<p>Blockchain is a technology to store data in a very secure and decentralized manner. It works by a consensus algorithm that adds a piece of data on the blockchain with every block that needs to be validated. The validation happens through many different nodes without relying on a central entity. Due to this architecture it comes with some challenges.</p>
<p>In this blog we will discuss one such key challenge and its solution without which we can’t achieve complete decentralization.</p>
<h2 id="whatisanoracle">What is an Oracle ?</h2>
<p>In medieval times oracles were people with magical abilities or objects who could provide wise and reliable guidance to those in need. Typical conversation between an oracle and peoples would be like:</p>
<p><em class="text-gray-500 font-normal"> Ancient one (not from marvel): What would the future look like ?</em>
<br/>
<em class="text-gray-500 "> Oracle (waving over a crystal ball): In future the world will work on chain of blocks :p</em></p>
<p>Similarly in the technology space servers have the data we can fetch them when needed. We use apis as an oracle to fetch data from the server and apis are powered by magical spells that we call code.</p>
<p>An example would be when a developer needs weather data or currency exchange rates we rely on third party apis which we can call over an http request. So here, the apis are your oracle.</p>
<p>Blockchain can leverage these apis too but that comes with a big risk. It will also shatter the core principle of blockchain completely. Let's see why.</p>
<h2 id="theoracleproblem">The Oracle Problem</h2>
<p>Using traditional APIs in blockchain environment can lead to some serious failures because</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Fundamentally blockchain can't use apis because blockchain needs to be deterministic. In the real world, the value of currencies or weather fluctuates really fast. So with variable data, blockchain nodes may get different values while validating the transactions. Hence the nodes may be able to build a consensus. Hence the entire chain will fail.</p></li>
<li><p>Generally apis are hosted on a server which is controlled by a centralized entity so if we use traditional apis we are introducing centralized data to a decentralized network. Which deviates from the main purpose of blockchain i.e decentralization. It will introduce a single point of failure if the centralized source is compromised, if it goes offline or sends faulty data to an on-chain network then the outcome of smart contacts will not be reliable.</p></li>
</ol>
<h2 id="solution">Solution</h2>
<p>Decentralized oracles provide a way for blockchain and smart contracts to extract data from the real world. They leverage blockchain to establish a network of nodes whose job is to aggregate real world data from various sources then filter it for inaccuracies and come to a consensus of a deterministic value. Then that data gets stored in the blockchain which can be used by other smart contracts.</p>
<p>By interacting with real world data we can truly unlock the full potential of blockchain hence projects like <a href="https://chain.link/" target="_blank">chainlink</a>, <a target="_blank" href="https://bandprotocol.com/">Band Protocol (BAND)</a> , <a  target="_blank" href="https://api3.org/">api3</a> are developing decentralized oracles to eliminate the oracle problem in the web3 space.</p>
<h2 id="implementation">Implementation</h2>
<p>Imagine you are developing a funding smart contract to receive ethereum in your crypto wallet. And you decided that the minimum amount would be 1 USD.</p>
<p>To apply that constraint,you need to know what's the current exchange rate of ethereum in USD is. As we require real world data here we can use one of the decentralized oracles like Chainlink - which currently is the most decentralized oracle network out there. Lets see a step by step guide to implement the chainlink oracle.</p>
<p><em class="text-gray-600 font-normal">Complete code is at the end of this article</em></p>
<p>Lets create a smart contract first</p>
<pre><code class="solidity language-solidity">// SPDX-License-Identifier: MIT
pragma solidity ^0.8.0;

contract ETHtoUSD {
uint256 minimumValue = 1 \* 1e18;

    function receiveFund() public payable {
        require( msg.value &gt;  minimalValue, "Please send minimum 1 USD.");
    }

