Even in 2017 . Everybody and their cousin began to believe that was going to disrupt every industry, change the face of the earth, and make obscure ICO investors millions in the process. blockchain technology was considered overhyped blockchain This hype and excitement around cryptocurrencies led people to believe some crazy things about blockchain technology and what it can actually do. Many people now have the wrong impression about the potential of this technology, and believe it’s something that it isn’t. As I’ve discussed before, is just a database structure with some distinctive features. a blockchain It allows multiple parties to record and share information on a database in real time, and not need to trust each other, as they are incentivised to do the right thing through tokens/coins. These features are clearly highly specific, and are therefore only really useful under a certain set of circumstances. For instance, they’re brilliant when used for cryptocurrencies such as , since the blockchain behind Bitcoin allows people to send money to anyone else, anywhere in the world cheaply, and without the need for a bank or other intermediary. Bitcoin However, blockchains aren’t actually suitable for every kind of data storage, and certainly shouldn’t be used as the solution to a problem nobody had. In this article I’ll break down 10 things blockchain and its applications (like Bitcoin) aren’t, from both the haters as well as the over-enthusiastic (in no particular order): 1. Bitcoin isn’t the , it isn’t rat poison, and it isn’t dead. biggest scam in history Some of the biggest names in finance came out swinging against Bitcoin in 2017, including and , as well as JP Morgan CEO . Warren Buffett Charlie Munger Jamie Dimon Bitcoin and the blockchain it is based on — like every early-stage technology — has its flaws. The consensus mechanism uses , and many people are taking advantage of the system for speculation and illegal activities. proof-of-work mind-boggling amounts of electricity But saying the technology will fail purely because of these flaws is kind of like saying in 1995 that the internet won’t work . because it’s clunky and unorganised Bitcoin has been going strong for 10 years despite being hundreds of times over. pronounced dead It might seem dodgy on the surface, but in the words of Naval Ravikant: “Bitcoin is a tool for freeing humanity from oligarchs and tyrants, dressed up as a get-rich-quick scheme.” - Naval Ravikant on Twitter Focusing on the negatives of this technology and calling Bitcoin a fraud is to be completely ignorant of what it actually enables us to do. 2. Blockchain isn’t a way to increase your company’s stock price , and are all notable examples of companies adding ‘blockchain’ to their name and watching their stock price soar, without a single blockchain in sight. Kodak Long Island Iced Tea On-line Plc 3. Blockchain isn’t a ponzi scheme Unless you bought into , which was literally a ponzi scheme. PonziCoin And don’t even get me started on . Bitconnect 4. Cryptocurrency isn’t just for scammers Sure, there are plenty of of and , and it’s an area of great concern for the industry. well documented cases crypto hacks scams , the anonymity afforded by blockchain tech is what enables these scammers and hackers. As I’ve discussed before But it’s an unfortunate side effect of the technology, not the point of it. Terrorist groups like ISIS use social media to find new recruits, that doesn’t mean we have to give up Facebook and Twitter. Pablo Escobar made so many American Dollars that he would burn them just to keep his daughter warm. The whole drug industry is run on cash. Does that make cash bad? 5. Blockchain isn’t a way for your non-blockchain startup to raise money Just because you saw a no-name company and raise millions off an idea alone doesn’t mean you can or should too. ICO The point of an ICO is to distribute tokens to potential users that incentivise them to use your blockchain. The tokens are eventually supposed to do something. If your startup has nothing to do with blockchain, then you have no need for tokens, so don’t even think about using it to raise money. 6. Blockchain isn’t going to revolutionise your business Unless your business needs , you will be no better off storing your data on one. all of the benefits that a blockchain provides 7. Blockchain isn’t going to disrupt every industry Ever heard the saying “it’s like Uber for (X industry)”. Well that has made its way into the blockchain sphere, with companies literally trying to create among other things. Uber for blockchain The small problem with this approach is that not every industry needs blockchain. So you don’t like Uber’s business practices, and think the solution — rather than just using Lyft — is the blockchain? A decentralised, peer-to-peer ridesharing network does sound pretty sexy. But that completely overlooks all the reasons why blockchain is a terrible way to organise ride sharing. By definition, there is no central authority governing a public blockchain, so who makes decisions in this distributed company? What about dispute resolution? Once data has been uploaded and verified, it’s not going anywhere. Got charged for a ride you didn’t take? Driver did something really bad that you need to report? Well too bad because nobody is listening. What about development? How is a distributed company with nobody in charge supposed to compete with one of the with a well-established market? most highly-funded startups in history Even if a decentralised Uber could overcome everything stacked against it and create a working service, how much better than Uber would it really be? Uber (and other centralised ride sharing apps) work pretty well right now. The alternative just isn’t that much better. The potential benefit of putting many existing industries on the blockchain just isn’t high enough to make users change their behaviour. 8. Blockchain isn’t a way to make sacrifices to Cthulhu The less said about this the better. 9. Blockchain isn’t a platform for memes is the most well known meme coin, which from Bitcoin in 2013 as a joke, and proceeded to hit a $2b valuation in 2017. Dogecoin forked 10. Blockchain isn’t useless. Unless your token is . literally useless So what is it then? Even though I’ve outlined all the things blockchains shouldn’t be used for, there are still cases where blockchain is the perfect application. Let’s take a look at the conditions that call for a blockchain: A shared, ‘add-only’ database Multipe writers Absence of trust The need to remove an intermediary Consensus & validation As it happens, money fits perfectly into this category. Applications like Bitcoin fulfill all of these criteria, and are therefore a fantastic application of blockchain tech. Unfortunately, as of 2018, there haven’t really been many other proven, mass-market applications for blockchains. That isn’t to say there never will be, we just haven’t found them yet. And that’s the point of this article: blockchain isn’t a useless technology, but neither is it the saviour of your business, the economy and humanity as a whole. We need to all be aware of the true potential of this technology and plan for what it can realistically achieve. Originally published at www.cryptobeginners.info .

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10 things blockchain isn’t

Brian Rankin’s background is not unlike others. Successful business man moves into blockchain and leaves to explore the traditional business world yet again. Unlike his peers, Brian saw something interesting during a time when most retail investors are exiting. Brian saw opportunity and massive growth coming. Inspired and motivated to re-enter the blockchain space, Brian found an unlikely suitor. A project that seemingly is unknown to many, yet poised to disrupt the payment industry. And with Brian’ s experience, this is exactly what he contends will happen. PLEASE TELL US ABOUT YOUR BACKGROUND AND A LITTLE BIT ABOUT YOUR EXPERIENCE AT RIPPLE? I’ve been working in the Fintech world since 2008, back when mobile banking was new to the world. At ClairMail (acquired by Monitise, then by Fiserv) I managed mobile banking deployments into 50+ banks and credit unions. At Ripple I led the team that deployed RCL (Ripple Consensus Ledger) and cross-border payments solutions into international banks throughout Europe and APAC. In both companies I was privileged to lead teams of absolutely outstanding engineers and managers, truly some of the best people I’ve ever worked with [ teams, hats off to you! ] And I’m a leadership coach. I believe that everybody is naturally creative, resourceful and whole (unless they prove otherwise) and the best part of my day is when I’m coaching & mentoring my team. WHAT MADE YOU DECIDE TO JOIN MODERN FINANCE CHAIN AFTER LEAVING THE BLOCKCHAIN SPACE? Quite simply I’ve a big believer in the potential of the blockchain and digital currencies. And the big vision of Modern Finance Chain: to expand cryptocurrency utility to the point of ubiquity. With Modern Finance Chain’s multi-blockchain solution based on flexible and powerful smart contacts, I find it personally compelling because it hearkens back to the root of what digital currencies are all about: truly decentralized, instantaneous, transparent, that’s in the best interest of both merchants and consumers. There are so many ICOs out there that are based purely on fluff and “make money fast” — in fact, if you want to see the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s take on ICOs then google HoweyCoins, which is the complete opposite of Modern Finance Chain. ELEVATOR PITCH. HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE WHAT MODERN FINANCE CHAIN IS AND WHAT IT’S TRYING TO DO IN A FEW SENTENCES? is a smart contract platform providing the ability for multiple digital currencies to be transacted across multiple blockchains — which is huge and very compelling because MFChain can embrace almost any use case that will enhance consumer and merchant’s experience. With multi-blockchain integration, it’s truly a decentralized network with no single dominant coin. And both merchants and consumers are rewarded for using the platform. Modern Finance Chain CAN YOU EXPLAIN YOUR EXACT ROLE WITH MODERN FINANCE CHAIN? I’m advising Modern Finance Chain on enterprise integrations. Many small technology startups, especially those that are consumer-facing, find it challenging to integrate with financial institutions and payments gateways. Banks — financial institutions in general — are large enterprises with a serious responsibility: they are custodians of financial asset used by millions of people (checking, savings, investments). This places huge regulatory, legal, compliance, and infoSec burdens on everything they do, highlighting the absolutely critical importance of quality product delivered to exacting specifications. I’m here to help MFChain navigate those waters — they can take advantage of my scars and deliver enterprise quality right out of the gate. REGULATIONS AND CRYPTOCURRENCY IS A HOT TOPIC. WHAT DO YOU THINK MODERN FINANCE CHAIN NEEDS TO DO TO ENSURE LONG TERM SUCCESS DURING THESE UNCERTAIN TIMES? So beyond ICOs and talk of digital currencies as securities: the big driver of regulation is that the institutional investors want in. Digital currency investments have a total AUM of about 5% of traditional venture capital. That’s a lot of room for investing in coin. What’s stopping things is lack of institutional-grade investor protection, which won’t change until the regulatory landscape around digital currencies matures. And Modern Finance Chain’s part? Keep abreast of what’s going on around regulations, but don’t let uncertainty and rumors drive the ship — stay the course and keep executing against the vision. At the same time work with the regulators, not against the regulators, as what they really want is to do what’s best for the security and well-being of the people and institutions who will use digital currencies (yes I’m giving regulators the benefit of the doubt). Finally, listen to the MFChain team members, often they already have the answer to — or at least an informed opinion about — the problem of the day. WHAT DO YOU THINK MAKES MODERN FINANCE CHAIN UNIQUE VERSUS ITS COMPETITORS? Several things. Let’s break it down. MFChain has their own Mainnet which enables multi-blockchain integration and a multi-currency digital payments system. And (I like this) it uses the BFT/POS consensus model, which scales horizontally very well. Merchants have choices: accept multiple digital currencies; convert some or all to fiat currencies as desired; control the surcharges on their systems so they can do what’s right for their individual businesses. Consumers can use whatever wallet they have today to transact on Mainnet — no need to go through an exchange. Privacy is king — and consumers control their own privacy settings. And consumers are rewarded — 1% of every purchase using MFX tokens. About those rewards — what I didn’t mention is that 16% of the entire token allocation will be set aside as a rewards pool. And the rewards merchants receive can be passed on — in part or whole — to their customers as they see fit. It’s an awesome innovation platform and incubator. The Mainnet gives the ability for other ICO projects to accept other digital currencies when generating tokens — today most ICOs accept only BTC and ETH. With MFChain we also accept NEO, LTC, XRP, etc — just about any of Altcoin on any blockchain. PLEASE EXPLAIN WHAT THE MF2X PROTOCOL IS? IS THIS FULLY COMPLIANT OR ARE LICENCES AND REGISTRATION STILL REQUIRED? The MF2X protocol enables direct crypto-to-fiat and crypto-to-crypto swaps without the need for dealing with a centralized crypto exchange. This allows any digital currency to participate & transact on the MFChain mainnnet, and opens up the MfChain products and services to millions of users. It’s exciting! Still lots of work to do, however we’re already collaborating with Credits to accept their tokens on our Mainnt. And yes, with our AML/KYC capabilities we will be fully compliant and will register as required within any applicable jurisdiction. Our legal team is managing those important details. PLEASE EXPLAIN THE MFX REWARDS POOL. HOW DOES THAT WORK FOR BOTH CONSUMERS AND MERCHANTS? The MFX reward pool comprises 16% of the entire initial MFX token allocation; additional allocations to the pool will happen as new blockchain partnerships join the Mainnet. The pool is used to incent both consumers and merchants to transact: consumers are rewarded for every transaction (a percentage of their purchase similar to a cash-back credit card program); for merchants the pool covers fees typically bundled by traditional payments systems: chargebacks, interchanges, assessments, payment gateways — these all go away with the MFX Rewards Pool. I like that it’s totally transparent to both the consumers and the merchants, and the merchants can choose to pass their savings onto their customers. It’s an important component of an entire merchant/consumer ecosystem, which is what MFChain is all about. ARE THERE ANY PARTNERSHIPS FORMED OR ANY POTENTIAL PARTNERSHIPS COMING UP? Absolutely! We’re partnered with Ingot Coin and Loopring, which provides us transparent access to their liquidity pools and cryptocurrency partners, and with DDEX as our first exchange listing partner. We’ve also joined the Komorebi Alliance, which I find especially interesting as it’a cross-blockchain group of partners that hedges risk by providing redundancy in the event there’s a performance issue with a partner’s platform, and, converges the industry-specific functions of each partner’s utility token — Token Augmenting Partnerships, to quote Hirander Misra. And we’re announcing two new partners: Zagg, a leader in Gift Cards, Benefits, Rewards and Loyalty industry, who will use the MF2X protocol for payments through MFChain’s payments gateway and will integrate their awards program with the MFX rewards pool. We’ve just partnered with Credits, a Singapore-based blockchain platform for developing dApps, who will use the M2FX protocol to enable the Credits token in the MFChain mainnet. What’s fascinating to see is that we are reaching out to potential partners — not just any blockchain company but the best and the brightest — and they get the vision, they see the value. They understand that by moving beyond the power of one to the power of team, all of us can be immeasurably more successful & impactful. And at the end of the day that’s what it’s all about: having positive impact in the world.

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Meet Brian Rankin, Former VP of Ripple

The teacher should also be a learner. Some Background This past summer I saw a Facebook post from my friend Andrew: I messaged him pretty much immediately. My initial thoughts we “I love mentorship, hell I started a mentorship program in Austin myself [shameless plug].” Code Orange But I hadn’t realized how the experience of mentoring a Pesto student would shape my own perception of the current state of tech and the world. For context, Andrew started Pesto in rooted in the spirit of learning. his own personal journey In the spirit of my own learning, I had agreed to be a “Silicon Valley professional developer” mentor for a student in Pesto’s first batch. I was born in Karachi in Pakistan. I’ve had the opportunity to go back multiple times, but have never gotten to visit India. (One of the potential perks of being a Pesto mentor was that I could perhaps go to India for a wedding one day.) Still I had always held a firm belief that if I wasn’t so fortunate to have the parents I had, if we hadn’t moved to Canada and eventually the States, then I would still be in Karachi today. It’d be unlikely that I would have the opportunity to write this today. It’d be unlikely I’d be where I am today. So in some ways it had always felt that I had a duty to give back to where I came from. (India and Pakistan were once one country and even if they weren’t I would still have felt similarly compelled.) To those who cannot relate, to put it succintly: If you were to consider your birthplace to be completely random, how likely is it that you would enjoy the life you do now? This is a question I constantly ask myself. How would I live if I was someone else’s child? It’s a heavy question. But as any kind of altruist, it’s one to ponder, regardless of how uncomfortable it is. The Experience I was assigned my mentee soon after committing to the mentorship program. As with any new experience, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I wanted to make an impact in someone else’s life, both professionally and personally, but I wasn’t even sure how much I had to offer. This was likely a symptom of my long-standing imposter syndrome as evidence of my career would prove that I had a lot to offer a more junior developer just starting out their career. Nikhil, my mentee, was introduced to me over email and we soon scheduled an introductory call. Admittedly though I had planned on doing due diligence ahead of time by searching up Nikhil’s past professional history and projects, I did not end up making the time to do so. This, however, was not a problem. Nikhil was very excited to be given the opportunity to speak to an experienced developer in the States. Similarly, I was already excited for the opportunity to be a mentor. So it was a good fit. But the specifics of what needed to be done in the program seemed free-form and fluid at first. This was daunting, but luckily my experience as a founder prepared me well for the task at hand. I realized early in the program a simple guiding principle: Mentoring someone is similar to managing someone. In management, your company’s revenue is your bottomline. In mentorship, shared personal growth is your bottomline. The first call was a simple introduction. I gave Nikhil a rundown of my professional experience thus far and he did the same for me. In my past experience, the better I could relate to my mentee, the more successful I would be at making an impact on them. So I tried to relate to Nikhil. It wasn’t difficult as we’d both had entreprenuerial aspirations throughout our careers and had realized that there was a ladder of experience that we would need to climb in order to get to where we wanted to be. Throughout the mentorship program, I related my past development experiences to him in ways that would be productive and helpful. Initially, I wanted to be respectful of what the instructors had intended for Nikhil to learn in terms of coding practices and frameworks, but I soon came to realize that he was hungry for more knowledge and experience. Throughout the program, I was held accountable by Nikhil’s professionalism responsiveness in emails. Every week, whether we planned for a call or not, he would email to make sure the a follow-up meeting was scheduled. He even took it upon himself to set the agenda for the next meeting we were to have. Needless to say, I was thoroughly impressed. At first, I would advise technically in a general sense. However, later in the program, I decided that screensharing the codebases we were working on would be the best way to understand each other’s working and coding styles. This became the standard on each call as we’d check-in on each other’s progress and have demos ready. We got on nearly hour-long calls at roughly a bi-weekly cadence. When I didn’t have time on a given week or we had to reschedule a planned call, Nikhil always followed up. On a particular week, I had completely forgotten about a call we were supposed to have a few days prior. I felt guilty; Nikhil was very understanding: As the program went on, the free-form fluidity of each meeting became more structured and productive. We pair-programmed at times. I gave him suggestions on npm packages, UI kits, React component strategies, styling methods, and more general advice on how to practice becoming a better developer. However, it wasn’t entirely stiff and formal. We chatted about Silicon Valley culture, the future of technology, and our lives in general. It was never boring. By the end of the program, Nikhil demoed his final project to me and I was truly blown away at his growth and progress as a product engineer. Not only did he utilize every bit of advice I had to offer, he created a well thought-out tool that would be helpful to any remote employee called . I was truly proud of he was able to accomplish in such a short period of time. Although he gave me much of the credit, his willingness to learn and grow were still his own. The Remotants How It Shaped Me By the end of the program, I realized how much I had improved as a developer and mentor when I looked back at the insightful questions that Nikhil had asked and how thoroughly I wanted to answer them. I began diving deeper into the frameworks that I had recommended. The technical practices that Pesto was teaching their students were, at times, beyond what I had bothered to learn and employ in my own work. For example, I decided it was time to buckle down and deeply understand the complexities of Webpack rather than hinging entirely on create-react-app to do configurations for me. I decided it was time for me to further my creative UI abilities when prototyping a product. In a general sense, I decided that I needed to live up to my title as a Pesto mentor. There were many points in time that I realized that we were completely in sync about our opinions on software development. We used the same PrivateRoute wrapper component for our React apps. We decided was a very useful UI kit to start new projects with. We utilized similar data-fetching mechanisms and error-handling. But the most important lesson I learned from mentoring a junior developer was not technical. antd In many ways, seeing the personal growth of a junior developer that I was partially responsible for helped me realize that there was a lot that I had learned in my career that I hadn’t actively realized. I found myself to be a better developer and manager than I had thought I was. My imposter syndrome began to ease up. I had always considered myself a solid developer, but never one that could offer the level of mentorship that I finally realized that I was capable of. The gratitude that Nikhil showed me would brighten the days of exhaustion working on an early startup and building a product from the ground up. Nikhil was doing the same thing, but his attitude and excitement to learn and grow was infectious. I became eager to learn more than I already knew. I became eager to be better, not just for myself but also for others. Teaching was always a passion of mine. Learning, a desire that usually ends after one graduates from school, became a regained passion. I was very grateful for that. I also began to realize how fortunate I was to have been given opportunities left and right to learn and grow simply by my geographic location in the States. I realized that not everyone is as fortunate as I have been in my aspirations, in terms of optionality and support. Desipite having worked hard for the opportunites in my career, I realized that my place in tech was still one of privilege in the scope of the entire world. Privilege comes with responsibility. Mentoring and teaching the next generation of developers is important to me and I plan to continue. And in doing so, I feel as though I am fulfilling an important part of my responsibility. The process has always been personally rewarding. Lifelong teaching is the easiest path to lifelong learning. Why Mentor? Mentoring junior developers is not simply a way of easing your conscience with respect to your privilege. Mentoring the next generation is a way to gain perspective on how you fit into a world that’s larger than yourself. It’s a way to learn about new ideas and reevaluate longstanding beliefs. As established developers, our ideas on tech are often formed in an ongoing process by the articles we read, the coworkers we work with, and the documentation we painstakingly sift through. But whether you have 20 years of experience or only a few, when you interact with people who are going through the same process that you had to go through to get to where you are today, you are often reminded of a time when learning was exciting. And you can carry that excitement into your own professional and even your personal life. The excitement of learning from your mentee will in turn reinvigorate your excitement for learning. Mentoring a junior developer will make you a better developer. It will help you learn the perspectives of developers that you may manage one day. It will equip you with the patience, understanding, and empathy you’ll need as a founder. And on a many levels, your personal growth will go far beyond your professional life.

