10 ways to effectively leverage Location-based Services for any business

One could observe revolution in location-based technologies during the last several years. The popularity of personal navigation devices as well as mapping services, for example, Google Maps in both internet and mobile versions has made many parts of society used to certain location-based ideas and their utilization.

Without the input of location data these days, no mobile experience is complete. It is the driving force behind some of the most widely used mobile apps which are used for geosocial networking, retail, and real estate searches, navigation and travel, mobile marketing and advertising etc. Location-based services (LBS) use real-time geo-data from a smartphone to provide information, entertainment or security. Location-based services tightly coupled with Google maps and other prominent map service providers via API integration to offer services optimization.

Use this web link to learn more on location Based Services and things can be done using it - https://www.optisolbusiness.com/location-based-services #Geolocation #googlemaps

There are multiple ways in which the LBS (Location Based Services) can be used. Below mentioned are key aspects and ways to effectively leverage LBS (Location Based Services) for any business.

Localized Search: Local search is the use of specialized Internet search engines that allow users to submit geographically constrained searches against a structured database of local business listings. Typical local search queries include not only information about "what" the site visitor is searching for (such as keywords, a business category, or the name of a consumer product) but also "where" information, such as a street address, city name, postal code, or geographic coordinates like latitude and longitude.

City Guides: The increase in the use of mobile phones has made it easier to provide different applications available to the users `on the go'. They are designed to be easy to operate. All points of interest/tourist places are marked on the map. This helps to discover cities in a very individual and unique way. With this idea, you can easily find all insights of a city - with GPS and route map to it.

Location-Based Advertising: Location-based advertising (LBA) is a new form of advertising that integrates mobile advertising with location-based services. The technology is used to pinpoint consumers location and provide location-specific advertisements on their mobile devices. There are two types of location-based services in general: push and pull. The push approach is more versatile and in the pull approach, users can directly search for information by entering certain keywords.

Task Management: Task management is the process of managing a task through its life cycle. It involves planning, testing, tracking, and reporting. Task management can help either individual achieve goals, or groups of individuals collaborate and share knowledge for the accomplishment of collective goals. Effective task management requires managing all aspects of a task, including its status, priority, time, human and financial resources assignments, recurrence, dependency, notifications and so on. These can be lumped together broadly into the basic activities of task management.

GPS & Map Navigation: Almost all smartphones now incorporate GPS receivers. This has been driven both by consumer demand and by service suppliers. GPS or Global Positioning System is a satellite navigation system that furnishes location and time information in all climate conditions to the user. GPS provides continuous real-time, 3-dimensional positioning, navigation, and timing worldwide.

Route Optimization: Route optimization is the process of using software to find the most cost-efficient route, given specific parameters such as destinations, fleet size, and costs. Route optimization solutions can quickly run various scenarios to find the best solution to a fleet's routing needs. Route Optimization software can quickly test various 'what-if' scenarios and work with business constraints like- vehicle availability, traffic congestion, suitable rider, etc. to provide the best possible route.

Delivery Scheduling: Delivery schedule is a business metric used to calculate the timeliness of deliveries from suppliers. It is a commonly used supply chain metric and forms part of the Quality, Cost, Delivery group of performance indicators. All activities that must be carried out before the goods can be delivered to the customer are considered during the delivery schedule. Ability to analyze requests for delivery or order by order to consider the delivery schedule and present options for the delivery appointment window.

Real-Time Tracking: Real-time tracking is made possible by the reporting frequency of the real-time GPS tracking device. When updates are sent frequently, a dispatcher or fleet manager can get an accurate sense of where a vehicle is and when it’s expected to arrive at its destination. This feature is available on devices that utilize real-time tracking. One of the major benefits of GPS tracking is that a business can view vehicle progress in real-time. Such updates put a business indirect control of vehicles en route, allowing the company to make better decisions and improve customer service.

Proof of Delivery: Proof of delivery (POD) is a method to establish the fact that the recipient received the contents sent by the sender. Proof of delivery becomes very important when legal and financial documents are to be exchanged between two parties. In the United States, DHL, UPS, and FedEx, as well as the US postal service (USPS), provide proof of delivery. Commercial fleet operators also need to be able to confirm proof of delivery of goods to their customers.

