Happy women's day to our nerds, geeks and genius coders

What image comes to your mind when you think ‘Geek’, ‘Nerd’ or ‘Genius Coder’?

The bespectacled guy with spiky hair is passé, here is what the geeks at Integration Wizards also look like. Women who are as good at applying make-up as they are at training the algorithm for intruder detection or detecting a bug in a thousand line code. 

Integration Wizards prides itself for creating an inclusive workplace where meritocracy rules. We function without any bias at every step - fair hiring process, promotions based on performance, onsite visits as per project requirements, leadership opportunities, it is all earned by the deserving employee. 

Women’s day started being celebrated in the early 1900s to respect and honour the work that women do. The theme for International Women's Day2020 is #EachforEqual to celebrate a world where women constantly challenge bias, stereotypes, and are achievers at every front. That just about sounds like the profile of any woman working at Integration Wizards. Our phenomenal women talk about what Women’s day means to them. 

This is what an inclusive workplace looks like. Ours. 
Happy Women’s Day.

What you need to know before bootstrapping your company?

- By Apoorva Verma

Starting a firm is one of the most planned decisions that one can make in their lifetime. In fact, the founder(s) have so much on stake that they look at all sorts of possibilities - including that of failure. Thus, building something on their own requires practicality, technical expertise and management knowledge in addition to the funds. 

Here are some tips on bootstrapping your own business by co-founders of Integration Wizards Solutions, an Indian startup that’s purely bootstrapped and profitable since its first day! Founded by Kunal Kislay, Saquib Khan, and Kumar Raman in 2014, its unique products are deployed by a global clientele including eight Fortune 500 companies. 

1. Learning to Balance 
According to research published in the Entrepreneur, business knowledge with necessary technical expertise in product development is very important for starting any business. However, "The best approach to achieve this is to get the right co-founders," says Kunal. He further adds, "As your partners, they play a key role in taking the organisation in the right direction by bringing their expertise, be it management or technical as well as contributing on various aspects of work and finances as and when necessary, especially if you are self-funded." 

2. Financial Planning
“While the lessons learnt along the way are priceless, one of the key lessons this journey teaches is the financial planning,” says Saquib. He adds that one needs to evaluate their revenue sources, plan a clear burn out strategy as well as resource management.   

3. Client Acquisition
It’s not just about starting out with an idea, it’s about researching the need for it and developing the product accordingly. If you carefully carry out this research, it has the potential to develop a product that could make your profits break-even within a short span.  

4. Creativity in promotions 
Bootstrapped start-ups need to be creative in their PR and promotional activities too. While they should be proactive in attending events and conferences to build personal contacts, it’s important to manage the funds in the right direction, and they need to decide when to spend and where. 

5. Risk Assessment 
Although, most entrepreneurs are confident, “One should have an exit plan in mind too” says Kunal. This is crucial as you need a plan in case things go south. Risk assessment is very important to save you from bankruptcy. It gives an overview of the business model, the revenue sources, market research, and management strategy et al. 

It's all about balancing the pros and cons

While the sense of responsibility increases as you run an organisation, the freedom to play by your own rules is a breather. As a bootstrapped firm, you will not have venture capitalists or investors breathing down your neck for every decision you make. 

Since the decision resides with the founders, the start-up growth is mature as it is free from outside influences that could push the company in various directions. Thus, ‘the company focuses on producing flagship products while retaining their company culture,’ says Saquib. 

As they say, necessity is the mother of invention – especially when your own pocket is on the line. Thus, you tend to innovate, invent, and reinvent on various aspects of businesses. In fact, sometimes you might find yourself working or making decisions on aspects of management that you haven’t done before. 

However, one disadvantage of a bootstrapped start-up is undoubtedly “the Cash Crunch.” It’s a perpetual reality and affects many decisions. One of these include hiring the right talent. As with all good things, hiring the right candidate comes with a price too. Moreover, if you haven’t taken interviews before, decision making becomes even more difficult.

Note: This is also published in YourStory.

Looking Back: The best of 2019

“If you are not prepared to risk the usual, you will have to settle for the ordinary” – Jon Rohn

This year saw substantial growth in artificial intelligence and computer vision adaptation as well as the demand to keep up with the technology and innovation in businesses. These were the key drivers that kept us going, and also continue to motivate us for the upcoming decade.

We completed six years and successfully graduated from the start-up club to become an enterprise. From receiving ISO certification and Nasscom membership to getting recognised by Google amongst a handful MDM providers, it was a year to be proud of.

Our revenue has propelled eight times and we have on-boarded about twenty clients in the last six years. Working with our strategic partners Nvidia & Microsoft, we cracked the code on machine learning and many from our team up-skilled. We developed algorithms to control automated drones and upgraded for our client goals.

