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.

3 Ways for Service Providers to Benefit from IaaS Market Trends

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Cloud computing market is no longer a trend or a niche subject. Cloud seems to be here to stay and is slowly becoming the new playing field, shaping up industries as it grows and forcing them to adapt.

In a series of articles we’ll investigate how the cloud computing market is segmented, its growth rate and also what this whirlwind evolution means for service providers that focus on SMBs.

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.

How Cloud Communications Help Create a Holistic Customer Experience

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By 2020, customer experience will matter more than price and product in determining consumer purchases. A strong and sobering fact for most companies. Thanks to the rise of the digital world, customers now have more choices when it comes to brand selection. Following a bad experience with a company, consumers are able to go online and spread the word about their poor experience. And this experience soon leads the way in which other consumers will make their purchase decisions. Because of this, many forward-thinking businesses are focused on cultivating an environment leading to positive customer experiences.

Deciding to pay more attention to improving customer service, many contact center decision makers are embracing the fact that customer experience needs a holistic approach. Customers no longer tolerate companies living and acting in silos. In fact, an omni-channel customer experience stands out as one of the top trends affecting how customers perceive their interactions with a specific company.

VoipNow Changing the Communications Game for 8 Years

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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

Spring Race III – And The $2000 Prize Goes To…

The one and only Laur Neagu! 🙂

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. 🙂

[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. 🙂

Software Vendors Killing Service Providers? UC as a Service Offering a Breath of Fresh Air

The surge of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) has left some providers worried. After all, with the rise of SaaS, clients may be able to buy solutions directly from software vendors, skipping these providers altogether. But does this mean that in less than 5 years, service providers will lose most of their territory to vendors selling directly to the SMBs?

Consequently, a number of ITSPs and managed service providers are eying various services they can combine in a logical offer, so that their customers get hooked on the service, rather than on the individual products. A recent study showed that 68% of communications providers intend to offer SaaS within the next two years. One of the most promising services to incorporate is Unified Communications.

smbs cloud insights for 2016

 

Research by MarketstoMarkets indicates the Unified Communications-as-a-Service (UCaaS) market will grow to $23.34 billion by 2019 from the $13.10 billion it’s supposed to bring in this year. The reason is straightforward: many service providers are adding it to their portfolios, to complement their existing proposition made to the SMB customer.

The Winner of Spring Race III Will Be Announced Tomorrow

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. 😉

A big THANK YOU to all those who worked hard and strove to design an app that handles picture management according to our requirements

Spring Race III Classification System for Pictures

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! 🙂 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.

Classification System for Pictures

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).

Enter the Spring Races
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