Task Completion: Task completion updates can be done real-time once the assigned task is being completed. Using the GPS, the service provider and end-users can acknowledge the fact of getting the assigned task completed successfully. This shall make sure of the assigned task being scheduled and completed on time and as per end-users request.

MarketsandMarkets projects the Location-Based Services (LBS) and Real-Time Location Systems (RTLS)market to grow from USD 16.0 billion in 2019 to USD 40.0 billion by 2024, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 20.1% during the forecast period.

In addition to the above mentioned, there are other features and functionalities can be used to its fullest potential when integrated with the Location-Based Services. To know and learn more on the same, please visit us at www.optisolbusiness.com

Top Five Cloud Computing Predictions of 2019

As the competition grows, the industry is expected to see the biggest cloud providers. The Low-cost infrastructure coupled with high-value development services is making the cloud as a new enterprise digital application platform. The spending on the cloud now is much faster than that was predicted a few years ago.

Forrester predicted that cloud computing would radically accelerate enterprise transformation everywhere. The future can't be seen, however, it can be predicted by the current trends and usage. Gartner calls this the second decade of cloud computing. The last decade witnessed an increase in cloud adoption across the industry.

The prediction is that with changing times, businesses need to change their strategies and way of working if they want to survive or really grow in the future. We've listed a few trends/predictions that are likely to happen.

For more details on Cloud computing and infrastructure, kindly visit us at www.optisolbusiness.com. You can also write to us at info@optisolbusiness.com

1. Increase in Enterprise cloud Spending

The spending on the could technologies will go high as companies willing to modernize existing apps and processes. This adoption is to make use of new data insights derived from loads of data collected from legacy systems. With the new investments into SaaS apps, using new cloud-native techs like Kubernetes, containers, and functions, organizations are looking to go the extra mile and empower themselves digitally.

2. Hybrid Cloud Platforms

Today companies are inclined towards hybrid-cloud environments. This helps in splitting data and workloads between on-premise clouds and public providers or enterprise managed cloud providers. Big players are gearing up for multi-cloud environments. The reason for this is to make use of multiple public cloud providers to outsource it to the vendor who will manage everything.

3. Cloud services that suit everyone

Cloud computing service providers offer capabilities according to different models such as: infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) – including specialized PaaS types such as integration platform as a service (iPaaS) and data platform as a service (dPaaS) – blockchain as a service (BaaS), software as a service (SaaS), mobile backend as a service (mBaaS), function as a service (FaaS), as well as serverless computing.

4. Increased Cloud Deployment

Companies can expect an increase in third party, commercial and enterprise developers and API exchanges. Off late, close to 65 percent of the new applications are being built with the cloud in mind, which expects to see more and more resources going towards cloud development.

5. Traditional Infrastructure to go away

For new services and functionality, companies adopt cloud applications. Having said that, we also expect these older systems remain in place. From next year and beyond, the legacy applications will be enhanced by using the cloud functionality including new database technologies, edge computing solutions for IoT, AI and machine learning capabilities to help bring new life into old functionality.

The cloud computing market is forecast to reach $411bn by 2020 according to new research from global communications provider CenturyLink and Statista. Today the global cloud computing market is worth $180bn in vendor revenues for SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS with the market growing by 24 percent annually. Estimated at just $24.65 billion in 2010, it has already surpassed the $100 billion mark and looking to reach $150 billion by the end of 2020.

Gartner Projects Cloud Services Industry to Grow Exponentially Through 2022. The worldwide public cloud services market is projected to grow 17.5 percent in 2019 to total $214.3 billion, up from $182.4 billion in 2018, according to Gartner, Inc.

Angularjs Fundamentals and Implementations with MVC Frameworks

Angularjs Fundamentals and Implementations with MVC Frameworks

Angular JS is becoming the preferred Java Script Framework for building high performance web applications, especially building JavaScript Single Page Applications. The features and the continuous updates happening in AngularJS world is helping developers spend more time delivering features to the users rather than developing the framework architecture.

