Google launched certification program for software application development companies

Recently, Google announced the certification program for the software development companies who had shown the great competence and unbeatable efforts in building apps and services. The sole agenda of this services is to identify the software companies that have undergone the mandatory training and have proved their excellence in building Android application. 

This program is an exertion by Google's Developer Relations group to work intimately with organizations around the globe and help them to construct top-notch user experience. It includes personalized training, dedicated content, priority support form, the product and developer relations team, and early access to upcoming developer products.

As a Certified Agency, software application development can highlight an identification on their site and materials that will help them to emerge when customers are searching for a software application development company. To get the certification, development organizations need to first be a member of the more extensive agencies program.

Afterward, members can fill out this form to begin the process. Only those will be eligible for the certification programs, who had reviewed participation in a program offered by agencies, feedbacks from clients and meeting the standard quality guidelines.

Total 13 software development companies in India, Russia, UK and the USA have already been already enrolled in since Google first announced this declaration since last December. These software application development companies worked with large as well as small enterprise.

Additionally, it was also noted that “These program does not endorse or offer any warranty regarding certified companies”, the thought here is clearly to highlight a portion of the organizations that Google itself considers among the best in the ecosystem. While the attention here is on Android applications, Google had also cleared that additionally, it will also incorporate support for organizations that work on web applications, as well.

Have a look at this video https://youtu.be/UBJlr6vxm0U for the better understanding.

Let the Gadgets Talk!

It is estimated that globally by 2020 there will be a growth of $30billion and connected device by $27 billion in IOT industry. Internet of Things or more precisely the internet of gadgets, it's all about associating gadgets over the web and giving them "a chance to talk" to us, applications and each other.

Though the technology is evolving, people do face the problems like shortage of the household chores suddenly, vehicle tank to fill up on the short notice, running out the electricity and much more. But to all of it, there is always a solution. However, in the expanding business sector for the consumer merchandise, Amazon launched the “Dash” button in the USA which is a 2-inch wifi connected gadgets. It refills and restocks ordinary family units essentials such as clothing cleanser, grain pack, child wipes and even certain medications.

Every button brandishes a specific brand, for example, Tide or Gatorade, and can be purchased for $5 and once associated, an arbitrary press naturally submits your request. Amazon sends a request affirmation to your telephone, so if you alter your choice you can still cancel it. Taking the thought forward, the e-trade monster has declared various accomplices, water filtration framework Brita, machine and office gear producers like GE and Brother. It additionally tied up with Samsung.

A wifi-enabled Brita "tech-savvy pitcher" monitors how much water has navigated the channel and consequently arranges a substitution when required while the tie-up with GE and Brother takes into consideration things like washers to naturally re-request cleanser and printers re-request ink. Samsung is currently making printers that come coordinated with Dash.

What is IoT

Internet of Things, or all the more precisely the Internet of gadgets is all about interfacing gadgets over the web and giving them "a chance to talk" to us, applications and each other. This permits gigantic measures of information to be gathered and exchanged, which can then be utilized for various viable purposes. By this, it enables to transfer a huge amount of information across the web. And it is not necessary that devices must be connected to the internet, it can be a web of networks.

A typical case is wrist watches with sensors that can track the wearers' pulse and this passes the information to our smartphones by means of bluetooth. The smartphone can store that information on cloud and anytime you can check your report card of how your heart has been carrying on for over a time of a week or a month.

With the advance innovation, techniques and strategies, IoT is developing at a fast pace. As indicated by IDC, the overall IoT business sector will develop from $655.8 billion in 2014 to $1.7 trillion in 2020. One such popular and much-talked case of IoT is driverless cars.  One of Google's self-driving car met with an accident, which demonstrates that there's far way to make them working. But the same cars have secured more than 100 miles under test conditions. How would they do that? "The vehicle has various gadgets which track the development of articles, catches the pictures encompassing it and procedures the data. It has gadgets on board that can alter the rate and course of development relying upon the feedback it gets from the outside environment," says Sudipta Ghosh, accomplice, innovation, PwC. The information is then uploaded to a cloud from which it can get directions and act in like manner, right from throttle quickening agent to applying brakes.

