Tech insights

In app purchases - video games started this. Gamers could buy super powers or add-ons for their avatars without leaving the game. When games moved from consoles to Facebook, they retained this flavour. Though retailers failed to capitalize on this. Most retailers think of Facebook value as a "Like" button on their website or a "Page" in Facebook. Unless one has read Facebook developer documentation (https://developers.facebook.com/docs/payments/overview), little does one realise that Facebook provides the user management and payment APIs to enable a retailer to sell their products within Facebook app just like those games' in-app purchases. Some service providers like StoreYa.com or storefrontsocial.com are already enabling small retailers to sell online using Facebook. So the question is - will Facebook compete as an eCommerce Platform in near future?

Any application evolves over time and so does the entities in the application. To start with, simple DDL scripts are written to create the DB. In each release, a new table is introduced or a current one modified. You are lucky if you can push the same version of application to all your customers. Since in real world this is not possible, soon one feels the need for managing DB for various releases of the application. While for managing code, there are excellent tools available (e.g. git, svn etc.), the same is lacking for DB management. Alembic aims to mitigate this problem. The website introduces Alembic as: Alembic is a lightweight database migration tool for usage with the SQLAlchemy Database Toolkit for Python. This is slightly misleading as it also supports MySQL and pgsql. Asterisk project has started using it for managing Realtime DB tables using MySQL. Though it's still in 0.7.1 version, the progress seems to be very promising. It's very easy to use which you c...

While reaching out to customer care these days, it's common to go through a series of questions on IVR before one gets to talk to a person. Even then, if it's your follow-up call on an issue, you have to start with several digits of a request number. How about using some technology to ease customer's pain? The IVR software should begin with checking if there is any past record of interaction from the particular telephone number. If not, present the user with normal set of options. If yes, it should directly connect the user to support staff simultaneously pulling up the concerned record on the display for support staff to refer to. What more, in eCommerce scenario most customers call up to find out their order details. Retailers can use this technology to give out order status before asking them if they want to talk to customer care.