}
</code></pre>
<p>Here inside ETHtoUSD contract we declared receveFund function with payable keyword which will enable the function to play with ETH transactions.</p>
<p>The require statement is like a “if then” function where we are saying that if received value is less than minimumValue then throw a message.</p>
<p>We are reading the value of ETH sent to our smart contract using a global keyword msg.value which gives us the amount in terms of WEI.</p>
<p><em class="text-gray-600 font-normal">1 ETH = 1^18 WEI</em></p>
<p>And that's why we taking our minimumValue as 1 * 1e18</p>
<p>To get current rate of ETH in real world we will interact with chainlink smart contract and to interact with any smart contract we need 2 things:</p>
<ul>
<li>Address of that smart contract</li>
<li>ABI of smart contract</li>
</ul>
<p>First we can get the address easily using <a href="https://docs.chain.link/data-feeds/price-feeds/addresses/">chainlink documentation</a></p>
<p><img src="/blogImages/decentralized-oracle/chainlink.png" alt="chainlink doc" /></p>
<p>We will use address of ETH/USD. For testing we are using the Goerli Testnet.</p>
<p>Second, to get the ABI we can import the file from their github.</p>
<pre><code class="solidity language-solidity">import "@chainlink/contracts/src/v0.8/interfaces/AggregatorV3Interface.sol";
</code></pre>
<p>Next, we will create a function to fetch data from oracle.</p>
<pre><code class="solidity language-solidity">function getPrice() public view returns (uint){
    AggregatorV3Interface Price = AggregatorV3Interface(0xD4a33860578De61DBAbDc8BFdb98FD742fA7028e);
    (,int256 price,,,) = Price.latestRoundData();
    return uint (price * 1e10);
}
</code></pre>
<p>Using AggredatorV3nterface we are getting the contract functionalities. Then we are using latestRoundData() to get the price result.</p>
<p>latestRoundData returns 5 values (roundID, price, startedAt, timeStamp, answeredInRound.) We just need the price data here so we can skip other information using a comma.</p>
<p>Finally this function will give us a price with 8 decimal places but in msg.value we received the amount in 18 decimal places so to match them up we need to multiply the price with 1e10 and return that.</p>
<p><em class="text-gray-500 font-semibold"> <span class="text-gray-700">Congratulations!</span> You just learned how to use decentralized oracles.</em></p>
<p>We got the latest price information and now we need to convert that into USD.</p>
<pre><code class="solidity language-solidity">function convertETHtoUSD(uint _ethAmount) public view returns(uint){
    uint valuePrice = getPrice();
    uint amountinDollars =(valuePrice * _ethAmount) /1e18;
    return amountinDollars;
}
</code></pre>
<p>This function receives _ethAmount which is the amount the user will send. In next line we are getting the currency value using our getPrice() function then we are converting it into USD using formula (ValuePrice * _ethAmount) /1e18;</p>
<p><em class="text-gray-700 font-semibold">Perfect! </em></p>
<p>Now we can wrap this function around msg.value like this</p>
<pre><code class="solidity language-solidity">require( convertETHtoUSD(msg.value) &gt;  minimalValue, "Please send minimum 1 USD.");
</code></pre>
<p>Here is the final code.</p>
<pre><code class="solidity language-solidity">// SPDX-License-Identifier: MIT
pragma solidity ^0.8.0;
import "@chainlink/contracts/src/v0.8/interfaces/AggregatorV3Interface.sol";


contract ETHtoUSD {
    uint256 minimumValue = 1 * 1e18;

    function receiveFund() public payable {
        require( convertETHtoUSD(msg.value) &gt;  minimalValue, "Please send minimum 1 USD.");
    }

    function getPrice() public view returns (uint){
        AggregatorV3Interface price = AggregatorV3Interface(0xD4a33860578De61DBAbDc8BFdb98FD742fA7028e);
        (,int256 price,,,) = price.latestRoundData();
        return uint (price * 1e18);
    }


    function convertETHtoUSD(uint _ethAmount) public view returns(uint){
        uint valuePrice = GetLastestPrice();
        uint amountinDollars =(valuePrice * _ethAmount) /1e18;
        return amountinDollars;
    }

}
</code></pre>
<h2 id="conclusion">Conclusion</h2>
<p>The Oracle problem is not new to the tech world. We have already seen this in web2 and now are facing the same in web3 but with some extra challenges like decentralization and deterministic values. In this article we saw how to solve this problem, we received real world ETH price using chainlink and converted into USD. Now it's your turn to go ahead and build something amazing using real world data.</p>

