With the whole world swinging in full throttle, balancing between work and life, we wanted to give something that money can’t buy, which is “Time”.

Whether we realize it or not, we are constantly faced with the decision to either spend hours cooking our own meals for the week, or to surrender and pick up a random sandwich from the cafeteria.

To ease the process, we have designed a system that will allow our customers to pick up their food, fresh & flavorful, without human interaction.To achieve that, we have developed a user friendly mobile application, which allows a user to place a food order on a nearby Vending machine / Kiosk and then pick it up.

Also, a profile for the vendor can be created to manage their products and kiosk detailsTech Stack:We have used the following technology stack to achieve the same.Hosting – AWS: Amazon Web Services (AWS) plays a very vital role in offering reliable, scalable, and inexpensive cloud computing services.JAVA: With Java as backend, we were able to effectively communicate between the application, Kiosk and the Database, so that we will can keep an update on the product availability & order status.React Native : Using React Native as mobile platform that offers Single framework and works in multiple platforms, we are able to achieve the proposed solution more strategically with less effort & time.BrainTree for PayPal: PayPal / Braintree provides us global use of payments with multiple payment options with credit card, wallet that makes our payment easy without having any security concerns for our customers.Key FeaturesOur team at Optisol has developed a simple, yet extensive application with features that assist in dispensing the products from Kiosk.Search and Locate the nearby Kiosk and the also ones in specific locations.View the products available at the specific kiosks.Buy products based on their availability.Make payment is made seamless through PayPal gateway.Generate barcode on each successful order.Track the order until it gets delivered or expired.Track the order expiry time taken for the users to pick up products.Scan the barcode in the Kiosk machine and dispense the products.Refund the amount on partial dispense or if the order time expires.Allow user to mark their favourite products, so that user can keep their favourite food on their tips to re-order.Conclusion:The implementation of food delivery using Kiosks has the potential of eliminating human interaction of picking up and delivery from restaurants.With administrative portal in place, the vendors will be able to understand the customer of their locality by the data points they get from the mobile application.

With that the vendors will be able to form a strategic plan for different regions to attract their customers, making it as Customer Centric.

One of the reasons ASP.NET Core is faster is its extensive use of asynchronous patterns within the new MVC and Kestrel frameworks.3.Multiple environments and development mode ASP.NET Core introduces improved support for controlling application behavior across multiple environments, such as development, staging, and production.

Environment variables are used to indicate which environment the application is running in, allowing the app to be configured appropriately.4.Dependency Injection ASP.NET Core is designed from scratch to support Dependency Injection.

ASP.NET Core injects objects of dependency classes through constructor or method by using built-in IoC container.5.Swagger OpenAPI Swagger is a set of open-source tools built around the OpenAPI Specification that can help you design, build, document and consume REST APIs.

Its use allows developers to document and develop APIs while maintaining synchronization with the code.What is ASP .NET Core?ASP.NET Core is an open source and cloud-optimized web framework from Microsoft.

It includes the MVC framework, which now combines the features of MVC and Web API into a single web programming framework.Why use ASP .NET Core?The features of ASP .Net Core are listed below: Supports Multiple Platform:ASP.NET Core applications can run on Windows, Linux, and Mac.

using Bower (a package manager for the web).

If this is your question, in the prevailing pandemic situation, companies irrespective of their sizes are forced to work on a remote basis evolving varying operational models.

The bigger companies have so far managed to adopt cloud at various levels.However, for smaller businesses, the adoption till date has been very cautious, largely influenced by necessity.

Mostly SaaS is consumed on-demand.

Work spaces can be planned at minimal cost as cloud services can be accessed via internet on any device, not just desktop but also via laptop, mobile, iPad and tablet.

This can be considered a good investment as moving forward the entire maintenance cost will be minimal and the spending towards hardware environment will reduce drastically.

Most of co-workers these days operate at different time zones and getting hands on to latest version of any work is no challenge as it’s readily available on cloud.In terms of security, cloud services are offered at compliance of very stringent rules and regulations to protect users’ data.

Many companies are using mobile devices in their workflow in very creative ways already, and we’re probably going to see even more interesting developments in this regard.

Enterprise mobility helps employees to perform their jobs from anywhere using a variety of devices such as smartphones and tablets, for business purposes and various applications.

Below are the top 5 vendors across globe who offer Enterprise Mobility solutions and services.

The Company provides cutting edge engineering solutions for global and Fortune 500 companies with the mission to help enterprises accelerate adoption of new technologies, untangle complex issues that always emerge during digital evolution, and orchestrate ongoing innovation.

Established in 2007, Intellectsoft operates across multiple offices with the engineering centers in the U.S., the U.K., the Nordic region and Eastern Europe.Launchpad (Australia):Launchpad is a boutique innovation consultancy and software development firm transforming innovative ideas into successful apps.