ORANGE

Why You Should Mentor a Junior Developer

How much is your personal data worth? For the average American about $0.20 to $0.40. Here is how much your data is worth in these scenarios: “Married” or “Engaged to be Married”: Add 30% more. “Recently Divorced”: Add another 10–20%. “Expecting a Baby”: Another 30%. “Own a Home”: Another 30%. Hopefully you’re healthy but if not this is a goldmine for advertisers. If you have common lifestyle conditions like diabetes, back pain, headaches, or high cholesterol your personal data worth rockets up to $0.46! Don’t worry Facebook doesn’t ask you if you have these conditions instead it can be figured out from the cookies that your browser leaves on websites for booking appointments, purchasing medications or searching for information on these unfortunate conditions. Read on…it gets even creepier. So what does this all add up to? After analyzing data on Statistica, as of Q2 2018: Facebook has 2.2 billion users Obviously there is a vast range in the price of personal data between countries, demographic and socio-economic profiles. To be fair let’s use the top ten countries by Facebook user count which comes to users during that same period in 2018: approximately 1 billion Accounting for just Americans this means Facebook generates about $42–84 million for personal data ($210m x $.20 to .40). Multiply this by the thousands of advertisers and data brokers then you can begin to understand the billions in Facebook annual revenue — all from the data that you have provided for free. The Financial Times created a very where you answer a few simple questions about your lifestyle, health and behavior and it will tell you approximately how much your personal data is worth for the multi-billion dollar data broker industry: interesting yet creepy tool Personal Data Worth Calculator (Source: The Financial Times) Can You Personally Profit From Your Personal Data? Chances are if you’re reading this your personal data is hosted on Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter. Maybe all three. What if you could profit from this data? It is your personal data which you own after all. Unfortunately unless you’re a data broker you’d only make a few bucks at best. The value is in the aggregation of this data which is why just earned more than $400 million dollars in annual revenue. Keep in mind these are just the . These are the players that collect and redistribute your aggregated data to and from Facebook, Amazon, Google, LinkedIn and Twitter. nine data brokers alone middlemen So unless you’re into data aggregation or get a few thousand friends together chances are you’re never going to make anywhere near what your data is really worth. Downloading your data is a good start though and just the beginning of a more decentralized world. Knowledge is power and understanding what data you’ve given up and how its being used empowers you to make better privacy decisions. Why Can’t We Just Switch to A Decentralized Network Where We Fully Control and Profit From Our Personal Data? The truth is because its a pain and not easy to do. This is because all of your friends and colleagues are there. Centralized networks create network effects and growth around this fact. You get to connect with your friends for “free” on these centralized platforms — all for the low low price of your personal data. Its no secret that your personal data is the primary revenue model for the modern centralized social platform. People will switch from Facebook or Twitter to a better solution if they are incentivized to do so. While regulation attempts to curtail the abuse in the usage of personal data it only stifles rather than creates innovation. There are solutions that are changing the game via solutions like (PDS) however people aren’t exactly flocking in droves from centralized organizations like Facebook and LinkedIn. PDSs today need to be more than just a concept in theory. The key is to figure out people’s motivations for switching to this alternative then providing the right incentive. Personal Data Stores So the real barrier from switching from a centralized to decentralized network is the lack of social graph portability. What would incentive you to switch from Facebook? People respond to incentives like faster, cheaper, safer, and more private. The reason that alternative decentralized solutions like a PDS have not blossomed is because they have yet to figure out a solid plan for network effects which Facebook has done quite successfully. To most its just not worth the “effort”. If an alternative solution figures out how to make the PDS transition seamless with the proper incentive structure for you to invite friends then the network effects will take care of itself. How Can We Build a Decentralized Social Network That We Fully Control? Decentralization can seem daunting at times. Don’t get me wrong, I am 100% on-board with the cause to decentralize. Its my modus operandi. We just need a “user-friendly” way to go about it. Although possible its quite tedious to export all of your personal data from centralized services like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter (see below for a step-by-step on how to do this). Its multi-step and not exactly easy to find but available for everyone. Why not create a simple one-click tool that does this in seconds — then import into one’s new PDS? The tool can optionally send an invite link to those extracted friends including a message to why your PDS is (fill in the blank with your best adjectives). If you follow the blockchain and cryptocurrency space you’ve noticed the explosion of Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs). Many are based on issuing a token similar to one that you’d earn in an online game. The token has a utility value on the service like paying for premium features, transactions, bonus payouts, discounts, etc. This “tokenization model” can be a powerful incentive. Many decentralized projects, particularly blockchain are based on a utility token that provides this kind value to the user. Perhaps there could be a PDS solution that pays people to provide their personal data to interested parties. The token could also be payed as a referral point system and if necessary traded for Bitcoin, Ethereum or fiat currency on a decentralized peer-to-peer exchange like , or . In this example the PDS solution would require advertisers to convert to these “PDS” tokens to pay individuals directly for their personal data. This would be the beginning of a sustainable token economic model that’s based on network effects. It would allow controlled privacy, easy on-boarding of friends and the a personal economic incentive to participate in the community. Win-win all around. IDEX StellerX Bisq While I’m sure there are projects today that are trying to solve this problem the reason that most of us have not heard of them is because the incentives are just now there — . The incentive would need to make up for the pain of moving from our comfortable social networks that we’ve updated and nurtured for years. That our friends, self worth and reputations are seemingly intrinsically tied to! We have to start somewhere and it starts today with understanding who is really moving our cheese. See below for how I apparently managed to sell my soul to 525 advertisers! yet Bonus: How To Download Your Personal Data From The Major Social Networks The first step in understanding what your data is worth is to have access to your data. Here’s how download and review all of your personal data on the major social networks Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn: : Twitter Go to and click the “Request Data” button at the bottom of the page. https://twitter.com/settings/your_twitter_data 2. You’ll get an email with your data. Ironically I was instantly served an ad to “learn data science by working with real data sets”: 3. You can also click the “Request Advertiser list” button to see who has purchased your personal data. If you notice above unbeknownst to me I have apparently sold my soul to 525 advertisers! Facebook Go to and click the “Download Your Information” button: https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=your_facebook_information 2. After about ten minutes or so you’ll have the option to download a mega file with thousands of data points spanning years. Mine was almost a gigabyte: LinkedIn Go to then click on “The Works”, under “Download your data” to download all of your personal data: https://www.linkedin.com/psettings/member-data 2. Take a plane ride to the other side of the world because it will take 24 hours until your download is ready. (If you decide to visit Taipei come join me here for some Taiwanese !) bubble tea

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Curious Case of PLATO: the cold war Internet

I originally in 2015. What started out as a manifesto turned into a resignation letter to the industry I had spent 20 years in. wrote about the problems with modern advertising The model was broken, it probably still is. Agencies are desperate to hold onto client retainers, endlessly churning out work that isn’t effective, endlessly reporting new engagement metrics to hide the underlying problem — the adverts aren’t driving sales. As a digital agency, we could see exactly what was happening. Every week a call would come from the client, the sales meeting was over, they hadn’t hit target, and we were told to pull the lever on those things which did work — Google ads and special offer emails. Despite our warnings that the Google ads were getting more expensive and constant emails would stress the customer database, the failing expensive creative campaigns continued. Hey, what did we know, we were just a little website company, we didn’t have an office on Charlotte Street and weren’t part of the conversation held in the agency box at Wembley. The Internet changed the advertising industry, companies could target lower down the funnel. Rather than printing ads in magazines, hoping to spark interest, Google allowed companies to target customers at the point of expressed interest and ‘owned’ assets such as websites and email, allowed a direct conversation with customers. But the advertising agencies and media planners were still running the show and these new channels were a threat to the broken business model of Charlotte Street. Keen to take their share of the digital dollar, these agencies adapted their creative process for the web with ineffective brand led social media and banner campaigns, and the clients were buying it. I now see a new threat on the horizon, one which the advertising industry is woefully prepared for. For the last two years, I have been going down the Bitcoin rabbit hole. For those with little exposure, Bitcoin is more than just some magic Internet money. It is a representative of the decentralisation movement, taking control away from governments and the Silicon Valley behemoths who have monopolised the web and abused our data for their own commercial agenda. Two days ago I wrote an article for Hackernoon, “ .” I was analysing the additional difficulties which these decentralised businesses face when trying to execute a growth strategy, what I realised are the issues they face will be faced by all companies. Alas, it is time to revisit my and start looking at these additional threats to advertising. We need to talk about Crypto marketing resignation letter Have no doubt, admen (and women) are liars. Compulsive liars. Have no doubt about how they work, I have sat in meetings with these vultures. Their motivations are simple: Convince you to buy more shit you don’t need Keep their retainer Win an award Advertising agencies are a willing participant in the mass surveillance operations of Silicon Valley-where the ‘free web’ is monetised by building ever more complex data profiles. Forget the glamorous world portrayed by Don Draper, it doesn’t exist anymore. Advertising is a tough business, clients move multi-million dollar accounts on a whim, whole departments are closed and creative teams who have slaved night after night, weekend after weekend, are discarded. It is a brutal environment fuelled by fear and greed. There is no place for truth in advertising, a can of Coke make you happy, a pair of Nikes make you cool, goddamnit, buy our shit you miserable loser… WILL WILL …but the Internet is a truth machine, the aggregation of customer data is unstoppable. We know that a can of Coke is unhealthy and those Nikes, made in a Vietnamese sweatshop are nothing more than a temporary high. Like drug addicts, we keep feeding our misery by buying more, and the advertising industry is the Mexican cartel of consumerism. The fightback is happening, and the response from business is transparent. You don’t want all that sugar? Here is our sugar-free Coke? You don’t want Coke? Here is our $3 bottle of tap water. No doubt the admen are behind this, presenting their research on changing consumer opinion accompanied by their cunning plan to keep us buying. The truth machine amplifies the problem. The vision of advertising we saw in The Minority Report is no longer the future, it is happening now. The dot-com mega corporations have enabled the admen to track our every move, thought and like. The artistic beauty of the 60’s has been replaced by custom ad placements stalking our every move. The NSA would admire Facebook and Google’s data warehouses, but this has come at a cost. Privacy is not just under attack, it is being abused to keep feeding the dark side of Silicon Valley. The philanthropy of these new billionaires is built through modern day sweatshops. While they strategise over burning effigies with their peers at Black Rock City, technology is filtering the consumer dollar into an ever decreasing number of pockets_._ Such is the march of technology that the universal basic income <cough>communism</cough>, is now seen as a viable solution to the millions of middle-class jobs are under threat. Where does it all end? As I said in my article, marketing is neither good nor bad, marketing is a tool to match needs and wants, it helps companies grow, and despite my misgivings about these dot-com monopolies: Google’s ability to find exactly what I am looking for is helpful Facebook’s ability to create communities around interests is cool Amazon’s convenience is second to none What isn’t acceptable is how they exploit data and privacy. The Cambridge Analytica scandal highlighted how insidious the business of data has become. Yes, I want to share my photos with my friends, no, I don’t want you using my data to influence elections. Yes, I want you to show me the nearest Chinese restaurant, no, I don’t want you listening to my phone calls. The problem is these companies can’t be trusted, they are hungry beasts, slaves to their share price and data feeds their growth. But an alternative is coming, a new wave of decentralised and privacy-focused technologies which are taking power back. With art imitating life, the vision of a decentralised Internet seen in the show Silicon Valley is being built by the inventor of the Internet Tim Berners-Lee. Built off the decentralised web platform Solid, puts the user in control of their data and who can access it. Inrupt “We are not talking to Facebook and Google about whether or not to introduce a complete change where all their business models are completely upended overnight. We are not asking their permission.” Tim Berners-Lee The threat to these centralised data abusers is significant, Inrupt can upend their entire business model and should it be successful, they won’t be able to do anything about it. Decentralisation is about taking power away from centralised entities and is there a better proponent for such a project than the inventor of the Internet? Berners-Lee isn’t the only person working on the problem: Ad blockers are removing banners and tracking scripts Brave has made private browsing default Cryptocurrencies are adding privacy to ecommerce DuckDuckGo has anonymised search Metamask is removing the need for user accounts The message is clear, people want privacy, ironically, Silicon Valley is responding. When I wrote about the advertising industry in 2015, my somewhat facetious article highlighted how the advertising industry was misusing the industry for its lies. Now there are new threats: Technology which blocks them promoting their lies Technology which stops them customising their lies Technology which stops them knowing who they are lying to Technology which stops them tracking the performance of their lies Companies will still want to market their products and services, and there is more to the advertising industry than Coke and Nike, there are honest organisations who need and deserve to be able to talk to customers. What is required is a new model, a new framework of thinking. My expectation is the industry will respond with more ads, wherever the media planners can find places to put them, and new metrics will be invented which allow large numbers to be sent to clients in Excel spreadsheets. Some of us know what is coming. We are preparing for a future where the consumer holds power and permission-based communications are not just a checkbox and an email. A civil war is underway in Silicon Valley, and the advertising industry is collateral damage. Peter McCormack If you you have any questions then please free to email me . You may also wish to read some of my other articles on my blog or listen to my Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency podcast, What Bitcoin Did . Further Reading (by me) Online Advertising Does Not Work (Fast Company) Exclusive: Tim Berners-Lee tells us his radical new plan to upend the World Wide Web Overhauled Brave browser beta gets max privacy with Tor-powered private tabs The Cambridge Analytica files: the story so far (Matthew Green) Why I’m done with Chrome

Analytica

Nike

What Bitcoin Did [the podcast]

The Decentralised Threat to Advertising

There are countless statistics available online that points out one thing on what kind of content users engage in — videos. Videos fascinate people and spur audience count to expand tremendously. In 2017, Oxford has chosen the term “Binge watching” as the word of the year, indicating that entertainment has become synonymous to online video-on-demand platforms. Revenue generated worldwide through video streaming industry amounts to a total of US$19,572, as of 2018. It is also projected that a staggering population of 548 million people would channel to video-on-demand websites as their prime entertainment source. This climate in media sharing indicates that the gates are wide open to new ventures in the on-demand arena. Video Streaming and Youtube Monopoly: Though there are a number of video sharing websites scattered online, no other video sharing service has been able to beat youtube since its inception in 2005. This humongous success is owed to 3 major factors that the creators of youtube incorporated in their brainchild — Personalisation, leisurely watchability and a wide range of video choices. Any video sharing platform that is to be built in the future or the ones that are already present online are bound to follow these essential codes to give a user-friendly experience. In order to build a video sharing website that aces the competition in video sharing, there are customizable video sharing solutions available that would make your job easier in building a successful video sharing website and app. Vplayed — A Condescending Video Streaming Solution of Successful Platforms Vplayed is a media streaming solution that has helped multiple global brands to create their own video sharing website like youtube. Since their inception, Vplayed has extensively researched on the climate prevailing around the video sharing arena and has subsumed all the above parameters in addition to the highly flexible customization options. How Vplayed confers the possibilities of success Building an independent video sharing platform yields more benefits than one would anticipate. Vplayed has loaded its solution with multiple pre-built features that have proven to be successful models for multiple global brands. These features are explained in detail below to give a foresight as to why it would be the best option you lay hands on for starting your own website like youtube. Video Players Vplayed uses HTML5 player in default as it offers additional benefits where you can add external links and applications to your videos. The application links can, in turn, be integrated with Skype or email marketing connects increasing the momentum of your circle reach. The HTML5 player is capable of driving the quality of pictures, sound quality, the ability to be adapted via extensions and be compatible cross-platform while being supported across all browsers. In case, if the owner of the website desires to wield a video player of their own to create their video sharing website, Vplayed equipped team would integrate the said player of their wish. Live Streaming Live streaming is a prime feature to be focused on when it comes to building a video sharing platform of your own. This mode of streaming brings in a brand exposure to people beyond your customer target. Vplayed prowesses in live streaming, as it has built highly functioning live streaming websites in the past. There is no definitive way to create a live streaming video that works well that lets the viewers gain knowledge of what your product is. Vplayed’ Live streaming feature provides a channel in which you can directly engage with your customer base without any restrictions. Customizability Though Vplayed has multiple no.of versatile features readily available, the solution always has its doors open for experimenting with new ideas for its clients. Whatever may be the challenge, Vplayed delivers what was asked of the video sharing website and app alongside an incredible UI experience that attracts relevant audience to the businesses. Widgets Vplayed aces the fixture of widgets, as its prime motto is to offer customization from all dimensions. Widgets are the elements that provide fundamental functions to be configured in web and mobile apps. These widgets form the functional units of any well-versed app. Some of the primary widgets in the video sharing websites are ‘Popular’, ‘Featured’, ‘Recent’, ‘Related’ etc with simple drag-drop options. They are the basic functionalities necessary to customize an app and give them their own style. The Off-panel widgets, in particular, proffers features that can be switched off while using the app by the user but cannot be deleted. Smart search Vplayed, by standard, integrates the video sharing apps with smart search engines. These smart search engines allow keyword search within the website. By landing on the specific category of content within a click, it enables platforms to retain viewership and extend the time they spend on the platform. User channels When you pitch in famous and creative relevant content makers to stream videos on your platform, the user base is bound to multiply with potential customers. Vplayed’s video sharing solution has remarkable user channel integration modules that allow the video sharing websites being created to be unique in its own way. Cloud Storage Vplayed uses Amazon S3 bucket that gives platform owners the freedom to store and transcode unlimited amount of data in them. They also provide a source of security and ensures your data is safeguarded from any kind of theft by incorporating encryption models. The adaptive scaling and speckless streaming are added icing on the cake. Multiple user registration Vplayed offers Multiple user registration that comes in handy when you desire to engage with viewers and broadcasters. This feature lets the platform to take up the notch and widen the horizons of streaming capabilities. Security The term being self-explanatory is to be taken into consideration as one of the prime factors. Security is not a parameter to be compromised with. Vplayed offers a three-step security encryption( DRM system, SSL certification & access control) process to safeguard your content from illegal breaches. Analytics Vplayed’s astute analysis such as User behaviour analysis, Current viewership status, Comparative study and Consolidated data report ventures on data to give instant updates provides you with real-time data of the performance statistics of each individual video which would give you an insight of what works the best without spending tons of your investment on content that doesn’t work. Monetization Monetizing your videos is as important as producing and streaming it. Below are the methods through which Vplayed warrants your content to be monetized. — Loyal consumers wouldn’t mind paying a fee for subscribing to quality content. Enabling this option would reap promisable benefits. Subscription — Be it an advertisement of your own co-products or ads of external agents. Ads have proven to work well in streaming platforms. Advertisement — Make money out of every view. By this method, the videos that perform well would be able to fetch justifiable revenues. Pay per view — Sell your content for offline downloads and make money. This monetization model promotes videos to escalate your business. Purchasable asset CONCLUSION: Even though building a video sharing website like Youtube or Vimeo of your own might sound hectic, creating a platform where you can stream HD videos of your own gives a face-lift for your entire business model and increases returns sooner than one would anticipate it to. Now you’ve got an idea on how to make a successful video sharing website that performs magic in its platform, it’s time to take your business a step above the notch with Vplayed’s expertise to elevate the ordeal.