<p>Good design is much less noticeable than bad design. One of the reasons is that good design fits our needs so well that the design itself serves us without being visible or drawing attention. Bad design, on the other hand, highlights its shortcomings and is noticeable. As designers, we can use psychology to create more intuitive and human-centred products and experiences. Rather than forcing users to follow the design of a product or experience, we can use some key principles of psychology as a guide to design who people are.</p>
<h2 id="psychologyprinciplestheultimatefive">PSYCHOLOGY PRINCIPLES: THE ULTIMATE FIVE</h2>
<h3 id="1mentalmodel">1. MENTAL MODEL</h3>
<p>A mental model is an explanation of someone's thought process about how something works in the real world. The user is satisfied as long as the process is performed in accordance with their expectations.They will start to make mistakes and lose their cool the moment it deviates from their expectations.</p>
<p>For instance, when you wake up in the morning and the first thing you do is take a brush, apply the toothpaste and brush your teeth. What if your brush doesn't have bristles and you can’t brush your teeth or the toothpaste is not there at the desired place. This will break down the mental model and leave you confused.</p>
<p>Everyone knows that on the top left corner of your website or chrome tab is a left arrow that indicates the ‘back’ (&lt;-) option. The mental model would be broken when a user would find no back option or a right arrow instead. Similarly, both Android or IOS phones have a settings option which helps you to customize it your way but when there is no such option available it breaks down the mental model and either frustrates the user or confuses them.</p>
<p><img src="/blogImages/psychology-design/mental-model.png" alt="mental model" title="mental model" /></p>
<h3 id="2feedbackloops">2. FEEDBACK LOOPS</h3>
<p>Feedback loops are processes where designers use systems output as input to find cause-and-effect relationships within it. In simple words, the feedback loop is the outcome a user gets at the end of a process. And this outcome should inform:-</p>
<ol>
<li>Recognition of a specific action or behaviour.</li>
<li>Identify the impact of the action or behaviour.</li>
<li>Set expectations for future actions or behaviours.</li>
</ol>
<p><img src="/blogImages/psychology-design/feedback-loops.png" alt="feedback loops" title="feedback loops" /></p>
<h4 id="therearetwotypesoffeedbackloopspositiveandnegative">There are two types of feedback loops: positive and negative.</h4>
<p>For instance, you switch on the light, it switches on and then you switch off the light and it switches off. This is the case of a positive feedback loop. What if you switch the light on but it doesn’t turn on? Now, this is the case of a negative feedback loop. Likewise, if you make a phone call to your friend but it doesn’t connect due to network issues then this is a case of negative feedback and if that call allows you to talk to your friend then that’s a positive feedback loop.</p>
<p><img src="/blogImages/psychology-design/feedback-loop-light-bulb.png" alt="feedback loop light bulb" title="feedback loop light bulb" /></p>
<p>A solution to this problem is to keep confirmation screens or pop-ups. We all know a similar example of Google Forms. There’s always a message after submission,” Thank you for your feedback” on submitting successfully and a message “You need permission” when you are not able to submit.</p>
<h3 id="3vonrestorffeffect">3. VON-RESTORFF EFFECT</h3>
<p>According to this principle, when multiple similar objects are present, the one that differs from the rest is most likely to be remembered. This effect is also called the Isolation effect. Let’s say when you study from a book you highlight important keywords that you are most likely to remember from other texts.</p>
<p>Similarly, while designing an application or a website, the CTA (Call to Action: a visual prompt that tells the user to take action) button is kept apart from other buttons or options.</p>
<h3 id="4serialpositioneffect">4. SERIAL POSITION EFFECT</h3>
<p>According to this principle, when people are given a list of items, they are more likely to remember the first few and the last few, while the items in the middle tend to blur. This effect is also called the Primary effect. For example, when you have verbally dictated the list of some grocery items you tend to remember only the first and last few items.
Similarly, while designing an application or website, the most important user actions are kept in the top navigation bar and the CTA button is generally kept at the bottom. This makes the user pay attention to these actions.</p>
<h3 id="5hickslaw">5. HICK’S LAW</h3>
<p>According to this principle, the more options a user has, the longer it takes for them to make a decision. In simple terms, more choices are directly proportional to the time taken. One of the best examples is a regular Television remote control has multiple buttons whereas Apple TV remote controls have only limited buttons. Refer to the image below.</p>
<p><img src="/blogImages/psychology-design/hicks-law-remote.png" alt="hick's law remote" title="hick's law remote" /></p>
<h2 id="conclusion">CONCLUSION</h2>
<p>The creative process may be greatly enhanced, user needs can be better understood, and designers can benefit from having a basic understanding of psychology in design. You’ve seen there are so many examples of design in our everyday life that have been built according to human psychology. From brushing your teeth in the morning to watching TV lying on your comfortable couch almost everything has been designed perfectly to fit user needs.</p>
<p>At the end, I would like to conclude</p>
<blockquote>
  <p><em>You don't need a PhD in Psychology to understand your user; simply be a good observer.</em></p>
</blockquote>

