How AI Can Unlock the Value of Data for Your Business

November 4, 2016August 25, 2022 Raj SrivastavArtificial IntelligenceLeave a Comment

AI and Cloud computing are providing SMBs with the tools to take on massive organizations; or as SalesForce’s Business Manager Sanj Bhayro puts it:

“All the innovation in the industry is coming from these small to medium sized businesses. They are disrupting the traditional market which is in turn forcing the traditional players to transform their own business models” – Sanj Bhayro

Bhayro goes on to point out how SMBs now have the capabilities and tools to grow well beyond what they could even 20 years ago. The two biggest reasons for this are the aforementioned Cloud Computing and AI for Big Data.

Prior to the cloud, custom software systems with complex algorithms for Data Analysis almost always required an in-house IT staff. At the very least, it meant a contract with an expensive Tech company capable of sending out people to your office. For most SMBs, the budget required for either option was prohibitive.

So for years, SMBs were stuck with off-the-shelf software – and software development companies were limited with what they could offer these enterprises. Because let’s be clear here: the cloud and AI offers a Software Development Companies like SDI and SalesForce huge opportunities as well.

The cloud means that complex Software programs don’t have to be tied down to a business’ location. SDI can host custom software programmers on our servers; for SMB owners, this means that if your software goes down, it can be easily rectified with a phone call. No need to have an IT department on hand, no need to have someone sent out to your office.

So, Business owners can have the same advantages custom software has provided large corporations for years, at a fraction of the cost. At the same time, the custom software provider can add value to their product and service, reaching a new, massive market in need. Oh – here’s a free piece of advice: your custom software system can make you money, not just save money.

SDI’s developers can provide you with the ability to create more unique user accounts – for you competitors. In other words, you can easily market your system to people in your industry. Talk about turning competition into your client base!

So the Cloud represents some unique opportunities for growth and even for revenue generation. But in all honesty, the cloud is small potatoes when compared to the advantages that AI/Machine Learning offers to SMBs.

Big Data and Artificial Intelligence

Big Data Analytics are the single greatest resource a Business owner can have. Hands down. “Wait but what about a cash flow, or even the basic product/service itself??” Nope. Here’s why: you may think your product is awesome, but the data generated from it will actually tell you whether or not you’re as great as you think you are.

When it comes to custom software, Big Data can provide us with tons of information for any change in the system, big or small. The biggest issue most have with analytics is that for most SMBs, the true potential of Big Data was out of their reach. As we discussed above, custom software systems are only now becoming affordable for smaller budgets.

But with the cloud, plus advances in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, improved data analytics are within the reach of any business budget. AI has revolutionized Business Process Management (BPM) with faster, real time data reporting and actionable customizable metrics. To really drive this point home, all you have to do is look at Industry legend Gartner’s study on just this topic:

A concession stand owner used an AI-enhanced BPM system at an event to monitor wait times at each stand, directing customers to stands where their wait would be minimal. BPM was even used to monitor what was selling and how often. This helped to prevent overstocking. Even better, AI is capable of making predictions based off the data it studies; in this case, it means that an AI BPM system would be capable of ordering supplies before you even knew you were about to be low. And, as this decision is based of a mountain of data, error rates in inventory decrease.

So, to conclude, Artificial Intelligence, when embedded into Custom Software provides business owners with predictive capabilities, improved/streamlined analytics, and the ability for massive (but intelligent) growth. And we didn’t even touch on how AI can help automate business processes; Just look at Tesla, who employs Robotic Experts to automate their entire manufacturing floor!

Your Tech Partner

Want to grow your business with improved data crunching and smarter business insights? SDI can help – and we have, for over 10,000 global clients. Give us a call at 408.805.0495 / 408.621.8481 – or click to contact us! Call now and get an hour of free consultation!

Artificial Intelligence has been making waves in the world of Consumer-oriented tech services (think Siri, Google Now, or Google’s new Messaging platform Allo), changing the way we think about our phones and Gadgets. But AI’s potential impact on internal business management has gone largely unnoticed. AI and Cloud computing are providing SMBs with the tools to take on massive organizations; or as SalesForce’s Business Manager Sanj Bhayro puts it: “All the innovation in the industry is coming from these small to medium sized businesses. They are disrupting the traditional market which is in turn forcing…

3 Ways a Mobile Website can Help Your Business

October 18, 2016August 25, 2022 Sakshi SharmaMobile Website

As a website development company, We want to offer you tools on how to make a real website that supports and grows your business. Specifically, we’re going to look at non-web businesses; how a website can help improve your business and what your website needs to be effective. After all, the importance of a website in an eCommerce business is pretty clear.

