Digital Solutions - Ouriken Blogs

Business Process Management, Digital Solutions

What is Business Process Management?

Introduction

Set of activities required to accomplish a common goal is Business Process. These activities are completed either sequentially or parallel and may be performed by people or systems. The acronym for ‘Business Process Management’ is BPM.

In every business, we hear the term business process management or BPM. BPM can be defined as a discipline of design, execution, modeling, optimization, and monitoring business processes to increase profitability.

That is the reason why BPM is considered more of a discipline rather than a tool or technology. It’s a very important concept. It is not just a software you can purchase and install to repair business issues, there are people involved who play a significant role in the business processes management. BPM software goes merely beyond the automation work to helping others with continuous process improvement, this is the key difference between workflow and BPM.

What is Business Process Management?

Business Process Management Services is a management approach concentrated on aligning all aspects of the organization with the needs of clients. Business Process Management tries to enhance processes constantly so that, it could be described as the “Process optimization process.” It is said that BPM allows an organization to be more efficient, effective and more capable than a functionally focused =, traditional hierarchical management approach.

Related Post: What is Agile Methodology?

Types of Business Process

It is very important to realize that processes differ greatly when starting our BPM. You can categorize your business in many different ways, which includes:

Complexity
Duration
Volume
Industry
Department

Some businesses are not very well suited to being managed within the BPM software that is why it is important. Let us take an example, where highly repetitive or regulated processes tend to be excellent candidates, unpredictable and unstructured processes are not.

The Process Lifecycle

There are 5 main phases of business process management: design, modeling, execution, monitoring, and optimization. Lets further dig into it

Design

Both the identification of existing processes and the design “to-be” processes get encircled within the Design Process. Representation of the process flow, the actors within it, alters and notifications, escalations, standard operating procedures, service level agreements, and task hand-over mechanisms are some areas to focus.

Good designs reduce the number of problems over the lifetimes of a process. A correct and efficient theoretical design is prepared is the only aim of this step. The improvement which is proposed could be in human-to-human, human-to-system, system-to-system workflows, and might target regulatory, market or challenges which are capable of competing faced by the businesses.

Modeling

By taking the theoretical designs and introduction of combinations of variables takes place.

Execution

If you want to automate the process, one of the ways to do it is to develop or purchase an application that executes that required steps of the process. But on the contrary, these applications rarely process all the steps properly to get the optimum result. Another great way to do it is to operate it with multiple software and human intervention, but then again this process is tedious and complex, the documentation part becomes very difficult.

To overcome these problems, the software has been developed that enables the full business process to be defined in a language that will be directly executed by the computer itself. To perform business operations, the system will either use services in connected applications or when a step is too tough to automate, will ask for human input. Directly executing a process definition can be more straightforward and therefore easy to improve compared to either of the previous approaches. For process execution and resolution, a business rule engine can be used.

Monitoring

In this phase, process performance is measured. Monitoring is completely included in the tracking of individual processes, so the information on their state can be easily seen, and statistics on the performance of one or more processes can be provided. Apart from this, to improve their connected processes, this information can be used to work with customers and suppliers. The generation of measures are examples of statistics on quickly an order of the customer is processed or how many orders were processed last month. They fit into three categories: cycle time, defect rate, and productivity.

What information the business wants to evaluate is totally dependant on the degree of monitoring, and analyze and how a business wants it to be monitored, in real-time, near real-time, or ad-hoc. However, BAM (business activity monitoring) extends the monitoring into generally provided by the BPM system (BPMS).

A collection of methods and tools related to process mining is known as Process mining. To analyze event logs extracted through process monitoring and to compare them with a priori process model is the aim of process mining.

Optimization

Retrieving process performance info from modeling or monitoring phase. Look for potential or actual issues and the potential opportunities for cost savings or other improvements then applying those enhancements in the design phase of the process hence, the creation of greater business values.

Conclusion

The most important aspect of BPM is one of the most often overlooked perhaps, is continuous improvement. Because, as time changes with technology, processes change too. The cycle begins again once the potential process change is identified and the best suggestions are implemented.

Ouriken is a standalone web design and digital agency. We design and implements powerful solutions for small and medium businesses in technology, business, and operations. Ouriken works with you to optimize productivity, improve performance and reduce time-to-market. To accelerate your business growth with our Business Process Management services.

Know More

Digital Solutions, Website Designing, Website Development Company

Common Problems in Web Designing and how to Avoid it

While developing a website you can face a lot of problems which can ruin your whole development process, the precious time you had invested in developing the project and the resources as well. In this blog, I will be sharing a few common issues, time-suckers, and other things that arise that can deviate a project.

Each Website project is different, but according to my experience, there are a lot of common problems that arise in the phase of website designing. And we do our best to acting in advance to deal with the expected change guide course of designing very clear of any issues so we can save our client’s time as well as budget in Website Designing services.

Here is a compilation of 4 common problems/issues we have observed in web design projects over the years and how to avoid them effectively. In order to keep your website production smooth and at a budget.

Wrong people in Charge

Many clients think that we are vendors they pay us to do the designing the websites, so all the responsibility is our own.

It’s very important to know that it’s a collaborative effect whenever we are beginning a web design project. To help you achieve your goals, we take our knowledge of the web, best practices and your option to create a website. To get there we need to have a point-of-contact that will be engaged, communicative, well-organized, and understand the large goals of the project.

We have run into issues where this does not go as expected, so once there was this client running the project without seeking approvals or feedback from anyone else on the team. Without the knowledge to us, we received approvals on things and then we got to the final stage. But when the CEO saw what we made, she hated it and we had to start over.

Assigning a wrong person in charge can be very destructive for the project’s budget and timeline – according to what we have seen. We should manage our time in terms of communication because the person in charge was not doing what they’re supposed to do, the less time we need to create a beautiful website.

Ignoring the budget

The trickiest subject to deal with when it comes to a project is its budget. We arrange our projects based on the number of hours we think it will take. Based on historical data from previous websites, we come up with our estimates. We estimate our deadlines accordingly.

We give updates on where we are with a budget, as we move throughout our web design project. Just address the concern and try to be mindful of the hours if you find out that the design phase is already wasting the development time.

Some clients have requested that we keep updating the design and hope that we will have enough for the rest upon knowing this information. It does become an issue sometimes and clients end up getting very close to their budget or exceeding it.