<ul>
<li>According to PWC, the estimated cost for RBI to manage old bank notes over a 5-year period between 2016 till 2021 was around 4.5 lakh crores.</li>
<li>As per the World Bank, India is the world’s largest recipient of remittances as it received $87 billion in 2021 with the United States being the biggest source, accounting for over 20 percent of these funds.</li>
<li>India piloted the Central Bank Digital Currency, or CBDC, in Nov 2022.</li>
<li>In India, only about 865 million people have access to the internet as yet. Hence an ideal digital currency needs to function offline as well.</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="theneedfordigitalcurrency">The Need For Digital Currency</h2>
<p>In FY 22, over 4900 crores were spent by the Reserve Bank of India to print securities. This does not involve any other environmental, social, ESG, or money printing costs and was predominantly borne by four stakeholders – the general public, businesses, banks, and the Central Bank.</p>
<p>The annual Financial Inclusion Index for India for March 2022 is 56.4.</p>
<p>The G20 nations want to prioritize a reduction in the cost of foreign remittances, increase the speed of transfer and reduce the inter-party risk.</p>
<p>There are many more reasons that necessitate the need for a government-controlled digital currency and all of them generate the benefit of reduced expenditure in managing money, reducing risks in the financial system, increasing financial inclusion of the masses, and many more.</p>
<p>So far many other countries like the Bahamas, Australia, Japan, China, USA, UK, and France have started experiments with their respective Central Bank Digital Currencies - CBDC.</p>
<h2 id="economicaspectsofcbdc">Economic aspects of CBDC</h2>
<ul>
<li>CBDC will be at par with the Indian rupee and will be a sovereign currency.</li>
<li>It may or may not carry interest, depending on its usage.</li>
<li>It will be the liability of RBI rather than individual banks.</li>
<li>No bank accounts will be needed to hold CBDC.</li>
<li>Using cash allows the identity of the payer to be hidden. - CBDC's may allow that secrecy but for smaller payment limits.</li>
<li>CBDC will work in offline mode too, without any internet, to allow people in remote areas to be able to use it.</li>
<li>CBDC issued will be different for retail and wholesale uses. The one for wholesale uses, CBDC-W, may have its uses tied to specific reasons. For ex., CBDC issues as agricultural subsidies may only be used for paying for agricultural purposes.</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="technologyaspectsofcbdc">Technology aspects of CBDC</h2>
<ul>
<li>While a private blockchain allows secrecy, it is slow to function as a real-time money transaction system. Hence CBDC may use a hybrid infrastructure combining private blockchains with some central authority.</li>
<li>The platform shall be highly scalable to support very high volume and rate of transactions without performance degradation.</li>
<li>Must be robust to ensure the stability of the financial ecosystem.</li>
<li>Must ensure tamper-proof access control protocols and cryptography for the safety of data for both CBDC and transactional data.</li>
<li>Must allow for cross-platform support, to allow the development of a large variety of client applications using CBDC for financial services.</li>
<li>Must have the ability to integrate with other IT platforms in the financial ecosystem must be at the core of platform design.</li>
<li>Must have a highly evolved fraud monitoring framework to prevent the occurrence of financial fraud.</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="thefutureofblockchaininindia">The Future of Blockchain in India</h2>
<p>Blockchain technologies have proven capabilities of reducing operating costs, and processing time, providing traceability, and increasing consumer trust.</p>
<p>But all blockchain-based applications require an underlying digital currency to operate. With all digital currencies being in the public domain, with governments having no oversight on who is moving the money, there were clear roadblocks to the governments' adoption of it.</p>
<p>With UPI, ONDC, and now CBDC, India has now achieved the holy trinity of a robust financial system. The government has agreed to the need of allowing businesses to connect to the CBDC system. And they have reinforced their commitment to the use of Blockchain as a technology for the future.</p>
<p>ONDC, which worked on the Beckn protocol, was already blockchain-based.</p>
<p>The introduction of the CBDC will remove all obstacles to using Blockchain as a technology. We see more and more businesses now turning to Blockchain in the time to come.</p>
<h2 id="references">References</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://rbi.org.in/Scripts/PublicationReportDetails.aspx?UrlPage=&ID=1218#CP2">RBI's published report</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/industries/financial-services/assets/pwc-cbdc-global-index-1st-edition-april-2021.pdf">PwC CBDC global index</a></li>
</ul>