Alongside

Fetch

How to Build a Video Sharing Website Like Youtube and Vimeo with Brand New Technologies

Hello Guys, React or React JS is a JavaScript front-end library from Facebook which lets you create HTML based GUI. It makes the task easier by providing a component-based architecture which was only available to languages like Java and C# before. Because of this awesome feature, React is quickly becoming the standard for developing front-end. That’s the reason many programmers and developers are learning React or React JS. JavaScript library But, the big question is Where should you start? I have known there are a lot of articles, , and books out there on the internet but how do you choose between them? how do you learn React? courses Well, it’s difficult but not complex. All you need a little bit of React knowledge to choose the right resource for you and that’s what you will find in this article. In this article, I’ll share some of the and courses for your reference. You can go through them and choose the one you like to start your React or React JS journey. best React tutorials 1. Our large team of engineers use this front end development guide by Yangshun Tay Our large team of engineers use this front end development guide 2. How to write highly readable React code — 10 coding style tips by Nirmalya Ghosh How to write highly readable React code — 10 coding style tips 3. React 16 — The Complete Guide (incl. React Router 4 & Redux) by Udemy React 16 - The Complete Guide (incl. React Router 4 & Redux) 4. The Complete React Native and Redux Course iOS and Android App Development from scratch — build full React Native mobile apps ridiculously fast! by Stephen Grider The Complete React Native and Redux Course | Udemy 5 . The most important lessons I’ve learned after a year of working with React by omasEg Tomas Eglinskas The most important lessons I’ve learned after a year of working with React 6. Free React Courses for JavaScript Web Developers to Learn Online by javinpaul 5 Free React Courses for JavaScript Web Developers to Learn Online 7. TypeScript React Starter Microsoft/TypeScript-React-Starter 8. 6 Reasons Why JavaScript’s Async/Await Blows Promises Away (Tutorial) by Mostafa Gaafar 6 Reasons Why JavaScript’s Async/Await Blows Promises Away (Tutorial) 9. All the fundamental React.js concepts, jammed into this single Medium article by Samer Buna All the fundamental React.js concepts, jammed into this single Medium article 10. React’s Five Fingers of Death. Master these five concepts, then master React. by Sacha Greif React’s Five Fingers of Death. Master these five concepts, then master React. 11. Presentational and Container Components by Dan Abramov Presentational and Container Components by on 12. React.js: a better introduction to the most powerful UI library ever created. Ilya Suzdalnitski Hackernoon React.js: a better introduction to the most powerful UI library ever created. That’s all about some of the . Once you have gone through these tutorials and courses, you will be able to find the one you like most. My preference is to start with , it’s simply awesome. best React tutorial and courses React 16 — The Complete Guide Btw, if you are don’t know JavaScript and directly jumping on React Wagon, don’t get me wrong but I have seen a developer doing that, I suggest you spare some time learning JavaScript. A couple of articles to start with are: 1. You are learning JS wrong by on Benjamín Calderón Hackernoon You are learning JS wrong 2. The Little Guide for OOP in JS by Germán Cutraro The Little Guide for OOP in JS And, if you need more choices, you can also look my compilation: 3. Top 10 JavaScript Tutorials and Courses for Web Developers Top 10 Courses to Learn JavaScript in 2018 - Best of Lot Other you may like Programming and Web Development Courses 5 Free Spring Framework Courses for Java Developers Top 5 Courses to learn Web Development in 2018 5 Courses to Learn Big Data and Apache Spark Top 5 Courses to Learn Spring Boot in 2018 Best Apache Kafka Courses — 2018 5 Courses to Learn React Native in 2018 Closing Notes Thanks, You made it to the end of the article … Good luck with your React JS journey! It’s certainly not going to be easy, but by following this roadmap and guide, you are one step closer to becoming a React JS expert. If you like this article, then please share with your friends and colleagues, and don’t forget to follow on Twitter! javinpaul P.S. — If you need some FREE resources, you can check out this list of to start your preparation. free React JS Courses

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Nominated for 2022 - HackerNoon Contributor of the Year - Django

Nominated for 2022 - HackerNoon Contributor of the Year - Online Education

Nominated for 2022 - HackerNoon Contributor of the Year - Google Cloud Platform

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10 React JS Articles Every Web Developer Should Read

With multi-channel becoming the norm, omnichannel a priority, digital transformation not a debate but a necessity, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) having more than a foot in the door, customer empathy and personalization reigning supreme — (CX) has turned into one of the most intriguing phenomenons to have emerged in the last decade, and continues to both confound and fascinate enterprises. customer experience According to Gartner, improving customer experience is one of the top outcomes organizations seek. And that’s for good reason, as customer expectations of companies to has reached whole new heights. comprehend their needs But a question that remains unanswered for many enterprises is how they will measure their CX improvements. Here we look at five customer experience metrics that’ll point you in the right direction, no matter which industry you’re from. 1. Customer Loyalty Information about the average buying tenure, purchase frequency, use of various buying channels, average order size and repeat ordering can help you gauge the likelihood of a customer staying a customer in the long run. On the other hand, churn rate points towards the percentage of customers who either don’t make repeat purchases from the same seller or stop using the service(s) of a company after one use or a few, for good. Although there seems to be no secret sauce for winning customer loyalty except through continually working towards customer gratification, rewards and loyalty programs are one tactic which has stood the test of time as a way to introduce profitability and delight in the buying cycles of loyal customers. In Feb. 2015, as a result of ceaselessly rewarding its frequent flyers, such as the time it with free round-trip tickets home for the holidays. Air Canada was named the top airline in customer loyalty surprised Canadians living in London Of course, rewards and loyalty programs come as an add on, only after the basic tenets of customer experience are met: quality, convenience, value, ease of use and consistency. 2. Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) Broadly speaking, customer satisfaction can be described as the “fulfillment quotient” of a customer after engaging with a brand. It’s measured through various techniques, often carried out in retrospect, including questionnaires or ratings aimed at surveying how satisfied a customer felt after using a service or buying a product. Questions can focus on factors such as the speed of delivery, query resolution after speaking to a customer rep, the overall experience or service or just the quality of a product or service. Although every small customer interaction matters, a survey by McKinsey & Company found that instead of measuring specific interactions, gauging satisfaction on the entire customer journey is of the overall customer satisfaction. The same survey identified three areas which build a foundation for consistent customer satisfaction: customer-journey consistency (in an increasingly multichannel, multitouch world), emotional consistency (earning trust) and communication consistency (walking the talk). 30 percent more predictive 3. Brand Advocacy Your brand advocates are clearly more than your repeat buyers. These are the people with a deep emotional connection with your brand, which prompts them to willingly endorse or recommend your product, service or organization. Again, it demands great consistency and personalization across all marketing channels and a sprinkle of exclusive attention which the customer receives, that differentiates you in their eyes, as opposed to your competitors. Brand advocates share their thoughts via social media, emails, online chats and forums, ecommerce sites, and through the power of word of mouth (identified by ). Nielsen as the most credible advertising Learning more and more about your customers, not just their needs, but what inspires them, is the lifeblood of advocacy. Being honest, transparent, lending an ear to customers’ needs, adapting to their preferences and quick resolution to their queries can be the starting points. Observing sentiment scores on social media, trust ratings, poll or event participation are a few parameters to judge advocacy among your customer base. Once you identify them, the next thing is to create incentive programs, and empower your advocates to influence their social circles. 4. Customer Effort Score (CES) Customers love finding the easiest possible route to solve their problems or perform a task. From a larger perspective, it can be anything: from making a service request to finding a product. Making your customers struggle too long to achieve their goals and you’ll see them switch loyalties in no time. Customer effort score (CES) typically pertains to customer service and is measured following an interaction via review forms or sometimes even by calling the customer. The rating or review is often taken on a scale of 0 (meaning very dissatisfied) to 5/10 (meaning highly satisfied) and is generally accompanied by an optional comments section. However, despite the best efforts to raise the bar of interactions, companies fail to look at customer service resolution from the customer’s perspective. According to , 95 percent of respondents cited customer service to be a key factor in deciding their loyalty towards a brand. Microsoft’s Global Customer Service Report 5. Employee Engagement (EE) Picture an attendant at Starbucks happily interacting with customers. Now picture that same person serving customers with a blank expression. Employee engagement and customer experience are closely entwined. Think of Southwest Airlines, Zappos, Sainsbury or even Amazon. The contribution the employees of these companies make on their customer experience is nothing short of remarkable. However, despite the obvious advantages — such as higher productivity, better sales and increased employee retention rate — many companies still don’t take employee engagement very seriously. According to a 2015 , only 32 percent of US workers were engaged in their jobs. Gallup poll If personalization and care while dealing with customers holds importance for your organization, then there’s a good chance that happy and fulfilled employees will find it easier than discontented employees to deliver on your promises of quality and value. An Unwavering Commitment to Customer Needs Forrester findings reaffirm the importance of customer experience, with 72 percent of companies naming . Initiatives around customer experience technology and customer experience management have gained importance, making it an integral part of enterprise business strategy to achieve operational efficiency and profitability. improving CX as one of their top priorities Great customer experience stems from unwavering commitment to customer needs. And that includes repeatedly providing clear and memorable experiences, unmatched personalization and intuitiveness. It starts from your own people who deliver the service to your customers, but never ends, even after the customer is long gone (sometimes to never return). Much has been written about the high cost of acquiring new customers as compared with retaining existing ones. Obviously this does not mean you stop looking for new customers, but it’s just one more argument why you should be providing your existing ones with the best experience possible. Make your customer experience best in class, keep measuring what’s most important to them, and turn those metrics into action. Pimcore guest blog published on CMSWire

Salesforce

salesforce.com

Southwest Airlines

Starbucks

5 Customer Experience Success Metrics That Never Disappoint

The web may be a fantastic way to connect users, share data and exchange ideas, but when it comes to getting the most out of a computing device, nothing beats native apps. Created to take advantage of specific hardware requirements, APIs and other platform-centric optimizations, native apps remain the best and most efficient way for users to get the most out of their phones, tablets and computers. Even though three platforms account for the vast majority of computing devices, developing apps that are compatible with one another is a different story. Apps written for iOS in Objective-C or Swift need time and tools to port code into Android’s C++ or Java, which requires extensive development resources to make apps compatible across different platforms. That is, until Xamarin. What Is Xamarin? is a platform developed by Xamarin company, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2016, designed to create apps for Android, iOS, macOS, Tizen, GTK# and Windows with a single shared .NET codebase. Building apps with Xamarin allow developers to make apps for all major platforms simultaneously that are indistinguishable from native apps. In fact, Xamarin apps are native, taking full advantage of native user interface controls, platform-specific APIs and platform-specific hardware acceleration. Xamarin Who Uses Xamarin? Major companies are adopting Xamarin to simplify their development process. , one of the world’s largest broadcasters of live sporting events, used Xamarin to help develop its mobile sports app and virtually test it across hundreds of different Android devices. also used Xamarin to build its mobile travel app, allowing users to have a seamless experience across desktop and mobile devices for checking in, boarding or changing information for a flight. Fox Sports Alaska Airlines Forrester conducted research in order to find out the for Visual Studio Cross-Platform Mobile Application Development. The research found out that Xamarin reduces mobile app development and life-cycle management costs while optimizing the utilization of existing developer resources. Forrester conducted interviews and analyzed the financial metrics of 4 existing customers that invested in the Xamarin for Visual Studio solution: cost savings and business benefits enabled by Xamarin A global entertainment company with annual revenue over $ 2,5 BN US-based consulting company with 500 consultants providing mobile strategy and app development for enterprise customers Global mobile app development company with 35 mobile developers A global portfolio of casual dining restaurant chains (1000+ restaurants, 100k + employees, >$ 4 BN in annual revenue The research found out that a composite organization based on the interviewed organizations experienced the following risk-adjusted ROI and benefits: Over a 3-year period, an organization with multiple mobile applications can expect: $1,365,003 — reduction in mobile application development costs through the use of shared C# code base across platforms $829,475 — mobile app maintenance and upgrade efficiency gains using Xamarin for Visual Studio’s shared code base $6,558,360 — savings on platform-specific mobile application developer expenses. The Pros of Developing With Xamarin Making apps with Xamarin is a great way for development teams to save time and resources. If you’re a developer looking to offer an app on another platform, simplify your tech stack or streamline your development operations, here are some of the biggest advantages to choosing Xamarin: Created with Visual Studio, Xamarin-based apps are developed using a single language: C#. A single tech stack for faster development: Xamarin apps utilize C# and shared codebases that cover up to 90% of each platform’s particular language, APIs and data structure and wrap them in a .NET layer that enables cross-platform development. By developing in C# and allowing Xamarin to handle cross-platform implementations, development teams will be able to accomplish much more with less. With Xamarin.Forms, developers have access to a complete cross-platform UI toolkit to build interfaces that work on any device. This allows for the creation of a single user interface across all devices, enabling developers to share more code without having to modify the UI for every platform. Rapid prototyping: In Xamarin it is possible to access each and every native API, so it is possible to use completely native UI, Bluetooth, SDKs etc. Because Xamarin can take full advantage of system- and hardware-specific APIs, apps built using the software will run as well as apps compiled in each platform’s preferred language. Users won’t be able to tell the difference between your app and a native app because there isn’t one. Native performance and user experience: Building apps with shared codebases eliminates time that would typically be spent translating, rewriting or recompiling code to work on different platforms. This shaves weeks, months and possibly years off of the development cycle, allowing apps for all three major platforms to be developed simultaneously. And because these apps are being built together, it means feature parity won’t slowly trickle down from your most popular platform to your least — they’ll be ready for deployment to all of your platforms at once. Reduced time to market: Maintaining and updating apps built using Xamarin requires less work. Once you’ve made changes to our source file, they can be applied directly to your apps, eliminating the need to update the source code of your apps individually should any updates, bug fixes or new features become necessary. Less maintenance: What happens if you’ve got a killer desktop app that needs a mobile version or vice-versa? With Xamarin, it’s no problem — developers can create apps for mobile and desktop experiences simultaneously. This also helps development teams cut back on having to decide whether to develop for just one single platform, as Android, iOS and Windows can be handled simultaneously. Apps for all platforms: Xamarin takes advantage of native frameworks and usually it takes 1–3 days for iOS and Android platforms to catch up to the latest features. Which is why new platform-specific features can be promptly introduced to your app once Xamarin has been updated. Easy to keep updated. The Cons of Developing With Xamarin Xamarin is free for individuals and small companies, however, enterprises need to purchase a license for Microsoft’s Visual Studio. For bare-bones access to Visual Studio without advanced Azure DevOps features or cloud services, single-user licenses start at $499. Enterprise users requiring all the bells and whistles pay up to $2,999 for an annual subscription to Visual Studio Enterprise. Depending on the size and needs of your developers, the cost of these licenses can add up rather quickly. It’s expensive for enterprises. While Xamarin does support most of .Net libraries, it doesn’t support all of the available 3rd-party libraries for Android and iOS without specific wrappers. It might be complicated to use all open-source libraries. Each platform has a different method for visually laying out screens: Not suitable for apps with heavy graphics. Credit: docs.microsoft.com If the application has rich UX/UI, it should be implemented natively. . Xamarin adds 3–5 megabytes for the release and around 20 megabytes for debug builds. Larger App Size Xamarin Is a Win If you’re a developer showing any inkling of needing apps developed for multiple platforms, Xamarin is one of the best tools available to make your life easier. Thanks to Xamarin’s powerful C# environment, native and cross-platform libraries and APIs, and ease of deployment, it’s the best choice to keep Android, iOS and Windows apps developed in sync. This, in turn, reduces the overall time of development and brings new features to your users faster. The author of this article is , Head of Mobile Stack at Ciklum. Check out to find out more articles on app development. Oleksandr Leuschenko Ciklum blog

