Let me confess, I almost never go out for dinner at a restaurant without checking the rating of the establishment on TripAdvisor or Google. How about you?

The same goes for booking a hotel room for a vacation, buying a car, looking for a physician, or hiring a tradesman. Nobody wants to have a bad experience and waste time and money on unverified services or goods.

“85% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations” – Bright Local.

These statistics and your personal experience should bring you to the conclusion that a web review service is in high demand now and can be a driving link in creating a chain between customers and businesses.

Isn’t it time to start thinking about creating your own review website?

Continue reading “How to Build a Review Website?”

When launching your business, and with only 10-15 customers on your roster, to start, you are surely able to remember all tasks and interactions with each of them. But, as the number of customers reaches several hundreds or thousands (including contacts, leads, prospects, affiliates, and partners) you’ll need accurate data storage and processing with quick access to all necessary information.

There are many types of software known as CRM systems that cope with customer relationship management and can be used to substitute Excel files and heavy paperwork.

Continue reading “How Much Does It Cost to Develop Custom CRM Software?”

Ready or not, GDPR is here to change the way we view privacy. And, unless you want to pay multimillion euro fines, you’ve got to take it seriously!

Of course, there is a silver lining and not everything is that bad. The new regulation has introduced very good privacy protection practices that will bring a lot of value to your users. So, whenever you feel intimidated, just remember that GDPR legislates common sense!

In this article, we deconstruct GDPR from the point of view of the impact it will have on the development of your website/web app. We did our best to extract the practical steps for making your website GDPR compliant.

Continue reading “How Does GDPR Change the Way Your Website is Developed?”

“Good ideas can come from anywhere: 92% of the creators of the best creative solutions come from different countries than the country from which the brief originates.” – eYeka State of Crowdsourcing Report.

Some challenges just need a collective mind, in order to solve them, and some tasks need to be delegated to someone who has better competencies in the specific area. Some projects are better for brainstorming across as many people as possible, too.

It’s no wonder that, with the development of the internet, it has become inevitable that people have started to delegate jobs to others via specialized platforms. To top it off, we have also now recognized the 12th anniversary of crowdsourcing as a social, business, and technical phenomenon.

Continue reading “How to Build Your Own Crowdsourcing Platform”

There are a lot of small and medium-sized enterprises owning or renting spare rooms that stay idle even though they are still being paid for on a regular basis. At the same time, many freelancers, start-ups, event-managers, and entrepreneurs are searching for an inexpensive workspace that does not require a lot of the hassle that comes with contracts and administrative costs, and could be rented on demand.

Why not connect these two groups of people to help each other? Looks like an idea for a start-up, doesn’t it?

Continue reading “How to Build a Website Like Airbnb for Commercial Real Estate?”

“95% of our energy should be spent on generating income. If I am spending that time typing in stuff, adjusting stuff, organizing stuff and only 5% of time on generating income, then I am in trouble!” Kris McCullough, a thought leader in real estate business, owner of KSA

When it is just you and a couple of clients, it might be easy to concentrate on the core activities 95% of the time. But as your client base grows and you add more and more people to the team, administrative and organizational tasks start to take over.

That’s the time when agents turn to business tools like real estate CRM and marketing automation software.

Continue reading “How to Automate a Real Estate Business Using Custom CRM Software”

“Where can I get new leads?” – the question that probably worries every entrepreneur.

There are a lot of marketing solutions for this, but today, we’ll share with you a technology that will cope with this and many other painful tasks using programming.

From the title, you have already deduced that we’ll talk about “web scraping.” So, let’s cut to the chase and dive in at once!

Continue reading “4 Ways Your Business Can Benefit from Web Scraping”

Today, 9 in 10 home buyers rely on the internet as one of their primary research sources when looking for a new house.

This is too big to ignore! Your buyers are online, searching their way through homes to find the perfect one. The question is – are you capturing this massive opportunity? Are you helping them in their journey to find a new home?

In this article, we will show you how to create a real estate website that adds value to real estate buyers. We will cover five strategies used by industry leaders to generate and nurture leads that have proved to boost agency revenues.

Continue reading “How to Build a Real Estate Website That Adds Value to Buyers”

We know how important it is for your charity organization to be recognized by as many people as possible to attract more donations for its good deeds in the community.

In spite of the popularity of fundraising through social media platforms, if your campaign is more than a one-time event, a full website is more functional and looks more trustworthy and reputable than a Facebook page.

All popular foundations like WWF, Unicef, Charity:water, Cancer Research UK and others, that focus on serious causes, have their own websites. They inform the public of their mission, announce upcoming fundraising events, collect donations, share outcomes of activities and communicate with volunteers, sponsors, and beneficiaries.

So, if you have an idea of how to change the world – then put it into action and make it even more effective with a website!

Continue reading “How to Build a Charity Website For a Non-Profit Organization?”

Speech recognition is one of the most difficult aspects of programming and, at the same time, one of the most desirable features of new-age applications. One of the potential implementations is using speech recognition in call-centers systems to automate the mundane work of operators.

The main question is how to make a machine understand natural language, transform it into text and return an adequate response? Many development companies such as Google, Amazon, IBM, Apple, and Microsoft are now highly involved in the creation of the best mechanisms to cope with these tasks. Thus, some time ago Amazon announced a service for creating conversational interfaces for applications – Amazon Lex.