Their vision is to empower disruptive startups and revolutionary brands to create digital products that delight users and rewrite the rules of traditional business models.

Machine learning is changing the future of supply chain management.

According to a recent study by Mckinsey Global Institute, advanced AI technologies have the potential to unlock a global economic impact of $10-15T across all industry segments.

Gartner recently projected that by 2020, 95% of supply chain planning vendors will rely on supervised and unsupervised machine learning for their solutions.Increasing costs, Revenue losses, Bad customer service, and reducing profits are all By-product of operational inefficiencies.

For the Supply chain business to survive in today’s competitive and complex market, Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are considered as the most promising technologies available.The ability for the system to analyze the data, learn, and improve automatically from experience, without any programming is done through Machine learning.

Machine learning is used to identify missing, rogue, or duplicate data points and uses history and historical actions to correct the data.Why and How does Machine Learning is ideally suited to transform supply chain management?

The predictive Analytics technique has the advantage of enabling real-time decisions based on statistical estimates of future outcomes.

OverviewPractically, most construction companies would want their projects to be completed and delivered on time without any delay.

It is the duty of a project manager to take proactive steps in order to avoid any hold ups.But how can the manager get a hold of what is happening without getting an in-depth knowledge on the progress of work?With the help of the project management tool, one can monitor the physical progress, manpower, labor productivity engineering, design status and direct cost.

It assists the project team to monitor the physical progress through Daily Progress Reports and financial progress through Cost Register Reports.The tool identifies and assesses critical areas of each project and based on its inbuilt alert system, slippages are monitored and hierarchically escalated to various stakeholders for effective decision making and taking necessary actions.User can download the jobs that are related to them and update their progress both online and offline.With the help of Machine Learning, attendance can be marked by the facial recognition of employees.The facial feature matching technology helps the application user to match the faces of the employee with the database and provide exact match.While marking attendance, with the help of facial recognition using Machine Learning, the system will be able identify and recognize any new faces and prompts the user to create a profile for them and add it to the existing labor list.With the assistance of AI, the system will be able to identify the faces of individual laborers and match it with the database, even if it has to run a facial recognition on a group picture.ApprovalsSuperiors can approve a work progress entry in a particular location by just tapping on the pin location and the list of jobs that needs approval will be listed.Tech StackXamarin Forms: Xamarin.Forms is an open source cross-platform framework from Microsoft, that extends the .NET developer platform with tools and libraries for building mobile apps.Zetetic-SQLITE: SQLCipher is a security extension to the SQLite database platform that facilitates the creation of encrypted databases.OpenCV: OpenCV (Open Source Computer Vision) is a library of programming function mainly aimed at real-time computer vision.

It is a library that is mainly used to do all the operation related to Image processing and Video analysis, as in the case of facial recognition and detection.Cosine Similarity: Cosine similarity is a Similarity Function that is often used in Information Retrieval.

It measures the angle between two vectors and in this case, used for facial feature matching.TensorFlow: It is a framework developed and written in Python, C++ and Cuda.

TensorFlow provides multiple API’s in Python, C++, Java etc.

Robin Cook novels and Contagion movie were just fillers to pass our time.

Whenever we watch Hollywood movies where aliens attack and try to capture the earth, we were sure that someone like Bruce Willis or Will Smith would save us for sure.

With the advent of Covid19, we are made to look at scientists and research scholars and medical professionals for their opinions and celebrity chart has changed its course.A similar change is happening in the world of technology where increasing organizations are forced to adopt digital technologies and amend their business processes to the new norm of the world order.

Science and technology has always offered helping hands in the time of distress and there are many options for enterprises to leverage technology to overcome this challenging time.

Following are three major focus areas that enterprises can leverage:Reach-out and smoothen customer experienceEmpathize and collaborate with workforceReengineer & Venture aheadReach-out and smoothen customer experience:The only thing available without limits during lockdown is internet and data.

During lock down or post lockdown, your customers would be looking forward to consume your services in safe manner.

Recently we saw screenshot that became viral and thought it was free PR to the concerned organization but it might have done some damage to bots and sure they may be heading to file some defamation suit in some courts.Now the story, this organization is into financial services providing payment services.

In the screenshot, the bot greets the users to ask a question and the user responds with a message that “I got scammed” and the bot responds with message ‘Great!’The automated responses may turn weird at times and it may hurt the user more than the actual pain that made him to get in touch via the support portal.

The virtual assistants can help in avoiding human interactions with instant responses and they are available 24/7.