The built-in features like Services, Dependency Injection, Directives etc. makes AngularJS more comfortable for the developer community building a Rich Internet web application especially SPA. In addition, AngularJS lays the path of further web application development offering native DOM templates, web components and 2 way data binding.

The community support for AngularJS is also growing massively. If you look at the trends in master commits in GITHub, Issue closures, forks etc. comparing to other frameworks like Backbone and Ember, AngularJS shows a clear upward trend. It is also backed by Google, developing some important products on top of it.

AngularJS thus leads the pack of other JS frameworks both in terms of features and community support offering tools to the web developers to develop applications that will result in improved productivity, increased testability, increased maintainability, improved performance and debugging.

At OptiSol, AngularJS is the preferred JS framework developing web applications across different technology platforms - .NET, JAVA, PHP and Ruby on Rail. Stay tuned in for further updates on How Angular JS works with various other MVC web frameworks like Ruby on Rails, ASP.NET MVC, Yii, CAKEPHP and Spring IoC. 

For more info, please visit our website: http://www.optisolbusiness.com/insight/angular-js-fundamentals-and-implementations-with-mvc-frameworks

Yii 2.0 Beta Benefits and Feature Video

Yii Framework 2.0 Benefits and Features

Yii 2.0 Beta

Yii 2.0 Beta is a complete rewrite of Yii1.1, the current stable version. The current version of Yii framework was heavily influenced by Ruby on Rails. It is a clean adaptation of the great features of RoR to the PHP fraternity. Yii framework 2.0 is a much comprehensive web development framework, aimed to take the framework to the next orbit. The team has clearly developed Yii 2.0 keeping Yii’s philosophy of adapting the best practices and features of other web frameworks. Some of the interesting features of what Yii 2.0, compared to Yii 1.1 is discussed in the sections below.

Namespace: The foremost and very important change in Yii 2.0 is the use of Namespaces. All the core classes are now namespaced. The class names do not use the “C” prefix. The use of Namespace improves the way Yii codes are written avoiding or limiting ambiguity in class names, evading in-identifier grouping for hierarchy and naming conflicts. The Yii class loader lets the developers use any core class of Yii without explicitly including that class file.

Component and Object The component class CComponent in Yii 1.1 is now broken into two classes – Object Class and Component Class. The basic data structures are provided in Object Class, configuration and the property feature. Component Class extends from the Object class adding events and behaviors. These way developers can now use Objects for classes that represent basic data structures while component is used for application components implementing higher logic with events and behaviors.

Object Configuration is simplified, introducing a uniform way of configuring objects. Any descendant class of Object should declare its constructor.

Events definition no longer needs an on- method. The developer is free to use any event names and attach a handler to the event. The handlers can also be attached with parameters to be used at a later stage, enabling the use of global events.

Path Alias is extended to both file/directory paths and URLs. It is also closely related with Namespaces.

View Yii 2.0 introduces a View class to represent the view part of the MVC pattern. It can be configured globally through the "view" application component. It is also accessible in any view file via $this. This is one of the biggest changes compared to 1.1: $this in a view file no longer refers to the controller or widget object. It refers to the view object that is used to render the view file. To access the controller or the widget object, you have to use $this->context now.

For partial views, the View class now includes a render () function. This creates another significant change in the usage of views compared to 1.1: $this->render (...)does not output the processed content; you must echo it yourself.

For more information about the yii 2.0 beta version release, please visit: http://www.optisolbusiness.com/insight/yii-2-0-benefits-and-features

OptiSol Business Solutions Overview

Friday Fury - Movie OptiSol. We may not get nominated for Oscar or
Golden-globe but we will get nominated for a place for sure in your mind
and heart. Please watch a quick YouTube movie on OptiSol Business
Solutions, our capabilities, portfolio etc. Fan club initiatives welcome
:)

For more information, Please visit: OptiSol Business Solutions Overview

Art of Startup Business Consulting

No ideas are small, but equally it is unfortunate that many a times these ideas are stuck with its initial inertia on finding its trigger point. It’s about where to start, how to start, when to start, who to start and many more questions. It involves writing a business plan to evolve revenue models, forecasting an operations blue print and identifying the break even points and ROIs’. And this list goes endless. This is more prominent with internet based start up ideas that may need a good mix of online and offline strategies.