IoT services and products have security requirements that rise above and beyond other services: Users need to be able to trust their IoT services and the services need to be worthy of that trust. To achieve that goal and prevent more incidents of failures, it would seem obvious that collectively implemented security processes to correct flaws, assure common mistakes are avoided and verify attack resistance are mandatory for all participants in developing and operating any IoT service.

Hence the whole world is a spider-web. Every node is interconnected and still web will be getting bigger and bigger in near future!

The Internet without Connection, Free Endless OS for Emerging Market

Billions of people on this globe live without Personal Computers and Internet connection. By this, one can figure out that there are still naïve people in this universe who simply can’t afford laptops or PC or internet and lives much in the traditional way.

However, some of the folks have started the global initiates to give free or at some affordable rate computer access to each and every individual on the globe who can’t afford it especially the children.

And hence “Endless OS” is one such project which gave birth to the new thoughts. It provides the free operating system and has been curved in such a way that it can work in the restrictive internet data conditions. This software works with or without internet connection and provides handful knowledgeable data and educational content which is useful for the children.

Endless OS is amazing and developed for the whole world where internet connections are not working properly or are expensive or where it doesn’t exist. Now developers have to think beyond the technology and have to do upgradations and carry out that application in some unique ways.

Endless OS have thousands of pre-installed apps that work online and offline. This makes easy for the educators to gain knowledge of all different fields. Preinstalled apps are in different categories like health, education, business, educational games, and more.

Matt Dalio – founder and CEO of the Endless OS have quoted that, this is only the way of connecting next 4 billion people today and hence this will make the internet connection fully affordable. Endless OS is created for the people to guide them who doesn’t have any computer knowledge and little to no internet connectivity.

Endless OS supports multiple languages. There are two versions:

Lite Version

This version is designed for the people where the internet is available all time and people can use it anywhere. In this version, users can download the apps and content what they want from this Endless OS. And additionally, it supports the English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Arabic, Chinese and Bahasa languages. Bengali, Thai, Vietnamese and more languages will be added soon, report says.

Full version

The full version is developed for the users who doesn’t have internet connectivity or less internet connection. It works in the same way as lite version and supports the similar multiple languages. The only sole drawback of this version is that it won’t be able to receive any updates in OS itself as well as apps.

What is Agile Development Methodology and why to prefer it?

Agile Development Methodology is the traditional approach of the software development life cycle (SDLC), which helps the team to respond though sprints. Agile development model is also called incremental model, where projects are incremented in rapid cycles after previous builds are released. Requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing cross-functional teams. Software testing is done at every stage of development to make sure that there is no compromise in the quality. It is about how to work together to achieve a common goal.

Agile Development Methodology is one kind of disciplined project management system that needs a frequent inspection for the rapid quality and high inspection of software. Agile methodology is one kind of agile manifesto that was developed by a group of fourteen leading figures of the software industry, which talks about their experience and what approaches works and dismay for the software development process. 

It mainly emphasizes on four different core values:

1. Communication between team regarding the process and tools
2. Detailed documentation on current software
3. Negotiation of contracts by customer collaboration
4. Responding to changes over following a plan

Ever since then, the use of methods that support these values has become increasingly popular. 12 principles are generally followed behind agile development:

1. Customer is the king and hence his satisfaction is the most important through continuous delivery of the software
2. Requirements changes as the time mature and agile welcomes it to harness the change of customer’s competitive requirements
3. Due to iterative changes, software must be delivered at a regular interval of time
4. Team leaders and team should work cohesively throughout the project
5. Support their needs in the project and make them believe to get the work done faster
6. Face-to-face conversation is very much necessary for conveying the information effectively
7. Working software is the primary measure of the progress
8. Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely
9. Continuous attention should be paid to the good design to enhance the quality of the project
10. As long as the project is simple, it will maximize the productivity and amount of the work done
11. Team importance is much essential to develop the best architecture design and requirements
12. As the project grows, team shows how efficiently they are working and adjusting to the behavior accordingly

Why Agile?