But we’re going to drill down even further, into 3 specific businesses: Real Estate, Education (not necessarily EdTech), and the Restaurant Industry.

Real Estate

Obviously, how a home looks is a key factor in how quickly (and for how much) it is sold. Agents spend days to weeks or even longer to make sure a home looks perfect. But when someone is looking at listings, they can only see a few boring, stagnant issues.

Today, we live in a world where anyone can snap a professional level photo, in an instant. So posting a few pictures isn’t as effective as was 20 to 30 years ago. Fortunately, a website is an excellent way to offer a whole new digital experience.

Think about it: potential home buyers make decisions by taking tours of the house. Prior to the Web 2.0, that meant your market was largely relegated to locals who could stop by your open house. And locals who happen to have spare time to take out of their busy lives.

Today, you can put on a virtual open house, visible to anyone in the world with a web connection. Even better, SDI can easily turn your website into a Web-Based App to really grow your audience to true global proportions! SDI has created apps and websites for the Real estate industry; we know how to create virtual tours that truly show off the excellence of your home.

With digital, high quality photos, you can really show off your home. SDI can build a website that lets you create 360 degree virtual tours, with drill-down details for each room and all pertinent home info a buyer needs. We can even help you create an Organizational Software infrastructure to help you convert warm visitors into hot leads and potentially closed deals!

Tutoring

We aren’t talking about EdTech here (though this is a growth industry teachers should be looking at!). We’re specifically looking here at tutors – those who have their own business helping kids (or adults!) learn. Tutoring businesses, even if you’re your only employee, can vastly expand their target market.

Creating a small webpage for marketing purposes that costs little but has huge payoffs. For individuals, find more potential students in need of help, boost your digital presence, and make it easy for people to find you. We can help you build a website that showcases your work, discusses your experience, and even provides details on your specialties (Math Wizard? History Buff? Literary Genius? All of the above?)

Are you a larger company who employs a bunch of tutors in a variety of subjects? SDI can help you offer better, more targeted services to your potential clients. Using machine learning algorithms and other coding techniques, we can design a website that finds out where a potential student needs help. Then your website will direct them to the appropriate tutors for them to choose whoever would work best.

SDI can also build a website with built-in video conferencing features, perfect for people to interview you, or even for a tutoring session itself. Our Design team can work with you to figure out what specifics you would need to truly be an effective online tutor. In our Modern digital world, having digital tools is one of the best ways to grow your business

Restaurants, Food Trucks, and More

Traditional restaurants (think Cheesecake Factory), as well as more trendy food service options like Food Trucks or Pop-Ups, can hugely benefit from having a website – especially one that’s been converted into a mobile web-based app!

Traditional restaurants can use a website to market their business, but more importantly, they can use it to push menu changes, new food items, upcoming live shows (if applicable), even take online orders and reservations. All of this is not only easy to do but relatively inexpensive, especially when you make use of the plethora of APIs and app tools out there (like OpenTable).

Food Trucks, while not a new thing, have grown exponentially in popularity. When I was growing up, we referred to these as Roach Coaches and they were only ever seen at Construction Sites. Today, that’s totally different. Brilliant amateurs and cooking legends alike are blowing our palettes away with culinary masterpieces made in a food truck. Millennials love them, restaurateurs are obsessed with them – heck there are even movies being made about them!

Pop-Up restaurants are a truly new phenomenon in the world of successful businesses and can’t succeed without a well-built website. Pop-ups, for those who don’t know, are restaurants that take over a venue for an evening or two, and then disappear, often never to be seen again. These events can be anywhere, but the key to their success is getting the word out.

So a website is a key to marketing a pop-up restaurant (and an app is heavily recommended), to get people who have been to your past events to show up again and to getting newcomers. But SDI can do more than that – we can help build you a website that helps find possible venues, chefs, and even new markets.

Build Your Own Website in 6 Weeks or Less

Ready to get started? Don’t worry about website development costs: for as low as $1200 or $20 an hour, you can have your own, tailored website, designed to meet your exact needs. SDI knows the tech world, from development to marketing, we can help your SMB grow.

Give us a call at 408.805.0495/408.621.8481 – or click to contact us!

