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.

Statistics is boring but computationally intensive. Hence for a long time, data warehousing and business intelligence (DWH & BI) was a specialized job. The contradiction being - folks who could understand pattern in data (business users) didn't know how to mine it; on the other hand, folks who could crunch data (engineers) didn't know what to look for.  Needless to say, anybody who could do both were looked up as wizards (Excel wizard!!). People learnt to live with it by compromising on a standard set of reports. IBM Watson Analytics aims to change this. It's a cloud based predictive analytics application. The cloud platform gives it the number crunching prowess resulting in instantaneous feedback. The beautifully designed application brings out the most important information out of humungous data at once. Further analysis can be done using drag-n-drop making analytics a playful exercise. After spending a couple of hours on the beta application, I must admit an...

For a retailer, order and inventory management used to be a simple exercise. Keep track of what sells in which store and replenish based on those statistics. Not any more. While multiple channels have ensured larger customer base and greater turnover, it has made managing orders all the more complex. However, with challenges comes opportunities. As a retailer, this increased scale allows one to differentiate oneself in the market and become more cost effective. An efficient order management system allows a retailer to achieve the following: - Minimize transport cost - Minimize inventory cost Below is a list of basic features under the above listed categories that an OMS should support. Minimize transport cost Pick up nearest DC based on shipping address Avoid splitting of an order by sourcing it from a DC which has all the line items Distribute fulfillment across DCs considering their capacity to ensure efficient utilization Club multiple orders in single shipment whereve...

A lot has changed since I last used Grails (v1.3.2). I had developed a project that I want to use with latest Grails version. The migration isn't easy. So here's a list of steps to perform the migration (cf. http://grails.org/doc/2.4.x/guide/upgradingFrom23.html):  Change Grails version required by application in application.properties. app.grails.version=2.4.3  Dependencies are no longer managed in application.properties; instead BuildConfig.groovy is used. Make sure Maven repositories are NOT commented.   repositories {         grailsPlugins()         grailsHome()         grailsCentral()         // uncomment the below to enable remote dependency resolution         // from public Maven repositories         mavenLocal()    ...

 Java world has used Javadocs for variety of purposes for a long time. It has served the developers well for technical references. What if the same concept is used to generate instruction booklet as well? ThingDoc allows you to achieve this for more generic use-cases like installation steps for software, building steps for hardware and even recipe book for food enthusiasts!! Source: https://github.com/josefprusa/ThingDoc