You should hear those concerns and make any important adjustments to preserve the budget for the remainder of the project if your web designer is bringing up a budget in the design phase of the project.

Radio Silence on Feedback

There are many website projects which are based on approvals. We typically start with a sitemap/wireframe whenever we begin with a new project. And once that is approved, we go ahead with the design.

It’s important to really review the drafts you are given and make sure its what you want, it’s typically a red flag that they didn’t really review it and will probably change down the road if clients are too swift to approve a design. Make sure your review is thoughtful and specific.

Assumption of the Template is a Right Method

We will sometimes recommend using a template to keep the budget low. Website templates help us put out a product quickly. But many clients opt for the template for the wrong reasons and don’t consider the long term consequences.

It doesn’t work in the long run, while the templates help us keep the budget less. A template has its own limitations. It could be further edited beyond its capabilities which will force the designer to use the custom website design, which will make the cost to custom website design so there is no use of using the cheap template for the use.

Conclusion

It doesn’t mean that every website project is doomed from the beginning, but if you are aware of the common problems, you can work with your company to avoid it effectively. We work hard to make our clients happy and to make a successful product that produces amazing results. And by collaborating to work on issues.

Ouriken is a standalone web design and digital agency. We design and implements powerful solutions for small and medium businesses in technology, business, and operations.

Know More

Application Development, Digital Solutions

9 Tips to Reduce Mobile App Development Cost

Since the past five years, there has been a major growth seen in the migration of consumers from desktop to mobile because smartphones allow users the accessibility at any time from anywhere. That is the reason why the businesses are shifting a major part of their development from desktop to mobile, with a goal of developing mobile apps will give exposure to the business, improve the loyalty of customers, and therefore building a stronger brand altogether. It will happen because mobile apps enable customers to interact with a brand personal space. However, extravagant app development cost acts as a discouragement to the company when developing a mobile app for their brand.

Costs for developing mobile apps shouldn’t be expensive. So we will discuss some of the points to reduce unnecessary costs without compromising on the quality.

Efficiently Planned Mobile App Development Process

Mobile App Development is a complex process that requires several iterations and modifications before achieving the final product. The basic requirement of the mobile app is that it provides the user experience which customer likes, for making it possible there are many changes in the process and each change ascends the app development costs. To lower costs from the initial stage is to have many ideas of how the customer can get the best version to enhance the user experience. By weighing the pros and cons of various ideas and brainstorming with the team at the initial stages will be very effective in cutting down some costs. You can choose to implement only the feature in which users want reducing a sufficient amount of costs in the development process itself by reducing too many alterations.

Preparing a Sketch of Final Product

Coding is just a base of the development process, it is very important that the developer has the vision of a clear goal of expectations from the app or the kind of the interface that needs to be provided by the customer. You can easily communicate the expectations of the customer to the developer by sketching the app and its interface so he can use it at his initial point for designing the interface and workflow to match the expectations of the customer. It will prevent unnecessary reworking of the app design that adds to mobile development costs.

Related Post: 8 Free Ways To Promote Your Business

The decision of Platform for the App

There is a various platform where you can develop your app – iOS, Android, Windows, always ensures that the app reaches more users when the company is trying to keep the costs low, it might make more sense to target a single platform. The best way to choose a platform to work on is to analyze what major consumers like and to work on it. By choosing one platform out of three, you automatically reduce the cost of app development to almost two-thirds. And chosen by many of the clients, cross-platform development is an economical way to make the app ready to be deployed on multiple platforms.

Outsourcing the Project

Many companies think to outsource as a loss for their development project, but on the contrary, it comes with a host of benefits. First, since you hire the development team only for a short time, paying them hourly, the app development costs cut down significantly than if were to hire an in-house development team as you would continue to pay them a fixed salary. Without knowing it, the number of hours they worked on the task. Secondly, you get access to not only to the skills of the expert developers who have experience in app development but also to much more design of the app.

Use Existing Technologies and Resources

Like we discussed in the above point, outsourcing the mobile app development to a developer with a skill set is that you can make optimal use of existing templates and frameworks he has developed for previous builds. By opting for pre-existing frameworks that meet your requirements you can significantly cut down development time, reducing app development costs in the process.

Framework Testing

Many companies make the mistake of not testing their app thoroughly in a rush on making it live in the market which results in not only a loss of reputation of the brand but also an increase in the app development cost for correcting the flaws. Testing the framework before launch will give us the idea of what is not working properly and fix them as soon as possible cutting downtime as well as costs.

Look for an Expert Mobile App Development Company

The mobile app development process requires skilled experts in various areas working together to build the app. That’s the reason you should look forward to hiring a mobile app development company who provides app development services who has good experience in app development for the various platform, besides offering end-to-end services, app development, design, and marketing. By doing this the cost of app development will be lower than if you have to outsource each service to a different agency.

Don’t Rush for the Launch

Reduction of development times will lower the costs, its no brainer to not rush in the process without following a systematic approach that includes, testing. Otherwise, any imperfections or bugs will be noticed only once the app is used by the customers, which will diminish the user experience, and affecting the brand value.

Keep it simple

It doesn’t mean that more features mean good experience. The Excitement factor in the initial stage of the app development process is understandable but it not only increases cost but also makes the app too heavy and also lengthen the development process. Highlighting the best features of an app that are essential for rand or business will keep your costs down.

Ouriken application development & support services help you maintain your business-critical mainframe applications & replace legacy applications. Ouriken is a standalone web design and digital agency. We design and implements powerful solutions for small and medium businesses in technology, business, and operations.

Know More

CRM Software, Digital Solutions, Website Designing

8 Free Ways to Promote Your Business

Every business wants their products or services to be seen by potential customers. But, most of the traditional ways for promotion costs money and not everyone can afford it if they are just starting up the business. Well, there are ways to promote your business without spending a dime. So, let’s get into the list of the ways of 8 ways to promote your business. These ideas will not cost you money but they will surely cost you some of your precious time.

Optimization of Website for Search Engines

In this digital world, what people do when they want to buy something? Well, they search for the product or service on Google or other search engines of their choice. The process of information gathering takes place about the product. They try to collect data from the internet so if your website is not the list which they are searching for their information on, so you virtually do not exist.

