Category: Technology

Mobile e-commerce or shopping and transacting on a portable device has become very popular with the people of this age. With the advanced technology that is used in manufacturing these hand-held devices such as smartphones, tablets and the like, the stage is set for mobile e-commerce to be given a serious thought in order to reap rich benefits from stores of popular brands. E-commerce is surely popular, but there is a need for businesses to look into mobile e-commerce too as it has an immense potential to eclipse the former. Mobile users may buy products while using apps on their portable devices or browsing on many popular browsers such as iOS or Safari. Here are a few popular trends that are and can be witnessed in 2013: 1. Emergence of Windows phones Windows phones are gaining over iOS as Apple products have lost their exclusivity so much so that they are available in supermarket stores such as WalMart. Apple has lost its mojo to woo people who look for the next magical device. This has unfolded since the demise of Steve Jobs and the Apple consumer has lost his connect with the electronics giant. Lately, it has become increasingly dependent on the loyalty of its customers. This signals a trend that tech-savvy people are getting increasingly besotted with the Windows phone and OS- Windows phone shipments grew more than 133 percent year over year and have almost doubled this year. Such trends signify the emergence of new e-commerce software that are compatible with Windows’ phones and rely on the Windows OS. Though it should be noted that smartphones with Windows OS do not have innumerable apps such as its competitive rivals like Android and iOS- apps being the sole factor for wielding complete control over this huge mobile market, Windows phones are fast growing and keeping up pace. 2. Android customers have limited means Many people buying Android smartphones go for it mainly because of the price criterion. This is because Google wants to command over a large share of the market and has tied up with a number of vendors that are increasingly identified with the common man. This quantity over quality precedence has made Android not suitable for mobile e-commerce. For Android lovers, their gadgets are a substitute to the high-priced Apple’s products in the market. This indicates that these buyers want the ‘cheap and somewhat best’ phones and thus never compromise over the price, even if they are a few dollars more. Android has ended up garnering a huge market share nonetheless, the popularity of Android is a fad. To sum this all up with the mobile e-commerce market, there is no doubt that Android phone users do not have the wherewithal to purchase products on the stores online and hence brands have to ignore them. They may even browse and hover over the products for the sheer fun sake of it and not necessarily buy these products. This can be put in the mall culture parlance as ‘window shopping’. Entertaining these visitors is detrimental to the brands’ profitability. 3. Increasing importance of iOS There is irrefutable evidence to prove that iOS is becoming increasingly important for e-commerce. iPads are becoming popular for online purchases. The moment iPad was introduced, the visits from traditional desktop and laptop browsers became less frequent to e-commerce sites. They dropped from 92.33 percent to 81.60 percent in one year and mobile devices like the iPad have doubled their market share. This growing prominence of iOS on the iPad is because of the fact that iPad has a comparatively larger screen to view the products listed on the e-commerce apps. This larger display of the products compounded with the clutter-free screen that is friendly to capacitive or resistive touches make the iPad the preferred device for e-commerce needs. 4. Mobile web design getting better Mobile web design is getting better day by day. The browsers are also keeping up with time and adapting to consumers’ needs. For example, Nokia has adapted to people’s needs and has come up with a new version for its handset users. It has incorporated a number of user suggestions that it receives from the feedback button. It has launched a newer version of its browser wherein it supports multitasking or in a more stricter sense, supports the browsing in multiple tabs that largely remained a handicap to its earlier phones. This is a welcome move as the user can open multiple windows simultaneously and can limit the use of desktop computers for work needs. Needless to say, mobile web design is evolving and can reach the zenith regarding flawless usability in the coming years. Mobile e-commerce can be as convenient as on the web then. 5. Mobile phones are getting stickier Mobile phones are more suited for e-commerce needs when compared to desktops. An average mobile phone user shuns the use of desktops because they do not come handy. Imagine the scenario where the mobile phone user forgets to buy something for an occasion such as a gift for a special one and remembers it in the most unusual of places and owing to time constraints and the distance to the nearest store, he cannot purchase it. He can readily order it on the phone as it is ‘sticky’. ‘Sticky’ in this sense, the mobile phone is portable. A desktop cannot help the user avail this privilege as reaching a nearest one can be a long walk. A simple reminder too can make the user aware of his special occasion fast approaching. E-commerce store owners have to take advantage of this fact and make users linger more on their sites. This can be done by driving users towards their site through inbound links from social media sites, where these users can always be spotted. Online chat rooms can also be found teeming with these kind of users. These store owners can plan thoroughly and reap huge benefits. 6. Attractive mobile version for users Mobile e-commerce store

