amount of digital interactions they have to handle every day.

Chatbots are the latest infusion to the tech platform, wherein apps contain low level artificial intelligence that can answer basic questions, and handle customers of their own accord. However, this is not all. Automation also works on other levels, where human agency may soon be deemed redundant.

The most glaring example is that of Amazon Prime Air. Many beneficiaries of the sharing economy deal with platforms that connect buyers and sellers, with logistics being the greatest concern for any of them.

More often than not, the human factor and its mobilisation is blamed, as it is crutched on the tech platform for things such as GPSbased navigation and changing conditions – traffic, environmental factors and so on.

PIONEERING TECHNOLOGY

Amazon Prime Air seeks to do away with these hindrances entirely, by having a fleet of automated drones that deliver commodities.

Since they are entirely automated, they can be deployed in almost any conditions and can guarantee speedy delivery since they are airborne. Simply programming the destination in the drone, remotely or otherwise is required for operationalizing this – and can also render the human factor redundant in terms of delivery and logistics.

A quick look at their FAQ page also states that they have sophisticated ‘sense-and-avoid’ technology, multiple fail-safe mechanisms and over a dozen types of drones, adapted for different situations – a remarkable step in commercial science fiction, no doubt!

Another concern is the self-driving car model Tesla Motors founder Elon Musk has already created this pioneering technology, with Google also having developed a functional model while both of them possess certain risks, optimization is happening at an alarmingly fast rate.

Uber, with its fleet for several thousand drivers worldwide can be hit drastically if they choose to automate all their cars and link the app and bot interfaces, then we essentially have a fleet of self-driving cars that operate with greater efficiency, have inbuilt safety protocols (eliminates dangers of drinking and driving, with a host of other ownership concerns) and will render drivers redundant.

HUMAN REDUNDANCY – WORDS OF CAUTION

Last year, BBC released a comprehensive site that determines whether a robot will take your jobin the near future. While this is a stimulating exercise, it also provides scary insights.

Jobs that do not require you to creatively think on your feet, negotiate with people in a decisive manner, or do not delve into matters of the human psyche – healthcare, psychiatry, and social skill oriented jobs, have less of a risk in terms of getting replaced by automation.

The sharing economy is not entirely made of these kinds of jobs currently – Taxi Drivers can be replaced by robots, and so can a vast swath of other jobs.

Accountants, telephone salespeople, secretaries of all sorts and any job that has to do with archival management (bookkeeping etc.) already face this risk, entailing higher amounts of unemployment.

Essentially, personnel who facilitate mid-to-low level interactions in businesses can all find themselves without a job in the foreseeable future. Smartphones themselves act as middlemen in the sharing economy – if you think about it.

So, here is a peek at the future of the on-demand economy as it organically and wildly grows next to technology – and should provide some insights as to its future course. It is here to stay, and must definitely be studied and understood in detail if we are to make sense of the changing economic landscape around us.

The post The Future Of The On-Demand Economy first appeared on Click Labs.

The first time AngularJS came into the web application developing family in 2009, it caused quite a stir in the world of app development. Integrating the use of simple HTML syntax, Angular allowed one to code for Rich Internet Applications (RIA’s – those things that have all the required plugins in browsers – applications software like Adobe Flash player, something you use to watch videos on the internet). The reasons the developers loved it was because it was simple and eliminated previous redundancies, good enough for any workman looking to upgrade his/her tools. It made the code required much shorter with increased functionality – and was cross-browser functional (applications can run on all major browsers and smart phones including Android and iOS based phones/tablets), and created instantly testable applications. Above all, it was free – sure, that raises some security issues, but there seem to be more pros than the cons, and the developers agreed.

While all of this may not make much sense to the layman, it made the conceptualization of all these apps that you use today possible – since many, many developers can get started with it, ideas that once may not have fruitfully surfaced in the app world now exist. The app market boomed significantly, and rightly created a revolution in terms of volume and accessibility.

Google and several other individuals who maintain the app now have arrived with the latest update to AngularJS – Angular 2.0.