Ciklum

The Pros and Cons of Xamarin for Cross-Platform Development

In order to get organized and stay productive, we need to do things every day that we don’t necessarily want to do. We have to learn that “needs to do” goes before “want to do”. This is hard. That’s why there’s a gazillion self-help books and websites out there. . So now I’m going to once and for all completely solve this problem for all people globally Well, perhaps not. But it might be useful for besides me, which is why I’m publishing this. someone Forget motivation and build good habits instead A habit is something you just do without really thinking about it. You do it even if you don’t feel motivated to do it, and this is key; do not depend on motivation, because motivation is inherently undependable — you will not always be motivated to do what you need to do. So forget motivation, and form good habits instead. I will tell you how. What we aim to achieve The goal of all this is to establish of good habits that we go through at various points. You could, for example, have a and an that you go through every day. Each routine consists of one or more , such as “get out of bed right away when the alarm sounds” or “floss”. routines morning routine evening routine habits Additionally, you could have an that you go through on workdays that might include habits such as “do laundry” or “make sure the kitchen counter is cleared of dirty dishes”. On weekends you might have a more comprehensive , consisting of such habits as “vacuum the house”, or perhaps a more generic one like “do whatever housework needs to be done”. The point is to make habits of things that you do, but otherwise tend not to. That way, you can enjoy your free time knowing that you’ve already done what you to do; now you can do what you to do. Procrastination is borrowing time from your future self, and you pay interest by feeling guilt. Future-you will not want to do it any more than present-you does, so just do it and get it over with. This method helps with that. after work routine weekend routine should need want Start small If you try to form too many habits at the same time you will likely feel overwhelmed eventually, especially when the novelty wears off. So don’t start with giant routines consisting of ten habits each. Start with something small, that you feel confident that you’ll be able to do 10 times in a row (that is, 10 days in a row if it’s a daily routine) without missing a single one — that means you should start with something small and easy. I started with the following two routines: Morning routine Get out of bed no later than 06:30 Evening routine Go to bed no later than 22:00 (that is, lights out, go to sleep) So, two simple routines consisting of one habit each that I’m pretty sure I can manage 10 times in a row without fail. If you feel that 10 is too low or too high, then go with whatever number seems suitable to you. But if you pick a number that’s too low, you run the risk of trying to form too many habits too soon, so you’ll end up overwhelmed. With too high a number, it’ll take longer than necessary to add new habits to your routines. Keep track of your progress with a Habit Tracker Get a piece of paper (preferably squared or dotted) and write down your starting routines with their habits. Make columns for dates to the right of them. Make sure you leave space under each routine, so you can eventually add more habits. This paper is now your Habit Tracker. Each day that you successfully complete a habit, mark that with an “X” on the habit’s row, in that date’s column. Each time that you fail, mark that with an “-” (a dash). Remember to not judge yourself when this happens. It happen on occasion, that’s to be expected. Note it, and move on. will A paper habit routines tracker It’s very important to update your Habit Tracker after every routine, because it makes it easier to remember why you’re doing this stuff, and the importance of it. So when can I add more habits? You can add more habit to a routine when you have successfully completed habits in that routine 10 times in a row (that is, when you have 10 X’s in a row without any dashes for all habits in the routine), because that means you’ve now established those habits to such a degree that you’re ready to expand. Congratulations, well done! one all What if I fail to complete a habit but it’s not really my fault? Sometimes life happens, and you are unable to complete a habit that day for reasons that are outside of your control. Perhaps you were invited to a party, and didn’t have time to clean the house that day. That’s absolutely fine. When that happens, just mark that day with a zero, and don’t count it as a completion, but don’t count it as breaking your streak either. So, if you have “X X 0 X X”, that still means you have four X’s in a row. Just do what you can to prevent this happening too often. What if I want to have routines that I don’t go through every day? No problem. In my case, I have Shorinji Kempo practice two workdays a week, which means I don’t have time for my after work routine those days. On such days, I just put an “0” for such habits on your Habit Tracker, same as if you missed a habit because of something that was outside of your control. How do I avoid forgetting to go through my routines? This is a very real problem. Even with the best intentions and will power to follow through, you can still to go through a routine. This is where come in. The idea behind this concept is that in order to not forget to do something that you want to turn into a habit, you should have a “trigger” for it. The trigger would be something that you always do and don’t forget, or something that happens automatically. forget habit triggers For example, most people don’t forget to brush their teeth every night. But most of us forget to also floss. Therefore, if we try to always floss every night directly after brushing our teeth, then the act of brushing our teeth will become a habit trigger for flossing. And an example of something “automatic” that you can use as a habit trigger would be a phone alarm that you set to go off at a specific time every day, or using “coming home from work” as a habit trigger to remember to start your after work routine. Can you suggest some useful habit routines? Sure! For weekdays, I’d suggest something like this: Morning routine Habit trigger: your wakeup alarm Get out of bed on time Strength exercises for 10 minutes Stretching / flexibility exercises for 5 minutes Shower Read something worthwhile during breakfast After work routine Habit trigger: coming home from work Make and / or have dinner Take care of any dishes on the counter Check if there is laundry to be done Work on your todo list for an hour Once you’re done with this routine, you’re hopefully free to enjoy the rest of your evening until it’s time for your evening routine Evening routine Habit trigger: a phone alarm at 21:00 Write / update a todo list for tomorrow Meditate for 10 minutes Brush teeth and floss Read something worthwhile until it’s time for bed Go to bed on time That takes care of the weekdays. I’d also suggest having a weekend routine that you go through on either Saturday or Sunday, whichever day works best this particular week. Weekend routine Habit trigger: waking up in the morning Eat breakfast Clean your home Do any laundry that needs to be done Work on your todo list for two hours Make a semi-permanent improvement for your home, such as putting up a shelf that needs putting up, or fix something that’s broken When you’re done, enjoy the rest of your day Doug thinks that productivity is for losers, and that you’re all a bunch of pansies. Yeah. I told you he’s a bastard. This story was originally posted by the same author as part of the Operation Get Your Shit Together project at www.operationgyst.com .

Dash

BUNCH

Routine

Habit routines — the easier way to self-improvement

: https://www.google.de/search?q=tangle+iota&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi_l7-wi-_dAhUMuaQKHU1DDw0Q_AUIDigB&biw=1363&bih=539#imgrc=hEDjkFFOylj9xM This article gives a short introduction to blockchain’s scalability problem and how Tangle solves it. Introduction to the Scalability Problem as a decentralized and cryptographically secured database is one of the new technologies, that will definitely have a huge impact on the future of the world. But with an increasing impact comes an increasing number of users — and there a big problem occurs. Most of the currently known blockchain networks are not made for many users — and I mean a lot of users. Let’s just take a look at the most famous blockchain system Bitcoin. The size of a block, which determines the amount of data being able to be stored, is limited to 1MB. As I described in one of my previous articles, , the data stored in cryptocurrency blockchains are transaction data. A block has to be generated and then validated by the network, and this takes time. Thus, there is only a limited amount of transactions, that can be done per a certain amount of time. But since this whole technology gets more and more participants, the time to handle such transactions, increases. This is called the problem of scalability. A solution had to be found, and IOTA did find one. Blockchain digital How cryptocurrencies actually work IOTA and the Tangle The IOTA foundation came up with a pretty nice idea — the so called Tangle system. Therefore they used their knowledge from a topic in maths called . No worry, I will explain it. First, take a look at a simplified structure of a blockchain in the figure below: Graph theory Visualization of a simplified structure of a blockchain. We have blocks of information, each block contains certain data and is connected to the previous block via a cryptographically calculated hash value. Now take a look at how the tangle looks like: Source: : https://www.google.de/search?q=tangle+iota&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjuz_PXgu_dAhUGUlAKHYBLBcsQ_AUIDigB&biw=1363&bih=601#imgrc=cUOYORd9LALTBM What you can see in the figure above, is something that is called a in mathematics. For the purpose of understanding it is enough to know, that a graph is just a set of vertices and edges. Directed means, that the edge, that connects two vertices, directs from one vertex to the other. In the tangle system, each transaction is represented by a vertex. That means, if someone is in the process of transferring some IOTA funds, he or she generates a transaction, which then becomes a vertex in the tangle graph above. The clue now is, that every transaction has to approve at least two other transactions. In terms of maths this means, that every vertex has to be connected by directing edges to at least two other vertices. Just look at the figure above and chose some arbitrary vertex — you will see, that there are at least to arrows showing to two other vertices. A transaction is said to be by another transaction, if there is a connection between those two transactions with at least one transaction between them. Directed Acyclic Graph indirectly approved So instead of storing transactions in blocks with a limited size, each transaction lives on its own and has to approve other transactions. With this method, the number of transactions, that can be handled in a certain amount of time, increases with the number of transactions! Have a look at the classical scalability figure from the IOTA foundation below. Source: : https://www.google.de/search?q=tangle+scalability&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwizqObThO_dAhWGblAKHZP6De0Q_AUIDigB&biw=1363&bih=601#imgrc=w0i0nV0APSwW-M Now that we know, how IOTA solves the scalability problem, it would be pretty interesting to know, how the network of participants is build up. Nodes in the IOTA network When participating in the IOTA network as a node, one has different options to choose. There are four different types of nodes, that can be found in IOTA: The Full Node, The Perma Node, the Light Node and a coordinator node. The Full Node is a standard participant in the IOTA network that distributes transactions. Since every network participant, who issues a transaction, has to approve at least two other transactions, they must be sent to him from somewhere. This is the task of the Full Node. The Full Node itself does not store the full transaction history of the tangle, but only the current state of the tangle. When it comes to storing the whole transaction history, the Perma Node is the one fulfilling this task. Basically this is the only difference between those two nodes. The Light Node does not store transactions or propagate them, it just gets the information needed from either the Full or the Perma Node. The last node to be mentioned is the so called Coordinator. This node is run by the IOTA foundation to protect the network, since, according to them, it is not yet able to maintain itself. The Coordinator generates so called , which are just normal transactions. If a transaction already stored in the tangle graph is indirectly approved by the latest Milestone, it is said to be confirmed. Milestones As a conclusion one can say, that IOTA’s method of using the tangle system to handle huge amounts of transaction data is indeed a pretty great idea. However, there are other solutions to the the scalability problem, for example Nano. Nano uses the so called which is a combination of classical blockchain technology and directed acyclic graphs. I will come to that in one of my following articles. Until then — thanks for reading and stay tuned! block lattice structure

IOTA

How IOTA solves Blockchains scalability problem

Ripple(XRP) overtook Ethereum(ETH) three times in the second half of September 2018 in terms of market capitalization. Although it was for a brief time, Ethereum lost its place as the 2nd largest cryptocurrency. Eventually, Ethereum powered back to re-take its position. Let's analyze the cause and effect XRP overtaking ETH Cause: Ethereum is an open-source, public, blockchain-based platform for dApps and Ripple is a real-time gross settlement system, currency exchange, and remittance network created to ease cross-border payment. The prime cause that could have acted as a catalyst for Ripple to overtake Ethereum was the news stating Ripple will launch the most awaited and premium product of Ripple on September 17. xRapid, This project has been under a validation phase from quite some time, as it is being tested by almost 19 Financial Institutions across the world. Ultimately the launch news did have its effect on market. Secondly, the hype around the ‘Swell 2018’ conference in which Bill Clinton was about to deliver a keynote address inviting global personalities from the financial space to discuss future prospects and growth of Ripple played its part in shifting odds in Ripple’s favor. Although it doesn’t affect Ethereum much even if it slips back to the third position, it’s a prominent landmark for Ripple. Despite the fact that Ripple doesn't do anything that a cryptocurrency is ideally meant to do, the price still has been steadily climbing. Essentially, the reason for this is, XRP has made a lot of people a lot of money. If someone had invested $10000 in early 2017 and held on to it just for about a year, that $10,000 would have made them over $3.5 million mounting to more than 350% in returns! There are even speculations that XRP might get a Coinbase listing soon, but they are just the speculations! These type of gains can only be seen in the crypto world. No other industry be it real estate or stocks or whatever for that matter can give as big returns as the crypto market has. Although it is true that the market has slowed down, the institutional investors and venture capitalists are choosing to invest in cryptocurrency over other alternative assets. Source: InWara’s database Effects of Ripple taking over the 2nd position Prospects of large international banks moving from SWIFT to Ripple will increase as one of the standout features of Ripple is the transaction speed it has to offer. By far XRP is said to have the fastest transaction speed in cross border transactions. To sum it up…. Whilst both XRP and Ethereum are based on blockchain technology and have a completely different target audience, when it comes to collating them based on their TPS, Ripple’s performance has been better as it is not only faster but also the cheaper one and can scale much more efficiently than Ethereum. However, it will be interesting to see the result of Ethereum’s Constantinople upgrade which is on its way to take decentralization of Dapps to a whole new level. Who knows, maybe it will perform better than Ripple in the future, but only time will tell! Disclaimer: This is not financial advice. InWara does not promote/demote any company/ICO. Opinions, statements, estimates and projections in this message or other media are solely those of the individual author(s). They do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Inwara or any of its affiliates (“ Inwara ”). Inwara has no obligation to update, modify or amend this message or other media, or to otherwise notify a recipient thereof, in the event that any matter stated herein, or any opinion, projection, forecast or estimate set forth herein, changes or subsequently becomes inaccurate. Any content, information and any materials provided in this message or other media is on an “as is” basis. Inwara makes no warranty, expressed or implied, as to its accuracy, completeness or timeliness, or as to the results to be obtained by recipients, and shall not in any way be liable to any recipient for any inaccuracies, errors or omissions herein. Without limiting the foregoing, Inwara shall have no liability whatsoever to a recipient of any message or media, whether in contract, in tort (including negligence), under a warranty, under statute or otherwise, in respect of any loss or damage suffered by such recipient as a result of or in connection with any actions, opinions, recommendations, forecasts, judgments, or any other conclusions, or any course of action determined, by it or any third party, whether or not based on the content, information or materials contained herein.**

Ripple vs Ethereum | Know which one is better | In-depth analysis

My journey through the Software Development Path

is a great way to orchestrate a . Long-running processes are often inevitable due to the execution time limit of Lambda functions, and they usually rely on an “always-on” infrastructure. How could you integrate these long-running processes into your workflow while still remain serverless? Steps Functions serverless workflow People have already heard of, or used Step Functions to coordinate cloud native tasks (i.e. Lambda functions) to handle part/all of their production workloads. In this post, I will walk through how to incorporate non-lambda tasks into a state machine in Step Functions. AWS At a high level, what exactly is Step Functions? This is probably the first question that everyone new to Step Functions will ask. After a bit of a play around it, I conclude it as this: It is simply an orchestration tool that lets you compose a workflow from your distributed, individually managed services. So, Step Functions, unlike what the name may suggest, are not actual functions that you need to write in order to link your application’s components together. At its core is a , or more precisely, a state machine, which is a way of illustrating your application’s flow by defining individual and between these states. In practice, a state is usually fated to perform a This is how AWS defines a task: state machine finite states transitions task . A task can be an activity or a Lambda function. Well, we all know what a Lambda function is, right? So what on earth is an activity? Here we go: Activities are an AWS Step Functions feature that enables you to have a task in your state machine where the work is performed by a that can be hosted on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), mobile devices — basically anywhere. worker Simply put, an activity is a symbol, which has to be realised by a that does the actual work. The worker is basically your individually managed service, which can be hosted anywhere as documented, as long as it can connect to Step Functions over HTTP. The worker will have to for the activity to check whether the state machine has reached this state. Once the activity in this state has been activated, the worker will start to work and then report back to that state for the state machine to carry on. worker poll So, how does Fargate fit in all this? At this point, people might ask, why couldn’t AWS just trigger an elsewhere-hosted task right from within the state machine, like it does Lambda functions? Good question. That’s one of the things in my wish list for AWS. I don’t have the answer, but I guess it’s due to the mobility/unknowns of the worker, which would make it really tricky to define your states. As mentioned earlier on, a worker must poll for a task in a state before it can execute. This essentially means you have to host it somewhere to maintain a socket to Step Functions in order to kick off when asked to. If you are dedicated to AWS, chances are you have got your workers hosted on EC2 or in containers on ECS clusters. The main drawback of that is you may end up paying for resources when your worker is off-duty. In an attempt to save cost, many people end up having to wire Lambda functions before and after worker execution, thereby introducing more states whose sole job is to warm up/decommission underlying infrastructure. That, was a pain until the release of . This, in my opinion, is a game changer to running many things in AWS. It’s basically a ECS offering, with which you don’t pay for any resources outside your container’s lifecycle. Which also means your container stays off until something wakes it up. Fargate serverless How would you implement this in practice? So if the container is off by default, how does it poll for a task in Step Functions? Asked one of my colleagues. I sort of already answered this question just now. If you knew how to warm up an ECS cluster to run your ECS worker, you surely would have known how to wake up a “fargated” container by using AWS SDK API. So the way I implemented it was by introducing extra state just before the state in which the ECS worker is specified. This extra state will run a task in a Lambda function, which runs the container. Once this Lambda function finishes, the state machine proceeds to the next state which is what the triggered container will be polling for. I have extracted this part from my production use case and simplified it into the following diagram. one The task in state runs a Lambda function, whose job is invoking API to wake up and run the ECS container as shown below trigger-ecs runTask exports.handler = async (event) => { var params = {  
    taskDefinition: 'step-functions-task',  
    cluster: 'ecs-test',  
    launchType: 'FARGATE',  
    networkConfiguration: {  
        awsvpcConfiguration: {  
            subnets: \['my-subnet'\],  
            assignPublicIp: 'ENABLED'  
        }  
    }  
}  
  
await ecs.runTask(params).promise()  
  
console.log('ECS has been triggered.') }; One thing to note in above Lambda function is that must be set to ENABLED for it to work, as the fargated container needs a public IP address to establish a HTTP connection to Step Functions for polling. assignPublicIp Upon the completion of this Lambda function, the state machine transitions to the next state . After the container has warmed up and started running, the worker will receive a task token from the state knowing it’s ready for action. The code below in NodeJS shows how a worker polls for a task and report back after it’s completed its job. execute-ecs execute-ecs var AWS = require('aws-sdk') var options = {'region': 'ap-southeast-2'} var client = new AWS.StepFunctions(options); var getStepFunctionActivity = () => {let params = {activityArn: 'arn:aws:states:ap-southeast-2:<account-id>:activity:run-ecs-task'}return client.getActivityTask(params).promise()} var reportBack = (token) => {let params = {taskToken: token,output: JSON.stringify({result: 'ecs done'})}return client.sendTaskSuccess(params).promise()} var executeTask = () => {return new Promise(resolve => {setTimeout(() => {resolve('job done')}, 10000)})} var execute = async () => {while (true) {var task = await getStepFunctionActivity()if (task.taskToken) {await executeTask()await reportBack(task.taskToken)break}}} execute() Noticed how I simulated function to return in 10 seconds? This is where you’d put your real logic in. At the end of the execution, the code will report back to the state machine with a json string output. Below is the execution history of this whole state machine. executeTask Notice there’s a roughly 10-second gap between 9 and 10? That was the execution of the Fargate container. ID 10 also shows the output from the container execution. That’s it. Hope you’ve enjoyed this walk-through. I’d appreciate any feedback and be happy to be pointed where I’ve got anything wrong.