What is Project Management? Well, before we start talking about troubled projects, let’s focus on what is project management. As per Wikipedia, “Project management is the discipline of planning, organizing, motivating, and controlling resources to achieve specific goals. A project is a temporary endeavor with a defined beginning and end (usually time-constrained, and often constrained by funding or deliverable), undertaken to meet unique goals and objectives, typically to bring about beneficial change or added value”. Now, that is a complex definition. To simplify the definition, Project Management is all about planning, organizing, communicating, identifying risks and motivating resources. But most importantly to get the work done on correct time and delivered to the right stakeholder. Why a project lands up in a trouble zone? To get the answer of this question, we will need to understand the difference between project and production. Instead of going to a bookish definition, let’s keep it short and simple. Project is achieving a common goal with a set of common services. For example, it can be an IT project or civil project like building a bridge. While any tangible item, which is produced or manufactured in a time-tested environment with a predefined output using some specialized services can be defined as a Production. For example, a factory manufacturing soaps. So, for project, the output is unique in nature and while for production based output is common. Thus, due to temporary and unique nature of project (until it’s quite diligently monitored), there is high chance of getting the same in a trouble zone. Does a troubled project have its own life cycle? There is no difference between a normal project and a troubled project’s life cycle. Something went wrong in the life cycle of a typical project which has introduced the word ‘Troubled Project’ or ‘Project on Fire’ (commonly used in IT world). For a waterfall based project, a typical life cycle will be: Setup or Initiation Planning & Design Development or Construction Testing or Review Deployment Maintenance In all of the above stages, a normal project can easily be turned into a ‘troubled’ project. Well, no one wants to be a part of trouble projects. Read on to learn more about troubled projects compared to smooth sailing ones…. Well, I did screw my project. How do I come out of it? Don’t worry! It even happens with the best in the lot and is normal. Let us focus on how to get the project back on track and make it a smooth sailing one. We don’t need to do something heroic or completely out of the box. Basic project management skills will help you get your project out of trouble. Few quick referencing tips & tricks: As a Project Manager, you need to understand the complete scope of a project. A single line missed in RFP or project scope document can be disastrous. Identify the potential skill of the delivery team of such projects. If require, set up a skill training. Always remember you are in an industry where you need to learn everyday and upgrade yourself.   Communicate with customer regularly and bring back his/her confidence on the team. Always remember when you are dealing with an outsourced project customer, agree to work on commitment virtually agreed on and any troubled project means failure of commitment. You might react more badly if the same happens to you. Update risk register on the project learning (so it can be used for future project reference). Make sure all the key stakeholders along with senior management are informed about daily project progress. This will help you ensure that all tasks performed by you are cross-reviewed at this critical stage. It has been observed that any project with ‘Fire’ really de-motivate the team. Well, let’s control all our emotions and motivate the team and bring back their confidence. Always remember team work is the pillar for any project success. Do a Root Cause Analysis (RCA – Fish Bone Analysis) and share the finding with the key project stakeholder. To all budding project managers, please make sure that the project triangle is always controlled. Always remember if you are running away from a problem, then you are moving far from its solution. Let’s face it and get it resolved. You will love the satisfaction of success. Do It Your Self (DIYS) Just to figure out how good you are in managing your projects, try out this tool: https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newPPM_60.htm. Be honest to yourself and check your score. On a lighter note If anyone follows this popular graffiti about project management available on online world, that individual will definitely land his/her project into the classification of ‘troubled project’: This Article is part of the employee experience sharing & content contribution initiative for Indus Net Technologies’ Blog site Content Credit : Souvik Chaki, Delivery Manager-Mobile Application, Indus Net Technologies About the Author :  A techno-manager with total of 11+ years in Software Development & Implementations in IT sector, including 7 years of relevant experience in Delivery, Project Management and Pre-sales activities. He can be reached at souvik.chaki@indusnet.co.in