<p>Next.js 13 was announced recently at <a href="https://nextjs.org/conf">Next conf</a> with plethora of new (and evolved) features that will make the process of writing and maintaining frontend code for software companies (and devs) like ours (<a href="https://www.itmtb.com/">itmtb.com</a>) easier by improving quality, efficiency and readability of code.</p>
<p>Some of those features:</p>
<h2 id="serversidecomponentsbydefault">Server-side components by default:</h2>
<p>Remember using <code>getStaticProps</code>, <code>getStaticPaths</code> and <code>getServerSideProps</code>? Well, they'll be obsolete in Next 13. Now is this a good step? In most cases, yes. Take the simple code below for example:</p>
<figure>
  <img
  src="/blogImages/next13/server-side-props.jpg"
  alt="Server side prop in Next <=12 vs Next 13">
  <figcaption>Server side prop in Next <=12 vs Next 13</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Apart from making the code more readable, server-side components bring in other advantages, like reducing client-side JavaScript bundle.</p>
<p>In large production apps with a lot of dependencies, it becomes a painful challenge for developers to reduce the bundle size, that too without compromising on functionalities. With server-side components, a major portion of dependencies never reach client-side, reducing the bundle size drastically.</p>
<p>Client-side components still have their purpose though, and any component can be made client side by simply adding <code>'use client'</code> as the very first line. Whenever you need to re-render, or use <code>useEffect</code> you can easily make the component client-side.</p>
<figure>
  <img
  src="/blogImages/next13/client-side-component.png"
  alt="Client-side component in Next 13">
  <figcaption>Client-side component in Next 13</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2 id="anawesomelayoutsystem">An awesome layout system:</h2>
<p>Next.js 13 introduces a new layout system at route level.</p>
<p>For example, we can now have custom layout for all pages in <code>/blog</code> route. Just put the layout in <code>layput.{js/jsx/ts/tsx}</code> under <code>blog</code> folder in <code>pages</code> (or <code>app</code> in Next.13) directory.</p>
<p>You can even have custom error component, or loading component based on routes. This definitely makes the developer experience way better and easier. Layouts even preserve state and don't re-render.</p>
<p>A deeper explanation of layout in Next 13:</p>
<div class="yt-container">
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/6mQ3M1CUGnk" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
</div>
<h2 id="turbopack">Turbopack:</h2>
<p>Let's be honest, <a href="https://webpack.js.org/">webpack</a> has been an essential part of the web, but with time it has shown it's drawbacks. It has it's fair share of non-fixable <a href="https://medium.com/hurb-labs/the-problem-with-webpack-8a025268a761">issues</a> and it has hit the cap for performance for a bundler written in JavaScript.</p>
<p><a href="https://vercel.com/blog/turbopack">Turbopack</a>, a bundler written in Rust claims to solve the issue. As per Vercel's claims, it does:</p>
<ul>
<li>700x faster updates than Webpack</li>
<li>10x faster updates than Vite</li>
<li>4x faster cold starts than Webpack</li>
</ul>
<p>The benchmarks are a topic of debate themselves, like the ones claiming Turbopack being 10x faster than <a href="https://vitejs.dev/">Vite</a>:</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Just to add a bit of context - in this benchmark, even before using swc for React transforms, turbo is only 2x compared to vite (compared to marketed 10x). So the difference wasn’t that drastic to begin with.</p>&mdash; Evan You (@youyuxi) <a href="https://twitter.com/youyuxi/status/1586317587348017152?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 29, 2022</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<p>Nonetheless, it is faster than Vite (way faster than webpack) and shows a lot of promise.</p>
<h2 id="imageandfont">Image and Font:</h2>
<p>Next.js 13 has a better <code>next/image</code> since it:</p>
<ul>
<li>Is faster as it ships less JavaScipt to client-side and doesn't need hydration.</li>
<li>Requires <code>alt</code> tag by default for better accessibility.</li>
<li>Easier to style.</li>
</ul>
<p>Next.js 13 also introduces a <a href="https://nextjs.org/blog/next-13#nextfont">font-system</a> through which you can use any Google font, <em>without sending request</em> to Google from browser. Fonts are downloaded at build time and self-hosted in your project. This improves both privacy and performance.</p>
<h2 id="seo">SEO:</h2>
<p>When sharing a blog-post or a page of website, you would've noticed a card like the one below:</p>
<p><img src="/blogImages/next13/social-card-for-blog.png" alt="Social card for SEO" /></p>
<p>This card is produced using <code>&lt;meta&gt;</code> tags in <code>&lt;head&gt;</code> section of page. The image is produced using <code>&lt;meta property="og:image" content="img_url/path" /&gt;</code>. Vercel has created a new library, <code>@vercel/og</code>, that works with Next.js 13 to create dynamic social cards.</p>
<p>You can explicitly create profile cards using <code>@vercel/og</code> like this:</p>
<pre><code class="javascript language-javascript">import { ImageResponse } from "@vercel/og";
export const config = {
   runtime: "experimental-edge",
};
export default async function handler() {
   return ImageResponse(
      &lt;div
         style={{
            backgroundColor: "#fff",
            backgroundImage:
               "radial-gradient(circle at 25px 25px, lightgray 2%, transparent 0%), radial-gradient(circle at 75px 75px, lightgray 2%, transparent 0%)",
            backgroundSize: "100px 100px",
            height: "100%",
            width: "100%",
            textAlign: "center",
            alignContent: "center",
            alignItems: "center",
            justifyContent: "center",
            flexDirection: "column",
            display: "flex",
         }}
      &gt;
         &lt;img
            alt="Vercel"
            width={255}
            height={225}
            src="data:image/svg+xml;base64,PHN2ZyB3aWR0aD0iMTE2IiBoZWlnaHQ9IjEwMCIgeG1sbnM9Imh0dHA6Ly93d3cudzMub3JnLzIwMDAvc3ZnIj48cGF0aCBmaWxsLXJ1bGU9ImV2ZW5vZGQiIGNsaXAtcnVsZT0iZXZlbm9kZCIgZD0iTTU3LjUgMEwxMTUgMTAwSDBMNTcuNSAweiIgLz48L3N2Zz4="
            style={{ margin: "0 75px" }}
         /&gt;
         &lt;div
            style={{
               fontSize: 60,
               marginTop: 30,
               lineHeight: 1.8,
            }}
         &gt;
            Vercel Edge Network
         &lt;/div&gt;
      &lt;/div&gt;,
      {
         width: 1200,
         height: 600,
      }
   );
}
</code></pre>
<p>The above code provides us with the card below for <a href="https://vercel-og-nextjs-one-phi.vercel.app/">this url</a>.
(<a href="https://github.com/devesh-anand/vercel-og-nextjs">Full code for the Next project</a>)</p>
<p><img src="/blogImages/next13/custom-generated-profile-card.png" alt="Custom generated profile card" /></p>
<h2 id="backendupdates">Backend updates:</h2>
<p>Next.js being a full-stack framework, has brought some backend changes as well:</p>
<ul>
<li>Middlewares</li>
<li>You can now use middleware to handle <code>rewrite</code> and <code>redirect</code></li>
</ul>
<h3 id="finalthoughts">Final thoughts:</h3>
<p>Some of the features (like <code>next/font</code>) are still in beta and might take some time before they're production ready. Also, migration might not be that easy, considering the major changes happening in Next.js 13.</p>
<p>Although Next has provided a <a href="https://beta.nextjs.org/docs/upgrade-guide">migration guide from v12 to v13</a>, it might still be tricky to migrate from older versions.</p>
<p>But for new projects, Next.js 13 seems promising. It will be better in almost all aspects, be it user-experience, developer-experience or maintenance, for both developers and companies.</p>