Our product is being used by 20,000 users across the globe and we actively participated in global conferences in the US, Spain and India. We grew not only in talent, but numbers too. A start-up that began with five now has about 65 members and a 7000sq. Ft of state of the art development centre in India.

Another feather to our cap came with the addition of seven Fortune 500 companies such as PostNord, Dover, Heineken, Xerox to name a few. Moreover, our AI-powered computer vision product, IRIS is now the synthetic intelligent eye for some corporate giants that include one of India’s largest solar plants, automobile manufacturer, chemical manufacturer, jewellery retail chain, construction corporate, heavy engineering, as well as FMCG. Last but not least, we also made some great improvements to our website – that’s right, we had a revamp of our website.

And we are not stopping here. We are striving to achieve more associations, more growth in 2020. 

#2020goals #yearendreview #sixyears #anniversary

Moving towards an AI-enabled future

McKinsey Global Institute claims that artificial intelligence is contributing to a transformation of society 10 times faster and at 300 times the scale, or roughly 3000 times the impact of the Industrial Revolution.

This is observed by the upsurge in artificial intelligence and computer vision adaptation as well as the demand to keep up with the technology and innovation in businesses in the last few years. According to a report by IDC, aggressive investments have been made in cognitive and AI solutions and in fact, global investments are expected to reach $57.6 billion by 2021.

Such investments are catalysed by the advent of modern computer vision and image processing techniques. AI-powered computer vision coupled with hardware-based accelerators have opened up the possibilities of analysing images in real-time to identify objects and activities. 

Since, a typical CCTV image is more than 100,000 Bytes, in this context, it might be quite apt to surmise that a picture is worth hundred-thousand words! 

At present, there are over 500 million CCTV cameras installed and the number is expected to rise to over a Billion by 2021. While these cameras cover everything from manufacturing, yards, warehouses, retail outlets to several parts of modern cities, so far they have been used retrospectively for monitoring and forensic analysis.

However, there is substantial growth in their usage in various verticals. For instance, retail outlets are getting equipped with the capability of knowing their customer demographics, dwell time and even emotions. Even the government is contemplating their use in smart city initiatives as they could prove beneficial if suspect activities are filtered from the live CCTV footages. Likewise, manufacturing premises bolster their safety parameters by ensuring any hazardous non-compliance is actively analysed and reported. 

In fact, stepping up occupational health & safety for people at all levels is the new benchmark that some of the companies are trying to work towards. If this becomes a norm, it could make a sustainable difference in global OSH challenges and promise a brighter future. 

Thus, an AI-enabled future lies in the best use of distributed vision technologies while delving into the deeper end of machine learning and deep learning to explore and understand the potential of these technologies better.

If you are looking to explore how computer vision technology can be useful in your enterprise, check out IRIS AI by Integration Wizards Solutions.

Empowering young lives in Aryan Ashraya

In a world where every penny counts, there are only a few who believe in the concept of ‘giving back’, and those who do, are the ones who create a positive impact on the society.

One such example is Manjula who manages an orphanage, Aryan Ashraya, and houses about 22 children of all ages (from infants and toddlers to older kids), with support from her family. She has a small school ‘Aryan Vidhalya Tutors’ and Yoga classes to help her family and the orphanage sustain. However, she struggles daily to meet the basic requirements of the children such as school fees, groceries, diapers, clothes, etc. as the orphanage is not funded or even recognised much.

We decided to help them by conducting a charity drive in the company. As a part of this gesture, we not only made a monetary contribution but also visited ‘Aryan Ashraya’ and spent a heart-warming day with these children. We hope to make a difference by sponsoring the school fees of these children as well as providing some necessary equipment.

You too can do your bit and contribute to their smiles by lending a hand to these underprivileged and less fortunate children by donating in cash or kind.


You can contact Manjula at 090664 14642

or pay them a visit at: Aryan Vidhalya Tutorss
Parvathinagar, Medahalli, Bengaluru, Karnataka 560049

https://maps.google.com/?cid=8048159181666823874

As an organisation, we aim to remain grounded to #humanvalues.

#csr #integrateitright

Android development - Working With A Designer

By Prakhar Srivastava

Image: https://dribbble.com/shots/3437005-Designer-vs-Developer-Rebound-challenge

I have worked with developers who were struck for the release just because they didn’t have an icon, email icon. Can you believe it, an email icon in 4 sizes, that’s all was needed for the project to release a build.

So in this lesson, we’ll see how to reduce the work of designers and hence playing nice to them (winks!).