Android platform is challenging to the developers and when aesthetically designed can prove to be visual treat to the customer. This satiating end user experience which is much craved for among the developers, can be a fulfilling experience. The full utilization of the capabilities of android can unleash a wide array of technologically superior mobile devices in the market. But most of the cell phones available in the market do not harness the full potential of the android platform. The tips listed below with a brief introduction to the basic components involved in design are expected to bridge the gap between the designers and the user to create an enhanced end user experience. Conforming to these tenets of design can also give you the assurance of being consistent with the user requirements. It will be useful for you to develop pixel-perfect graphic assets and nice XML layouts. Pixels Pixels are a very important part of the visual design experience. After all, pixels themselves are the basic components that form an image and are the very essence of it. Most of the developers are familiar with User Interface (UI) patterns, but lack the acumen when it comes to visual designing. Exploring the possibility of supplying this lack of expertise can mean the deliverability of high-fidelity mock-ups, drawable resources (i.e., graphic assets) and guidance to the inquisitive developer.  Scale well: Android is a platform designed for a variety of screen densities. Screen resolution is not a question here, but graphics, widgets and layouts on par with a density independent measurement scheme is. Devices using the android platform come factory-loaded with a mechanism to optimize graphic assets for each density. Manually optimizing is definitely not a good idea. The platform can scale down the resources reasonably well without a lot of hiccups. But it is wise to test designs on low-end devices first and optimize resources that scale badly.  Be state friendly: Touch states play a pivotal role in the usage of the device. Going by the market trends, capacitive touch screens are in vogue. The touch states provide the user with available options to select. When customizing widgets such as buttons, it is important to create drawables (the area on the touch screen that is sensitive to the touch) for all the necessary states (i.e., default, focused, pressed and disabled). A brief description follows:  Default: as the name suggests, this state is not available for the operation of the user and can work silently in the background.  Focused: this state usually highlights the option at the very top of the screen. It allows the user to navigate the menu with his trackball or directional pad. This option is not much used in recent smartphones.  Pressed: this state acknowledges the user selection  Disabled: as the name suggests, this state disables or dims the options which are not available or are irrelevant to the operation. The size of the touch target matters too. Normally, if stylus replaces the fingers, there can be a small size touch target. If fingers are used the size of the touch target should be at least 45 density pixels in width and height.  Use fonts: Droid Sans and Roboto are the 2 fonts popular with android developers. Roboto was released in Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4). It has been compared to Helvetica, but is a little condensed, ideally suitable for small screens. There is a provision in Android for using other fonts too. They can be packaged within an app in TTF format (with some memory overhead).  Use 9-Patch drawables: drawables define the touch sensitive areas on the touch screen. 9-Patch drawables allow Portable Network Graphics (PNGs) files, which are basically image files, to stretch (as in the zooming operation) and scale down nicely in pre-defined ways. Markings along the top and left edges define the stretchable areas. The padded content areas can optionally be defined with markings along the bottom and right edges. 9-Patch drawables are essential for creating and customizing User Interface (UI) widgets (i.e., buttons and the like). These drawables can also define the areas for scrolling down a list of options and swiping, which are stretched vertically in the middle of the top of the screen and horizontally stretched at the bottom of the screen respectively. It is possible to manually define the 9-Patches too, but the android SDK is provided with a nice, simple tool called Draw 9-Patch. This facilitates the quick and easy conversion of a regular PNG into a 9-Patch. It highlights the stretchable area and displays previews of the resulting drawable with different widths and heights.  Stick to the design legacy: honeycomb (Android 3) and Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4) have come loaded with a snazzy visual design that incorporates the Holo theme. Very less manufacturers do justice to the hallowed platform that Android is- they do not keep the versions up-to-date. Only the most popular devices that have made their way into the market recently, sport the Android 4 (Ice Cream Sandwich). There are two types of consumers whom you could possibly cater to- one are that fit in with the modern look and the other vouching for familiarity with the design. The former can be provided with a design necessarily throwing strong focus on delivering the current look, feel and experience to all devices, while the latter can be satisfied with a separate style of widgets and drawables used for Android gingerbread and its previous versions.  Showcase the brand: some clients fear that by going with the recognized user interface design patterns, they may lose their brand appeal. This is not true. On the contrary, with the introduction of non user friendly patterns, the users can be at their wit’s end trying to figure out the right way of using their device. This could be detrimental to the brand, losing its connect with the customer. Branding can be expressed through an appealing design of icons, drawables and widgets, and also with a good choice of colours and fonts.