<p>Recently, Diwali- the wonderful festival of lights was celebrated all over India. In earlier times, women used to draw rows of colours forming a beautiful design called Rangoli in their homes and courtyards. Considering human factors, nowadays rangoli stickers are provided that can be pasted anywhere.</p>
<p>Earlier, people used to keep indoor plants in their homes as a form of decoration. But, if there were children or pets at home they were most likely to chew or crush the plants. Designers then came up with the idea of artificial plants that were just imitations of natural plants and needed less maintenance.</p>
<p>Nearly everything is designed to fit human needs, from rangolis to indoor plants. But that wasn't always the case. Believe it or not, it took years for designers to consider what we now call the human factor. The human factor describes the range of variables humans bring to their product interactions.</p>
<h2 id="humanfactorsthatinformdesign">Human factors that inform design</h2>
<p>Here's a few of the most common ones:</p>
<ol>
<li><p><em>Impatience</em> - If we even look at how WhatsApp has adapted itself for the average impatient user — It went from allowing the user to check if their message was sent, to now not just checking if the recipient has received the message, but also blue ticks to check if they have read it.</p></li>
<li><p><em>Limited memory and concentration</em> - People can only hold a small amount of information in their short-term memory, which fades fast. For example, people forget a new password that they’ve just created whereas feeling a new web/mobile app is so easy to use even though they’re interacting with it for the first time.</p></li>
<li><p><em>Analogies and prejudices</em> - During analogy, due to the ‘ Serial Position Effect’ people are most likely to choose the first product they saw. For instance, while ordering food people often compare Swiggy and Zomato. And if they’ve seen Swiggy primarily they are most likely to choose Swiggy over Zomato.</p></li>
<li><p><em>Changes are needed</em> - Yes, change is inevitable. Technology evolves while old ones subside and as a result, users gain experience and new expectations. Consider the rise of Reliance Jio, the telecom company founded in 2016. By providing lower-cost phones and offering consumers free 4G data connections, Jio amassed a huge subscriber base.</p></li>
<li><p><em>Making errors and misjudgment</em> - The Indian copy venture of Adidas i.e. ‘Abibas’ failed miserably in the market for obvious reasons of being a fake brand of the internationally renowned brand.</p></li>
</ol>
<h2 id="conclusion">Conclusion</h2>
<p>Despite all the human factors' limitations on UX designers, it allows them to create even better user experiences.</p>
<p><em>Just like India’s favourite gifting brand, Cadbury Celebrations has rolled out #ShopsForShopless this Diwali, a campaign providing hawkers with a virtual store to sell their products. This is a heartwarming campaign that will promote thousands of hawkers across the country.</em></p>
<p>At the end, I would like to conclude:</p>
<blockquote>
  <p><em>When UX designers turn limitations into opportunities, the human factor isn't so limiting after all.</em></p>
</blockquote>

