Management

Every new business needs an online platform, some turf to call your own. So, you invest time and money to build it. Finally, after months of negotiations and revisions, you deploy it. At first, you’re happy, but weeks go by and your shiny new website is still not attracting customers. In an effort to protect your investment, you start spending more money on PR trying to get people to notice you. But it doesn’t work the same way it did before.

Bad news is — press release is dead. Good news — there are ways around that. Once you understand how we got here and why the old tricks don’t work anymore, you’ll be able to adjust and rise to the top.

When we think about Uber, what immediately comes to our mind is cabs. We assume Uber to be an amazing transportation company. While there is no question that Uber revolutionized transportation, Uber is, in essence, a technology-based disruptor. What Uber did is to make use of the latest technology in breaking what was considered normal at that point in time.

Uber did not change the way cabs were driven – it was the same drivers and the same gasoline engines, and electric motors in some cases! However, what Uber did was to change the way the driver connected with a passenger who actually needed transportation.

Striking at the root of a process has its own benefits. It helps you diversify your portfolio of services and that too, in a very effective and efficient way. This is precisely what Uber did. They realized that what they have hacked is not transportation but technology. This is what enabled them to create a simple taxi app that started with operations in New York. In 2010, a year after it was introduced in New York, it also started serving San Francisco.

Uber came with better quality cars and aptly named it UberX and this service started in 2012. With the growing demand for carpooling and ridesharing, Uber started off with UberPOOL in 2014. Uber made sure it took into consideration the convenience and the competition. In 2014, Uber created Uber Moto which enables users to request motorcycle taxis. To take on the competition by players like Ola in India, they came up with the concept of Uber auto that delivers auto rickshaws to customers at their location.

Alright, so you have just planned to hire developers for a Mobile App which could potentially steer your business ahead. The reasons for your decision would be quite obvious on the surface. Mobile App development is a core part of today’s businesses. It provides a near-perfect platform to serve customers through the portable devices they own.

But it’s easy to be a sheep! If you really try to understand this market, you’ll realize that more than half of the apps fail to earn revenue, and a significant amount of them barely cross 1,000 downloads. As per a Gartner report, it was found that barely 0.01 percent apps will find financial success by the year 2018.

GoROBO is an ITMO University project through and through: one of the co-owners graduated our mechatronics MA program, and two other employees are current postgrad students.

Let’s talk about the educational environment they want to create, why they chose to build such an unusual startup, and what awaits GoROBO clubs in the future.

“In 1665, Cambridge University closed because of the plague. Issac Newton decided to work from home. He discovered calculus & the laws of motion.”

We live in a truly remarkable moment. With the year 2020 and the COVID-19 outbreak employees all over the world are staying home for quarantine, trying their best to sustain the normal flow of life, which means continue working. And this is something new compared to all the previous infectious pandemics humanity has survived through — this time we have the Internet.

In my previous post I mentioned that I had started my freelance career as a senior full stack software engineer. The first problem I faced was clients – it's a pretty tough job to find them. I will show you my trial and error approach to getting a first paid contract. It’ll start from paid ads on social networks, going through content marketing and surprisingly ending on free promotional channels. At each step I will share with you my thoughts, tips and samples. The whole journey from zero to one client took me three weeks.

At the start of the journey I had a portfolio site, several photos for ads, and a lot of optimism. I need to mention that I decided to avoid freelance marketplaces such as UpWork and Freelance.com as their rates are too low. I also avoided TopTal and Turing.com as I don’t want to spend my free time on their several-stage interviews (I've played this game with Google once, and don’t want to do it again).

Today, Microsoft and partners across 35 countries took coordinated legal and technical steps to disrupt one of the world’s most prolific botnets, called Necurs, which has infected more than nine million computers globally. This disruption is the result of eight years of tracking and planning and will help ensure the criminals behind this network are no longer able to use key elements of its infrastructure to execute cyberattacks.