The easy fix for this is to hire a digital agency that can do the optimization of your website for you but, even in that case you need to be aware of the process, so that Google cannot penalize your website for some wrongdoings or against its algorithm. By reading some guides on SEO you can tweak your website and rank higher on Google and on other search engines as well. The good thing is agencies would not be able to fool you if you know some of the processes.

Business Listing

Vendors are being searched on business directories by buyers. If your products are mostly B2B, add a free listing on IndiaMart, Trade India and Indian Yellow Pages. These are some popular business to business directories.

And if you’re products or services are B2C then you can list your business on Just Dial, Ask Me and Get It for free. The biggest advantage of these platforms is that they have mobile apps and that attracts a huge audience.

If your business is selling software’s then SoftwareSuggest is a very good directory to list your business. The categorization of the software’s on this website is quite good, like HR, CRM, ERP, etc. Many small businesses have been profited by this.

Listing On Google My Business

Google is trying to make the search personal and now displays results that are tailored for your location. For example, if we search for McDonald’s, Google will show you the outlets in your city with a map. So, if your list your business on Google, it will be very beneficial for you, and it is necessary to get listed on Google as the rate of competition is increasing very rapidly.

Adding your business is very easy, Google made sure that the process is simple for addition and managing the added business for the location on the map.

Social Media is Powerful

Social Media Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, not only help you get more customers but also the engagement to get quality feedback from them for your products or services. One can get around 20% of traffic only from social media.

The key point in achieving most out of social media is the frequency of our posts, if we post regularly, the rate of popularity and loyal customers will increase. Business updates or news related updates can be shared with your industry. Competitor analysis on social media is very easy as well; we can follow some influencers and monitor their activity. Recommended is to post twice to thrice a week on Facebook and 2-3 times a day on Twitter.

Answering Questions

It happens most of the time that people don’t get their desired answers on the Google search, so they turn up towards forums on the internet to solve their problems. QnA sites like Quora and Yahoo answers are one of the popular places where you can find new customers. There are LinkedIn Groups that are also used for the QnA website.

How can we benefit from these sites? We first have to create accounts on these websites and start searching for your product or services; we will get a lot of questions related to your product or services. People will ask about the top companies that sell this product and they will compare different products and so on.

Always start by answering easy questions and then move the levels up a bit by bit. For Example in Ouriken, I searched for a web design and development company on Quora and got hundreds of questions related to the topic. Then, like I said start answering easy questions and keep recommending your website in the answers so that you will get organic traffic to your website that too, free of cost.

The same thing could be done on Yahoo answers and LinkedIn groups, all 3 of them are a good source for organic traffic and very influential. Talking about good things, all these websites are crawled or indexed by Google so your answers will get displayed on Google whenever someone will search for it. Tip for answering in these websites is to have the intention of helping the needy first then we can sell our things in between. Nobody likes hard upselling.

Attending Networking Events/Meetups

The Concept is to visit Events/Expos/Meetups and increase your network in order to find new customers. You can just search for “Business events in (your city)” and Google will come up with the list of upcoming events if there are any. Most of the events are free of cost, you just have to bear the travel expenses and they attract potential customers as well as distributors/resellers/consultants.

Gradually, there will be a realization in you that people attend these events just to meet other people and increasing their network, eventually increasing their customers. Meetup is a site through which we can meet a lot of entrepreneurs and startup owners meet frequently using this site. People with open minds come here to meet and or open for new ideas sharing and partnerships in the existing startups.

Uploading Videos on YouTube

Over 4 billion videos are played on YouTube every day, and this number is growing exponentially. So, uploading videos on YouTube of your product or service is a no brainer. The best part is, search results of your videos will appear on the Google search result page giving your website more visibility.

For product, a 2 min demo video of the product will do, and for service, you can upload a testimonial of the client and upload it. You should always remember to put keywords in the title or description of the video so it ranks up. If you come up with interesting content that has the potential to go viral and hit the jackpot, leads will flood into your inbox.

Offering a Deal to Customers

Deal sites like Groupon and Coupon Dunia attract millions of users to their portals. So, have a meeting with the deal website guys, brainstorm with them and come up with a deal that your customers cannot resist. And you can a good number of buyers at no cost.

Once you have decided the discount to give to your customers, the deals website will do the promotion for you. Since they have a large database of registered users. This process of offering deals will be more or less will remain similar in other websites as well.

Conclusion

These are just 8 ways, there can be or there are many more ways of promoting your business. You just have to be creative and have an out of the box thinking. Some of the points mentioned above will yield results instantly, and some will take its own natural time. If you’re on a tight budget for marketing you have to invest your time in it instead to promote your business. There are some startups who succeeded with literally ZERO marketing budget. If you have any other ideas to add in this list, I know there are. Feel free to comment down below.

Ouriken is a standalone web design and digital agency. We design and implements powerful solutions for small and medium businesses in technology, business, and operations.

Know More

Digital Solutions, Web Beacon, Website Designing

What is Web Beacon (Bug)?

A Web Beacon is also known as Web Bug, pixel tag, invisible GIF, Clear GIF. In order to know what the user has accessed in emails or web pages, web bug is used. Mostly used for web analytics, a Web Beacon is mostly invisible. A Web Beacon arrives in the form of an image and can be detected by the user, only if the back end source code is checked. Web Beacon can work easily because it is a small graphical image with very little size and low bandwidth and weak network connection is not a problem to it.

Web Beacon is still a controversial topic and is still debatable whether to use it or not since it comes with its own advantages and disadvantages. Some take it to be a good thing because of its ability of high-level real-time analytics for business. On the other hand, some people consider it as a tool for data theft and are causing disruption. Some find it extremely concerning.

While in many cases, Web Beacons also constitutes an image which has a pixel size dimension of 1×1. But, Web Beacon has so many positive aspects and it could be used in the tracking of the following statistics:

The exact time for the web bug was used or accessed or viewed.
Type of Web Browser of a user who has fetched the web bug.
The physical Internet Protocol address of the system that accessed the web bug.
User Preferences are stored in the Web Beacon to use it later for remarketing Ads.
Advertisers have the ability to build up browsing profiles for customers to display a healthy amount of relevant ads.

For validating email addresses a Web Beacon can be used by spammers. The sender can validate if the user has accessed the email, therefore, the sender can validate the authenticity of an email address.