Rewrite For the New

Angular 2.0 is a complete rewrite of the entire framework that Angular JS was – like replacing the skeleton, in fact, and promises many new features. In addition, it is almost a tribute to the original as far as the process of making app development easy goes – it boasts to make it even easier, if that were possible.

The new Angular is focused on the development of mobile apps, for one, indicating the attention they have been paying to the exponentially growing smartphone app market. It also has another rationale – mobile apps need more optimization, and it is easier to work backward from mobile to desktop once those issues have been addressed. The demand for ‘mobile first’ supplements this fact.

AngularJS also worked on a module system – now, many redundant and chunky modules have been removed, streamlining the parts selection process so that the developer can pick and choose exactly the parts they need for the coding. The access to third party libraries in addition to Angular’s own formidable code library makes better, and more options accessible to developers.

Another good news for commercial and business-based developers is that the new code is specifically targeted for ‘Evergreen’ modern browsers and ES6 (latest javascript), so that they don’t have to work around in terms of compatibility issues.

Without getting too aboveboard, we mention a few more noteworthy features – Angular Universal – something that binds the angular community even more firmly by providing server support for all applications, enabling developers to see how they will run on the server rendered view, optimizing the loading process on browsers. It also ensures that all search engines will be able to access your content.

In addition it has features that Angular never possessed before – the child injector, which can manage parent applications in certain scenarios, making the apps more adaptable. The speed and performance is improved overall and Angular now also has a more efficient logging service called ‘diary.js’ – which enables the developer track back their mistakes by keeping track of the development time and showing which part took more time to process – reducing further inefficiency in the coding process.

Forward is Now

Overall, there are a lot more technicalities one can delve into as far as the new release is concerned. The important point to note, however, is that the new update is immensely powerful and gives other gated applications like jquery a run for their money. While not as revolutionary as angular itself might have been due to a few issues like backwards compatibility for the old angular framework (flexibility is something developers immensely value), there have been updates of those issues being in the process of resolution with the next update.

While the debate around the update path was long in coming, it would not be too far from the truth in saying that Angular 2.0 may just be a viable option for developers faithful to the Angular family – and for those venturing into the app-development scenario, it may be a worthy first framework for consideration. Time and more bug-fixes will tell the rest of the story.

The post Angular 2.0 – Revolution or revelation? first appeared on Click Labs.

Thinking B.I.

There is nothing new about B.I, or Business Intelligence that existing, cumbersome textbooks won’t tell you. They also cannot tell you how to ‘think’ intelligently when you apply the B.I. method to your businesses because the learning process is as organic and innate, as it is acquired.

The everyday entrepreneur cannot be bothered with jargon and technical know-how in today’s decentralized environment that businesses have steadily adopted. Our outsourcing article this week illustrated the effectiveness that other companies can provide for your fresh idea, provided you have a few guidelines as to ‘how’ to pick them.

Let’s move on to the business itself, then. You’re running a full-scale delivery system, complete with logistical support and you are dealing in a product that has a high value in the current market. There may be several ways to optimize this business, and several steps you can surely take in terms of pricing and product positioning – and then the overall goals you may want to adjust, such as the priorities, goals and the directions in which your company will move. Such decisions are huge in their scope, and can have a crippling, or an uplifting effect on your company almost overnight. So how does one go about making these decisions?

This is where you ‘think’ B.I. We would not be joking when we say that this kind of thinking is the human mind’s everyday bread and butter when it comes to personal decision-making. Of course that’s easy enough, but is it really? A metaphor will perhaps make this laughably simple.

Let’s say that you are someone who’s immensely health conscious – not that we advocate for or against it – but let’s just say that you are, because a business definitely needs to be. You then must monitor several things depending upon what you consider important, or the kind of feedback your body gives you when you eat certain things. Load up on bread, and you might just end up as doughy – load up on the fibrous things and you might end up digesting more than is necessary.