<ul>
<li><p>The digital twin market is expected to grow from $7.5 billion in 2022 to $96 billion by 2029 at CAGR of 40.6%</p></li>
<li><p>The top 4 industries adopting digital twins are Aerospace &amp; Defense, Automotive, Manufacturing and Healthcare</p></li>
<li><p>75 percent of organizations surveyed by Gartner in 2019 were already using Digital Twins or planned to within a year</p></li>
</ul>
<h2 id="whatisadigitaltwin">What is a digital twin?</h2>
<p>A digital twin is a virtual representation of a real-world product or system and is identical to the original in its behavior.</p>
<p>Imagine a 3D, virtual model of a high-speed pump employed in an oil rig, miles off the coast. The virtual rotors on the 3D model would move as fast as the rotors on the real pump working hundreds of miles away. The outer surface of the 3D model starts to turn red as the real pump's outer surface heats up. Or if the flow of extracted crude slows down in one of the conduits, the 3D model immediately reflects that slow down too.</p>
<p>Further, imagine that a 3D model operator, by observing the model, figures out that the increasing heat on the top right surface of the pump is due to degraded coolant viscosity. At a click of a button on the virtual model, the old coolant starts to flush, and is replaced by new flow parallelly - and these events reflect on the actual pump at the same time.</p>
<p>And if during operations the actual pump shifted its position by 3 cm, the digital twin would also shift by the same amount.</p>
<p>That is what a digital twin is - a virtual representation that not just reflects the internal and external conditions of an actual product but can also change the behavior of the actual product connected to it over the internet.</p>
<h2 id="howisadigitaltwinused">How is a digital twin used?</h2>
<p>Uses of a digital twin range from safety, maintenance, training, and downtime management.</p>
<p>They are useful in optimizing product performance, understanding the in-service life of a product, performing predictive maintenance, and extending a product’s remaining useful life (RUL).</p>
<p>After a malfunction, machines deployed in remote locations need to wait longer while engineers arrive and inspect. If on inspection they find that some spare parts will be needed to fix the machine, their transit adds to the downtime costs of the organization. For machines with digital twins, engineers can identify issues remotely, or even assist local engineers to fix them thereby reducing operational losses.</p>
<p>Training, safety, and expertise are enhanced by training manpower on digital twins simulating the real machines under real working conditions.</p>
<p>Smart cities are increasingly using digital twins to plan city layouts. Automotive, aerospace and defense are using digital twins to monitor and calibrate remote equipment in real time. The Healthcare industry is aggressively pursuing digital twins to monitor healthcare equipment and patient response. Here is a most interesting video that highlights how human digital twins can enhance personal healthcare.</p>
<div class="yt-container">
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/H6JzPCbyVSM" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
</div>
<h2 id="technologiesusedfordigitaltwins">Technologies used for digital twins</h2>
<p>A digital twin setup uses a combination of hardware and software tools. Various IoT sensors dot the machine and send real-time data of its working conditions and internal environment to connected cloud servers, where all that data is analyzed using Artificial Intelligence.</p>
<p>Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality techniques are used to render 3D models of the model, overlaid with real-life working conditions and with integrated controls to make changes in the real machine if required.</p>
<p>Special hardware is needed to create 3D models of the machines and their spatial surroundings to be fed into their VR counterparts.</p>
<h2 id="conclusion">Conclusion</h2>
<p>Most industries stand to gain a lot through the introduction of digital twin technologies in their systems. The introduction will be initially cost-intensive but is capable of generating multiple times RoI by optimizing asset utilization and optimizing planning, safety and responsiveness.</p>