Flow

Incorporate AWS Fargate into Step Functions

Last month (September 2018) I started the . It’s an intense software engineering training utilizing what is known as remote pair programming. The goal of the program is to get its students ready for entry-level remote or relocation-based jobs in software development. Pair programming is not an entirely new concept, but I consider it a revolutionary learning method. Sans an instructor but with a partner to learn with. Microverse Fast Track Program How I used to learn — inconsistent, inefficient Prior to joining the program, I had been trying to learn web development for more than 3 years. I had purchased a number of courses on Udemy (and signed up on a lot of free courses there and on Youtube). My cloud drive is stacked with lots of programming books. Despite the myriad of materials, I still considered my learning to be insufficient. Sure I was able to learn technologies such as NodeJS, D3 and React, but I don’t consider myself any closer to building anything useful with them (except a blog CMS app I consider as one of my shining achievements — | live ). repo here demo here I probably have 4 to 5 Day 1’s in my #100DaysOfCode/#301DaysOfCode tweets (often times I restarted at Day20ish). I was pretty inconsistent that the first time I learned HTML it took me four months just to finish . There were times the topics were so tough that I couldn’t move forward for three days or so to the next one. I didn’t realize my problem wasn’t that I was learning things that were out of my league. Nor that I was running in circles with different topics. My problem was that I was learning alone. Yes, I could get some help from the Stackoverflow community and what have you online. However, I still consider that as learning by myself. Jon Duckett’s book — HTML and CSS: Design and Build Websites Getting on the fast-track program is an awesome opportunity Then fast forward to last month (September 2018), I started Microverse’s Fast Track program. It isn’t a beginner’s web development/software engineering course. The program is for those with coding experience who just need a little more polishing to be hireable. It’s a study-now-pay-later approach where you only need to pay the company when you’re already earning. Now there are already other programs that do the same payment approach. But Microverse does it remotely. The course topics include HTML5/CSS3, Ruby/Ruby on Rails, JavaScript and React. It doesn’t stop there, though. The Microverse team goes further to help you build your portfolio, social media/online presence (yes, writing this article is part of the training haha… Shout out to ). Training for interviews and connecting to recruiters and tech companies in the US and Europe are part of the whole system. Plus, there is an army of experienced and super awesome software engineers to guide us. One of them being assigned as our dedicated mentor. What more could you ask for? Ariel Pair programming benefits — more than just alternating control of the keyboard Remote pair coding is a great way to learn teamwork, from a distance (image c/o Unsplash) I guess pair coding is the glue that binds the fast-track program’s curriculum. Around it revolves our daily activities. So I must say a thing or two about it. Pair coding helps a coder in several ways. Here are my list of benefits I, so far, experienced from it: — since we have a structured daily schedule (this is a full-time program), there’s no oversleeping in the morning, no “binge-social-media-ing” (if ever there is such a term). You are forced to be ready because you have someone waiting for you on the other line. We share screens with each other in Hangouts so we cannot even take a sneak peak at our Facebook newsfeed. Discipline and consistency — part of our week includes us either working on a project or doing some readings. In the projects, my partner and I take turns being the driver (the one who is actually coding) and navigating (the one assisting the driver to find bugs, research on solutions or just tell him a good joke or two to make the activity fun). We start our day solving some algorithm challenges. In my opinion, working on projects by myself would be faster IF and ONLY IF the motivation was consistent. And that was my problem in the past. Pair coding ensures the motivation is there at all times. Also the answers to hard problems come quicker as there are two of us analyzing and researching. During reading times we get to discuss what we’ve learned and share other materials to supplement each other’s understanding of the topics. Efficient and more effective learning Dipto — Thanks to the Internet, opportunities that used to be limited by geography now are available to everyone. However, it also means learning how to work with others in a different part of the world. Cultural differences, at times language barriers, and even attitude clashes can break team members working remotely with each other. Dipto and I luckily don’t seem to notice any cultural difference. And while neither of us is a native speaker, we do communicate very well with each other in English. He natively speaks Bangla, and I, Filipino. Working together everyday from different time zones trains us to deal with others in an actual team working in a company or open source projects. Sure, we experience challenges. Lots of times we disagree on our approach to a coding challenge or in our projects. But those challenges train us on how to handle such circumstances in an actual remote job or open source project. Or they at least teach us how to handle strong emotions during discussions. Developing team playing skills — I guess everyone who codes or is learning to code can agree that some days will be boring. Those are the times that as a learner you just decide to get on Netflix and binge watch Stranger Things rather than getting your butt up. With a coding partner, who may or may not feel bored at the same time as you, you can just pause a bit, tell a funny joke or share something interesting. Dipto and I recently talked about each other’s native language’s idiosyncrasies and some of the exotic dishes in the Philippines. We did that because at that point we didn’t feel like starting our project (we just finished our reading). After that conversation (and the 1 hour break after it) we again felt rejuvenated to resume the work. You have a friend to talk to during boring times More to come in the upcoming weeks After finishing a project or solving a difficult algorithm problem (image c/o Unsplash) It’s just our first month (5th week to be exact), yet I already feel we’ve accomplished so much. We’ve finished 8 projects so far (in the HTML/CSS sections), 9 including our collaborative project when we were applicants in the program. We have also solved at least 10 algorithmic challenges. The list of goodies I know will increase as we go through the program. And by its end, not only will I have become a legit (probably an awesome) software engineer, I also know I will have gained a friend and an awesome colleague. Follow me on | Twitter Github

Glue

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How Five Weeks of Remote Pair Programming Helped me Build Strong Habits

Automate or die. As dramatic as that might sound, these words speak volumes about the digital world we live in. Looking at the field of marketing, alone, currently use marketing automation. Further, 58% of B2B companies plan to adopt such technologies. 51% of businesses Image via Email Monday HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: Love, Fear, Harmony, Grief, Despair: How to Drive Shareable Content How Do You Amplify Influencer Content? Considering that 91% of businesses use content marketing, it comes as no surprise that the automation bug has bitten this industry, too. Whether it’s basic pre-scheduling of posts or constructing an funnel, every business uses content marketing automation in some form. email marketing And while there are a lot of advantages to content marketing automation, businesses aren’t exploring its full potential. More often than not, they restrict themselves to simple email marketing and customer relationship management hacks. But relying on such simple hacks simply won’t cut it in today’s intensively competitive markets. If you want to be a leader in this domain, these content marketing automation hacks will help you get there. For the ease of understanding, we’ll split these up into three broad buckets — content creation, content curation, and content distribution. 1. Content Creation Hacks Artificial intelligence and machine learning have come a long way in recent years. So much so that you can get your entire content written by a computer. The only issue with that such technology can’t produce the kind of deep and insightful content consumers typically prefer. expect brands to create content around themselves and their offerings. But 60% of brand content fails to live up to customer expectations. Automation will only make matters worse. 84% of consumers While such a “set-and-forget” strategy makes content creation a lot easier, it does nothing to establish your thought leadership. So, perhaps creating your entire content via an automation tool isn’t a viable option. There are, however, some parts of it you can still leverage it for. Here are a few of the best content marketing automation hacks: Ideation Ideation is easily one of the most challenging and pivotal aspects of content creation. Your content needs to be relevant to your industry as much as it should interest your ideal audience. Ever so often, though, content marketers find themselves hitting a roadblock when hunting for topics to address through their content. Here’s where content marketing automation can make your life easier. Content explorers can simplify the ideation process by recommending ideas and topics for you to create content around. , for instance, helps you identify blog pieces (related to specific keywords) that have performed well in the past. BuzzSumo Image via BuzzSumo Interest Monitoring Now that you have a few topics around which you want to be creating content, the next step is measuring potential interest in them. One way to do that is to use tools like to gauge audience interest. Headline Analyzer HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: 25 Content Marketing Platforms You Need to Know in 2018 Considering your headline is what grabs a potential reader’s attention, you should try measuring their effectiveness. Tools like these give your headline a score as well as analyzes words patterns to suggest ways you can improve your headlines. Image via WordTracker Lead Nurturing Another aspect of your campaign you can involve content marketing automation is the lead nurturing and management process. Let’s look at your email marketing efforts to demonstrate the benefits, here. Getting a site visitor to sign up for your newsletter is only the first step of the lead nurturing process. It’s where things go from there that matter more. Establish triggers in your automation process to ensure your campaign sends out appropriate emails to your subscribers. For instance, if a particular subscriber doesn’t open your email, you can send them a reminder about your latest newsletter. Similarly, if they did open your email, you can shoot them a complimentary content piece entice them into making a purchase decision. Such dynamic emails can prove highly beneficial in delivering critical information at the right steps of the purchasing process. At the same time, such relevant and targeted content goes a long way to keep your audience engaged. Not to mention it works wonders to establish your thought leadership in your industry. 2. Content Curation The second bucket where you can apply content marketing automation hacks is the content curation aspect of your campaign. We all know the importance and value of content creation and building a strong is concerned. social media presence In recent years, social media has caused a meteoric rise in the amount of content that is being consumed online. Try as one might, relying on content creation, alone, won’t help to meet the increasing demands for content. Here’s where content curation can help you remain relevant and in the eyes of your audience. Content curation, however, often proves to be a rather laborious task when done manually. Particularly so, if you have a presence on multiple social media tools. What’s the solution then? You guessed it. Content marketing automation is the solution. Not only will you save a lot of time and effort, but will bring in a factor of consistency in your curated content, as well. HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: 36 of the Best Content Writing Tools for Content Writers The biggest challenge, of course, when it comes to content curation is how do you discover relevant, curatable content. I’ve found tools like to be particularly helpful in this regard. It provides you with content recommendations for each of your social media accounts. Simply peruse through them and decide which ones you want to be curating. DrumUp Image via DrumUp The tool also allows you to edit the original post, add images, and schedule it to be shared on multiple accounts. It even recommends relevant hashtags you can use, set custom publishing times, and more. If you’re using such content discovery tools for your content marketing automation, do remember one key thing. These discovery engines rely on keyword search to provide content recommendations. The issue with that is, not all recommendations are those of high-quality pieces of content. So, always remember to review the suggestions and don’t let your tool work in auto-pilot. Moreover, some of the content may not reflect the values of your business or worse still, promote your industry rivals. These tools are meant to be used in an effort to reduce the energies you need to divert to these activities. They aren’t designed to completely eliminate the human aspect. So long as you’re mindful of that, your content curation automation efforts will benefit your brand. No wonder more and more companies are adopting tools to automate their content curation. 3. Content Distribution Another rather important aspect of content marketing is how you distribute your content to your target audience. The success of your campaign rests on whether or not you’re able to deliver the right content to the right people at the right time. Even the most brilliant piece of content you produce won’t do your business a lot of good if you don’t have a holistic content distribution strategy. Despite optimizing your content to be discoverable by search engines, you may not be able to reach as many people as you’d like. That’s why it’s critical for you to step up your game and not rely solely on old SEO hacks to improve your content engagements. That’s why owned media and paid media are an important facet to consider when devising a content distribution strategy. Newsletters, email subscriptions, ads, and social media are very effective channels you can use to amplify your content. Luckily, there are a few content marketing hacks that can help you with this. HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: 5 of the Best Ways to Use Competitive Intelligence to Boost Your Content Marketing Strategy Email Marketing You’ve produced a great piece of content, shared it on your blog, on social media, and other avenues. But how do you get the word out about it? Often the simplest solution is the best solution. Just let them know that you’ve published a new piece of content that you think they might be interested in reading. One content marketing automation solution you can employ to improve your content distribution is to use tools like . Simply notify all your readers about your latest post and watch as your readership increases. Automated tools like these ensure that your content always reaches the right eyes and ears, that too all at once. MailChimp Most automation tools have pre-designed templates that you can send out to users at various stages of the sales funnel. For that matter, you can even create your own custom templates to use. So, for instance, when a new user subscribes to you, the tool automatically sends out a welcome email to them. Image via MailChimp You can use such content marketing automation tools to follow up with your customers, source feedback, and more. These tools empower you to sell more, build customer loyalty, and improve productivity. Social Media Marketing Another great content marketing hack is to use tools to automate your . Social media is, of course, one of the best channels for you to promote and distribute your content on. content distribution on social media By sheer number alone, the potential audience you can find on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. runs in the billions. No matter how niche a market you might be targeting, you’re sure to find an audience for yourself on it. Having a proper posting schedule for your content sharing on social media is a good plan to have. Figure out your optimum posting times so as to maximize your engagement on individual platforms. HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: How to Write Content That People Will Love to Read and Share But it isn’t always possible to share your content around those optimal timings. So, what do you do then? Here’s the part where content marketing automation hacks come handy. A social media management tool like is a great example. Sprout Social’s content publishing tool Image via Sprout Social It allows you to post your content on multiple social media accounts at once. But more importantly, you can use their calendar to schedule your content pieces to be published according to your optimal posting times. It serves as a great content management and optimization tool to automate your content distribution. Conclusion While there are a plethora of marketing tools out there, let’s be clear on one thing. Marketing can’t ever be truly and completely automated. That’s particularly true in the case of content marketing, the aim of which is to engage audiences with authentic and organic content. That being said, the hacks we’ve discussed above will help you save time and resources. This way, you’ll be able to stay more focused on other aspects of your business. Know any other content marketing automation hacks? Feel free to share them in the comment section below. Originally published at Shanebarker.com . About The Author is the Founder and CEO of and . You can connect with him on , , , , and . Shane Barker Content Solutions Gifographics Twitter Facebook LinkedIn YouTube Instagram

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The single most important feature of any trading exchange is liquidity. Without liquidity, operating a successful exchange becomes unviable. This is particularly true of cryptocurrency exchanges with volatile markets whose traders want to cash out (liquidate) their positions quickly. When new tokens appear on crypto exchanges, they are often thinly traded, which results in difficulties in supply and demand, therefore diminishing liquidity. I spoke to CEO Adam Todd to find out why liquidity is so important — and how his upcoming commission-free futures exchange plans to ensure liquidity for traders. Digitex Futures Futures Trading: A Snapshot Source: EduCBA Futures trading has existed since , going all the way back to around 1750 BC. The way in which people recorded trades (on clay tablets) looked a little different from today, but the concept is still the same. A futures contract is an agreement between two parties to buy or sell an asset at a future price and date, specified in the contract. ancient times Going back to our ancestors, you could think of futures contracts as a kind of Mesopotamian “IOU.” Today, futures trading allows traders to navigate the choppy waters of particularly volatile markets — which is why futures trading lends itself so well to crypto. “Futures is basically a concept to address volatility,” Todd explains. “Think about the oil market. The price per barrel can fluctuate greatly in any given month. Last year, the price bottomed out around $40 per barrel and this year it’s soared to around $70. But for companies that need large quantities of oil often, such as airlines, to offset volatility, they enter into futures agreements at a set price.” He continues, “This provides the issuer the peace of mind of receiving his absolute minimum trading price, even if market value falls, and it also protects the buyer against price escalation. Clearly, there are winners and losers in any futures exchange. If you entered an agreement to sell 10,000 barrels at a fixed price of $50 and the actual market price at the time the contract expires is $70, the airline comes out on top. But it can just as easily go the other way. Think about futures in crypto. Who would have predicted that Bitcoin would have hit an all-time high of high of almost $20,000 in December 2017 and then fall back down to a quarter of that this year? Maybe a futures trader. And if he had, he’d be making a lot of money right now even in a bear market.” Why Is Liquidity So Important to Exchanges? Source: Donal McKillop The more traders you have, the more volume, the more volume, the more liquidity. If an exchange becomes illiquid for whatever reason (a lack of trust, trader confidence, a security breach), it usually goes out of business pretty fast. That’s why all exchanges must work to ensure there is ample liquidity at any given time. Especially in futures trading where there is potential for extremely high profits. While the term “futures” automatically makes us think of faraway dates, some traders use short-term, aggressive trading strategies to make a profit. This method of trading, known as “scalping” is the model that Todd (himself a former pit trader) has always found worked best for him. Futures traders can actually earn a profitable living going for short upticks in the price. However, this profit is often wiped away due to commission fees. Todd explains: “When I was trading back in the 90s, I was taking quick, single tick profits and losses so that I could trade quickly and profitably. But the huge trading commission fees had a massive negative impact on my PnL. Some days, they turned profitable days into losing days and made my scalping strategy ineffective. I daydreamed about zero commission-fees back then, and back then, it really only was something to dream about.” Zero Commission Fees Will Increase Liquidity According to Todd. the biggest winners from commission-free trading will be traders who use aggressive trading strategies with a single-tick profit target, like himself. Although traders of all stripes will appreciate not having to hand over a slice of their profits to a centralized exchange. “If traders know that they can use scalping strategies and not get hit by crippling commission fees, they will naturally flock to the Digitex exchange,” Todd states with confidence. “This will create a highly liquid exchange.” One-Click Trading Apart from zero trading fees, what else is Digitex doing to ensure liquidity? “Speed is everything in futures trading,” says Todd, “that’s why we’re allocating a ton of our ICO resources into ensuring the trading interface is as advanced, easy to use, fast and robust as possible.” It has a one-click ladder trading interface which will allow traders to trade in next to real-time, rather than going through several steps or multiple mouse clicks that could see their profits drop. Native Token Another way that Digitex plans to increase liquidity is through their native DGTX token. While traders speculate over the price of Bitcoin, Litecoin, and Ethereum futures, they must purchase DGTX to realize orders. This creates a constant demand for DGTX and ensures liquidity. It’s also the business model you can read about in the Digitex Futures that allows them to remove the commissions from the trades. whitepaper Automated Market Makers Digitex will also be using automated market makers to increase liquidity. These are basically trading bots with programmed algorithms designed to break even. 200 million tokens from the ICO were allocated to trading bots to deploy at their discretion, even during times of high volatility. Liquidity Is Key “Exchanges look to increase liquidity in a number of ways, often by offering a high selection of contract types, or an advanced user interface,” Todd explains, “Digitex removing commission fees, adding a one-click trading feature and automated market makers are all innovative ways of providing a high level of liquidity for our customers and accountholders.” Liquidity is one of the most important components of a successful futures exchange. “Without a liquid trading environment,” says Todd, “an exchange will not survive in this highly competitive industry.”