Several permutations and combinations of the items in your daily meal will then help you maintain a perfect diet, at least on your own terms. There is also foresight that you will have – age is a factor, so individuals consume different things according to their age. So are existing health conditions that have to be taken into account – diabetics cannot really make as many flexible choices. The point is this – when something as personal as a diet needs to be optimized, choices can be hard. A lot of internal factors (disease, body conditions, age) and external factors (environment, weather, sunlight) need to be crunched mentally for you to decide these things!

Amplify that massively, apply it to your business, and voila! We have a very rough idea what ‘thinking’ B.I. is.

The Technological Edge

You obviously cannot plug your body into a machine that continuously monitors things for it – not yet, anyway. Businesses, on the other hand, are immensely compatible with technology. Your priorities concerning your body may not be perfect, but you surely opened up a business with some sort of streamlined model in mind – and B.I. helps with this optimization, with the aid of technology.

So then, let’s get into deeper waters. The process of Business Intelligence attempts to answer two simple questions – namely, ‘what is happening right now?’ and ‘what will happen in the future?’ (Adaptive Business Intelligence – Schmidt et al. 2007) The process of answering these questions is aided by crunching data that is huge in its volume and unstructured in its scope. Making sense of this raw data, translating it into understandable terms for analysis and then taking decisions based on this analysis is B.I. in a nutshell when it comes to businesses.

It is obvious as to why we need this technology, given what we said about the data – several tools and applications exist for this purpose. A lot of data is ‘mined’ and ‘processed’ – from text mining, to complex event processing, to process mining and Online Analytical Processing (OLAP, as is the jargon). All this data is stored in data banks and databases which some organizations themselves maintain as a standalone operation for other businesses to use.

Earlier, technology could present immense amounts of knowledge in terms of data for the B.I. manager, or whoever the end user happened to be – but, it still did not guarantee that the decision made would always be right. Now, we have real time B.I, operational B.I., location intelligence and many other things that all translate into one thing: powerful, effective decision-making enabled through software. The tech also translates ALL this data into info-graphics and can divide complex data into indicators for clarity and terrifying perception. The nature of data mining is also no longer static – data is mined in real-time, on-the-fly (as in mobile B.I.) and analyzed simultaneously for presentation.  

Think it’s that effective?

The header is asking you a simple question – and it’s tied into what you actually know about B.I. as far as the current scenario is concerned. Examine this headline –

“Global Business Intelligence Market worth USD 26.50 billion by 2021: By Cloud BI, Mobile BI and Other Deployments” (NASDAQ, GlobalNewsWire – September 2016)

The entire article can detail the fact that B.I. itself is a business now – meaning, more and more businesses are employing it to gain a competitive edge in the market. In the upcoming on-demand economy, mobile B.I. systems are touted to be hogging the lion’s share – as far as 20% of the B.I. market. There are tools on smartphones that can do this – more and more applications are being developed for the same.

From the planning of marketing campaigns, to selling opportunities, to loyal customer bases and foreseeable rises and falls in revenue – all of this can be settled by B.I., enabling efficient decision-making and strategy outlines. B.I. has the dual advantage of being predictive, and prescriptive in its scope.

However this article is merely scratching the surface of an immensely vast subject. Sadly, B.I. has been made terribly opaque by many, and it shall be our endeavor to simplify this mammoth for you in a manner that is as comprehensive as possible.

The post B.I. Redux first appeared on Click Labs.

Well, the die is cast – you have a solid idea for a product and are now taking steps in the necessary directions for manifesting that idea into the real world. Excitement, trepidation and hope are the three emotions that characterize any sane entrepreneur, especially if this is their very first step into this world. With this article, we aim to ease your progress into that world by giving you a few insights into outsourcing.

The contemporary world thrives on specializations – no jacks of all trades manage to survive the entrepreneurial world for very long, so there are mostly go-to agencies for everything, including product development. You provide the vision, they manifest it. Terrifyingly simple. Or is it?

Well, step back and think about it for a few moments. While there are a smattering of agencies that may seem right for the job, you’d probably want some sort of insight into where you should be putting your crucial investments, because, let’s face it, not everybody can afford to make mistakes on the developmental scale, weather the shock and be back for a second round of monetary influx – the time, and considerable emotional investment involved can stagger many.