There are many reasons to choose agile methodologies. It provides great opportunities to assess the direction of a project through SDLC. Hence the progress of agile development can be achieved by regular monitoring of work known as sprints, and the project should be ready in a delivery mode before the deadline. By focusing on repetitive work cycles, agile methods are described as iterative and incremental. At every sprint of development, requirement, design, research, code is continually tested throughout the cycle. When the evaluation is stopped, the team thinks about the project in another direction. Inspect and adapt strategy reduces development cost and saves much time. When team gathers the requirements, at the same time they develop software and this phenomenon is known as “analysis paralysis” cycle which doesn’t hinder the team much in making the progress. The team works for 2 weeks and hence this give the opportunities to stakeholder to calibrate the release in the real world. This methodology encourages the team to build the right product and of course quickly. Instead of committing to market, a piece of software that hasn’t even been written yet, agile empowers teams to continuously replan their release to optimize its value throughout development, allowing them to be as competitive as possible in the marketplace.

Agile Metrics

Metrics collected for effective agile is:

• Hourly efforts do not contribute to the sprint goals
• Drag factor can be improved by shared resources, and by reducing the amount of noncontributing work
• No of units tested
• Number of failures converted into delivered functionality
• Rates can be increased by % of drag factor – new rates = old rates + drag factor
• Time taken to complete the releases
• Errors in the increments or previous iterations
• Production defect leakage

Advantages

• There is a less use of documentation in agile technologies and hence, it saves a lot of time and money
• Changes can be implemented at any stage of the development without considering the budget constraints
• Due to daily discussions and meetings, issues can be identified in advance and therefore one can work accordingly
• Testing is done after every sprint, hence it enables the quick development

Talend Rolls new cloud data manager platform

Recently, data management specialist Talend rolled out the new tool named “self-service – data preparation tool” for moving the workloads of big data to the cloud. Talend announced this new data stage as a way of achieving the high support via cloud integration tools. For this, it leverages corporate data lakes and other cloud resources for self-service data preparation.

Through this data preparation tool, data can be accessible throughout the enterprises. These days scientist seems to be collaborating the more value from the Big Data as this tool is much enhanced to get access to the more and more information beyond the in-house data.

This tool is developed, by keeping the security features in mind. New features are much emphasized, resulting leads the employee to the information broker within the enterprise, and of course by taking the keen care of data attacks.

Talend has put many efforts in improving the platform of the commercial version. Through “role based access to shared data stores”, it helps in controlling the use of information. Data Preparation tools deliver the data at scale, by taking the guidance of hundreds of information sources. “Smart Sampling is one of the features of data preparation tool which upgrades master data sets from time to time.

Sharing of these data sets have increased to the larger extent and hence it can be clarified that data preparation will highly collaborate with the enterprise which results in shifting their big data roles from consumers to providers. Additionally, it has become easy for integrating data management schemes, master data into the workflow. And due to increase in the technology and innovations, data tool developers are thinking far beyond spreadsheet software’s, to automate the centralized control over the data.

Amazon Web Service is the platform for the data tools, which is used by the Talend and other additional fabrications include SSL communication between data integration workloads and cloud integration. These cloud platforms are designed with the special analytics business intelligence tools and algorithms to speed up the analytics data that runs on Amazon red shift. Security plays a vital role when accessing the sensitive data, hence redshift takes care of it.

Cloud Platform – AWS encrypts the client side data and likewise it allows the admins to inherit the credentials from the identity. It also ensures that only authorized user have access to the services.

Additionally, there are some other tools like Amazon DynamoDB connector which also have the power for quicker processing of data and workload. Talend said that new tool is available currently and licensed version would receive two seats for its data preparation tool at free of cost.

Microsoft extended bug bounty program to target .NET Core

Microsoft has planned to extend its bug bounty program to include the .NET core and ASP.NET Core RC2 framework. The senior director of Microsoft’s Security Response Center, Jason Shirk confirmed that the latest program will remain active from June 7 to September 7 this year. Testing will be done on the platforms – Windows, Linux and OS X.