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The concept of Liquidity: Explained by the CEO of a Cryptocurrency Exchange

A Progressive Web App (PWA) is proving to be the next application development standard. If you are new to the concept of Progressive Web Apps, then you can check out our blog on to understand why everyone is drawn towards it. PWAs In this blog, let’s focus on the business benefits of Progressive Web Apps to understand why it’s a major game changer. Progressive Web Apps to transform your Business Landscape So, what makes PWAs different from responsive web apps and native apps? For businesses, what’s the hidden advantage with PWAs? Well, it’s much cheaper than a native application. You get web applications which function using modern web technologies with the fluidity of native and responsive web applications in your allocated budget. Once the Progressive Web App gets out on the internet, it works seamlessly on ’n’ number of devices available in the gadget world. Hence, you don’t have to explicitly check its responsivity on every screen. This further reduces the effort of the Quality Assurance team during software testing and increases the speed to market. For users, it is the best option for an impeccable mobile web experience. The ability to work in offline mode and lower data usage when connected to the internet makes PWA be a favorite among the users. These are some of the very known advantages of PWAs for both the businesses and users. Now, let’s do some serious study to understand how important a Progressive Web App is for your business. Top Players doing it right with the PWA Game Today, pioneers in the industry have already got some splendid results with PWAs. The credit goes to its distinct characteristics and a wide range of business advantages. What exactly was their business benefit? Let’s dive deep down! Twitter Lite The popular social media platform, Twitter, has about 335 million monthly active users. And almost 80% of these users are on mobile. In 2017, Twitter entered the PWA game with its new Twitter Lite. It is available in 45 countries as of now. The PWA requires only 3MB of storage space in Android and 1MB storage space in iOS. This new release came as a surprise to the users. There was a time when Twitter iOS consumed about 100MB. So, the lite version is definitely a storage saver. Further, the internet usage has been reduced up to 70% in the PWA version. It easily loads on 2G and 3G networks. Once the data saver mode is turned on, you have the provision to limit the downloads as per your preference. Results? 75% increase in the number of tweets 65% increase in page sessions 20% decrease in bounce rates Alibaba Alibaba is the world’s fifth largest B2B marketplace with a revenue of 98.7 lakhs USD. They have 617 million monthly mobile users. Alibaba offers a strong mobile experience with their native app. However, they later realized the drawbacks of their existing mobile app. Their users preferred a quick solution instead of downloading a high space consuming app to browse or complete transactions. In order to provide the users with a great mobile experience, which offers a fast, reliable, and engaging experience to its users. The new application has the features to engage the new as well as re-engage the returning visitors. Alibaba built a PWA Results? 76% increase in mobile web conversions 14% more monthly users on iOS and 30% more on Android 4X higher interaction rate Ola As a leading cab aggregator in India, Ola could not play a chance with their mobile web user experience. Their services extend to 100 cities in India with about 600K driver partners. The cities in India opens up a plethora of opportunities as well as challenges to the leading cab aggregator. The commoners are in high need of an affordable and reliable cab service such as Ola for their commute. However, a majority of the population in India either deal with slow internet connectivity issues or device storage spaces. And Ola native apps are of 60MB and 100MB in Android and iOS respectively which need a fairly good internet connection. Ola understood that the probability of users downloading and using their native apps was considerably less. Hence, they came up with a light-weight PWA which is suitable for any device and internet connection. The PWA requires only 200KB of data for installation. It’s 300 times smaller in size on Android and 500 times smaller on iOS. Results? 68% increase in mobile traffic 30% increase in conversion rates 20% increase in new users Book My Show Bookmyshow, India’s largest ticketing company, has over 50 million monthly visitors. And most of the visits and transactions happen on mobile. Despite the significant traffic to their mobile website, high bounce rates were observed due to the prolonged page loading time. The user-experience was also not optimal in the mobile website. Heavy data and storage usages were the other issues associated with its native app. To mitigate these issues, Book My Show opted for a PWA using cutting-edge technologies for boosted performance. The Book My Show Progressive Web App is optimized for speed and has proven to be a major game changer in this aspect. The PWA is 50 times smaller in size on Android and 180 times smaller on the iOS. Results? 80% increase in conversions Loading time less than 2.94 seconds Checkout time reduced to 30 seconds Conclusion: PWA is the application game changer Progressive Web App is the next step after responsive web apps. And it’s way too equipped to compete with the native applications. In a way, we can say that companies choosing PWA for their online presence are in a way of choosing their path to success. If the cost of development and integration with existing systems are your concerns, then just leave it upon us. One of the major advantages of using PWAs is its cost-effective development features. Furthermore, as a with 7 years of experience, SayOne has helped clients all over the globe with over 300 applications. And Progressive Web Apps are one of our favorite ones. Custom Software Development Company So, what’s holding you back? Let’s get started! Originally published at https://www.sayonetech.com/blog/progressive-web-apps-why-your-business-needs-it/ .

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Progressive Web Apps: Why Your Business Needs It?

Interstitial ads are one of the most common ad formats used on nowadays. They are full screen ads that appear as an overlay upon an app. Interstitials are usually shown at different transition points or natural breaks, such as between activities or levels in games. They require an action by the user who can either dismiss or click on the ad. mobile Within an interstitial, different types of media can be found such as static images, videos, playable ads, surveys and others. Interstitials are also one of the most popular ad formats on web. When they appeared on mobile apps, they resolved one of the biggest pains for advertisers looking to enter the mobile space, the limited real estate available on mobile. Marketer’s perspective | Ideal for storytelling and brand awareness Mobile interstitials are of high demand among advertisers and brands, so it’s really interesting to see why marketers prefer them. Pros A format that grabs user’s attention Mobile interstitials render in full screen, covering the user’s app and require an action by the user who can either dismiss or click on the ad. They are usually visually appealing and can easily grab user’s attention , resolving issues like banner blindness which can be found in banner ad format. Perfect for brands Interstitials, by taking advantage of the full screen experience on mobile, are ideal for storytelling and can make a brand stand out. There is enough room for a proper marketing message achieving this way a high memorisation rate. Advanced targeting options Since interstitials are a very popular format among the mobile publishers community, advertisers can have instant reach to millions of users and advanced targeting options on a global level. Cons Content requires more work Mobile interstitials cover the full screen space of an app and therefore require much more work from an advertiser’s perspective, to create compelling content. Source: AdMob Publisher’s perspective | A high converting format Interstitial ad format is heavily used by the publishers community too. Some of the pros and cons of using interstitial ads within a mobile app can be found below. Pros Easy to set up Interstitial ads are shown as an overlay, therefore there is no need for changes in the UI of an app, making them easy to integrate. Increased fill rate Interstitial ads are quite popular among brands and performance mobile advertisers, resulting to high fill rates. High conversions Interstitial ads force the user to either click to dismiss the full screen ad or click on it. Therefore, they have an excellent level of user engagement and high click through rates, resulting to high conversions. Cons Decrease in retention If publishers overuse interstitials and do not follow best practises, they can dramatically affect user engagement and retention within their app, resulting to app uninstalls. Highly intrusive Since interstitials render in full screen on top of an app, they can be highly intrusive for the users if misplaced to interrupt the flow of an app and can create user frustration. In some cases, users also have to wait for a few minutes prior being able to disclose the ad. Some users might find that irritating. Placement thought process Placement of interstitial ads within an app requires extensive thought during the design phase in order to properly be included in the strategy. The right time and place to show an interstitial ad is really important. User emotions are equally important when the ad is shown and can heavily affect conversions. monetization In this article we tried to understand the interstitial ad format both from the perspective of the app publisher but also from the side of the marketer. In the next article we will discuss some best practises when using interstitial ads, along with tips and tricks, followed by some real world examples.

Mobile Ad Formats Lab #4 — Interstitial Ads

Blockchain and Crypto have been in people’s mind for a quite a while now. Almost everyone has heard about Bitcoin and many have even participated in ICOs. The technology promises to disrupt industries and to change life as we know it. However, there has not been a blockchain project that reaches real mass adoption. If you think about it, a lot of money has been raised in the industry so it is certainly not a lack of funding. Why could this be? The Blockchain industry and the Internet are often compared. According to the history books, Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web in 1989. Some of the biggest Internet companies we know today have been founded around 1994–1995 (Amazon, eBay, etc.) but it took them several years more to reach mass adoption. To be accurate, . In comparison, ten years after the creation of Blockchain the number of . However, some individuals have several wallets so it’s safe to say that the number of unique blockchain users is around 20 million. In the same period of existence, there are 10 times fewer people using Blockchain than there were the Internet. In the next paragraphs, I will analyze what hinders adoption and take an educated guess on the future steps to reach it. Could it be the small period of existence? there were 248 million Internet users worldwide in 1999 people with blockchain wallets today is around 25 million If time and money is not the biggest issue, what could it be? Solving Scalability Designed by from Freepik www.flaticon.com If you have been long enough in the space, you have certainly heard about the scalability trilemma. Currently, one cannot have Scalability — Security — Decentralization simultaneously. For example, Bitcoin and Ethereum were built with a focus on Security and Decentralization, however, it became evident that the transaction processing times can be extremely slow. Not to mention that the quantity of TPS (transactions per second) is far from VISA payments. Some people are reluctant to join the Blockchain movement as they fear expensive transaction costs and slow processing times. It is worth mentioning that this issue is being addressed. Developer teams are working on scaling solutions such as Lightning Network, Proof of Stake, Sharding, Plasma and etc. Only time will show which is the most proficient solution but mass adoption cannot occur until the problem is solved. Once the majority can join without causing the system to break, more and more individuals will become confident in the technology and get involved. Solving scalability is probably the first step that needs to be taken. Blockchains won’t go viral unless they scale adequately. Regain the trust of people If we go back to the origin of Blockchain, it was meant to solve the problem of trust. After the financial crisis of 2008 people had lost faith in financial institutions and exactly then Bitcoin appeared with the promise of providing transparency, trust and decentralization. Ironically, in a recent survey carried out by PwC users specified Trust as one of the biggest barriers to blockchain adoption. Potential reasons could be the constant exchange hacks, scams and the whole bad publicity surrounding ICOs. In a sense, people still don’t trust the technology itself. Many are put off by the possibility of losing all their funds due to a private key theft/loss. The question now becomes how to restore the trust in the space. A necessary step would be better ICO regulation. To put it differently scam ICOs should remain history and there should be clear legal consequences for those who try to screw investors. Fortunately, the issue is being addressed. ICO expert communities are being created in order to vet scams. Regular investors have become more cautious in regard to ICO selection. Several months ago Vitalik Buterin proposed an interesting model for ICOs called DAICO. Generally speaking, the concept implies that the funds raised are gradually released. Provided investors are satisfied with the performance of the team, they release tokens. If the team underperforms, investors can even decide to destroy the contract and get their funds back. Adopting the DAICO model could be a step in the right direction but so far ICO teams have been reluctant to use it. Governments are the ones who can regulate ICOs instead of counting on the teams to do it themselves which leads us to the next step. Governments should have clear regulations for ICOs and the Blockchain space in general Concentrating all your efforts and time on one project makes sense only when you can be certain some government regulation won’t destroy it. Unfortunately, this is not the case with Blockchain. Many governments have no official position on the topic and the ones that have are not 100% clear on the exact conditions. Individuals are reluctant to join the community as their decisions should be based on theories about regulation instead of fixed rules. In the worst case scenario, regulation could even lead to the failure of your whole endeavour. For the purpose of reaching mass adoption, good and timely regulation is necessary. As the popularity of blockchain and cryptocurrencies increased in 2017, governments took a more serious position on the matter. Some countries preferred “business first, regulation later” whereas the United States favoured a “regulation first, business later” approach. Both options have pros and cons but it is essential to have a unified regulatory framework for blockchain. With this in mind, the G20 countries have started discussions this year and they have met several times. Unfortunately, no official consensus has been reached but it remains only a matter of time to have clear and unified Blockchain regulation. The more widespread the technology becomes, the faster governments will act. Make it easier for people to use It is human nature to follow the easy path and do what causes the least resistance. This is exactly the case with apps, websites and products in general that we use. In other words, everything based on Blockchain should have the same or better user experience than the current solutions. Not so long ago I tried to convince some of my friends to join the Blockchain movement. As soon as they heard how a MyEtherWallet transaction takes more steps than a Paypal transaction, they became sceptical. It seems like many people are not willing to put in the time to understand the technology. What most companies should do is constantly improve the UX (user experience) and simplify the products. Obviously, this will take time but it’s an essential step for mass adoption. Final Words Once Blockchain is scalable, regulated, easy to use and has the trust of people, the sky will be the limit. Thank you for spending the time to read this article! I would appreciate it if you give feedback (positive or negative). Feel to contact me for questions or collaboration.

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The 4 Steps to Attain Blockchain Mass Adoption

“ ” — Look at all the code I wrote! #CowboyDeveloper If you hang around for any length of time, you’re sure to hear the above refrain. It a bit of a catch-all phrase, but the situations you’re most likely to hear it involve #CowboyDevelopers is : Code quantity as a proxy for capability. Or, to put it differently, “ ”. Bragging Rights Mine is bigger than yours After all, it’s a well known fact that the amount of code you write is directly proportional to how correct your implementation is 🙄. Settling Arguments: : Basically the , the amount of code that was written by the is consider dispositive evidence that the current approach is correct. Continuing With The Current Approach Sunk Cost fallacy #CowboyDeveloper The commonality to all of this are the implicit assumptions that Writing code is hard. Therefore, the more code you’ve written, the more hard work you’ve done. a) b) Yes it’s true — in absolute terms, writing code hard. That said, in the world of Software Engineering, is writing code is not the long pole! Take the life-cycle of whatever is being built. Odds are that it goes something like this ** **Identifying all the requirements associated with whatever you’re building, including who wants it, what they actually need, what they’ll be satisfied with, timeframes, and an infinity of other questions that your Product Managers tear their hair out trying to get answers to. Identify the problems ** **All the engineering associated with figuring out the “best” solution to the problems that you’ve identified above. Mind you, this is largely a case of multi-dimensional optimization, and there is rarely a “perfect solution”. Come up with a solution ** **Here we get to the “Writing Code” part of the entertainment. And no, I’m not giving it short-shrift — depending on what’s being built, it can involve any amount of pain and suffering. Dealing with GC pauses, cache-lines not behaving the way they should, elusive bugs in underlying libraries, oh, this can be seriously painful indeed! Implement the solution ** **Aaaaand, here’s where life get’s interesting. , my friends, is the long pole in the life-cycle! The thing is, six months from now, you (yes, even you!) have forgotten what your code does. And yes, maybe you documented your code well, but if you’re a , the odds are that you didn’t. What’s worse, the odds are that you will have moved on to the next project, which means that some luckless wight is goin to be sitting there tearing hair out trying to figure out what exactly your code is doing. Maintaining the solution This will #CowboyDeveloper their And that, my friends, is the point. In many (most?) cases, the fact that you generated an ∞ of code can be more about your lack of skills (and/or laziness!) than about your awesomeness. Writing code may be hard, but maintaining code is way way worse! , that we’ll go through and emerge victorious in the end. To us “the end” is when we’ve delivered the code — it’s how we picture us riding off into the sunset, victorious, The reality, however, is that that’s pretty much when the game begins anew. Maintaining the product, adding features, fixing bugs, dealing with unexpected situations that weren’t in the original requirements, oh, it’s a never-ending battle, and it’s where — if your product is successful — you’re going to be spending the vast majority of your time We’ve all bought into the myth of The Hero’s Journey , The Ordeal because the product has shipped! Internalize this lesson. Remember that the game never ends. And above all, don’t let code quantity turn into a measure of awesomeness! Note: Another way to look at is is that Code Quantity is proportional to Number Of Bugs (thanks to Cyclomatic Complexity) . So, when somebody sez. “Look at all the Code I wrote!”, you should actually hear “Look at all the bugs I created!”. . For more, read this article ( This article also appears on my blog )

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Code Quantity =/= Personal Awesomeness

The world of DevOps is a pretty confusing place for folks just starting out. Even figuring out what “DevOps” means can be hard. Is it to drive Agile™ product iterations? Or is it SSH-ing into a box and ? You guessed it. All of the above and most things in between. CI/CD with Kubernetes and Serverless restarting Apache After ~20 years in Ops and later Dev I thought I’d write up a biased, but hopefully helpful list of that I would look for when hiring someone for a DevOps position. technical and organisational skills 1. Deploying. DevOps is very much related to “releasing stuff” and making that work without a hitch. If there is you should get paranoid about it is about managing, prepping, rehearsing, checking (and later automating) releases and deployments. Regardless of language, platform, framework, sector, industry or any other technical / organisational details this is the thing that REALLY matters. anything 💡 Two life tips: Don’t buy pans from Ikea and never deploy on Fridays. 2. Monitoring Intrinsically connected to deploying is making sure that deployment works as expected and within parameters. This is about as vague as it gets. Just make sure you are somewhat comfortable with the various types of monitoring out there: uptime monitoring, process monitoring, real-user monitoring, synthetic monitoring etc. The bigger, more complex your stack, the more of these you will need. Again this the bread & butter. Screw this up and you are dead and blind. 💡 Nagios, Graphite and other “old school” tools are still very useful to grasp the essentials. 3. HTTP Learn how HTTP works. Obsess over tools like curl and your browsers debugger network panel. 99% of your tools and API’s speak it. All your SaaS providers speak it. Being able to interpret HTTP traffic and write simple scripts that “do HTTP” is a gift that will keep on giving. Hungry for more? Dive into TCP also. 💡 Try a telnet session and type the HTTP protocol by hand. 4. SSH Next to HTTP, SSH is basically essential. It lets you quickly navigate and troubleshoot almost any current stack. Except the serverless ones I guess. Creating and using keys and swift usage of any SSH client (whether on Linux or Windows) must feel like second nature. Strangely, FTP seems to be going extinct. 💡 Tunnelling over SSH will save you one day. Learn it 5. CPU, process and storage You need to have a basic understanding of how a computer works, again regardless of the platform. Why? Because you will encounter issues with stuck programs, corrupt files, performance bottlenecks, i.e. complaining end users or coworkers. In 99% of cases, this is due to resource contention somewhere. Regardless of the cause (bad programming, failing disks, slow CPU) you will need to get a knack for recognising where to look. Over time, you will recognise patterns “this reminds of that crashing disk issue we once had”, or “seems like Java just hasn’t got enough memory and is GC-ing all the time”. 💡 Try to REALLY understand the output of _top_ on *NIX or its Windows equivalent. 6. Triaging Probably the easiest way to spot a junior engineer is observing how they go about find the cause of some arcane bug or mysterious outage. Don’t get me wrong, this is a hard skill to grow. The systematic process of identifying, analyzing, developing and implementing a remedy for a problem is something you just have to do a lot to master it. It is the opposite of “have you tried turning it off and on again?”. This skills also transfers well to other business domains and even your daily life. 💡 Read error messages. You’d be amazed how many people skip this essential step. 7. Databases You don’t have to be a full blown DBA. You do need to recognise that databases are in general still a “hard” problem to solve. In comparison, (stateless) API’s, web servers, application servers etc. are all fairly low risk, low maintenance and almost complete commodity. Databases, distributed or not, are still hard and tend to hold a ton of value for your company. Learn some SQL, read the Mongo docs or just go with Postgres, the best database in the world™. 💡 ORM’s are not an excuse to not grasp how databases function. 8. CI/CD Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment only at place eight? That should be number one, right? Actually, no. Without understanding how databases and migrations work I dare you to create a useful deployment pipeline. Without understanding how HTTP works and how sessions are (not) handles, I dare you to do continuous deployment without interrupting users and generally creating a very bad time for your customers and coworkers. 💡 Master doing things manually. Understand them deeply. Only then automate them. 9. Risk assessment Isn’t this part of deploying? Kind of, but with added security and business insights. As you and your organisation mature you will have to judge whether the path you are taking is safe, secure and even legal in the broadest sense. Storing those user files in S3? Porting production backups to test environments? Many times your product and business coworkers will not see (or care) about the risks involved. Technical people can leverage their general paranoia here for good. Be critical. Block unsafe, risky or careless proposals, or at least raise your voice. 💡 Security testing or penetration testing help. Do them quarterly. 10. Load & performance testing You will need to be able to at least make a guesstimation on performance for new products or features. Even in the age of auto scaling and quick cloud provisioning. Remember that databases, some external services or expensive / specific hardware don’t not scale that well. Start with simple tools like Apache Bench and slowly ramp up to platforms like Jmeter or Gatling. Try to use data and usage patterns that are somewhat representative of real users. This is hard. 💡 Don’t expect load patterns found in test to translate 1:1 to prod. Stay vigilant. 11. Language runtimes and their configuration One language shops exist, but don’t bet on it. Get some inkling on how a basic app is build, started and configured for multiple platforms. Building and running a Node.js app is pretty different from a Java / JVM app, which can be split into Scala an Kotlin and Clojure variations. They use different package managers, require different types of monitoring and have different resource usage patterns. 💡 Starting with a JVM language helps, even if your shop doesn’t use Java. 12. Infrastructure as code You can do CI/CD easily without any automated infrastructure provisioning. And infrastructure as code not a super valuable “business booster”. Except when things get bigger and scale happens. This can also be “internal scale” when you have to duplicate environments for development and testing purposes. Get handy with Terraform, Ansible, Puppet or AWS Cloudformation. Spinning up a new environment with the touch of a button is pretty damn cool also. 💡 Don’t try to get 100% full reproducibility. It is an endless time sink. 13. Developer Experience You are expensive and so are your developer pals. Keeping them happy is actually pretty important on many levels. The term “DX” is pretty new but makes sense. As the DevOps mindset enters an organisation tools, platforms and infrastructure can get overwhelming. A smooth, transparent workflow where teams can easily access resources, ship new projects and get feedback on their new services is a holy grail for many companies. There is no easy solution for this. Listen and take baby steps. 💡 Sometimes a cup of coffee or having lunch together is all the DX that is needed. 14. Containers (Docker) containers are here to stay, so you probably need to get comfortable with the eco system. None of this is terribly hard, especially not if you have some Linux chops. Most important is to recognize when to use them and when they are just an unnecessary burden. Do not “containerize all the thing”. 💡 Docker portability between Mac, Windows and *NIX is not 100%. Expect some issues. 15. Container orchestration In a mature technical organisation at some form of scale, you will be introduced to container orchestration issues at some stage. It is where the industry is going. By all means, use Kubernetes or any of its competitors but remain critical. Compared to using just Docker to wrap some apps in container, using any container orchestration tool is a significantly bigger investment in time and money. Remember, this tech is quite young, so only use it when you are feeling the pain of using it. not 💡 Get a hosted solution if you can. Further reading This a list of books useful books, even if some of them might seem dated. The books are listed alphabetically by author. Not all are strict “DevOps” book, but all have valuable content related to the skill areas mentioned above. DeMarco, Tom. e.a. — Peopleware Mostly on soft skills and project management. Still highly relevant in tech circles. Grigorik, Ilya. — High Performance Browser Networking Everything you need to grasp HTTP from a web perspective. Humble, Jez. e.a. — Continuous Delivery Essential to grasp the current CI/CD, Agile and DevOps scene. Martin, Robert C. — Clean Code Java oriented, but whatever language you work with you will recognize things from this book. Originally published at checklyhq.com . P.S. If you liked this article, please show your appreciation by 👏 below and But wait, there’s more! clapping follow me on Twitter !