Working of Web Beacon

Images within the web page also get rendered when the browser tries to render a web page. A request by the browser is made to the server to download the images within the web page, with this request server keep a log of some information such as IP address, timestamp, and other few details. The process of tracking how many times you have accessed the web page could be done with the help of Web Beacon with the location information and few additional user specifics. Reference to an existing can also be made by this request which was sent to the server by the browser. By the means of this request, the webmaster understands the user preferences and builds a profile based on user preferences. It’s placed on the website by website design and development company in the backend, making it completely invisible. Web Beacon can not only be used over emails, but it can also be work over websites. Tracking and monitoring emails and their click rates is a common practice. Open Tracking, a Method that is used to insert images right in the emails. So whenever the email server tries to download an image in the mail, an alert is directly sent to the web server. In email marketing, it is an important part of analytics since they know if their email was opened or clicked.

Web Beacon can also be a part of embedded links, most probably in the form of a reference ID within the URL. By clicking on the embedded link, one can identify if the email was opened and when it was opened. In 2007, Facebook implemented its own beacon which was also referred to as “Facebook beacons” existed. Facebook Beacon collected data from users profile from beacons partners of what that user accessed and other information. But without taking any prior consent, Facebook displayed this data on users profile’s which a breach of privacy and security, which was without really letting the users turn on or off this feature, which was a huge security issue. That was past, Facebook learned its lesson owing to privacy concerns they revoked the Facebook Beacons and had to suspend it from the website.

Difference between Cookie and a Web Beacon

Most of the times both the components are used for a similar purpose, which is to track information. The purpose is to provide a better user experience. Perhaps they sound similar, but the working is different. Many of the times Web Beacons are used in conjunction with cookies. Cookie could be identified as a session cookie or a persistent cookie. Cookies are targeted to improve returning customer’s user experience by enabling faster interactions. Cookies have an upper hand that they can be accepted or declined. By default, cookies are turned on, but most browsers give users to choose the cookie preference.

On the other hand, Web Beacons are a part of images and are not visible to users in any way unless the user checks the source code. Web Beacons do not provide user preference to accept or decline them. But there’s a way to block the Web Beacons by just going into the browser’s privacy section. But this has to be done manually on all the browsers the user is using. By doing this few of the other websites or user interface may not work properly based on the configuration of the website.

Advantages of Web Beacon

It has some advantages that are the reason many websites and email marketing campaigns focus on this.

Based on interest, Web Beacons allows advertisers to display ads to users very effectively.
Easy to implement and extremely cheap.
It enhances user experience with the help of selected personalization
Data Insights are provided, which is data gold mines.
It increases the Retention of customers and user engagement.

Disadvantages of Web Beacon

Basically, there are no disadvantages for Web Beacon, but there are some concerns which annoyed some users, they are listed as follows:

Coding Expertise is required.
Since it is technology dependent, and hence implementation can vary based on technology.
To avoid any privacy-related issues it should be implemented carefully.

Related Post: Push Notification – Modern Advertising Channel!

Conclusion

Web Beacon can provide great insights making it a powerful tool. If implemented properly can provide great data insights. Without the requirement of any expensive analytics tools, Web Beacon is the most affordable option.

Ouriken is a standalone web design and digital agency. We design and implements powerful solutions for small and medium businesses in technology, business, and operations.

Know More

Artificial Intelligence, Business Process Management, CRM Software, Digital Solutions, IoT

Why Businesses Must Integrate Artificial Intelligence [AI]?

In 2017, Artificial Intelligence became one of the hottest topics and is still attracting attention and investments. There was a void in businesses without AI – Artificial Intelligence, before that social networking, mobile apps, the Internet of Things, and Data Analytics have filled that void. Scientists have been working upon the technology and been talking about the benefits of AI from the past four decades, it’s about time that society’s AI dreams are coming true.

When the term AI is told, people think of the AI we encounter in personal lives which is web ads dependent and based on our search history, facial recognition on Facebook, or the IVR of banks or other companies. Or perhaps, some people think of personal digital assistants namely, Siri (Apple), Alexa (Amazon), Cortana (Microsoft), and Google Assistant (Google). But AI applications impacted both consumer and business operations. For example, a Harley Davidson dealer implemented an AI-driven marketing platform into his marketing mix and the results were astonishingly high. He witnessed a 2930 percent increase in sales, which literally tripled his business over the previous year. But every AI integration is not as successful as that dealer. Social Networking and Smartphones were into the consumer world first then they moved into Business, in the same way, we can expect AI to seep into business applications in a natural way. However, with an increase in the volumes of people, places, and things plus there is also an increase in computing speeds and real-time processing power. AI applicability and business benefits are becoming a reality with immediate effect.

AI Estimations

A survey of Cowen and Company, currently 81% of IT leaders are investing in or planning to invest in AI. CIOs are also heralding to their companies for the integration of AI into their entire technology hub. Meanwhile, 43 percent are doing a proof of concept for AI, and 38 percent of organizations have already implemented AI and been planning to invest more into it.

Estimation from McKinsey research states that tech giants spent $20 billion to $30 billion on AI in 2016. Of that, R & D and deployment will get 90 percent and 10 percent to AI acquisitions. Artificial Intelligence will grow to a $47 billion market by 2020, says industry analyst firm IDC with a compound annual growth rate of 55%. Companies will spend around $18 billion on software applications, $billion on software platforms, and $24 billion on services and hardware, states IDC. Your business will risk irrelevancy if your business doesn’t already have a strategy to incorporate AI or machine learning (ML) into your development efforts by 2020 that too with this level of investment.

Related Post: What is Internet of Things [IoT]?

Exponential Growth of AI

Google, Amazon, and Facebook are leading the AI race right now, with Microsoft just behind between those three are catching up rapidly with the investment of a lot of time and resources in AI. With access to thousands of researchers on staff and billions of dollars set aside for investing in capturing the next generation of leading data scientists, proving these organizations a head start over the rest of the market. For example:
1. Google’s 25,000 engineers, only a few thousand are knowledgeable and proficient, that makes roughly 10 % and they are making efforts to make that number 100 percent.
2. The AI and research group at Microsoft grew by 60% through hiring and acquisitions in the first year of its operations.
3. FBLearner Flow is being used by over 750 Facebook engineers and 40 different product teams, which helps them leverage AI and ML. Over a million models have been trained on the new software.