Jason added – the bounty amount will range from $500 to $15,000 and divided based on the severity of the bug and security. Now reporting could be done only after presenting a valid and unreported bug. This means all .NET developers should submit a valid bug to qualify for the reward. The acceptable vulnerabilities are privilege escalation bugs, remote code execution (RCE) vulnerabilities, remote denial-of-service (DoS) weaknesses, security design flaws, XSS vulnerabilities and information leaks.

Not only this, if any of the reported bugs requires a special treatment, then the reward payment amount will increase from $15000. Shirk said, “Bounties will be worked alongside Security Development Lifecycle (SDL), regular penetration testing of our products and services, Security and Compliance Accreditations by third party audits and Operational Security Assurance (OSA) framework”.

Microsoft also has other bounty programs like Mitigation bypass, Microsoft's Nano Server beta, Bounty for Defense program, Online Services, and Nano Server beta.

Download .NET RC2 application from here.

Microsoft announced release of ASP.NET Core RC2 and .NET Core SDK Preview 1

Microsoft made an announcement for the release of its next generation version of the NET platform - Release Candidate 2 (RC2) of .NET Core and ASP.NET Core. Since the release of RC1 last November, Microsoft ASP.Net developers will get this biggest update of RC2. According to Microsoft, this can be used to build ASP.NET core, class libraries and console apps for Linux, Windows and OS X. 

With all new version of RC2, users will find major improvements, including new command-line tools for .NET Core is known as .NET CLI (Command Line Interface), new APIs, reliability and performance improvements. Also, DNX (.NET Execution Environment) tools are removed in this new version.

The .NET Core SDK Preview 1 is available for download on Windows, Linux and OS X platforms. Also, the user can use it with the Docker.

Release

The latest release has got three major components: .NET Core RC2, ASP.NET Core RC2 (formerly known as ASP.NET 5) and .NET Core RC2 SDK Preview 1. The changes arrived in ASP.NET Core are Visual Studio that has got full debugging support and support for authorization and authentication by using the Active Directory in both the Azure and on-premises.

Supported platforms

It will now support more operating systems, including –

• Debian 8.2+ 
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.2 
• Ubuntu 14.04 
• Centos 7.1 
• Linux Mint 17+ 
• Mac 
• Windows 

.NET Core deployment options

With the Microsoft latest release, ASP.NET developers will be introduced with following the new deployment options.

• Portable apps: User will be able to deploy apps that rely on a shared installation of .NET Core version that will enable it to work similar to previous .NET Framework. 
• Self-contained apps: This type of apps have no .NET core dependency. They include both application code and runtime, and required to compile particularly for the targeted platform. 

Additionally, the API in .NET Core RC2 faces two more changes, including the System.Drawing to support graphics and implementation of System.Data namespace for database applications.

.NET Standard Library

This .NET Standard Library is released for the very first time, which basically represents APIs that are available in all .NET implementations. This .NET Standard Library can be considered as the next version of Portable Class Libraries, however, the process of creating the libraries and the availability of the APIs set will be very much different. The user will experience more APIs and support for .NET platform with each .NET standard versions.

.NET Core Tools Telemetry

There is another new telemetry feature available which collects usage information about the .NET Core Tools that will allow Microsoft to make improvisation if required. The data collected are the framework and commands used and the versions.

The user may any time opt-out from this telemetry feature by setting DOTNET_CLI_TELEMETRY_OPTOUT environment variable.

Microsoft announce extensive commitment for Apache Spark

Recently, Microsoft announced that it had made serious commitments for the open source Apache spark cloud-based framework, launching many new deals and offerings. Open source technology trend emerged in Microsoft since Satya Nadela CEO of Microsoft took over the company. This announcement was made at spark summit developer’s conference 2016 by Microsoft at San Francisco. It also announced that on-premises version of R Server Hadoop (which uses the increasingly popular open source R language for big data analytics and modeling) is now powered by Spark. The R refers to programming language and statistical computing and predictive analysis.

Moreover, Microsoft declared that R Server for HDInsight (basically the cloud-based form of R Server) is leaving a review later this late spring and Spark for Azure HDInsight is currently on and large accessible with support for Spark management from Hortonworks. Power BI, Microsoft's suite of business knowledge tools, will now additionally bolster Spark Streaming to permit clients to push continuous information from Spark directly into Power BI.