An Opinionated List of Skills You Need for a DevOps Job in 2018

The Gemini Dollar (GUSD) was developed by Gemini Trust Company, LLC. and is backed 1:1 by the United States Dollar(USD). Therefore each GUSD will be worth one USD. always We at Forra, have decided to integrate GUSD into our marketplace because it’s “the world’s first US regulated stablecoin”. The number of USD and GUSD is audited monthly by an external public accounting firm. If you’re interested in viewing the audits they are public. The purpose of stable coins Cryptocurrency is extremely volatile by nature, and it is not uncommon for prices to fluctuate 5% or more within a 24 hour period. This volatility poses large issues in various industries, one of which is crypto-ecommerce. Since stable coins are pegged to the price of USD it provides users with a way to hold USD on a blockchain to avoid the volatility that typical cryptocurrencies have. How Forra is using stable coins Forra is an ecommerce marketplace that allows you to buy and sell your goods for cryptocurrency. Like most ecommerce marketplaces we utilize escrow in order to safely serve our users. Traditionally sellers take on large risks when selling items on a crypto ecommerce marketplace, due to the volatility of cryptocurrencies. If a seller sells an item for 0.22 ETH (around $50), there is a chance that after those funds are released from escrow to the seller, that same 0.22 ETH could be worth less than the original purchase price. It often takes 3–5 business days for escrow funds to be released, further increasing the chances of receiving a different amount of money. As a business owner, you often want to minimize risk, so crypto currencies are not a viable option. This is the problem we are solving by integrating GUSD with Forra. On Forra, “If you sell any item for $50 you are going to get $50” This is how that process works. You your item for X amount list Someone buys your item The funds are held by our escrow system The escrow system converts the crypto that the buyer paid with into Gemini Dollars Gemini Dollars are held in escrow Buyer receives item Gemini Dollars are converted to crypto Crypto is released to sellers wallet Any questions? Ask us on . discord We want to continue to provide innovative solutions to both the ecommerce and crypto industries. Please join our if you would like to join our community, request a feature, or speak to the people making Forra. discord Originally published at forra.io .

Ethereum

The Gemini Dollar — A real use case

Kubeflow. If you read on, you might just fall in love with Kubeflow . It’s not just a cuddly way to get going with machine learning , it stands for something huge for the data science community. You’ve been warned. The Hard Way Let’s talk about an ancient phenomenon: worshipping . Many of us have been guilty of it, but it’s especially common among STEM folk who’ve undergone decades of hazing. The kind of hazing that measures your worth in how well you can reinvent a wheel, how well you can do every bit yourself, and how little help you accept. When you’re in the thick of this mentality, you think the difficulty or complexity of a task matters more than its value. (And perhaps one day you’ll use your vacation to build a computer and its operating system from scratch just to make sure you understand the everything of everything.) The Hard Way really The Hard Way means swimming through a sticky syrup of drudgery, taking forever to get things done. I had this attitude in my wild youth, but today I’m embarrassed on behalf of forces that make life difficult for no good reason. Progress tends to move in the direction of making things . I’d prefer to celebrate progress instead of being proud I can still do things the hard way. Sure, I can with pen and paper… by why would I ever do it? Because all the world’s computers might be raptured? easier invert a matrix Still waiting for this tech to make a comeback. Any day now. I’d better practice my by hand. backpropagation Let’s welcome the reduction in toil that technology brings. Bad tools and processes that slow everyone down belong on the endangered species list — let’s start being proud of doing what’s valuable instead of what’s difficult, and if you insist on tackling a real challenge, why not work to make difficult things easy for everyone else? embodies taking a stand against doing things The Hard Way. It’s a ski lift for your mountain of chores. Kubeflow Among the tools that embody a stand against The Hard Way, is a project that’s close to my heart — and I wrote some of the original blueprints in a manic fever right after our first cup of coffee together. I’m pretty sure I didn’t get up for sustenance that day, not while the first draft of the design doc was still on the inside of our skulls. Kubeflow David Aronchick What is Kubeflow? So, what is and why did it inspire all that intense passion? It’s a ski lift to help you with the mountain of setup chores. Let’s unpack that… Kubeflow machine learning The document and I wrote started under a different name. Eventually it was codenamed Grace, but we called first version Beautiful Machine Learning. Okay, maybe not my most original naming moment, but cut me some slack. We folk like a thing to do exactly what it says on the tin. (Thank goodness someone with some creativity fixed it later, right?) David statistician That’s the point of : beautiful machine learning. Specifically, the beauty of the ’s experience while wrestling into submission the beast that is machine learning in multicloud hybrid environments as an entire stack. Which, if you’ve tried to DIY it in the pre-Kubeflow days, was anything but beautiful. Kubeflow data scientist In case you prefer videos to reading stuff, here’s me summarizing from Next 2018. David’s talk on Kubeflow If you’re like me, you barely tolerate the boring parts of the process and it’s very hard to work with a song in your heart while you do the bits involving minimal cunning and maximal drudgery. (A personal exception is my perverse love of data cleaning, which I enjoy as a meditative activity in the same category as playing . Mmmm… injecting order into chaos. Delicious.) data science 2048 What data scientists want You want to work on those interesting models, you want to focus on testing your hypotheses, you want to make gorgeous plots (you the kind whose heart beats a little faster when I say interactive, shiny, animated?), and you want to get to the actionable insights. Yeah, me too. But first we have to spend an eternity on setup and operating systems and scaling and all kinds of painfully boring stuff. I mean, come on, does anyone actually enjoy giving Big Data special treatment relative to small data? As far as most data scientists are concerned, it would be great if all the code we wrote were the same for big or small, laptop or cloud, prototype or production… Deep down inside we know that the only reason that this isn’t the case is that we live in the dark ages where our tools suck. So how about if we make them unsuck? And, while we’re at it, how about if we could have the ideal data science workflow with every dream bell and whistle all laid out so that using them was effortless and we could just get on with the fun parts of our work? is about giving data scientists the experience they’d have if they got rid of all the fiddly bits they don’t like. Kubeflow is what beautiful machine learning, and ultimately , is all about. It’s a blueprint for living the dream, for giving the experience they’d have if they got rid of all the fiddly bits they don’t like. is not perfect yet (it first greeted the world at the end of last year), but it’s moving rapidly in the right direction. That Kubeflow data scientists Kubeflow Making our tools unsuck If we want to go about fixing things, where should we start? The team picked composability, portability, and scalability. Kubeflow accommodates all the various data science tools out there. Composable ML means it’s easy to go from prototyping models on your laptop to running them unchanged in production. Portable ML means it’s effortless to go from your small data prototype to huge data pipelines. Scalable ML You know what’s really good at composability, portability, and scalability? and ! Containers Kubernetes For most data scientists, even talking about these tech buzzwords is an exercise in improvisation. Ugh, the gotcha. For most data scientists, even talking about these tech buzzwords is an exercise in improvisation. If you’re not already an expert, using machine learning on presents a world of pain — not only because there are so many things you have to become an expert in that are unrelated to your comfort zone, but also because all the primers are written for a different kind of engineer. You’ll need to earn a second black belt in addition to your one. Aaaand we’re face-to-face with the problem again! Kubernetes machine learning A second black belt? Most consider learning all that stuff a special kind of torture, and those who are excited by it might simply not have the spare time. Can’t someone else go learn for us so we can get on with our actual jobs? data scientists Kubernetes is a ski lift to help you with the mountain of machine learning setup chores. Kubeflow Consider your volunteer buddy here. The whole point of it is to make it easy for everyone to develop, deploy, and manage portable, distributed machine learning on . No extra black belts needed. The goal is to have your entire stack made unannoying and complete with every beautiful toy you want. We’re not there yet, but we’re accelerating fast. For example, v0.2 gets you fully set up with one (!) single line of code. Kubeflow Kubernetes Kubeflow You can deploy Kubeflow with the one-step script included in the download. For more info, see . David’s talk It takes only one line of effort to get notebooks, distributed training, and model serving fit for the hybrid cloud environment. Oh, and there’s customizable ksonnet packaging too, H2O.ai tooling, and powerful hyperparameter tuning to boot. Data scientists, think on these additional things, look me in the eye, and tell me you want to figure out autoscaling based on job submission, cloud-specific VMs, and data exfiltration prevention. No? Well, luckily you don’t have to. Congratulations on waiting it out long enough to have it taken care of for you, kind of like you don’t need to build your own computer anymore. Jupyter A glimpse of what hyperparameter tuning with Katib looks like. What’s a hyperparameter? It’s that dial on your toaster. When your has a lot of knobs and dials, figuring out what to set them to can be annoying — luckily tools like Katib are here to help. machine learning algorithm An attitude shift towards inclusion is the discipline of making data useful, and since the world is generating data like never before, the work do is becoming more necessary than ever. We all want a world where information is used to make life better instead of collecting cobwebs. There’s so much data and so much work to be done that we need the barriers to entry into analytics lowered as quickly as possible. I’m proud of the role is playing in that. Data science data scientists Kubeflow We’re entering an era that is about empowering everyone stand on the shoulders of giants. Actually, by talking about how lovably shiny is, I might have distracted you from the bigger point: what it represents. It’s an attitude shift towards inclusion and it’s one of the early steps our community is taking in an era that accelerates everyone’s ability to stand on the shoulders of giants. It points to a bright and exciting future! Kubeflow Imagine a world where the tools are so easy absolutely everyone can use them. That’s where we’re headed! I’m proud that as a community of data professionals we’re starting to shun The Hard Way and stepping up to make fiddly things easy for everyone else. We’re beginning to say, “ Don’t know the gory behind-the-scenes details? That’s okay! We refuse to leave you behind. Come have a seat at our table and join us in making incredible things.” That smells like progress to me — let’s have more of it! If you’re interested in trying out Kubeflow, get started . Or learn more in David’s fabulous . here talk

Community Is

Slack

What do you call AI without the boring bits?

Keep your pants on for now. ICOs are having a hard time, but they are not dead. The ICOs (Initial Coin Offering) are in deep trouble. A year ago a typical shelf company with 20 selfies as a team and shady whitepaper with no product, no money and no skills could raise millions of $. But today real companies, with existing product, business and revenue have hard time raising even hundreds of thousands $. The realistic amount is actually closer to tens of thousands of $. If you are lucky, and if you are not it may be flat zero. This is how bad things are. But you will not hear this from so-called top advisors and ICO marketing agencies. They will still charge you over $100k just for basic stuff, even though they know you have no chances of being profitable. On several occasions I have advised companies not to do an ICO if they have at least some funds to start a business or have possibilities in raising funds the other way, from private investors for example. And in case of being broke, to wait at least for several months. Even though telling so is not be in my personal best interest. But as a consultant I just don’t feel right giving the wrong advice. Sure there are ICOs that still raise millions, and I’m part of two of them currently, but in this situation 99% of funds are coming from private investors, which means that they could have raised this money even without an ICO. So why did this happen? First of all ICO is very young industry, it’s only a little bit over year old. And unfortunately it dated in the time of a another crypto bubble. This made ICOs to sky rocket in the beginning, and then fall even harder. In a normal market situation it would take years for industry to grow to the size to what ICOs grew, but here it just happened way too fast. This caused lot of investors to lose huge amount of funds. We are talking about tens of billions United States Dollars here. This is how much money has faded away from the token market since December 2017. This is basically the same if Bitcoin had cost 100$ already in 2011, and then it would fall back to 1$. The trust in Bitcoin would have been lost since almost no one except few early adapters had a chance to cash out before it was too late. And now for most tokens it’s unfortunately too late. Sadly they will never regain their previous value and will die out in the end completely. This is also due to the fact that most of the ICOs turned out to be scams, and the revolutionary product that promised will never be ready. Actually it hasn’t even been started in most cases. What should we do now? Relax, stop panicking. You will only make things worse. The money you stupidly invested is gone, but by spreading the fear you will risk destroying the whole industry. There is nothing bad in ICOs. What simply happened is that euphoric investors poured money into ICOs because frankly they had no idea what they were doing and now they are paying for it. If you did this, you can only blame yourself. Don’t blame the industry, it’s the same if you had invested in bad stocks, it just happened that most of the ICOs were bad, and this happened thanks to the idiots like you who though that putting money into something they didn’t understand was a good idea. Right now we are entering the phase where all frauds of ICO companies are revealed and people are very cautious. Though as human nature is, they are again doing it wrong. Instead of being wisely cautious, they are terrified of everything that says ICO. Now they are not investing even in the companies in which they would normally invest in, if it was a traditional fundraising. This is why now we have to wait until fear will pass and people will finally view ICOs in a reasonable matter. When this will happen is unsure. But in order it to happen the whole crypto market, and Bitcoin as priority has to recover from last fall to at least the same value as the last all time high. After that we can see another boom in crytpo industry and see new assets coming to the market. I would expect this to happen within one year, and after that we can see the rebirth of the ICOs. And hopefully this time, investors will be smarter.

Keep

What on Earth happened to ICOs?

