Posts in Category: clouders

Happy New 2015!

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As the end of this year approaches, everyone is making retrospectives of 2014 and forecasts for 2015. I’m sure you’ve already read a thousand times how great 2015 will be for communication and collaboration. Just a few thoughts I read lately:

  • most companies will (finally) understand and begin to leverage the power of the cloud.
  • business will explode as service providers are going to bundle amazing services with fabulous customer support.
  • BYOD is grand for efficiency and a true morale boost, but still gives nightmares to IT/infrastructure teams.

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Verb Days 3, The Wrap Up

Verb Days 3 got us so hooked that we’re already missing it! The 6 teams turned the office space into the perfect collaboration environment and filled the air with their creative vibes. Jokes echoed throughout the day. There were moments of panic when an app wouldn’t work, but also ‘Eureka’ moments when obstacles were defeated. In the end, we had lots of fun and some cool ideas with big potential!

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Here’s what they came up with.

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Verb Days 3: Live Updates

The Verb Days are here!
To help you get a glimpse of what we’re up to, stay tuned to this post. We’ll be sharing updates throughout the day.

1:30 AM We proudly announce that Verb Days #3 was a blast! Each application was different and so was each team’s presentation style. Laughter often ensued, but so did critical thinking, improvement suggestions and even new ideas.

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Verb Days 3: Teaser

Just a couple of days left until Christmas and everyone is getting all cozy.

Not at 4PSA though! We’re tuning our focus to the maximum, because it’s Verb Days again!

Verb Days, now at its 3rd edition, is an internal hackaton that we’re hosting every year before the winter holidays. In teams including both tech and non-tech people alike, we spend a full day to create and implement an application of choice. It’s an adventurous process that involves creative thinking, sharing ideas, laughter, coffee, healthy snacks and…coding. Lots of coding!

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The event lasts from early morning to midnight, but time flies fast when you’re having fun.

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Hour of Code, Our Way

A couple of weeks ago, I received an invitation on Facebook to attend Hour of Code Romania. I don’t usually pay attention to such notifications, but this one was somehow different, as the name got me thinking 🙂 I know what you can do with a line of code, but what does an hour of code represent?! This was enough to trigger my curiosity, so I did a little research.

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Follow Your Passion, Whether for IT or…Tea!

You know what they say, businesses made with passion are the ones that make a difference. It’s the case for any industry, which got us thinking: how does passion for other types of businesses differ from our passion for IT?  What is it that drives others?

To explore this notion of passion, we’ve set out to learn the stories of people who are putting a shoulder to a very different wheel than ours. As of September this year, we’re thus organizing a series of monthly internal meetups called Labors of Hercules*.

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In The Company of Strong Teammates

For the past three years, 4PSA’s girls cycling team mounted the podium in the women’s category at the Skoda Velo Challenge. We have a dedicated corner in our open space filled with the trophies they brought home. This is a good motivation to train hard every year, because maintaining a top place is not an easy task. And now we’ve raced our bikes in the Baneasa forest once again.

For those of you who do not know what Skoda Velo Challenge is, here’s the short story: it’s a relay cycling race opened for people working at the same company. We team up to compete against other companies in the same field of work or in the general classification. It’s basically a fun day in the woods, without computers and tasks, but with deadlines to meet. Well, you do need to beat the other competitors’ times, don’t you?

Winning Does Not Come Easy, But Feels Great

With only two girls willing to join the ranks this year, we took a different approach. We entered the race with two teams in the mixed competition. Team Hubgets and Team VoipNow, each made of three boys and one girl, lined up at the starting grid, along with 81 teams from other companies. Team Hubgets relied on stronger riders and aimed high. Team VoipNow was all about the fun of it.

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Why We Were Happy to Support Rails Girls Bucharest

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 Timișoara.

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.

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GalleryManager – Winning App In Spring Race III

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 🙂

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.

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VoipNow Changing the Communications Game for 8 Years

8 is definitely a lucky number. It signifies fortune and prosperity to the Chinese and wealth and abundance in Hinduism. For us, 8 is the number of years since VoipNow was born.

Today we’re celebrating VoipNow’s eighth birthday, together with our partners that use it to deliver Unified Communications services to more than 200,000 businesses around the world. Voxilla recently acknowledged it as one of the top-three call center solutions in 2014

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