Android apps provide users a variety of information on everyday weather, fancy games, music, emails, shopping, maps, media, videos, social media etc. Android apps are not only stylish but have great utility along with sophistication, allowing the user to feel confident about his choice of app. The wide varieties of apps that are available in the market cater to both business and personal uses, making Android apps an all time favorite. Adding to this, Android platforms also have great features, remarkable screen resolution, interesting functions and most certainly weigh lesser than other mobile platform phones. It has been observed that the number of application users in other mobile platforms like iPhone, windows, blackberry are very less when compared to android platform owners. The Android platform is slowly beginning to rule the smart phone market showing a tremendous growth in a short duration. The increase in demand for Android apps has led to accelerated increase in Android app developers all over the world. The open source platform provided by Android is a welcoming gesture where developers get to experiment their app and users are free to use it without having to pay for a licensed version of the app. It also allows you to sell the application to a third party vendor, helping the developer make more money out of his finding. Basic Fundamentals of an Android Application All Android applications are written in the java programming language, while the Android SDK tools compile the code, including all data and resource files, into an Android package. The .apk file is treated as an application which all Android platform phones install in order to use an application. Once an application is installed in a phone, it has its own security sandbox. The Android OS uses a Linux system where each application is treated as a different user. Automatically the system assigns each installed application a unique Linux ID, securing the entire system Each process is made to have its own virtual machine, isolating all the applications installed Since each application has its own Linux process, an application process starts and shuts down automatically once the process is complete, helping the system to recover memory when required for other applicationsThese methods are termed as ‘principle of least privilege’ where each application is allowed to do its own work and is not allowed to access other parts of the system creating a secure system.It is also possible for applications to share data with each other and also access system services. This is made possible in two ways: The user can arrange for two applications to share the same Linux user ID making it possible for them to access each other’s files An application can also access device data when permission is granted by the user during the time of installment. Device data such as contact numbers, SMS messages, SD card, camera, Bluetooth and others can all be accessed. Security is Key Data Storage Security: Android offers numerous choices for application data management. Depending on our requirements data can be made private or public and users can also chose the amount of space required to store one’s data. Data that is meant for public is stored in the exterior storage and private data in the internal storage Apps request for Permissions: On installing an Android application, the user has to grant permission right from the start to access other data on the phone. Even after denying a number of permissions, the apps are developed in a manner to still function appropriately Network Security for IP Networks: App developers have to keep in mind to provide network security for IP networks and telephony as it provides recent details for securing applications, recognizes bottle necks created by IP networks, guards against hacker attacks and also protects the phone against dangerous external and internal threats Different Methods of Security: Android apps provide different security features for different reasons. Challenges like virus attack, hackers, breakdown or crashing of the software can all be solved by installing software like C++, Java and many other software which are available in the market. The primary reason to provide security for an Android phone is to lower the occurrences. The security sandbox created by the platform on installing an application would already have separated the app data and system data, creating dual layers of security. A Few Tips for Building Attractive Android Applications Neutral Theme: Appling a neutral theme will avoid the developer from having to change styles for each activity of the app. The dark or light themes are the most used and most preferred of all the themes which suits almost all context Flexible Layouts: Android apps have the malleability to fit multiple screen sizes. Using layout designs that can be stretched to fit the screen are most appropriate to develop fun apps. ‘fill_parent’ and ‘wrap_content’ are layout designs which easily allow the application to adapt the content to the screen size automatically Receptive Web Design apps: Designing receptive web design layouts makes the app compatible with any kind of Android device widening the scope and usage of the app Eye catchy icon: Google play has over 7000 apps and if you want your app to stand out in the crowd, you better make sure your icon is more than eye catchy. The icon should be designed in a manner which will depict the use of the app just through the image Adding a Price Tag: Most of the apps in the market are free of cost. But if you choose to quote a price for an app, it is best to wait for a short duration before you add a price tag. Observe its acceptability in the market and then move on to sell your app, giving the users who have already installed the app a free trial period Give the User some Freedom: Allow the user to end, quit or log off from the app on his own accord. Do not make him plead to be let off.