The caveat is on picking right processes that can be enabled with conversational AI via bots.As a start, Bots work without hassles with closed end options, like cancelling an order or track where the shipment currently etc.

and further issues can be escalated to human interventionIt helps in managing enterprise stakeholders and smart workforce management via tools to update vacations, book conference rooms, and record expenses, get policy guideline clarifications etc.The bots also work well for enhancing process efficiency by answering questions based on pre-loaded intelligence like getting clarifications around legal documents, policies, safety guidelines, etc.Bots also do a wonderful job in answering information around processed data, like a quick glimpse of financials, sales figures, competitor information, and equity updates etc.

and can be a wonderful assistant to CXOs.The major places not to leverage bots is around areas constrained by languages, emergency updates/clarifications, and emotionally sensitive areas.The best way gets start with Bot implementation:At OptiSol, we have center of excellence focused on AI and ML services and as part of that practice, we have built voice and text bots across verticals.

Pros and Cons of Microservices – The Trending Business ArchitectureWhat is Microservices?A microservices architecture is a suite of small, autonomous services which are independently self-contained and implemented to a single business capability.Services can be deployed independently.

A team can update an existing service without rebuilding and redeploying the entire application.Services are responsible for persisting their own data or external state.

This differs from the traditional model, where a separate data layer handles data persistence.Services communicate with each other by using well-defined APIs.

Internal implementation details of each service are hidden from other services.Services don’t need to share the same technology stack, libraries, or frameworks.What’s special about Microservices?Agility: These independently deployable services can be easily managed mainly during bug fixes and feature releases.

Unlike traditional application, the service can be updated without redeploying the entire application.Small, focused teams: The microservices have short development cycles, which can be managed by a small development team eliminating dependency between teams that helps in promoting greater agility and increase productivity.Small code base: Each service is a separate code-base, that in turn minimizes dependencies, and that makes it easier to add new features.Mix of technologies: Teams can pick the technology that best fits their service, using a mix of technology stacks as appropriate.Scalability: Services can be scaled independently, letting you scale out subsystems that require more resources, without scaling out the entire application.

Using an orchestrator such as Kubernetes or Service Fabric, you can pack a higher density of services onto a single host, which allows for more efficient utilization of resources.Data isolation: Contrast to monolithic applications, the schema updates can be easily updated without affecting the other parts of the application.What are the Stumbling blocks in Microservices Architecture Integration?The benefits of microservices don’t come for free.

1) What is Azure Data Lake storage?It’s the enterprise wise repository for big data analytics workloads.

Data stored can be of any type and any size.A single store for all dataAll ranges of data can be stored such as raw data to the highly transformed dataData Lake Store is a no-limit cloud Data Lake built so enterprises can unlock value from unstructured, semi-structured, and structured data.Data Lake Analytics is a cloud analytics service for developing and running massively parallel data transformation and processing programs in U-SQL, R, Python, and .NET over petabytes of dataAzure HDInsight is a cloud service that allows cost-effective data processing using open-source frameworks such as Hadoop, Spark, Hive, Storm, and Kafka, among others.2) How Azure Data Lake works?Ingest all data regardless of requirementStore all data in native format without any schema definitionLater, the analysis part can be done with Hadoop, Spark, R & Azure Data Lake Analytics (ADLA)3) How the data is stored in Azure Data Lake?A data lake is a storage repository that holds a large amount of data in its own raw format.

Advantages of a data lake: Data is never thrown away, because the data is stored in its raw format.4) What Azure Data Lake does?Storage in form of petabyte size files and trillions of unlimited data.Develop massively parallel programs.Pay per jobCan debug and optimize big data problems.It can start the job within seconds as there are no virtual machines or cluster loading like stuff to wait for.U-SQL is used to parallelize the scaled job massively5) What is Data Lake architecture?A Data Lake is a storage repository that can store large amount of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data.Unlike a hierarchical Data warehouse where data is stored in Files and Folder, Data Lake has a flat architecture6) How Azure Data Factory, Azure Data Lake and Power BI works together?U-SQL The “U” in U-SQL stands for “Unified”; which is aptly named whereas it is designed to execute parallel queries across distributed relational or unstructured data sources using the SQL syntax.U-SQL in AzureU-SQL is a language that combines declarative SQL with imperative C# to let you process data at any scale.

Through the scalable, distributed-query capability of U-SQL, you can efficiently analyse data across relational stores such as Azure SQL Database.Power BIPower BI is a powerful business intelligence platform.

It is known for the abilities to connect to various data sources, tools for aggregating and analyzing data, and for the rich library of visualizations with many styling options.We can connect Power BI with Azure Data Lake Store (ADLS) which is one of the most popular storage products for massive datasets.Why Power BI Microsoft Power BI is used to find insights within an organization’s data.