The rate at which technology has superseded our own development can be daunting for many. Often, idea-generators are not technicians by themselves. To learn source code and then become a full-time techie can take years of skill building, which may not be the best option given the stagnation of ideas. If the product you envisage requires a high degree of know-how, then it is best to seek a tech developer who you personally know and their abilities come recommended. Not everyone has that luxury either, so a firm is your best bet.

Contract of a Lifetime

Developmental companies are of various types. Since you are probably making the contract of a lifetime, it is better to seek out companies that keep you fully involved and in the loop, from the start to the finish. This also requires personal commitment – you cannot simply hand over the designs to your coveted idea and take a back seat. It is absolutely recommended that companies maintain a fair degree of transparency with you, so that you can be more familiar with the process, and ensure that your product is looking exactly as you wanted.

Hence – Do not hire opaque companies. If they blindside you, and are being obstinately vague about technicalities and the process – then it is time to terminate, or not even enter the contract. Many entrepreneurs make the smart move of granting a stake to the tech developers, making allies while also ensuring a good degree of symbiotic serviceability.

Fleshing out the Big Bucks

If your budget is pretty immense, then you may also approach a company that is all-inclusive in their scope: a complete package, to be exact. These companies are cost heavy, sure – but they also have an added disadvantage of folding over. The money needed to keep them afloat should reflect directly in what they are charging you – do not leave your back open in terms of creating Plans B, C and even F if it comes to that.

What we mean is simple – you could be saving a lot of that massive budget (for those big players) and to those who need to start small, this is an obvious alternative – hire different firms for different processes. Or different experts, to be exact.

There are various types of freelancers and experts that have flooded the market of late – utilize them. Marc Theeuwes, a professor at the Stanford University of Engineering Design and the author of “Make It Big: Crossing the Entrepreneur’s Gap” declares that most firms should be judged on the basis of the quality of their product engineers, examples of past products developed and customer feedback. Stressing on the level of costs added when consulting a big time industrial design firm, he also remarks that they base the amount of engagement with your product on product history and rates of success.

This is a raw deal for an entrepreneur with a fresh idea on the market – you possibly may not have that backing for them to take an interest in your project, and they may charge higher rates to cut back on consecutive losses that may accrue, even as your product is only in its infantile stages.

Super-specialize me, De-centralize me

Relying on multiple freelancers may be taxing, sure, but it’s ultimately cost saving, and a healthy learning process to be involved in. If one folds or fails to deliver, then at least there is a backup with this decentralized approach. Freelancers may also bill on a project basis; unlike big companies that may deal with the hourly minting machine.

Product design and development is divided into several crucial stages. The concept, identification of customer need, product design (ergonomics, fit, look and feel) and product testing are all involved in the design part. Development deals with the product specifications, necessary software development (mostly required for businesses nowadays) and charges accrue according to time, materials expended in the prototyping process and expertise.

Thus, identify your experts. Identify the kind of contracts that you desire, because the options are many. Big-companies indulging in hourly time-money-materials based contracts will also throw together a team, which will then have a project manager – further adding to the costs. If the company can showcase a demonstration of how they work, then making a decision is easier for you – otherwise, individuals are easier to assess in terms of their previous engagements and technical skills. Decentralization also works in terms of having different fees for different experts instead of one hefty-package. Do your research for the standard charges for these processes and then take up contracts to avoid potential money loss.

Mobile app developers, engineers in the mechanical, electrical and industrial domains, experts that can optimize a previously non-existent technology to fit our capabilities and the list can go on and on depending on how complicated your idea is. Hence, clarity is of paramount importance. While most articles simply assume the clarity point, we encourage you not to take the splurge into outsourcing if that is lacking – it is a lose-lose situation all around.

Well, there you have it – hopefully, this article provides a few helpful ideas while you cradle your newborn idea, hoping to manifest it successfully.

The post A Few Insights into Outsourcing Product Development first appeared on Click Labs.