However the solution lays in the fact that one need to look at these issues from within and they will be surprised to admit the fact that many of these challenges they perceive to have need not to be tackled by them. As owners of ideas that have a fair share of their heart, their role is to keep dreaming high and rely on partners with necessary execution expertise, who can come along with them in realizing these ideas. It necessitates a need for these partners to possess broader breadth in business analysis, and deeper IT expertise. It is about an ability to combine unconventional methods, business wisdom and proven standards & methods to propose an evolutionary solution. The outcome will be a superior framework to evolve programs for platform (technology), data and marketing. We call it Start up Business Consulting Framework!

At a platform level, it is about associating the expected features list of the beta launch on a suitable technology stack that goes in line with the time to market and TCO. At an execution level, it necessitates deeper business analysis expertise that can transform ideas into actionable programs. It is about providing a peer level champion from these partner organization who typically engages very closely with the client team. This forms a foundation phase, as high level functional description of ideas gets transformed into a system level use cases that shall be implemented. This is an excellent way to start the program since this gives visibility on feature sets that shall be available as part of the beta launch.. However one needs to realize that this is just the beginning and they need to have good blue print of operations roadmap post this beta launch. The key here is to have a comprehensive online marketing program and data management program.

As a business consultant, it is imperative that the consulting partner takes a significant role in both these dimensions of marketing and data management. On the marketing side, it is about how an online business enterprise fares though the following life cycle,

• Building the base channel – membership / subscription models, building a product merchandize , value added service delivery models, promotions etc
• Building revenue models / channels – Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and web analytics
• Building a framework to Know Your Customer (KYC) – Customer loyalty management, CRM management, & Campaigns Management

Finally one cannot set aside the need to have a good program for data management as data is the king always! For an online business model to stand tall amidst peer competition, it is its ability to maintain the most recent and real time data. Consider a case of an online portal that does the price comparison for a product from different merchants. The result view of price for a product across different merchants need to be real time since there are possibilities that some merchants may provide discounts / promotion at that point of time and the online portal still need to capture those. This will be the essence of the robustness about the solution. It may happen via an online channel where the merchants can upload their data or by having comrades on the field, which does the work of collecting these data and uploading it into the application. Hence irrespective of the fact that the product data can come from both online and offline channels, it is a must that a comprehensive quality management program exists to make sure the data are accurate and managed in real time.

At one level above the above said transactions, data program also need to have an ability to gain insights on these real time data. It can be customer data, transaction data, web traffic data etc that needs to be stratified to identify and isolate cohesive data groups. This will involve interesting and multi dimensional data analysis that will result in enterprise level metrics. Hence it is definitely an icing in the cake if the consulting partner brings in the necessary process management skills to define a back office framework for these enterprises. When you are a start up, you may think you can manage it yourself along with your other founding members but equally the irony is that you wish you grow at a rate that cannot be managed by you and your team. Remember, as your enterprises grow, your data grows and so is your business process overheads. So better lay the platform ahead so you don’t get into a data trap.

At OptiSol we understand these dynamics and bring in expertise in Technology outsourcing, Business Functions Outsourcing and Online Marketing Management. We have created many success stories as a technology partner to internet startups. This includes building prototypes that has facilitated our clients to generate investments and it has been a growth story since then.

Our Business Consulting Services are

• Start up Consulting
• eBusiness Channel Management
• Business Process Outsourcing Management Services

For more details please visit us at www.optisolbusiness.com

Leverage ZKoss Framework for RIA

Introduction

ZK (Zkoss) is a leading enterprise application development framework to build great modern JAVA web applications. The framework provides intuitive tools that span the entire application development lifecycle, including the UI design, prototyping, development and deployment. The framework also provides libraries for integrating with enterprise components like Spring, JSF and JSP tags. With wonderful community support coupled with the backing of an enterprise for support and value added services, ZK is fast becoming a framework of choice for Developers.

Why ZK?
The choice of an application development framework is largely made by the developers or architects of the application. Mostly, the needs of developers like the available tools, libraries, architecture support, flexibility, community support are considered in choosing the framework. ZK provides solution to most of the needs of the developers. In addition, ZK also takes care of the business needs by providing a wonderful support infrastructure.