Moreover, Infor, Microsoft, and Salesforce have also been researching and implementing AI in their business. In the market today, these tech giants are just a few of the serious artificial intelligence contenders. It makes smaller companies very tough to attract and retain the skilled work required to make their AI dreams a reality. Recruiting efforts won’t just be it to create an impact, but also the time required to conduct a new employee onboarding, supervised learning, and training to effectively scale AI programs.

Most companies lack analytical infrastructure and general knowledge needed to apply AI and ML to its full potential. Secured access of data without having to deal with multiple authentications must be enabled by engineers. Often it’s a case if the company has several isolated data warehouses or enterprise resource planning application systems. IT leaders must have the ability to bring large data sets together from several unique and varied data sources into centralized, scalable and observed data repository, for this they have to attempt to successfully deploy and conquer an enterprise-wide AI strategy.

Development of AI Applications Market Place

When it’s clear that the use of AI is important, not all companies have the IT budgets to hire the employees required to build AI-fueled applications that too in-house. For that reason, we can expect to see on an immediate effect, the rise of AI services marketplace in the near future. There is already an emerging form of companies providing AI self – service tools that are very easy to use for the non-data scientist and not that expensive to acquire. These AI market places will resell AI services and specialized algorithms that companies can completely buy and implement within their business, which will make the business process management more easier to handle. To compete in this race of AI, this marketplace will provide companies AI services which are in a modest budget.

Conclusion

We have only seen a few examples of the major AI benefits, we will see a rise in the integration of the AI in the coming future. Having the roots in computer science since, a few decades. It is only now that this concept is getting popular among the organizations as well as the consumer applications, and the need for it increasing day by day. By embedding AI into the core functions of the software enterprise software providers are making AI a necessity. We can see this integration more in the coming years. For businesses, this will mean that they no more need to hire computer scientists or invest large capital to develop their own AI systems.

Ouriken is a standalone web design and digital agency. We design and implements powerful solutions for small and medium businesses in technology, business, and operations.

Know More

Cloud Consulting, Digital Solutions, IoT

What is Internet Of Things [IoT]?

Almost everyone has been heard of this term ‘IoT’, but never could have actually figured out that what it really is. Well, let’s get familiarize to the topic by introducing the person who coined this term. Kevin Ashton coined this topic in 1999 at presentation to Procter and Gamble. Kevin co-founded MIT’s Auto-ID Lab. He believed that Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) is essential to the internet of things, which basically allows computers to manage all individual things. heard of a company named zensi, it’s about energy sensing and monitoring technology, it was started by Kevin Ashton as well.

Introduction to IoT

So, what is IoT? If put in a simple way, IoT can be any ‘thing or object’ which is connected to the internet than people. It is more a device that has sensors in it with the ability to collect and transfer data over a network without human intervention. The technology which is embedded in the device helps it to interact with internal states or within itself and of its external environment which helps in the decision-making process. In short, IoT describes the internet where data is created by things.
Gartner stated, by 2020 there will be more than 26 billion connected devices and will keep on increasing as it grows further and can reach up to 100 billion devices. Just like us, the humans the network is only going to get stronger and will increase the object-object and people-object connection. Imagine the giant network of connected things where IoT does not only impact the standard of living but also how we perform our day-to-day tasks. And just like humans learn from each other those devices who are in a network will learn experiences from other devices.
Here’s a quote by Kevin Ashton on IoT –

“If we had computers that knew everything there was to know about things—using data they gathered without any help from us—we would be able to track and count everything, and greatly reduce waste, loss, and cost. We would know when things needed replacing, repairing or recalling, and whether they were fresh or past their best.”

Whenever a new product is being released, before going to the consumers they test it manually for the error and defects which that product may come up with, and then we learn from those errors and defects and try to eradicate it. It’s a process. In the same way, a room temperature sensor collects data and transfer it across the network, which is received and used by multiple other devices or sensors to adjust their temperature accordingly. For example, a refrigerator’s sensor will receive the outside temperature and will adjust its internal temperature according to it. And air conditioners are already sensing the room temperature and adjusting the power according to it. This is how devices create their own eco-system by interact, contribute and collaborate. Currently, we are surrounded by lots of IoT enabled devices that are continuously connected to each other and emitting data and communicating through multiple devices. IoT will be the future and will survive as technology grows. All the data is stored in the cloud and many organizations provide cloud consulting services maintain and optimize the data.

Advantages of IoT

IoT has the functionality that devices could be controlled remotely across the internet. So, by the use of the sensors and the internet IoT created opportunities to directly connect and integrate the physical world to the computer-based systems. It will create automation in nearly all fields by the interconnection of these multiple embedded devices. therefore increasing the efficiency, accuracy and economic benefit with less human intervention. It encapsulates technologies such as smart grids, smart homes, intelligent transportation, and smart cities. Some major advantages of IoT

1. Better customer engagement

Automation of action is vastly improved by the help of IoT, for example, a car will automatically detect the issues within the car by the help of the sensors built in it. The driver, as well as the manufacturer, will get notified about it. Till the time driver takes the car to the service station, the manufacturer will make sure that the faulty part is available in the service station so it can be repaired or replaced immediately.

2. Optimized Technicality

Improving technologies and making them better is another benefit of IoT, the car manufacturer can collect the sensor data from so many different cars and analyze them to optimize their design and functionality and make them much more efficient.

3. Reduced Waste

Till now, what we know about the insights are they are superficial, but with the help of IoT, we can get real-time information leading to effective decision making and management resources. For example, just imagine there is a fault in the entire manufacturing belt of the spare part that car which broke down and there are problems with multiple engines, he can track the manufacturing plant of those engines and can correct the issues with manufacturing belt.

Hardware required for IoT

Ever wondered what hardware we might need for preparing an IoT solution? well, the answer is simple. The raw materials required for it is ‘sensors’ which senses the environment, and also a remote dashboard to monitor your output and display it in a clear form. And lastly, you will require a device that can connect to the internet, or is capable of serving and routing. Detecting specific conditions and taking actions accordingly would be the key function of these devices. Here comes the tricky part, we should always secure the connection and communication between the devices and the dashboard.
Accelerometers, temperature sensors, magnetometers, proximity sensors, gyroscope, image sensors, acoustic sensors, light or photosensors, pressure sensors, gas RFID sensors, humidity sensors, and micro-flow sensors are some of the common sensors we are surrounded with. Nowadays, we are familiar with devices like smartwatch, shoes and 3D glasses, these devices are best examples for smart solutions. The 3D glass is capable of adjusting the television’s brightness which is comfortable to one’s eyes, and smartwatches keep track of your daily activities and they also keep track of the heart rate which gives us approximate insights of our health. A device called Raspberry Pi is a credit-card-sized computer developed in the United Kingdom by the Raspberry Pi Foundation. It has four USB ports, one LAN port, one audio port, one HDMI port, one SD card slot, one general-purpose Input/Output [GPIO] port, and one charger port. The current generation device also houses Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.