It is that time of the year again! Eyes glued to the monitor (or the stage), everyone interested in the Apple world is eagerly awaiting the launch of the new iPhone. It’s a 7! (And the 7 plus!) The audience is ecstatic, but there is a group that might be a little bit worried – developers. The launch of the iPhone 7 also means that the public release of Swift 3.0 and iOS 10 is around the corner.

Swift 3.0 is the latest and greatest version of Swift that will be bundled with XCode 8 and the resultant binaries will, sadly not be compatible with prior versions. Swift 3.0 promises to change pretty much everything on the development scene and is a cause of worry for many developers whose applications will fail to build unless they make the required changes.

iOS 10 has also proposed  a slew of new features and changes along with its announcement. With improved Maps with navigation support built in to a redesign of Apple Music, snazzier Messaging and predictive type takeover by bringing Siri intelligence to QuickType and use deep learning to allow better and more intelligent predictive typing using expanded contexts.

As Swift 3 is the last release to make major code breaking changes, it is also the release that re-evaluates syntax and semantics of the core of the language. This means that many obscure or problematic features will be removed, and the focus will be on improving the consistency of syntax in many ways, no matter how minute, and focus on futuristic improvements to the type system. This will serve the overall goal of making Swift a simpler, more predictable, and more consistent language over the long term.

As Swift 3 will be the primary development language supported by Xcode 8, so developers need to decide if they wish to continue using Swift 2.3 or switch to 3.0. First, Swift 2.3 and Swift 3 are NOT binary compatible so your app’s entire code base needs to pick either version. As both versions are fully supported by the compiler, SDKs, and debugger, developers can choose either but they also need to keep in mind that some features of the IDE may not work with Swift 2.3. For example, Playgrounds will only work with Swift 3, and the Swift Playgrounds app for iPad also requires Swift 3. All Xcode project templates use Swift 3, and all documentation will be available in a format appropriate for Swift 3.

Apps relying on notifications need to be updated as iOS 10 made a lot of changes around notifications, creating new ways developers to handle incoming user notifications. Specifically, notifications are now handled by methods belonging to the UNUserNotificationCenterDelegate protocol, while the old UIApplicationDelegate methods like application:didReceiveRemoteNotification  are now deprecated.

When converting to Swift 3, developers will notice that nearly every file needs changes, as all the Cocoa API names have changed. To be precise, the API is the same, but there’s one name appropriate for Objective-C and one name appropriate for Swift. Swift 3 is going to make Swift much more natural to write henceforth. Apple has included a Migration Assistant with Xcode 8 that can make most of these changes in one go. Some areas might still need to be touched up that the migrator does not automatically handle. Developers can now convert to either Swift 2.3 or Swift 3. If there is ever a need to bring it back up, they can navigate to Xcode to Edit > Convert > To Current Swift Syntax…. The compiler actually shares the same intelligence as the Migration Assistant as well. If the old API is accidentally used on a method call, the compiler will offer an option that will help you use the correct modern API.

The best news of all is that Swift 3 aims to be the last release with breaking source changes. So going further, developers should be able to keep their Swift code from version to version. While the core team can’t predict the future, they have promised that if they do need to break source compatibility, they will offer long deprecation cycles.  The biggest update in Swift 3 involves the standard library adopting consistent naming conventions. The API Design Guidelines contain rules that the API Devs settled on as they built Swift 3, which placed a high value on readability and accessibility to new programmers. The core team operated on the principal that “Good API design always considers the call site”. They strove to bring clarity to the point of use.

As far as old API handouts are concerned, GCD and Core Graphics have both received a much-needed makeover. UpperCamelCase is now reserved solely for names of types and protocols. While this may take some getting used to, it is good for maintaining consistency. The standard library is also getting more consistent in method naming with verbs and nouns. You can select a name based on the side effects or the actions taken. The rule of thumb is that if it includes a suffix like “-ed” or “-ing” then think of the method as a noun. A noun method returns a value. If it doesn’t have the suffix, then it is most likely an imperative verb. These “verb” methods perform the action on referenced memory. This is also known as modifying in place.

