Imagine this scenario: a lawyer and a client, separated by thousands of miles, need to decide if they’re going to accept a settlement by the 5 p.m. deadline. They planned on connecting over the phone at 4 p.m. to come to a decision, but the client is too busy with another meeting. Thankfully, with the help of Unified Communications, they are able to connect via instant messaging and discuss the settlement (without having to leave the meeting), reaching a decision before the deadline passes.
Imagine this: two employees located in separate offices have only an hour left to meet the deadline of a critical project. Instead of settling for the outdated approach of sending countless emails back-and-forth, they leverage the company’s communications and collaboration tools, such as audio conferencing and instant messaging, to conduct a much more effective conversation and strike a business deal in time.
This is very much today’s reality, as people are simply not as attached to email as they used to be. In fact, one could argue we are witnessing the demise of the golden age of email.
There is no question that Unified Communications solutions are good for business. But it’s often understated that UC solutions can have a great impact on the environment too. UC tools are all about connecting people and making their lives as easy as possible through smart deployment of technology.
Consider the following two aspects and you’ll see where I’m going with this.
With the power of UC solutions to unite business partners around the globe at a moment’s notice, in many cases in-person meetings are no longer the necessity they once were. Rather than having international business partners travel to a specific location to negotiate, consuming a lot of resources and time in the process, partners can now call from anywhere they are, with the same personalized, seamless interactions they would have in real life. Add to that the recording capabilities of the best UC software, and you will get an even more powerful means of following up on meetings.
An Ovum study conducted with over 1,300 ICT decision makers in 18 countries revealed that organizations are still bound to on-premises Unified Communications. Around 80% of UC systems are deployed on-premises and managed internally or by a third party. Managed UCC arose from the need of organizations lacking in-house experts to support the UC evolution. So where’s the cloud in all of this? If we look below, we can see that hosted core IP PBX stands at 3%, while instant messaging and presence lead the way with 7%; which is a lot less than we’d like.
On May 30-31st, for the first time ever, Bucharest was the host of the international Rails Girls event, that we were happy to support as a main sponsor. Rails Girls Bucharest was a 2-day free workshop exclusively dedicated to women who are new to software engineering, but keen on learning Ruby on Rails. The event, organized by Girls Who Code Romania, was held simultaneously in Bucharest, Cluj, and Timiศoara.
We chose to support Rails Girls Bucharest, not only because at 4PSA women are significantly represented (approximately 45% of our software engineers are women). But because we truly believe that women play an important role in technology.
As promised, today’s post is authored by Laur Neagu, winner of the last online hackathon in our Spring Races series.
Hello everyone! My name is Laur and I’m the designer of the winning app in Spring Race III. When I started developing the app, I didn’t think of a name for it. Meanwhile, I found one – GalleryManager ๐
The purpose of GalleryManager is to classify a set of pictures according to a series of criteria such as time of day, picture quality, location, weather conditions, etc. We all know that managing our camera roll pictures can be a nightmare, so I’m thinking many people will find this app very useful.
What is interesting about it is that it recognizes the number of people shown in pictures. Plus, it saves to a temporary folder the faces recognized in each picture. The photos, saved as grayscale, and are focused on face details. Now that I’ve enabled this, I’m very close to finding the total number of pictures in which a certain person appears, throughout the entire camera roll, indicating those exact pictures, and a couple of more interesting criteria. For now, using Gallery Manager you can sort your photos by the number of faces in the pictures.
Today, we had a special guest in our office. Spring Race III
The one and only Laur Neagu! ๐
We can’t wait to meet him tomorrow. When we hand him the well-deserved $2000 prize and we find out more about him. We’ll tell you everything about the winning app too. So stick around for updates. ๐
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cl6yi812WR4[/youtube]
Once again, thank you to all Spring Race III participants. For us, it’s been quite an experience. We hope it’s been the same for you too. ๐
We’re back with news! OK, partial news, but it’s just a matter of days until we all find out the winner of the last hackathon in the series, Spring Race III.
We just wanted to let you know that all the apps you have proposed as a solution to our challenge have been received. As it turned out, the $2000 prize was quite a motivator. ๐
A big THANK YOU to all those who worked hard and strove to design an app that handles picture management according to our requirements
Ready for the last hackathon? We surely hope so. Because this time we have a US $2000 prize that we can’t wait to award! ๐ That is if you can design a solution that will automatically classify pictures as required below and submit it by next Friday, May 23rd, 24:00.
Before detailing the problem, here’s a short recap for those who are new at this: make sure you read the terms and conditions and follow the steps needed to enter the race. Don’t forget to register your team first using this form.
Managing pictures is a nightmare. Everyone knows how frustrating it is to locate a particular picture in a very large collection. But this is where you could lend a hand. We need you to dramatically simplify the process by building an automatic classification system. The system should be able to read a collection of pictures and classify them, based on the picture information (Exif and the actual picture content).