Website this and website that; I’m sure you’ve heard all about how great the internet is for your business. And it’s true: it’s basically the best, most cost-effective way to grow a modern business (surpassed only by mobile apps). But more often than not, you just get 1000 words of someone telling you that websites are great. As a website development company, We want to offer you tools on how to make a real website that supports and grows your business. Specifically, we’re going to look at non-web businesses; how a website can help improve…

CheatSheet: How to Build an App for UberRush

October 4, 2016August 25, 2022 Sakshi SharmaTaxi app developersLeave a Comment

This is where the success and brilliance of Uber Cofounders Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp truly lie. It isn’t in creating a beautiful piece of code that performs with near perfection, while simultaneously being some complex that it kept any competitors from pulling ahead of Uber. It isn’t even their ability to bypass state and city regulations, thereby avoiding the huge costs that Taxi companies face.

It was in their ability to realize that there was a problem: people around the world were in dire need of a ride service that was available immediately. Plus, they wanted something that can be summoned to the rider, rather than the rider hunting down a taxi. Most people didn’t even realize this was an issue, much less seeing the path toward solving it!

Disrupt, Disrupt, Disrupt!

But as with most Silicon Valley tech companies, Uber follows a simple creed: innovate or die. Conquering the world from San Francisco to Beijing to New York wasn’t enough; so UberEats was launched. Similar to other food delivery services, UberEats allows the user to order food and have it delivered by an Uber driver.

Camp and Kalanick have also launched UberRUSH; which delivers products within an hour. The true entrepreneurial genius behind UberRUSH is that it’s offered to businesses as an API. This means that SDI’s developers can take any app and add in the UberRUSH API. This way, users never even have to leave your app to have their orders delivered near instantaneously.

Let’s take a traditional Marketing approach to this: First, we will identify the problems with delivery services, then we will talk about how integrating the UberRUSH API is superior to other options and good for your SMB or startup.

The Problem[s]

There are a lot of delivery services out there. A lot a lot. We all know the big guns: UPS, FedEx, even the US Postal Service. There are even Delivery Services that go beyond the traditional shipping giants, such as GrubHub, DoorDash, or PostMates. Even Amazon has its own rapid delivery service.

While these are all great options with their own advantages there are issues with each one:

• Traditional Shipping/Receiving companies (UPS, FedEx, etc) are great for shipping in volume and have nice inexpensive options. But the fastest they offer is 1-day shipping, which costs an arm and a leg. 10 years ago that would have been enough. Unfortunately, today is the day of instant gratification, so 24 hours is 23 hours too long.

• GrubHub and other Food Delivery App businesses are great, quick options that aren’t super expensive. But they only focus on food delivery, and are only consumer-facing. As a business, you probably have your own app (contact us if you don’t!) so what you need is a Business to business API. Something that can be added to your branded app.

• PostMates solves the issue of B2B services, but isn’t an integrated API. Users and shoppers need to use the branded PostMate app. So that cuts out your own app and brand, unfortunately. Also, PostMate tends to focus on the big players, leaving the small guys by wayside.

• Of course, there’s always the old, traditional way of doing things: having your own drivers. But then how often do you have a rush delivery order? Even if you have a lot of them, you’re still looking at paying employees for round trips, providing auto insurance, wages, gas money, maybe even benefits.

The Solution

Let’s talk about how UberRush works. UberRUSH integrates fully with any app, granting you the ability to provide one hour delivery service. Not tomorrow, not just relegated to food. Even better, UberRUSH is specifically oriented at small local businesses, ones that can’t traditionally offer deliver services.

As Uber’s Product Manager (Calvin Lee) has stated, UberRUSH is the company’s first attempt at a wholly B2B service. With SDI’s help, you can integrate this API right into your app, allowing users to instantly order their products with a single tap of a button.

It avoids the expense of maintaining your own delivery service, because you’re only hiring a driver as needed, you don’t pay their insurance and other incidentals and you’re only paying for a one way trip. As the company itself points out, when an UberRush Driver, you’re only paying for the trip from your business to your client (and that cost is passed on to your consumer).

So with a simple call to our developers, you can add incredible value to your app, while keeping your users firmly planted in your own app. Plus, the costs are negligible and the appeal massive. Don’t have an app for your company yet? No problem: Give us a call at 408.805.0495/408.621.8481 – or click to contact us!

Everyone knows about Uber. They’re one of the most disruptive and successful tech companies in the world, having started off as a ride-sharing, pseudo-taxi service. They’re an algorithm and associated mobile app revolutionized the taxi industry, solving a huge issue most people didn’t even realize was there. This is where the success and brilliance of Uber Cofounders Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp truly lie. It isn’t in creating a beautiful piece of code that performs with near perfection, while simultaneously being some complex that it kept any competitors from pulling ahead of Uber. It isn’t…

3 Ways to Acquire More Users with Better Data Analytics

September 29, 2016August 25, 2022 Sakshi SharmaData AnalyticsLeave a Comment

For centuries, people have sought to have better data reporting tools; but until the advent of the digital age, crunching massive amounts of data in a realistic, actionable timeframe was near impossible. Fortunately for the entrepreneur of today, we now live in the time of Big Data.