But, the most important device which has tremendously contributed to IoT is cell phones. Mobile apps are the most revolutionizing contribution to the technology of the world. Cell phones are devices that come with apps and sensors which reveal a lot of information about the user. From geo-location information to tracing light conditions, also to orientation of the device and a lot more information. Since the main function of a cell phone is to make calls, so cellular function, and other functions like Wi-fi, Bluetooth are some of the connectivity options the cell phone comes with which helps them to communicate with other devices. Because of all these functions, the cell phone remains the core of the IoT ecosystem. Further, it can now talk with the smartwatch and fitness band to ease and improve the user experience. Bluetooth, Wifi, NFC, RFID, radio protocols and Wifi-Direct are some major technologies and protocols to communicate with devices based on requirements. Across all industries and markets, IoT applications are flourishing. The IoT has a crowd of expansion over various industries, including the vast group of users, from individual who wants to conserve energy by implementing IoT automation to the large scale companies who want to enhance their business operations. IoT not only is very useful in optimizing critical applications but also they have enhanced the concept of advanced automation which we have imagined a decade ago. Let’s now dig into the capabilities of IoT across different industries and look at how they are revolutionizing them.

Applications of IoT Across Various Industries

Here are some major industries where IoT is integrated and been proven it’s worth. Automation with the help of IoT is the key to the technology of the future.

Energy Industries

Due to an increase in the rates of energy, individuals, as well as organizations, are looking for a way to take control of consumption in their hands. Hence, IoT provides a solution for not only monitor the energy usage at the application level but also at house level, grid-level or maybe at the distribution level. Devices used to measure and monitor energy consumption are smart meters and smart grids. It protects appliances by detecting threats to system performance and stability.

Healthcare Industries

Fitness bands and smartwatches have revolutionized the frequency of health monitoring. An individual can monitor hos own health by the help of it. And if a patient is reaching the hospital by ambulance, his reports are prepared and been diagnosed by doctors by the time he reaches the hospital, and can quickly start the treatment as soon as he reaches there. Furthermore, that data is collected and analyzed by doctors to find various information about the diseases and find a cure for it.

Education Industry

In order to fulfill the gaps in the education industry, IoT provides education aid. It not only improves the quality of education but also enhances the cost and furthermore, enhances the management by taking student’s performance and response into consideration.

Government

IoT also provides solutions for building smart cities. Armed forces systems and services are also enhanced by the help of IoT. Be it better Border Security or high-performance vehicle, everything is taken care of from the data which is collected and analyzed.

Air and Water Pollution

We can detect the pollution in air and water by frequent sampling with the help of various sensors. Substantial contamination is prevented because of it. IoT automation plays a vital role in this industry as is allows the operation to minimize human intervention in farming analysis and monitoring which notifies the user if there is any change in the structure of crops, soil, environment and more.

Transportation Industry

Self-driving cars with sensors, traffic lights that can sense the traffic and switch automatically, parking assistance, giving us the location of free parking space, etc are some of the existing IoT examples in the transportation industry. Like we discussed above in an example, there are sensors in the vehicle which indicate about the current status of the vehicle, so we don’t run into problems while driving. By the end of 2021, it is projected that 82% of cars will be connected to the cloud or the internet.

Marketing Industry

By delivering relevant content and solutions, organizations analyze and respond to customer preferences, using IoT. Business strategies could be improved in real-time.

Business Process Industry

Inventory management and automation are possible by using IoT, ultimately, smart devices will be implemented to track the inventory data in the system. Creating new gadgets, furniture, home appliances, and devices to meet the new demands consumers have will offer a new and reliable source of revenue for the entire business world. A task that used to require the on-site presence of humans for its competition will also be done with IoT. All this massive data generated from smart devices will help businesses to gain knowledge of how and what to create ultimately transforming for the greater impact.

Conclusion

Implementation of IoT is just a beginning, Businesses will get a competitive advantage of this technology who are taking a step to develop or expand IoT technology in services, products and business operations will grow exponentially.
Sooner the digital marketing agencies understand how to integrate IoT in their services and what opportunities and challenges they might face as more devices start to get webbed in the network on IoT.

Ouriken’s cloud consulting services identify and prioritize cloud applications, optimization, cloud migration which helps your business.

Know More

Digital Solutions

What is the best time to send push notifications?

Introduction

A push notification is a marketing message that companies can send at any time, regardless of whether the user is currently browsing through the application or website, on mobile phones or laptops respectively. So that means it can be both- app-based and web version.

These days push notification has become the most popular and efficient tool for increasing sales and retention. They are basically used to engage and re-engage your existing users and also create new clientele and inspire them to use your application actively. While sending or triggering push notifications is is really very important to follow a few guidelines so that the purpose of sending such notifications is solved. Here when we talk about guidelines our main focus is when where and how. Because if the notifications are sent in a vague manner untimely that may annoy and irritate the user and chances are that he may opt-out. So it is very to research regarding the frequency and time before sending the notifications. Thankfully because of the emergence of technology, you can automatically segregate and set the time for your notification only once, without repeating the steps every time.

In order, not to annoy your users with unnecessary push notifications, we recommend few guidelines that help you find the right time for sending push notifications to your web users using PushPush.io.

Check the timezone of your users

Technology has bought the world very close. So it may happen that the timezone of your client and you are different. Business is spread across the globe so here time plays a very important role. The time at which your users get notifications from you is one significant aspect adding to the achievement of your campaign. You have to make sure that the scheduling of your push notifications is in inline with the timezone of all your target users. For example: Being a radio taxi cab like Uber, if you send a push notification on its mobile app giving discount coupon during peak commute hours will boost the bookings.