Some of the reasons why ZK framework is considered the best choice for both developers and businesses are:

• Industry Leading MVC Architecture using defacto jQuery and JSON along with transparent Ajax communications
• End to End productivity tools from UI design to Deployment
• Rich Modular UI for developing Rich Internet Applications
• Great Community Support
• Back up Support by a dedicated team
• Extensions to enterprise frameworks like Spring, JSF
• Proven Security Standards

Technical Overview of ZK

The application allows the developers to write their applications are pure java and optionally have fine grained control over the client. The architecture also enables the developers to use, extend and customize ZK’s fundamentals quickly and efficiently. The event-driven model of ZK, facilitates in developing rich internet applications using pure java, thus reflecting desktop programming experience to the clients without the usual concerns of java script, cross browser compatibilities etc.

The extensive set of ZK components varying from UI Components with polymorphic functionality, extension components and core components enable rapid application development and deployment.

The diagram below explains the logical components of ZK.

The MVC pattern enforces the decoupling of View, Model, and Controller, making applications more flexible to change and easier to build.

The View can be implemented using ZK User Interface Markup Language without any programming; meanwhile, ZK automatically wires the UI components and user events to members in the Controller class.

The server-centric solution to Ajax brings a productivity boost, robustness, and security to Web application development; while client side solutions endows Web applications with greater controllability and the ability to leverage client side resources.

Sample Architecture on ZK

OptiSol Business Solutions is one of the pioneers to adapt ZK framework for developing enterprise class java web applications. OptiSol has developed Rich Internet Applications based on ZK/Spring/JSF/Hibernate.


This section provides an overview on the logical architecture of one of the applications developed in ZK by OptiSol team. The application extended ZK components and customized for the application need. The application was built on ZK/JSF/Hibernate/MySql stack with integration to Lucene Search.

1.  The web components are accessed via Browser Extensions (for limited functionality) as well as ZKoss UI Components (for full feature access).
2. ZKoss being a framework based on MVC, the controller objects direct the UI requests to the Data Access layer via DAOs (Data Access Object) and DTOs (Data Transfer Object).
3. The Data Access Layer has two components, Hibernate ORM as the Persistence Layer and MySQL DB as the storage layer.
4. The access between MySQL and Hibernate ORM is handled through the Hibernate configurations stored as XMLs.
5. The Lucene Search Engine interacts with Lucene indices to fetch the search results based on instructions from the DAO

Source: http://www.optisolbusiness.com/insight/leverage-zkoss-framework-for-ria

How Open Source Frameworks Help Startups Reduce Time to Market?

How many times have you seen a portal launched with the idea that you have been thinking about? Or a feature that you thought would be great has been launched by another portal? It is not just great idea that defines success! It depends very much on how soon you can take the idea to the market.  Especially, if you are a web based startup, winning in the market place requires your development team to put the portal on the market ahead of the competition. And yes, you need to do this with bootstrapped budget.

While reduced time to market and limited budget are business challenges, Web Startups also have different technology challenges to face.  Not all businesses have in-house capability to meet the technical challenges. In fact, many of the novel ideas for web based startups have come from people with non-technical background. This paper attempts to provide an overview on the critical technical factors to be considered in launching a web portal and discusses the advantages of using Open Source Frameworks to meet the business and technology challenges.

Critical technical Factors

Security, Maintainability and Usability are three critical technical factors to be considered while launching a web based portal.

Security: Be aware of the latest web application vulnerabilities and make sure that the application architecture provides the necessary protective mechanisms to guard against the web application vulnerabilities. Protecting customer data is a critical factor and the businesses should ensure that the data transacted and stored in the portal are secure against any web application vulnerabilities. Also, the application architecture should provide the ability to adapt against emerging vulnerabilities in the future.

Maintainability: The people in the development team are subject to change. You can’t have any one in the team granted for the business. Men may come Men may Go, But the business has to go on forever! You may be outsourcing or insourcing the development. In any case, the code developed by must be maintainable not just by the programmers who developed but by any other programmer. 