Big Data gives CEOs and business owners more control over their business than any time in human history. With Big Data Analytics, you collect more data, from more places, with better reporting – in real time. This means a lot for how a marketing strategy is created, concerning anything from brand growth to user acquisition for apps and websites.

Why is real time so important? Because it allows you to move quickly to new trends before it’s too late. Finding out that a particular element of your mobile app isn’t performing up to snuff a week later could potentially mean thousands in lost revenue.

Of course, with so much many metrics being analyzed, it’s easy for the important ones to get lost in the noise. That’s why it’s important to hire an expert development team, like the one at SDI! SDI can install top-notch software like Google’s Analytics 360 Suite to help you gain full control of your business.

Then we research the heck out of your industry to discover what data metrics will be the most effective. By providing tailored metrics with real-team actionable reporting, our team helps your team quickly and accurately respond to data changes. With our help, you will have the ability to make real, positive, impacts on your business.

So Data makes the world go ‘round, but why don’t we narrow down the scope of this discussion just a little bit: how data can help you convert users for your app or website (sometimes referred to as a Data Driven Acquisition Strategy). Specifically, let’s take a look at some common tests that web marketers perform and more a more general conversation on User Acquisition.

Growth Hack Tip #1: Testing

There are many tests a good digital marketer uses to analyze user traffic on a website or app. That being said, there are two in particular that help a marketer when it comes to a visitor to user conversions The first is A/B Testing.

A. A/B testing is a very cool user acquisition tool that SDI’s marketers especially adore. It lets two visitors who are roughly similar and visiting your website or app at the same time see two different versions. Whichever gets more visitors to signup is thus better at getting users.

B. One of SDI’s marketer’s favorite tools is A/B testing. This lets us create a control user and a variable user: they are shown two different versions of your product; whichever converts more visitors is judged to be the more effective design.

Growth Hack Tip #2: Multivariate Testing and Heatmaps

Multivariate testing is similar to an A/B test, in that marketers are looking to see which design is more effective (A or B). But whereas an A/B test compares two complete designs, Multivariate testing compares different elements on a single page.

For instance, if I’m running a Multivariate test on the login page for my iPhone app, one visitor may see a screen with red headers and green footers, one may see one with a red header and no footer, another may see no headers or footers – and so on.

The idea is that a Multivariate test allows marketers to test near endless mashups of various elements. Well really, the idea is, as always, to see which design converts more visitors into users.

Multivariate Testing also works exceptionally well when combined with analytic heatmaps. Heatmaps allow marketers to track exactly where on a web page or app screen a user is hovering or touching a screen. This makes it a great tool to judge points of interest, especially for apps (heatmaps for websites, while very useful can be confounded by users hovering a cursor over an element while away from their keyboard).

Growth Hack Tip #3

Hire professionals. Obviously, we’d prefer it was us, but no matter what, this isn’t an area where you should just take a leap of faith. This is one of the most effective tools for business growth out there (and it’s largely free), but it’s also a hot mess. You don’t want to hike this big [data] mountain without an excellent Sherpa.

A professional team already knows the morass that is digital marketing. We know what to track and how. We know what works and what doesn’t. But most of all, we know how to show you what to track, watch and change (that whole teach a man to fish proverb and all!).

A good marketing team like SDI can help you create User acquisition and growth strategies that work. From industry-specific, actionable metrics to improved analytics testing tools, SDI can put full control of your business, right at the tips of your fingers!

All in all, a robust, effective Analytics software is the most essential weapon in the arsenal of modern day business owners. It allows you to see what’s working, what’s not – and what might work better. Most importantly, it good analytics are designed around your industry, ensuring you are provided with the most effective tool possible.

Your Big Data Team

Ready to install robust Big Data analytic software like the Google Analytics Suite 360 on your app, website, or software program? Give us a call at 408.805.0495 / 408.621.8481 – or click to contact us!

Businesses, small to large, startups to corporations, survive and thrive off of data. This has been true for as long as the business has been around. CEOs at the beginning of time understood that the more data they had about their organization, the more chance they had a succeeding. For centuries, people have sought to have better data reporting tools; but until the advent of the digital age, crunching massive amounts of data in a realistic, actionable timeframe was near impossible. Fortunately for the entrepreneur of today, we now live in the time of Big…