These declarations mark what Microsoft calls "a broad responsibility for Spark to power Microsoft's huge information and analytics offerings." These offerings incorporate Power BI and R Server, additionally the Cortana Intelligence Suite, which consolidates some of Microsoft's huge information and investigation management under a solitary umbrella that likewise highlights various machine learning devices. 

Microsoft, and in addition Google, Baidu, Amazon, Databricks and others, will highlight noticeably at the Spark Summit in San Francisco in a later week. Microsoft guarantees to share more data about its dedication to Spark at the occasion, as well.

A Smart Pen for today's digital world!

Typos is always a curse on touch screen devices. Technology have advanced so much that, the line of difference between physical and digital machines is almost eroded. Hand-writing the most common written form of communication are now widely compatible with modern technologies. The pen is the most common input device, but due to the increase of modern technologies, problems also started moving forward.

With so many new innovations in these digital era, Phree which is a pen like device is booming in the market. This small pocket pen, lets you to convert all your hits into digital device. The primary thing is, you can write with Phree on any surface or any wooden surface or soft surface or hand.

The Phree is much similar to stylus. Stylus was used to jot down everything written on the phablet and smart-device. This tiny pen, uses the laser technology to sense the directions of the pen; in which direction it is moving. There is no need for any touch screen device or the table to scribble. You can use any surface. The direction in which it moves, is converted into live hits on your touch screen. The sole condition is that it should be connected to the touch-screen and the Phree should be connected via bluetooth.

Phree is digital pen developed by OTM Technologies, an Israel based Tech-company. This pen uses compact 3D laser interferometer at the tip, and this is how it tracks the motion of any visible surface. Apart from this, with Phree, you will be able to answer calls, communicate in the way you want, interact with the notification. For example answering the message by writing on the wooden surface.

How does the Phree work?

Signal Processing algorithms are used by Optical Translating Machine that translates the data which is collected by sensors. The data is 3D. Phree understands the data like the human eye is reading any article. Hand motion can be 0-1000mm/sec can be wide for the Phree to capture the data. It has high level accuracy and resolution (2000 dpi) to catch the motion of 1 inch. Researchers have said that, pen is so accurate that, it can also be used for bio metrical identification.

"Android Nougat" - Google announced the official name of Android N

Finally, the suspense, curiosity, and the hype for the name of Android 7 or Android N came to an end. On 30th June 2016, Google officially announced its 7th version of its Android Operating System. The much awaited Android N is now named as “Android Nougat”. Check out the official video Android Nougat Statue Unwrapping.

There was a much hype created around the world for this name search. Also, a few days ago, Google jokingly confirmed Android N name as Namey McNameface. (Read my earlier blog covering this topic: http://hiren-it-consultant.blogspot.in/2016/06/google-android-n-namey-mcnameface.html)

A worldwide campaign was executed in which the Google fans participated with lots of enthusiasm. After revealing this name, hearts of many fans were broken into pieces, especially from India. Earlier in May Google invited their fans to suggest the names for Android N. And the response was flooded with the sweet treats named Neyaappam, Nankhatai, Nutella, Newyork cheesecake and to the surprise, there was the massive response from Indians. And finally, it came with the name as Nougat which is a hard chewy white or pink sweet food, usually containing nuts.

Currently, Google is headed by an Indian CEO Sundar Pichai, and thus many fans thought that company would name its new version with an Indian dessert. The most hyped name was Neyaappam which is traditional South Indian delicacy from Kerala. Several campaigns were run to vote for this name on the website androidneyyappam.com. This website even suggested the logo somewhat similar to this dessert dish.

The release for the Android N was initially announced in March 2016, and this current beta which is likely said to be stable is up with the improved notification, emoji’s, split-screen multitasking, security, interactive assistance service, better battery life and also revamped the feature of Doze which came in the previous year of Marshmallow update. And it also has the feature of Daydream which will be only supported for the day-dream handsets. Soon these features will be rolling in all the Android smartphones. It is said that the next nexus phone will be based on Android N.