Usability: The key winning proposition of a web based portal is on the usability. The standards and technology for usability change continuously. Most of the new technological changes are now happening on the Usability. The architecture that we choose should be able to implement the latest usability standards using cutting edge technologies to keep up to the market.

With the bootstrapped budget, necessity to launch the portal with reduced time to market, Startups don’t have enough time, in some cases, enough capability, in evaluating and finalizing a custom application architecture that would meet the business and technology challenges i.e help development teams develop a portal with robust architecture with reduced time and restricted budget.

Solution

Open Source Frameworks for Rich Internet Application Development is the key solution to the business and technology challenges faced by the startups. A web application framework is a software framework that is designed to support the development of dynamic websites, web applications and web services. The framework aims to alleviate the overhead associated with common activities performed in web application development. For example, many frameworks provide libraries for database access frameworks and session management, and they often promote code reuse.

The frameworks offer robust architectures to take care of security by the built-in security libraries for managing web application vulnerabilities; Offers a defined standards for development with documentation on the architecture implementation and hence enables maintainability by different programmers; Evolves based on the latest technology standards through the contribution of the community using the frameworks and hence always has updated versions for implementing latest technology trends; Allows rapid application development by eliminating the overheads in application development.

Backed by the support and contributions of the worldwide technology community, developer patronage and proven implementations, Open Source Frameworks have matured architecture that will meet the technology and business challenges. With in-built utilities, libraries, widgets and other necessary development support components, it reduces the time required to implement a feature. Thus helping the start-ups launch the portal with reduced time to market, within budget backed with a robust architecture.

Choosing the right development framework, matching the needs and budget will ensure half the success for the start-ups. Stay Tuned for the next topic on how to choose the right framework.

OptiSol Reiterating Its Focus On SME’s with Revised Positioning

OptiSol has re-engineered its service orientation and our website has also been re-designed to reflect the changes. Our approach has been built on SME engagement framework with right balance towards commercial and open source platforms. Emphasizing further to our commitment on solution based services; our corporate logo has been updated with our core attribute as Solutions | Services.

Our services have been consolidated under four focus areas:

• Enterprise Content Management
• Enterprise Solutions
• Technology Outsourcing
• Professional Services

The focus areas have been mapped to our technology capabilities and as highlighted earlier, it has been a right mix of commercial and open source based platforms. This right mix of offerings enables us to provide a solution that would meet their specific needs and wants. This helps us to uniquely address each customer requirements depending on their value chain. We have built capabilities to understand the unique needs of startups and how to differentiate that over the operational/business needs of SMEs.

We have built specific packages for Startups for their web content management, workflow management and eBusiness strategies. As an Internet based startup, your initial focus would on a web content management platform to disseminate your business proportion.

Considering that it is a startup, OptiSol maps the specific needs to the available open source ECM platforms and implements a WCM system with a robust backend to manage your future needs. This would help you to enhance visibility and customer awareness to generate traffic and revenue.

OptiSol also helps you to establish your eBusiness channel and assists in strategies around it from techno-functional perspective. This involves multi faceted approach that involves technology as well as organized marketing campaigns. OptiSol would be able to help you in this initial step through our start up consulting business unit. We have expertise in building working prototypes that would facilitate you to scout for Venture Capitalists or Business Associates. We have created many success stories as a technology partner to internet startups. We have built working prototypes that facilitated our clients to generate investments and business partners and it has been a growth story since then.

For SMEs we have a basket of content management solutions both in open source and commercial platforms. Our Enterprise Solutions suite has CRM packages, eBusiness solutions, Sharepoint and BI & DW solutions.

Our application design and development capabilities would help SMEs to build their custom application leveraging our technology capabilities across platforms.

To consolidate, our orientation towards SMEs is built on a need based solution approach leveraging technical expertise on commercial as well as open source platforms. We take our customers through a typical tailoring process keeping them informed on the decision points and choice events. This again, reiterates our orientation towards solution based services with a partnership approach. This reorientation has been infused down the pyramid and will reflect across our communications, development methodologies etc.

Please visit us at http://www.optisolbusiness.com/insight/optisol-reiterating-its-focus-on-smes-with-revised-positioning or Email us at info@optisolbusiness.com for further details.