Power BI can help connect disparate data sets, transform and clean the data into a data model and create charts or graphs to provide visuals of the data.Author Bio:B. Anitha Letchumi, BI Lead at OptiSol Business Solutions, having 10 years of experience in Business Intelligence and working with OptiSol for the last 7 years.

There are various PHP frameworks available in the industry- Laravel, Symfony, CodeIgniter, CakePHP, Zend, Yii etc.

Laravel is a framework for creating web applications with an easy to use syntax.

Laravel 6.0 - the updated version was released on September 3, 2019, with new functionalities such as shift blueprint code generation, introducing semantic versioning, compatibility with Laravel Vapor, improved authorization responses, improved job middleware, lazy collections, and sub-query improvements.

In addition to support for sending email, Laravel provides support for sending notifications across a variety of delivery channels, including SMS (via Nexmo) and Slack.

Reduce Manual Effort & Cost:With the help of Artisan, a built-in tool of Laravel, manual efforts such as doing repetitive programming tasks are reduced for developers.

This feature not only reduced development time for developers but also, from the standpoint of a business, this directly reduces the costs the business has to bear for the PHP development solutions they may be looking for.

Azure Notification Hubs enable you to centralize notifications across platforms so your back end application can communicate with a single hub, which takes care of distributing the notifications to each platform-specific PNS.What is Azure Notification Hubs?Azure Notification Hubs scaled-out push engine that enables you to send notifications to any platform (iOS, Android, Windows, etc.)

Here are a few example scenarios:Send breaking news notifications to millions with low latency.Send location-based coupons to interested user segments.Send event-related notifications to users or groups for media/sports/finance/gaming applications.Push promotional contents to applications to engage and market to customers.Notify users of enterprise events such as new messages and work items.Send codes for multi-factor authentication.What is Push Notification?Push notifications are a form of app-to-user communication where users of mobile apps are notified of certain desired information, usually in a pop-up or dialog box on a mobile device.

It’s the best app-to-user communication because it is energy-efficient for mobile devices, flexible for the notifications senders, and available when corresponding applications are not active.How does Push notifications work?Push notifications are delivered through platform-specific infrastructures called Platform Notification Systems (PNSes).

To send a notification to all customers across the Android, iOS, and Windows versions of an app, the developer must work separately with Apple Push Notification Service (APNS), Fire base Cloud Messaging (FCM), and Windows Notification Service (WNS).At a high level, here is how push works:An application wants to receive a notification, so it contacts the PNS for the target platform on which the app is running and requests a unique and temporary push handle.

Some of the infrastructure challenges are:1.Platform dependencyThe backend requires complex and hard-to-maintain platform-dependent logic to send notifications to devices on various platforms, as PNSes are not unified.2.ScaleAs per PNS guidelines, device tokens must be refreshed on every app launch.

A simple broadcast to a million devices results in a million calls to the PNSes.

The impact of Covid is here to stay on a long terms and it is also getting obvious that the impact of the epidemic on healthcare systems goes beyond the current turbulence and there will be new norms.

The current turmoil could trigger a change in the course of this direction and adoption to digital solutions can be a reality soon.

“Globally, there has been drop by 60% in the visits to hospitals and ER as people avoid due to the fear of getting infected”One of the vital steps towards easing patient experience is providing virtual care via digital tools.

Recent reports states that there is increase of hospitals and health systems which aims in providing virtual care as part of their transformation strategy.

The Doctors can manage their appointments and availability timeslots.

Both Doctors and Patients get alerted on appointment confirmation and upcoming appointments.Digitized Doctor - Patient Portal: Doctors can access the portal using their mobile or tablet devices to view patient details, make virtual consultation and recommend medication.

Increasing organizations are getting Chief Digital Officers or someone at CXO level to focus purely on digitization.

The transformation involves two different aspect, one via behavioral/mindset and the other one on the technology ecosystem of the organization.

“At least 40% of all businesses will die in the next 10 years… If they don’t figure out how to change their entire company to accommodate new technologies.” — JOHN CHAMBERS, EXECUTIVE CHAIRMAN, CISCO SYSTEM The tech modernization via CX modernization, tech upgrade and automation would accelerate the transformation from technology perspective and it is high on the checklist for the digital officers.

The major dilemma with tech modernization is about: Rebuild from monolithic to micro services architecture or Build API services on need basis within existing eco system and build portals/mobile apps or Reorient the frontend alone for CX and integrate with existing backend via API servicesThe answer to the above dilemma varies based on the context and current status of the enterprise technology stacks.

“In Today’s era of volatility, there is no other way but to re-invent.

Because nothing else is sustainable, everything else you create, somebody else will replicate.” — JEFF BEZOS, AMAZON FOUNDER Amongst multiple tech stacks, Full Stack JavaScript (JS) has been the pick of flavor for many but again it is subject to the context.