Plan the Days

While planning your push notification strategy, one thing you can not afford to miss is the day. If you have a restaurant and you have planned a promotion -meal for two’ on Friday. Sending a reminder notification to users on Saturday will not really be a good idea. There are particular days and time which has shown evidently high click rates for most of the brands. Make sure you are scheduling your notification around these days.

We have segregated each day of the week with its best time to send push notifications according to our research made and that has given high ROI to companies.

Tuesday: 4-5 pm, 5-6 pm
Wednesday: 10 am-12 noon, 3-6 pm
Thursday: 3-5 pm, 5-6 pm
Friday: 10-11am, 2-3 pm, 3-4 pm
Saturday: 4-5 pm

Check on Upcoming events

You may customize your message based on the time of year or any upcoming holidays to make the brand attractive.

Make sure that your notification calendar is always in sync with the events happening throughout the year. It’s done to avoid a situation where your notification may get ignored reason being that day falls on a busy festival day. Further, following a track of events will ease you develop and create festive offers for those events which have constantly gained considerable response rate.

For example, push notification for a restaurant review set to go out two days prior to Valentine’s Day could be like, “Happy Valentine’s Day! Have a lovely evening. Here’s a discount code for dining out with your loved ones.”

The frequency of Sending Notifications

The frequency at which you send the notifications to your users depends on various factors like industry specific-News app, Gaming app or website, Travel portals, Fitness apps, E-commerce or your Notification purpose like retargeting users, brand awareness of your product. We have segregated the frequency as per the industry.

News: 3-4 times a day which depends on the news, it’s significance and gravity as per your users.
Games: Once a day or less and that too after deciding its time slot as to when the users will be excited to receive your notifications and give the maximum response.
Travel: 2-3 times a day. This number may vary depending upon the holiday seasons. Also if your plan to promote a new holiday package.
Fitness: 3-4 times a week or even daily reminders are acceptable depending on the type of fitness business. For example, if you are a fitness band app then daily morning and evening notifications are fine to alert the user to remind about his target.

Right Content

When the right content is sent to the right audience and that too on right time then that is surely going to help you achieve your business goals.

Push notifications study reveals that there are a huge amount of users that find these notifications as important and essential. It is may happen so since the notifications sent by you are of user’s interest or the content provided is giving valuable. Content that is relevant to users generate high user engagement. As per the recent study, Personalisation can boost push notification open rates by up to 800%. When the content is personalized it boost the open rate 4 times than sending a generic message. This can be done reciprocating your user with their name, including a custom image, a thank you note, personalized message etc.

Content and timing go hand in hand for any push notifications’ success. Giving a customized and personal touch to your notification on right is sure to give an immeasurable response.

Targeting the right audience

Always consider sharing the right content with the right audience with your users. Your information should be as targeted as possible. Creating and recognizing who you plan to target must be an essential part of determining your push notification plan. There is a greater risk of your entire communication being a failure if you target the wrong audience. Therefore, building specific customer personas benefits you plan the most powerful push notification strategy. It is better for companies to learn more about users and take extra efforts to avoid their push notification to be seen as annoying by users.

Let us take an example of women to fashion retail brand wherein they have segmented their target audience in personas like Let’s say you run a female fashion retail chain. You have successfully segmented your audience in personas such as- working class, middle-aged housewife, a young mother, and student. So here you would never want to notify all the personas with one push messaging for the sale of babies wear. That just does not make any sense.

Choose the right timing

You have to choose the right time to share the right content with the right audience. Timing should be an indispensable part of your push messaging plan.Suppose you receive a disturbing push notification message at 5 am when you are in deep sleep. What would be your reaction, will u still like that brand or unsubscribe its offers? Here, you are required to take care of local time notification delivery. For example, In New York, it is morning 5 am and at the same time in London, it is 9am.You can determine the right time for your push notifications depending upon your Industry or targetting persona.

Industry-based time

News-10-12 pm,5 pm
Fashion & lifestyle-12 pm, 5pm, 9 pm
Travel-9 pm
Hospitality-10 am, 2 pm, 8pm-10 pm
Entertainment-8 pm -10 pm
Education-11 am-1 pm, 8 pm
Healthcare-12 pm

Persona-based time determination

Working class-9 am, 12 noon-2 pm, 9pm -11 pm
Young mothers-11 am-12 pm, 7 pm-8 pm
Middle-aged housewives-12 noon 2 pm, 9 pm-11 pm
Students-9 am-12 am, 7 pm-2 am

So to conclude we may say that tailoring your push notifications to your users is not just about what you say and how you say, but first and foremost factor is about time i.ewhen you say it. Lastly, don’t forget to expire messages when they go out of date.

PushPush.io gives a modern day advertising platform where a company or website owner can use push notification to monetize their web traffic and advertiser can send notifications to their targetted audience, wherein the users grant permission to receive such messages.

Know More

Digital Solutions

Push Notification-Modern Advertising Channel!

What is Push Notification and how it works?

Push notifications are a communication channel built into every mobile device sold today. They enable apps to reach out to users with short messages that users may respond to. They are notifications that can be sent to a user through a desktop web and mobile web. Web push notifications are delivered on a user’s desktop or mobile screen anytime they have their browser open despite whether or not the user is on the website.

Types of Push Notification

1.Transactional Notifications

Transactional notifications are used to send a notification to users about events upcoming. For example, If a user has ordered some book from an e-commerce application or website, they are notifying a user that their package has been shipped and will be delivered on a particular time and date. Airlines sending notification about the delay in flight and latest status of the fight.

2.System Notifications

System notifications are used to inform users about new product features or openings. For example, sending a notification to the user of a new product feature, or of a vacation or holiday discount offer. Such information when send may attract users and are having chances to conversion.

3.User Notifications

User notifications are used to send alerts or notify users of new messages received from their friends or office colleagues, such as in an e-mail or social networking application. For example, if an important message that’s awaited from a client, push notification alerts to make the further course of action saving time.

push notifications

Importance of Push Notification to Website Owners

Push-notification advertising is a modern type of advertisement, that enables advertisers to reach their target audience more efficiently and website owners to earn more without adding any banners. So fundamentally it’s a new method to monetize your website.

According to a recent study,73% of publishers are not convinced with their website monetization. They are continually seeing for new ad channels and header bidding solutions to get higher returns on cost per click or cost per impression.

Launch push-notification advertising on your website is very simple. It is more or less similar to any other type of ad types. If You have apparently tried display or native, push notification also works the same way. You just install the code of the ad network of your choice like PushPush.io and start getting more money.