By and . Originally published on . Robert Miller Vince Kuraitis The Healthcare Blog You’ve probably heard of Bitcoin, but we doubt you’ve heard of Dentacoin, MedTokens, or Curecoin. These are healthcare specific cryptocurrencies born from , or . In this article, we’ll briefly recap the trend of healthcare ICOs and provide you with a summary financial analysis of how this trend has played out among 138 healthcare ICOs. The results to-date are enlightening, but disappointing. We believe there’s still potential for some projects to be successful. Initial Coin Offerings ICOs Background Over the past year, Vince has curated and crowdsourced a public . We believe it’s highly representative of the universe of healthcare ICOs. list of 138 healthcare ICOs There are some commonalities among healthcare ICOs: they are all building some type of decentralized or distributed network and/or platform; they all make use of blockchain technology, and almost all bring a strong focus on some type(s) of healthcare data. Beyond that they are an extremely diverse group that spans the globe. Some of the categories on which these projects are focused include: integrity of healthcare supply chains, e.g., pharmaceuticals; distributed electronic health records (EHRs) and/or personal health records (PHRs), with control of data typically decentralized to individual patients; marketplaces for matching patients with healthcare providers, some providing real-time consultations; collection, storage, and/or analysis of genetic & other healthcare data; applying analytics and/or AI on various types of health data; organization of clinical trials processes; and miscellaneous clinical applications, devices, procedures. We provide more background about ICOs in the original THCB article . here Methodology and Key Findings We started with a . We cross-checked these against 1,916 coins catalogued on as of September 5, 2018. CoinMarketCap is the most comprehensive source of exchange-listed ICOs. A more detailed description of our methodology, findings and limitations can be viewed . The table below summarizes key financial data. list of 138 healthcare ICOs CoinMarketCap in these spreadsheets Through September 5, 2018 Some key findings from the starting list of 138 healthcare ICOs: · 122 healthcare ICOs are not listed on any cryptocurrency financial (e.g., ) exchange Coinbase · 16 healthcare ICOs are listed on one or more exchanges · Of these 16, 5 show a positive financial return since the date of their listing · 2 show a positive return for calendar year 2018 to-date The 16 exchange-listed ICOs represent a 12% exchange-listing rate. On average the 16 listed healthcare ICOs had a -26% overall return rate, with the worst performing asset returning -95% and the best 108%. We also collected market capitalization data on each of the exchange-listed healthcare ICOs. These ICOs collectively raised $186 million, not including the 3 healthcare ICOs on which we could not find data. The market cap of the 13 healthcare ICOs for which data is available skyrocketed to a peak of $2.8 billion early in January 2018, and has since declined to $269 million. This data is greatly exaggerated by the inclusion of one outlier healthcare ICO ­­ — Dentacoin. If Dentacoin is excluded from the analysis, the peak market cap reached by the remaining healthcare ICOs is $1.1 billion in January and $153 million as of September 5, 2018. Through September 5, 2018 We also found that the total healthcare ICO market cap grew largely in tandem with the overall cryptocurrency market during 2017 and declined in tandem in 2018. The graphic below illustrates this trend. More specifically, we found a correlation of 75.1% between Bitcoin and the healthcare ICOs and 87.1% between Ethereum and the healthcare ICOs. Discussion and Commentary The first observation we’ll note is that there has been a amount of healthcare ICO activity. substantial However, we would label the overall performance of the healthcare ICOs as “disappointing”. Only 5 reported positive returns since the date of their listing and 2 in 2018 to-date. The since January 2018. Monthly funds raised by ICOs are down, and funding has shifted towards a few mega projects (like EOS and Telegram), big private sales, and smart contract platforms. overall ICO market has been declining During the market of 2017, healthcare ICOs greatly benefited from burgeoning prices and market euphoria. It gave them access to easy capital (often non-dilutive as well), created a buzz around the industry, drove consumer interest in their products, made it is easier to hire top talent, and resulted in happy investors. bull The markets of 2018 have hit healthcare ICOs hard. It has become extremely difficult to raise capital, ICOs don’t have organic user growth from an appreciating cryptocurrency, exchanges slow down listings, team morale suffers, and ICO big investors become unhappy. bear Moreover, companies in the crypto space have difficulty establishing banking relationships and as a result many hold their funds raised in cryptocurrencies (i.e., in Ether vs. $USD). When prices fall, treasuries and most important suddenly become much shorter than teams previously believed. As an example, a project that raised $10m late in 2017 might expend $2m in marketing and legal fees, and then pay year-end ; after the price of Ethereum dropped 80% in 2018, their initial $10m could suddenly be reduced to less than $2m. project runways taxes The high overall correlation between healthcare ICO prices and cryptocurrency prices is also troubling. In a market that is well functioning and transparent, we would expect that prices would be based more on performance of individual projects, rather than tied to a nascent and volatile market of speculative cryptocurrencies. What should we make of the fact that only 12% of healthcare ICOs are listed on exchanges? There are some understandable reasons to choose to be listed, or to delay getting listed. It is an expensive process, potentially costing up to $1m. Some teams are choosing to wait and get regulatory clarity before listing. The listing ICOs does not currently match the quality of exchanges listing publicly traded stocks. not caliber of exchanges Another possible explanation for healthcare ICOs low listing rate is that exchanges do not see healthcare cryptocurrencies as a market enticing enough to drive retail investing demand. A “new Bitcoin” is sure to excite people and generate retail investor trading, and thus generate revenue for exchanges, but a cryptocurrency made to “revolutionize FHIR based interoperability” or “drive value based payments” doesn’t have the same sex-appeal. But in the long-run, NOT being listed on an exchange will be a huge liability for ICOs. For investors it means there is no easy way to buy and sell your tokens. This liquidity is important. First of all, it provides an ramp for cryptocurrency, a way for people to get their hands on what’s necessary to use a crypto-product or service. Second, it provides an ramp for investors in ICOs to liquidate their positions. Investors will often times have locked up their capital for months in high risk high return ICO ventures with the ultimate goal being an exchange listing. In the case that there is no listing, it becomes much more difficult, sometimes impossible, for an investor to sell the cryptocurrency they have bought. We believe almost all legitimate projects will seek listing over time, but we cannot tell which healthcare ICO projects are making this effort. extremely onboarding exit Our personal knowledge of the healthcare ICO market affirms the financial analyses. We are aware of few live pilots, let alone production scale projects. We invite executives from ICOs to provide comments on their successes and challenges. Also based on our personal knowledge, we believe that most healthcare ICOs have not understood that their fundamental mission is network building, and in turn that they must focus on creating network effects. ICOs, when executed properly, could be . Hardly any of the healthcare ICO whitepapers discuss community building or how they plan to undertake the growth hacking activities that are required to achieve network effects. amazing tools to achieve this purpose Moreover, cryptocurrencies are a new way of organizing human activity, and as such they require new forms of governance. Again, we have seen little far-sightedness about how these networks will be governed. This reflects a lack of thoughtfulness in the current generation of projects; they have proven to be very effective at raising money, but less so at everything that comes after that. While there has been substantial evolution in standards, practice and regulatory guidance since the advent of ICOs, at the moment the evolving conventional wisdom around ICOs has become gloomy. It is hard to say what the future will hold. We believe, under the right conditions, that the ICO model can prove to be an extremely effective way to bootstrap a network and launch an amazing service. Depending on your point of view, this past year might evolve to be cryptocurrency’s “ ” or it could simply be a rerun of the dot.com bubble. Time will tell. Netscape moment Appendix — Resources on ICOs #Crypto Utopia Autonomous Research, June 2018 Crypto Canon Andreesen Horowitz, 2018 Initial Coin Offerings: A Strategic Perspective PwC and Crypto Valley, June 2018 How to (Not) be a Shitcoin: What I’ve Learned About Markets, Psychology and Value Creation Meltem Demirors SlideShare; September 7, 2018 Blockchain and cryptocurrency reading list Robert Miller in Medium; November 26, 2017 Chasing fake volume: a crypto-plague Sylvain Ribes in Medium; March 10, 2018 The Bullish Case for Bitcoin Vijay Boyapati in Medium; March 2, 2018 Blockchain Governance: Programming Our Future Fred Ersham in Medium; November 27, 2017 Thanks to Dr. Jody Ranck, Dr. Charles Bruce and Leonard Kish for their comments on an earlier draft of this article. Robert Miller (@bertcmiller) is CEO of Honeycomb Health and an early advocate for blockchain in the healthcare space. He manages a blog and a newsletter you can find at http://bertcmiller.com/ Vince Kuraitis, JD/MBA (@VinceKuraitis) is an independent healthcare consultant with over 30 years’ experience across 150+ healthcare organizations. He has been a frequent contributor to THCB and writes at www.e-CareManagement.com . Connect with me You can also follow me on here on Medium or on . I appreciate feedback! Twitter

Canon

A status report on 138 healthcare ICOs

Using different writing styles and swirly fonts on a website is an awesome way of boosting its appeal. , who has extensive experience in web design and currently teaches people his skills, says that “the right typography makes reading a website’s content effortless, while poor typography sends readers away.” Alihashmi Simple body font when complemented with fancy, elegant fonts makes an article easy on the eyes and pleasant to read. When writing a piece, you need to use a simple, discernible, and easy to read font type; the content can become monotonous and boring when the typography is too plain. Here are nine best practices for using typography in web design. Keep It Simple Readability is key. You definitely don’t want to overdo the calligraphy fonts to a point that readers can barely make out the words you have penned down. In fact, using standard fonts can engage readers’ mind better since most people are familiar with them. Simplicity adds to your website’s readability and boosts its visual appeal. You should strive to use a minimum number of fonts on your website to maintain structure and professionalism. Trying too hard to appear sophisticated using calligraphy fonts can be disastrous for your website when the content turns into an indiscernible mess. of your website largely depends on your needs. For instance, when promoting your brand, custom fonts can be useful at that point. The typography Also, consider the device on which users will mostly access your website — whether laptops, tablets, or smartphones. This will help you in choosing fonts that are legible and well displayed on the target devices. 2. Properly Match and Pair the Fonts System fonts are a safe bet for web designers as they are easy to use and do not give out a complex layout. However, to use properly the numerous fonts available in the text tool, you need to select and match them up in pairs that give a great mix. calligraphy Some calligraphic fonts give favorable results when matched with other specific fonts; therefore, you need to skillfully pick and mix them. There are websites that offer a selection of free fonts but it is important to confirm if they are licensed and whether you are allowed to use them. You don’t want to use calligraphic fonts that require licensing on your website since it would amount to stealing. Some websites require pesky uploading of fonts while some don’t, so you will have to find those that work best for you. 3. Avoid Lengthy Lines The number of characters on a line of texts largely determines the ease with which a user can read and grasp a message. Shorter sentences offer better readability than the longer ones; therefore, your typography should not be too wide or too narrow. A common web typography rule is to restrict the range of characters per line to about 50–60. For an optimal line length of your website, you should consider fixing the width of your layout. 4. Correctly Use Vertical White Space The correct use of white spaces between lines of text not only boosts visibility and visual appeal but also improves legibility. Failing to allow the right line height measurements can make your website to appear cluttered and fail to draw the reader’s interest. You should consider applying the right line height between the lines of text on your website for better typography. 5. Make Good Use of Color Contrast Color plays a huge role in web typography best practice. Therefore, carefully contrasting the text and background colors can boost the legibility of texts. 6. Consider the Message You Wish to Relay How a message is received and interpreted by the end users will largely depend on the penmanship. To convey a message in a design effectively, ensure that your choice of fonts does not change the intention of the message. For instance, if your aim is to create and communicate a happy and relaxed atmosphere, formal fonts would not suffice — and screaming or “scary” fonts would not work either. Therefore, follow font best practices to realize effective designs. 7. What’s the Occasion? The occasion for which you are crafting content influences typography in web design. It should always come into play as you make a decision on the fonts to use for a design. For instance, a fun and creative font such as Princess Sophia would best suit a website selling children ware. And, if designing for a wedding, a more sophisticated and romantic font such as Coneria Script would be appropriate. The event for which you are creating a design should always guide you on the best font to use on the project. 8. All Caps Texts are a No-No Capitalizing all characters on a text or message makes it appear like you are screaming and imposing on your readers. It is unpleasant to the eyes and most of the readers won’t even get to the end of the message as it will likely put them off. 9. What’s your Target Audience? For your website to sit well with your targeted audience, you should understand the end users and take their needs and expectations into consideration as you craft your typographical design. Who are you designing for? What is their age group? What are their likes and dislikes? Answering such questions about the target audience will help you to choose the right fonts for the message you wish to convey to them. Final Word To realize your objectives, you need to ensure your website’s typography content is legible, polished, and not distracting. web design Furthermore, you need to be creative and go through the different font collections and practice using various systemic and custom lettering to determine which ones match up best. Above all, there’s no single formula to attaining perfection in web design typography but with enough practice, you will grow your skills. Do you have another tip about typography in web design? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below.

9 Best Practices for Using Typography in Web Design

So I have three devices from currently serviced, all three bought last year. My iPhone SE’s touchID stopped working, my iPad Pro 10.5 started to feature white spots on the screen, and today my “made to order” iMac 21" shut down all by itself and won’t power up anymore. Apple What is this? What are the odds of this? But, dear God, wait ‘till you hear the actual problems. I also have an iPad 4th generation on which Apple’s iOS 10 throttles the CPU in such way that it is unbearably slow for no reason. I am unable to keep it in an useable state, by downgrading, because, for Apple, whatever I buy is not really mine to decide what to install on it. To solve the lack of an iPhone, I use an old Android phone I had in some drawer. I can’t message anyone on my iMessage list anymore, because there is Hangouts for iOS but no iMessage for Android. My iMac 21" powered off for good fifteen minutes ago, but, the luck! My 10 year old iMac 27" still works! I take it out of storage, place it on my desk, plug the wire and, voila!, it boots up as if it was bought a day ago. I guess planned obsolescence wasn’t invented at Apple in 2008. But, the joy is short lived: I need the password to my router. It is saved in my iCloud notes. The joy! But wait, the slow sluggish iPad is signed into my wife’s iCloud account. I have a power user idea, instead of signing out of her iCloud and having everything stored on the iPad erased by the sign out, let’s go online to get the magic note with the magic password. I figure my junky android Samsung Grand Prime, which is horribly outdated but still runs smooth running the latest Android it supports, unlike the iPad4, would be faster in opening the iCloud website, logging in and seeing the note. But alas, Apple tells me that my Android Chrome browser is “incompatible”. That’s so, so 90s! Well back to the old CPU throttled iPad 4. I log in on the iCloud.com website, I get to the Notes web app, but, the moment I try searching, the web browser crashes. I try Chrome, I try Safari, I know they’re the same thing in iOS 10, but I am hopeful, to no end. What to do? I have a very, very important discussion in less than one hour and Apple’s walled garden and greedy, trillion dollar, planned obsolescence business decisions are keeping me from it. Lucky me I have yet another Apple device, the MacBook from work. This one succeeds in opening iCloud.com in a “compatible” web browser and also succeeds not to crash, so my router password is back to me and I give it to the eager iMac 27”, built in early 2008. Then the world slows down as the iMac’s 2008 SATA HD drives start indexing the sync of the iCloud drive, so I have some time to ponder. What happened to the Apple who built the iPad 4 which won’t die and won’t have screen artefacts pop up for no reason, the iMac 2008 which won’t shut down on its own, even if it has had its fair share of running time a long time ago? What happened to the experience of “it just works?”. How could have Apple made orders of magnitude better experiences when it had orders of magnitude less money to spend? But despite all the clear wrongs with Apple the alternative is just one company: . I have this phone as proof that despite GDPR, despite fines, despite Facebook’s failure to respect it’s users and the backlash of it, Google is the big brother watching everything I do, forcing me still to accept permissions on my device which I sill don’t understand on my up to date Android 5.1.1. … Google, and it’s shell Samsung, which still won’t let me free up the space on that phone by removing it’s useless bloat. Google Using this surrogate Android phone for the past two days I found myself wondering: why do people buy the Pixels? Why pay the premium price for a device that despite its price still treats you like the product? How much targeting is required to milk all possible advertising money? Is this a real competitive market, a duopoly offering either living a dystopian shared surveillance, between a corporation and the thousands of developers making things curated by the Holy Ghost of luck, which tap into the surveillance data at will, or living in an utopian garden of Eden that shuns and bans you as soon as you’ve stepped outside? Is this CHOICE? Blackberry is out, Windows Phone is out, Nokia is out. I am still in and I’m not having fun anymore, being not a customer, but a prisoner asked which of the two masters do I want to serve.

Samsung

My Apple lock down because of Google’s greed

Selling is one of the activities that I often find engineers shy away the most from. Yet, it is likely one of the most under-rating and important activities an leader can do. I intentionally try and spend 20% of my time working with sales teams to help sell our products. There are many reasons why I think this activity is vital to any engineering leader, which I will cover in this post. engineering Qumulo’s Selling is where the rubber meets the road As an engineer working on various products, I had the (naive) impression that whatever I build will be magically sold. I mean, the product is so good it will naturally sell itself. There’s a definite sense of pride behind this assumption as well as a tad of naïveté. Most products, especially enterprise software ones, do not sell themselves. Finding out how your product is sold and why customers buy it helps engineering leaders in several ways. The most important in my opinion is developing customer empathy. As a leader you will understand why customers buy your product and how they use it. Odds are you don’t win every deal and often times customers end up choosing a competitor’s product. Losing offers its own set of valuable lessons. It helps you understand and see your products gaps and rough edges. The data and insight you get from trying to sell your product is invaluable, especially when you relay it all back to your engineering teams. Wait, isn’t what I just described what Product Management ought to be doing? That’s correct, however, my view is customer empathy is a skill that has to permeate throughout every function in a company. Knowing what matters to your customers and how to make them more successful should never be just confined to the PM org — it’s everybody’s job to know and enable that. In fact, at Qumulo we encourage engineers to go on sales-calls with our sales organization, specifically to develop that muscle and also to help win deals, which might hinge on engineering related concerns. Getting engineering and sales closer Have you ever wondered how your product is sold? Or how did you sales team find customers? Or how long did is your sales cycle? The world of selling is often times shrouded in mystery to most engineers — myself included. My first impression about how sales operated was likely influenced by the clip below from Glengarry Glen Ross. Selling is a job. Your sales and marketing teams have to find customers (lead generation), they have to qualify these leads (probability that leads will buy) and then your sales teams have to prosecute these qualified leads in order to try and sell them your product. That will typically require pitching the product, demo-ing, a free trial, finding out how your product fits into the customers IT environment (especially for enterprise products), RFPs, conditional purchase orders and much more. Seeing that selling motion in person is eye opening. It will help you appreciate what it takes to sell your product. hard Conversely, your sales team might learn from you how the product that they sell is built. Design, refactoring, testing, resourcing, prioritization, CI/CD, UI/UX and more are likely topics your sales team has little to no knowledge about. Yet, they are critical to the development of a product. By collaborating with your sales team you will both learn from one another, demystify how each function operates and help bridge gaps between sales and engineering. Having a healthy relationship between sales and engineering is critical to your company’s success. It’s a great development opportunity! When I go out on sales calls, I am not there just to listen to what prospective customers have to say about the product, I am also there to try and sell it. That might require demo-ing the product, pitching it to customers and answering technical questions about it. The soft skills — public speaking, storytelling and thinking fast on your feet — are ones that will help you in many other aspects of your career. One area I benefited from immensely from interacting with my sales team is in recruiting. Recruiting is selling someone a job vs a product! Ditto for fund-raising for your next . That’s also selling. startup I hope I encouraged you to try and leave your office and join your sales team on selling your product. It’s a great experience. I will cover what to do (and not!) when you are on sales call in my next blog post.

HackerNoon Tech Stories Archive October 5th, 2018

@jack.dossmanJack Dossman

@cryptojayson17Jayson

@moizrizviMoiz

@MarcMarc Howard

@tipsngutsPen Magnet

@whatbitcoindidPeter McCormack

@hackernoon-archivesVplayed

@javinpaulJavin Paul

@merahulsinghRahul Singh

@ciklumCiklum

@enforsChrister Enfors

@schaetzcorneliusCornelius Schätz

@syedshoebSyed Shoeb

@diptokmk47Dipto Karmakar

@wujianfeiMichael Wu

@ryveeRy Vee

@shane_barkerShane Barker

@utsavjaiswalUtsav Jaiswal

@sayonetechSayOne Technologies

@vourkosaAndreas Vourkos

@stoyanvlahovskiStoyan Vlahovski

@dieswaytoofastMahesh Paolini-Subramanya

@tim_noletTim Nolet 👨🏻‍🚀

@patrickman6Patrick Manfra

@kozyrkovCassie Kozyrkov

@filip.poutintsevFilip Poutintsev

@bertcmillerRobert Miller

@ledumjgDr. Michael J. Garbade

@andraganescuAndrei Draganescu

@karimfanousKarim Fanous

@jack.dossman
Jack Dossman

@cryptojayson17
Jayson

@moizrizvi
Moiz

@Marc
Marc Howard

@tipsnguts
Pen Magnet

@whatbitcoindid
Peter McCormack

@hackernoon-archives
Vplayed

@javinpaul
Javin Paul

@merahulsingh
Rahul Singh

@ciklum
Ciklum

@enfors
Christer Enfors

@schaetzcornelius
Cornelius Schätz

@syedshoeb
Syed Shoeb

@diptokmk47
Dipto Karmakar

@wujianfei
Michael Wu

@ryvee
Ry Vee

@shane_barker
Shane Barker

@utsavjaiswal
Utsav Jaiswal

@sayonetech
SayOne Technologies

@vourkosa
Andreas Vourkos

@stoyanvlahovski
Stoyan Vlahovski

@dieswaytoofast
Mahesh Paolini-Subramanya

@tim_nolet
Tim Nolet 👨🏻‍🚀

@patrickman6
Patrick Manfra

@kozyrkov
Cassie Kozyrkov

@filip.poutintsev
Filip Poutintsev

@bertcmiller
Robert Miller

@ledumjg
Dr. Michael J. Garbade

@andraganescu
Andrei Draganescu

@karimfanous
Karim Fanous