Actually, we actively use AWS products in many of our projects and know their specifics, so, in spite of the fact that Lex was still quite raw (new and poorly documented), we were determined to crack it. We hoped that this would be one more positive story that would give us more points toward our overall expertize score.

However, our experience turned out to be quite controversial. If you plan to use Lex for your automatic speech recognition (ASR) bot, you may find it helpful to read this article. We would like to caution you.

Continue reading “Creating a Call-Center Bot with AWS Connect and Amazon Lex: It Can Speak, but Does It Understand?”

“What’s the ROI of your mother?” replied Gary Vaynerchuk when someone asked him about the return on investment of social media marketing.

Gary has a point here. Not everything may or should be quantified. Some things bring non-monetary value that is far greater than money. For instance, if your safety training leads to fewer accidents, it can potentially result in a saved human life. Now, that is invaluable!

However, when it comes to corporate training programs, sometimes you do need to show the numbers, especially if you want a bigger budget.

Continue reading “How to Calculate Return on Investment (ROI) of eLearning?”

45% of the fastest-growing companies in the world will “employ” more smart machines and virtual assistants than people by 2018.

Indeed, nowadays we see more and more businesses using artificial intelligence in a variety of areas. And among the early adopters are industry leaders such as Uber, Airbnb, and Etsy – which are also the subjects of this article.

Continue reading “The Role of Artificial Intelligence in Business, and Why Uber, Airbnb, and Etsy Can’t Survive Without It [Infographic]”

From a business perspective, you should regard an effective search engine as a powerful tool that is able to increase conversion rate and bring more profit to website owners. If your website search mechanism doesn’t provide relevant results or its searching performance is too low, people will leave the website and go to its competitor.

So, what is an effective search engine?

Continue reading “Elasticsearch vs. Solr vs. Sphinx: Best Open Source Search Platform Comparison”

We bet your life will never be the same after you read this article.
Next time you go to App Store or Google Play to download a mobile application, you will be hypnotized with humpty-dumpty attempts to guess if it is a native or hybrid app.

If you still haven’t figured out what we are talking about, let’s roll back a little bit and start with the basics.

Continue reading “Native vs Hybrid Mobile App Development: What to Choose in 2018?”

Curious to know what the future holds for corporate eLearning industry in 2018?

After all, wouldn’t it be nice to know beforehand if one day your boss decides to replace you with a robot?!

Luckily, this isn’t the case for most of us, at least not yet. Nonetheless, this year we will see a lot of advancements in educational technology. And, in this article, we outline the general directions for these advancements, i.e. eLearning trends to follow.

Continue reading “4 eLearning Trends in 2018 That Can Make You Reconsider Your eLearning Strategy”

“If there’s something strange

In your neighborhood

Who you gonna call?..”

No, really, if only any service would be so quick and effective as it was in the movie Ghostbusters! What if, as a result of your urgent call, a dream team of superheroes rushed to save humanity, even if it was only a leaking tap in your flat? But, in real life, it works differently. How many plumbers arrive in time and how many fixes are made in the first attempt?

Unfortunately, the customer experience with field services (plumbers, electrics, drivers, HVAC, engineers, doctors, etc.) are, in most cases, still horrible, and management is helpless to do anything as they do not see what is going on in the “field.”

Are there any ways, then, that technologies can make Field Service Management more transparent both for management and clients?

Continue reading “12 Benefits of Using a Field Service Management App”

When you love your work, you don’t want to stop learning new things. It is always exciting and, at the same time, challenging to try new technologies.

Being already well-experienced with React in frontend development, the next logical step forward for us was to make friends with React Native (RN).

This relatively new, but quickly evolving technology couldn’t help attracting our attention. We were eager to add the project performed with RN to our portfolio, so it seemed that we were just waiting for the right time to jump on the train. And fate gave us this chance.

In this article, we would like to share our experience of creating an app with RN.

Continue reading “How We Created a Photo App For Jewelry With React Native”

A Customer Relationship Management System is an indispensable tool for modern sales managers. It is thought that using CRM improves productivity by 30% “if used correctly” but the correctness depends on how well you understand the system, to be able to exploit it in a way that fits your company processes.

“56% of CRM users name system customization as one of the most significant challenges in working with their CRM.” – Software Advice survey.

This means that more than half of CRM users are forced to struggle daily with systems that fail to effectively integrate with the business needs, due to inappropriate and inflexible functionality.

Unfortunately, this is not the only problem users usually face when working with the CRMs. Our goal is to empower you with the information you should use and pay attention to when choosing the CRM solution for your business.

Continue reading “5 Reasons to Build a Custom CRM System”

Without a Business Analysis, web development looks the same as traveling without knowing your final destination. In the case of traveling, this may seem like an incredible adventure while, in business, the risk would not be one worth taking.

Before starting with a project estimation, you should clearly understand the goals and imagine the results that you’d like to achieve. Developers are not oracles and have no way of knowing exactly what it is you want.

How can a Business Analysis help in overcoming challenges at the planning stage? Read on!

Continue reading “What Role Does a Business Analysis Play in Web Development?”

“To share is to trust. That, in a nutshell, is the fundamental principle.” Roland Berger, ‘Think Act, Shared Mobility’.

Letting strangers into your home, repaying someone’s loan, or even leaving your child with somebody you’ve met online…

All this becomes possible only because the sharing economy pioneers like Airbnb, LendingClub, Trusted and others, put such a huge emphasis on trust!

Continue reading “3 Trust Strategies to Grow Your Peer-to-Peer Marketplace”