Importance of Push Notification to Advertisers

Push notification technology is fast evolving from a simple message delivery system to a strong and interactive medium. They are the first and often most important communications channel used by apps. Almost all major app uses push notifications for transactions and re-engagement. They signify a great way to interact with your audience. According to a study made, 52% of smartphone users let push notifications on their devices, and this method can benefit businesses in the following ways:

Pointing users to visit your social media networks or channels.
Advertising your existing products and services or promoting the new ones especially ones having special offers.
Developing trust, loyalty and brand reputation by delivering valuable content to users.
Engaging users who are currently on your website.
Re-engagement is possible for users who have abandoned carts, especially for e-commerce applications.

Best Practice when using Push Notification technology

An important element of notifications is that users must opt-in to receiving such messages. The number of notifications that most users get, many choose to opt-out of receiving more unless and until there is a compelling value of those notifications.

The simplest idea for an application to increase the opt-in rate is to define the value of notifications before prompting the users for notification permissions.

Using Permission Messages before showing a device Permission Requests is a genuine practice as it increases the probability that users will remain subscribed to your push notifications and find them valuable. Permission messages do the following three things

They inform a user of the value of subscribing to push notifications.
They obtain user intention with buttons like ‘Enable’ and ‘No Thanks’.
Trigger a Permission Request, if the user shows his preference to get such notifications.

PushPush.io provides a modern day advertising platform where a website owner can use push notification to monetize their web traffic and advertiser can send notifications to their targetted audience and wherein the users grant permission to receive such messages.

Know More

Digital Solutions

Why your Business Needs Digital Marketing to Grow and Thrive?

At one time online marketing was simply a new and different way to market. It opened up a new kind of media on which to trade goods and services. But in past few years, the importance of digital marketing has become something else. It’s become an indispensable part of what a business is to its clients. It’s no longer sufficient to have a website or run any un-focused AdWords campaign. If you don’t have integrated digital marketing solution working for your business then time is working against you because of it. As the Internet grows twisted with everything we do, the value of digital marketing is becoming crystal clear. The main benefit of digital marketing is that a targeted audience can be reached in an economical and measurable way. Other digital marketing advantages add increasing brand loyalty and pushing online sales.

Let’s take a look at why your business requires digital marketing to grow and succeed.

Advanced Analytics

Digital Marketing helps you know the following about your ads and user:

You can know whether they viewed or not. But in the case of TV ads, you don’t even know that much. The TV might be on mute or they could have been in some other room.
If they interacted with the ad after viewing
Have they shown a liking for the ad by checking the likes?
If they shared the ad with friends or family which itself gives an indirect boost to the ad.
If they click on some action button mentioned on the ad.
We can also track the demographics of the viewers as this is much easier to track with free analytics tools provided by Google like Google Analytics. Also, there are many paid tools available which even give more insights.

Personalization

When your client database is linked to your website, then whenever someone visits your website, you can welcome them with your targeted offers. The more they purchase from you, the more you can improve your customer profile and business effectively and efficiently to them. With the help of digital marketing services, you can build a very strong presence on social media platforms. Also by getting connected with social media and handling it carefully, you can develop customer loyalty and build a reputation for being easy to engage with.

Easy to Scale & Adapt

With any marketing campaign or tool to run, there’s initial investment needed to get traffic streaming to your business. But the effect of a digital marketing plan for small businesses becomes very obvious when you see how simple it is to scale and adapt as your business develops and grows. For instance, with social media campaigns, you can choose a daily budget with display ads and search ads. Which will help you know exactly how much that campaign will cost you. You start seeing amazing results and you also need not have to go and renegotiate an ad spot to keep the ad going. Your ad remains uninterrupted. As you continue to convert that traffic, you just increase your everyday spend and revenues with it. And If something is not working in your marketing campaign, you do not have to wait for the ad agreement to run out. Also, you don’t have to start from scratch. Since you have got the control and power so you need to just make a few small changes and re-launch the ad. The importance of digital marketing rests in the fact that you can get on-the-spot results. Analyze data and bring changes quick to decrease wasted ad spend and spent revenues. This proves to us how digital marketing solutions for a small business.

Best ROI

Email marketing is one marketing method which as the highest ROI. It can show great results for the business. It is a conversion machine. But you need to build your email list with quality subscribers. Then deliver very relevant and quality content to a subscriber’s inbox. This is usually achieved through a blend of social media marketing and content marketing. But these marketing methods have an effective ROI of their own. Content marketing can create three times the leads for about 62% less than traditional marketing. When we talk about leads we are just not talking about website traffic but they are likely to buy your product and become loyal consumers as you nourish that relationship.

Social media can give indirect ROI at times. Forbes study observed that companies using social media exceed 78% of businesses when compared to ones who don’t use social media. IBM noticed that a lead which comes in through social media is seven times more likely to convert into a paying customer. That also means it is more likely that you are spending less money when trying to convert people who will never develop as paying customers. The ultimate priority as a small business is cost-effectiveness. Every Rupee you spend matters. You need to know it is going to give you an ROI. That is the value of digital marketing to small business.

Global Influence

A website empowers you to discover new markets and trade globally with only a small investment. The growth of digital and social media marketing has motivated brands to adopt global marketing at a very deeper level. The lines between separate markets have become smudged. Digital Marketing campaigns appeared in one region surely ‘leak’ to others via social media channels, as are the people’s comments, feedback, and opinions, whether positive or negative.

This approach has worked especially well for certain brands. For instance, Coca-Cola established the initial concept of global marketing and has maintained to hold its slogans universal over the years. From slogans like ‘Have a Coke and smile’ in 1979 to ‘Can’t Beat The Feeling’ in 1989 and ‘Always Coca-Cola’ in 1993, its taglines attracted to its audience’s emotions – universally so. Similarly, Nike has also placed the bar pretty high when it comes to embracing digital as a platform to accelerate global campaigns. A shift positively occurred when Nike launched the Nike iD online store, that allows customers to customize their own shoes. It was a success, with sales reaching above $100 million in a few years. Nike has not looked back since then.

Ouriken has passionate digital strategist who helps in creating digital ecosystems and brands wherein providing a proper digital marketing solution for your business. Also, we give website development services in India and Overseas. We focus on technology research, training, innovation & development of the product.