1. Ask for icons in only one size and any color.

Always ask for the icons in only size. The perfect size would be 128 X 128. But we have to keep the icons in 4 sizes in four different drawable directories. This is where you get to see the cooler side of android studio. You can create sharp different sized drawables in any color using the image-asset tool.

Right click on drawable folder and new image asset.

drawable(right click) > new > Image Asset

In the next window, choose the type of icon you want. For all the tabsand drawable_left/right icons, the ActionBar & Tab Icons works perfectly.

Choose asset type image and color as custom. The designer will give you the color code and you can generate the icon in that color.

Same thing for launcher and notification icons.

You got it working. See easy.. only one size and the color code.. remember.

2. Avoid asking for color codes

Don’t ask for color codes. If you have the screen designs, you can extract every color out of it.

Download the software getcolor for free and use the eye dropper tool anywhere on screen (not only on mages but absolutely anywhere).

Download it here

3. Fonts and spacing

Stop asking for the .ttf or .otf files for font, if the font is free.

We can find it on our own. Just type the name of the font and append ttf/font download. The designer does the same thing and finds the font.

Also, the fonts can be identified from an image on the websites like what font is, but they are not very reliable. So the font name should be mentioned by the designers.

image source: https://helpx.adobe.com/indesign/how-to/adjust-letter-spacing.html

In the above image, we can see how the spacing impacts the design and how significant it is.

A lot of developers do everything right but miss the letter-spacing. The colors are perfect, font type and size are perfect, icons are perfect. But when the psd and the xml design are matched, they don’t look same. The reason is letter-spacing, that the designer knew is important and we developers chose to ignore. The letter spacing can be added in android with a line in 

xmlandroid:letterSpacing="YOUR_VALUE sp"

Also, one should take care of the shadows. The elevations and shadows adds a lot in the beautification of the design. In android, the shadows and elevation can be defined by adding one line in the

xmlandroid:elevation="YOUR_VALUE dp"

This is how designer and developers together can deliver a great product. Share the responsibilities.

These are a few of the time-saving hacks for designers as well as developers for android. There are a lot more tricks, that I will cover in upcoming blogs. But these are the easiest and most needed, so make sure you get them right.

Computer Vision: Enhancing Industrial Safety with AI

by Apoorva Verma

The AI revolution is here.

As artificial intelligence increasingly gains prominence, several sub-domains such as computer vision, machine learning, deep learning, internet of things, and analytics are some of the technologies that have propelled growth.

Out of these, computer vision is one of those technologies that enable the interpretation and understanding of the visual world for machines. With the help of digital images and deep learning models, computers react to what they 'see' by identifying and classifying objects. In fact, accuracy rates in recognising and responding to visual inputs for the technology has risen from 50% to 99% over the past decade. This means that such solutions could become indispensable for a range of applications across industries.

However, our focus of discussion is the use of computer vision technology in manufacturing, which now have the necessary means to achieve automated safety compliance.

A Computer vision solution, such as the IRIS, developed by Integration Wizards, to work with an existing CCTV network, would serve as an advanced and effective replica of the human eyes, with the added ability to identify and classify different objects or situations, and react accordingly, such as in the form of alerts.

For instance, the AI-powered solution ensures workforce safety compliance by identifying workers without prerequisite safety equipment or protective gear such as hardhats, visibility vests, etc. This results in an appropriate response, like sending a real-time notification to the safety manager. The solution also maintains a database of safety protocol breaches which would be useful in investigations of any workplace accidents as well as take a step towards preventing accidents.

The application of the solution further extends from safety gear detection to occurrence of serious incidents such as the detection of fire and electrical malfunction, machine malfunction, trespassing or unauthorised access to hazardous areas, etc.

Efficient response trigged from the system in such scenarios aids in preventing serious losses to the workers as well as the manufacturing plant. Thus, it detects any anomalies that are not in accordance with the standard operating procedures. Real-time alerts and fail-safe measures accelerate the resolution of the issue.

The application of the solution can further encompass operational safety compliance. This would include material safety, such as the multi-object detection through computer vision, with automatic scanners on production lines, etc. In addition, it would identify any faults with raw materials that may be too small for the human eye but could prove detrimental for the final product.

In high performing manufacturing plants, compliance with safety regulations becomes the utmost priority. In fact, components falling off the production line must also adhere to safety guidelines.

Ultimately, the pressure of delivering high quality, efficient and time-sensitive results at manufacturing premises, together with the use of heavy machinery, potentially dangerous equipment, and the possibility of human error, make such sites prone to oversight of safety compliance, and by extension, workplace accidents.

Such unique innovative solutions can ensure safety compliance across the workforce as well as the entire manufacturing process and facility.