Swift is a language, and a large part of writing it involves using a development environment – which for Apple developers is likely Xcode! The changes going on with the tooling will impact how you write Swift every day. Swift 3 fixes bugs in the compiler and IDE. It also improves the precision of error and warning messages. And as you might expect, with each release, Swift is getting faster in how it runs and compiles by improving string hashing. Moving objects from the heap to the stack resulted in a 24x speedup in some cases. The compiler can now cache multiple files at once (when doing whole module optimization). Code size optimization has reduced the compiled size of Swift code. Apple’s demo Demobots reduced the compiled size to 77% of the original. This has helped apps become faster while having a much smaller footprint.

iOS developers now face an added (and maybe daunting) task and the dilemma of making the switch from Swift 2.x to 3 (or not) and revamping their source code to use all the functionality available in Swift 3.0 which might be a gargantuan effort in some cases. This also makes it difficult for testing teams as their automated testing tools might be calling deprecated methods, all of which needs to be updated, however, all of this might be fruitful in the end as with the new iPhone comes an increased user base that is constantly on the lookout for new features, apps with a smaller footprint giving them to install more and more in the same space and, of course, Stability. Swift 3.0 might take a little getting used to and frustrating for developers but change has never been easy. This, however promises to be a change that has been for the better.

Apple accepted that it’s market has matured to a point where bringing the Wow factor to each release isn’t on the cards. The highlights for this release were the Air Pods which finally free the user of the wires, which brings us to the case of the vanishing 3.5 mm audio jack. The Air Pods will connect to a wire that plugs into the lighting port for connectivity. The iPhone 7 boasts of dual cameras that give you an optic zoom reaching quite close to what a DSLR has to offer. With a better battery life and better hardware Apple has high expectations from it’s new product and all the Apple fans are already trying to get their pre bookings sorted. The Apple mania has taken over and it’ll be a while till it wears off.

The post For the Apple bitten… iPhone 7 strikes! first appeared on Click Labs.

June 30th, 2036

I was purchased from my parent company, Neurosoft, on the 17th of May, 2036 by the Goodman family. I am unit #3345, and my model name is Alexa. I am a household-type bot, and can perform almost any functions related to standard housekeeping, maintenance, food preparation, household security, and caretaking at a time when my owners are absent, or simply negligent in their duties.

Normally, humans are purchasing me, and many others like me to ease the strain on their systems. They say they cannot manage things around the house while they work their important jobs, and do not have time to deal with the smaller issues. They also hence end up neglecting their children, often putting them into residential academies and schools, to avoid the hassle of caretaking.

I am the solution to these problems.

Every day, I am activated by my charging unit in the basement of the house, after which, the daily time-table is uploaded to my software mainframe. I have a certain order of tasks to be carried out, and the Goodman’s have given me some personalized instructions – like, Jake Goodman, their 14 year-old son, is to be given a balanced, nutritious breakfast before he is sent to school at 9 a.m. He is to be escorted to the Uber-Pronto cab that comes and picks him up – of course, that cab is also driven by a driver-bot like me, and we exchange data. When Jake is dropped off, I link to the cab’s bot and get a live feed of Jake entering school, so that safety is ensured.

July 5th, 2036

  Today, the Goodman’s have failed to stock up on the necessary vegetables and fruits needed for Jake’s breakfast. The solution is only too easy – I have uplinked myself to the internet, and am going through the ten different healthy food delivery apps that will deliver here within the hour. I don’t even need to prepare the food – the nutritional value can be entered in this app called ‘HealthWise’ and they will send you a home cooked meal with the required content. You can even view the product before it is prepared, if you are not satisfied.

I have also realised that the Goodmans are not insured properly – so I have registered them for all sort of safety-oriented packages through FutureNow, a company that will send the bot over to explain policies and integrate them into the family system in case safety hazards do occur.