A botnet is a network of computers that a cybercriminal has infected with malicious software, or malware. Once infected, criminals can control those computers remotely and use them to commit crimes. Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit, BitSight and others in the security community first observed the Necurs botnet in 2012 and have seen it distribute several forms of malware, including the GameOver Zeus banking trojan.

TheKey is, as they like to call themselves, a «network of smart workspaces». But it wasn’t always this way.

^{The kitchen here is small, but cozy}

Image credit: Unsplash

What will the future bring to the programming world? Are there any specific technologies that will rise and fall? Which programming language one should learn to succeed in their career? What should a newbie programmer know and understand to build a successful career in the 2020s?

I had the opportunity to sit down and talk about these issues in greater detail with Vitaly Kukharenko, a CTO with 10+ years of experience and creator of several high load startups.

Hi all! I lead antispam team and several machine learning teams at Mail.ru Group. The subject of this article is self-development for team leads/managers. But in reality many techniques and recipes do not depend on the role at all. This really concerns me because machine learning is developing extremely fast, and it takes a lot of time to stay up to date. So the question about what should be done for development and how is quite topical.

Of course, the content of this article is not the ultimate truth but just a description of the results of my continuing quest. It tells about approaches based on books and workshops, trials and errors, which have worked for me. It'll be good to have a discussion with you in comments.

The internet is a global high-density slum. The Kowloon Walled City of our times, it is packed to brim with useless promotional content. Trying to sell a product in this environment is no easy feat.

No matter how original and well thought-out it is, it has to provide cultural value to succeed. Otherwise you become the knockoff brand. Below are three ways to quickly integrate brand’s culture into your content-marketing strategy, and what’s even more important — scale it with little to no additional resources.

Successful startups often emphasize their grassroots aspects. In part one of this series, we talked about the origins of startup culture and the DIY attitude that is prevalent in the tech industry. However, there’s more to modern startup culture than that. Today, it is in many ways defined by the innovation infrastructure that got things started and allowed the tech space to blossom, and that is the focus of this article.

Laeneco is a smart stethoscope capable of detecting respiratory diseases with greater accuracy than most trained medical professionals. Let's take a look at the device, the way it works, and the people behind it.

It is quite observable today that every business requires to leverage the power of the internet and mobile to earn more profit and attract tech-savvy audiences.

We have transcended into a world where most of the services that we want our needs available right in the comfort and confines of our homes! It is quite likely that an application addresses those needs.What makes these applications more interesting and relevant is the fact that they can identify the user and multiple attributes.

One of the significant attributes that can be identified by using mobile applications is the precise location of the user. The GPS, which was once confined to the military and aviation industry, has now been made available to almost every smartphone user. The GPS, combined with the mapping and navigation services by technology companies like Google and Apple, has made it extremely easy for the service provider to reach the location of the user.

Even the most honest of scientists are regularly misled by their cognitive biases. They often go to great lengths to find proof for whatever seems logical, while dismissing evidence to the contrary.

Yet this issue is rarely discussed — because it remains an embarrassing subject.

Hello! I just finished interviewing with Google and wanted to quickly catch you up on some interesting and frustrating steps of the process so that you can understand what to expect from Google interviews and the steps involved. I will also share some tips on how to prepare for the interview and mistakes to avoid.

If you’re looking for a success story, this is the wrong post for you. I actually failed the interviewing process, but the whole experience was pretty interesting for me and leads me on to another stage of my career. I will share more details on this at the end of the post. All names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of Google employees.

ITMO University operates an in-house business accelerator. In this series of articles, we’re going to take a look at some of its residents, starting with two machine vision projects: Labra and O.VISION.

In this article, I want to consider an approach to splitting tasks into subtasks when using Clean Architecture.

The decomposition problem was encountered by the NullGravity mobile development team and below how we solved it and what get in the end.

The Department of Computer Science and Control Systems at ITMO University houses a robotics lab. In this article we’ll take a look at the projects its staff is working on, and show you the machinery on site: industrial manipulator robots, robotic hands and dynamic positioning system testing equipment.