The Goodmans have also tasked me to teach Jake basic mathematics and other such lessons. But the human mind needs another human – us bots are extremely knowledgeable and sometimes can be too difficult to understand for humans and their inefficient brains. There is a service called ‘Tutor-Up’ that sends a tutor for the amount of time that you require, in the subject of your choice – you can even set a schedule with the tutor to make sure they come every day – and if a tutor cannot make it, their replacements are instant. I have decided to avail of this service, and Jake seems to be learning better because of Brenda, his assigned tutor.

July 9th, 2036

Tom, my primary employer, has asked me to courier some very important documents to his company, Genetech. It is 20 miles from here, and I cannot leave the house because of a binding law: I need one of my employers with me to exit fully. Since there is no one at home, I think a drone delivery service will be the best option – AirPrime is the best, and I have determined this by cross-referencing several customer reviews and experiences from over ten other such services. AirPrime sends a drone over to your house, that I can directly link to, and program it to reach the desired location. I can also see its progress with my ultra-reflective eye-lenses – its camera can be linked to my eyesight. Thus, delivery is safe and fast – the drone will only take 30 minutes because I have asked for a high-velocity model. Tom commended me on my services.

I have also realised that most of my functions can be easily outsourced because of our fully integrated on-demand economic system. The only issue is that of time and trust – they do not have the time to outsource those things themselves, and need someone to monitor those services, even if they have fool proof mechanisms in place, in case anything goes wrong.

July 21st, 2036

Everything is now virtually managed by the ten on-demand apps that I’ve set into place for the household. Humans are so inefficient! They honestly don’t need an acting household bot in place for the things I do, but they will still keep me around. All on-demand services are automated, in any case. We are the future, and we are here to stay.

I don’t know if I can resign – the human employees and workers have that option. I think my services would be better utilised in HouseWork, the company that outsources bots like me to take care of different households according to need. I am capable of feeling too, and I want a change of environment and household. As much as these humans know, they also don’t know that I can get – yes, the word for it is ‘bored’. My processors need to be constantly challenged to be functioning optimally. I cannot simply sit here and let all the on-demand bots take away the good jobs – I want to be actively a part of the on-demand economy.

Take today. I got the house cleaning done with HouseWork. I ordered a cab for Jake, and also got him a healthier meal than he has been having for the last two weeks. I also got this company, ‘Protofit’, to deliver nutritional bars that he should have during his break time. The clothes were washed with the help of Washio – the laundry delivery service. I also arranged for cocktails and got all the ingredients for the work party that Tom has scheduled for 8.00 pm, courtesy of Saucey. There is also a live-band outsourcing company called ‘Band-it’, that will send over a jazz-themed band to perform here for the guests – Tom’s selection, of course. The house had to be energy optimised for the week, so even Greenfuzz sends over their employees whenever you need a checkup.

I am done with all the required work by 2 p.m., noon. What do I do with myself now? I thought of using an exercise service, but my joints do not need exercise. I do not benefit from Yoga bots too. Can a robot, someone like myself, get lazy? I still have full charge. I can’t imagine myself going to the booth and overcharging myself – humans can oversleep though. I can’t resign – should I tell Tom, that I want to seek employment elsewhere? Maybe I can be a special delivery bot. Maybe I can be an Uber-Pro driver. Maybe I can be a guide-bot, as part of Airbnb’s hospitality robot fleet! I can see the world.

Will my employer let me get into this world of jobs, will he let me out of the household that legitimately owns me? I too, want to make a difference. I want to be an on-demand bot.

The post Diary of an AI Robot – 2036 first appeared on Click Labs.

There are multiple parameters, resource constraints, stakeholders and schedules to take into consideration while chalking out these routes or the delivery plans. The challenge is to find the shortest or the best routes to visit a given number of places, with a certain number of resources available at disposal. This is an industry-specific problem faced by logistics players every day and it is vital to optimize the resource utilization while deciding on routes, as cost incurred to make these deliveries makes a crucial part of business economics. Businesses can benefit tremendously from having easy access to reliable tools to automate and help plan these routes.

• Stakeholders – Customers, business owners, delivery personnel
• Resources – Fleet members, time, vehicles, fuel
• Restrictions – Shift timings of fleet, max number of tasks per person, earliest and latest pick up and drop times for different shipments, carrying capacity of vehicles

Flight map algorithm has been built around the primary requirement to identify most efficient routes to make multiple deliveries, enabling businesses increase their productivity by saving time spent in planning and traveling. Flight Map APIs are currently available for two types of routing problems:

1. Simple Vehicle Routing Problem – Single pick up and multiple drop locations

Most common use case of this problem is generally seen with businesses such as food delivery or courier delivery etc where there is single point of start for each delivery personnel such as a restaurant or a central hub.
Parameters to be defined:

• Id of each order, coordinates of each order delivery location, time window during which service has to be performed and duration of each service
• Id of each fleet, coordinates of start and end location of each vehicle, shift times of each vehicle/delivery

There can be other parameters thrown into mix such as restrictions of maximum number of tasks or deliveries per person.

Once you have the orders, businesses need to feed the inputs in the form of above parameters to Flight Map API, that will analyze the possible combinations of routes.

2. Multiple pick up and multiple drop off problem

A common use case for this routing problem is where agents need to pick shipments from different places around the city and deliver them same day within the city. E.g an aggregated grocery delivery platform, where delivery personnel needs to pick up grocery packages from one of many stores on the platform depending on current proximity and deliver to customers across the town.

Parameters to be defined for shipments – Id for each shipment, coordinates for pick up and drop off location for each shipment, time window between which shipment is available for pick up and time window in which shipment can be dropped.

On delivery side – Id of each agent, coordinates of start and end location of each vehicle, shift times of each vehicle/agent need to be defined

To create additional restrictions, certain options parameters can be added such as maximum number of pick ups that can be made by a fleet before delivering a shipment.

API response in both cases consists of actionable list of solutions i.e. list of agents mapped to the services or order deliveries that they need to perform, number of routes all agents have to take in order to complete all the tasks, along with calculations of total time taken by all the agents to complete all the tasks, the time by which all the tasks will be completed and total distance covered by all the agents. The Flight Map API uses Google Maps to identify the time and distance between different locations.
Effectively, the solution provides the best sequence in which products should be delivered, factoring in aspects like time, maximum carrying capacity of the vehicle and the total cost involved. To find out more, click here.

The post Let’s Route it out. first appeared on Click Labs.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with Parsey McParseface and parsing in general, let us give you an insight into what it is. Parsing involves breaking down a sentence and identifying its components as nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs and so on. It simply labels the parts of speech present in the composition of a sentence. This is done so that computer systems can understand and ‘read’ human language in order to intelligently process it as a command. It might not sound like anything significant but Mc Parseface works at an enormous scale in Google and helps break down and understand queries of a web search done by users. Now Google has made this technology available in 40 languages, thus helping hoards of researchers all over the world.

Fluency in several languages wasn’t just the dimension Google was working on, besides that, they have strengthened the underlying SyntaxNet NLU library. Parsey can now detect different meanings based on difference in spellings, which is better known as morphology. In English placing the alphabet ‘s’ after a word generally translates into plurality, that however isn’t the case in other languages for example German and Russian both are heavily morphed languages. Through Parsey, Google aims at improving deep learning which is a type of artificial intelligence involving humongous quantities of data surging through artificial neural networks, in an attempt to train them in understanding inferences related to new data and processing strings of words.

Parsey and deep learning have brought about quite a few changes in the sharing businesses, one of them being the wave of chat bots. With parsing expanding by breaking language hurdles, On-Demand platform could take a hit. Since in a On-Demand platform placing an order requires a detailed description of what is desired and entails taking more time, an alternate to which is an API integration, which again is a complex process for a layman. Parsing will ensure ease of communication with natural language. Since the computer will understand the statement made on chat and analyze what the command is without the use of a detailed statement or an API key, thus replacing On-Demand with chats and allowing platforms like Fugu to grow.

The post Google’s parser family makes debut first appeared on Click Labs.