<p>The year 2022 saw over 80 billion USD of gaming acquisitions. Microsoft led the pack with the 68 billion USD acquisition of Activision Blizzard. Facebook and Google has made acquisitions in the gaming space as well, along with Sony and Tencent amongst others.</p>
<p>At the onset it appears a simple strategy to dominate the world of games, strategically they are more valuable buyouts with a wider objective of integrating AR/VR technologies in their business kit.</p>
<h2 id="whatisthebigdealaboutarvr">What is the big deal about AR/VR?</h2>
<p>Let us have a look at the business growth seen in AR/VR in the last few years.</p>
<ul>
<li><p>VR market is estimated to grow up to 252 billion USD in the next 5 years.</p></li>
<li><p>In 2019, about 5 billion USD of VR headsets were sold. This number is slated to touch 20 billion USD by 2023</p></li>
<li><p>The B2C market for VR, which was estimated at 1 billion USD in 2017, is slated to touch 22 billion USD by 2027</p></li>
<li><p>75% of industrial companies that have implemented large-scale VR and AR technologies saw a 10% increase in operations</p></li>
<li><p>According to some reports, the VR and AR market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 63.3 percent by 2025</p></li>
</ul>
<p>VR is going to dominate the way businesses and people do things and it comes as no surprise that the big 3 will want to benefit from it. Let's have a look at the big 3 may benefit from their gaming buyouts.</p>
<h2 id="microsoftshololens">Microsoft's Hololens</h2>
<p>Microsoft has been into gaming for decades now. Though Xbox lags behind the likes of Playstation, it has its share of fan following with games like Gears of War. Microsoft has had Hololens too - the virtual reality headset which currently is used primarily in industrial applications. Automobile companies for example are now using Virtual Reality tools and devices to design automobiles, a task which once was done using life-sized clay models and took years to perfect. Buying leading gaming companies also allows Microsoft to have an edge in AR/VR technologies and open other revenue streams. VR has a wide array of industrial applications and Microsoft intends to stay on top of it.</p>
<p>Have a look at how Toyota is using Hololens for design reviews.</p>
<div class="yt-container">
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Rcct5aBGWs8" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
</div>
<h2 id="facebooksoculus">Facebook's Oculus</h2>
<p>When Facebook acquired Oculus, it was seen as an experiment to enhance the social interaction experience. But as time has passed we have witnessed Facebook's scale of ambitions around the Metaverse. And being the connected world that Metaverse would be, the Oculus may just be the new platform on which we experience our worlds. If that happens it can be an even bigger opportunity than mobile phones.</p>
<h2 id="google">Google</h2>
<p>Google Glass was ahead of its time. But now that time may have come. Google's indirect acquisition of Gambit allows them to enhance their AR/VR technologies. The way we interact with the internet is going to change and with it, Google needs to adapt. Moreover, the Android buyout was one of their biggest successes after the search engine itself. Investment in AR/VR technologies will mean they will be ready for the next platform when the time comes.</p>
<h2 id="conclusion">Conclusion</h2>
<p>VR is immersive. It brings good experience. There is no doubt that the future is going to be dominated by VR and businesses will flock to it as they have flocked to making mobile applications for today. It is only a matter of time now before the big 3 have made billions of dollars of investments in it.</p>

<ul>
<li><p>Agriculture is the primary source of livelihood for about 58% of India’s population</p></li>
<li><p>India has the world's largest cattle herd (buffaloes)</p></li>
<li><p>India has the largest area planted to wheat, rice, and cotton, and is the largest producer of milk, pulses, and spices in the world</p></li>
<li><p>India is the second-largest producer of fruit, vegetables, tea, farmed fish, cotton, sugarcane, wheat, rice, cotton, and sugar</p></li>
<li><p>Agriculture sector in India holds the record for second-largest agricultural land in the world generating employment for about half of the country’s population</p></li>
<li><p>The agriculture and allied sector contributed to 14.2 per cent of the total exports from India in 2020-21</p></li>
</ul>
<h2 id="problemsinagriculture">Problems in agriculture</h2>
<p>Here are some major problems impacting the agriculture sector in India and that are being solved by technology.</p>
<h3 id="climatechange">Climate change</h3>
<p>Increasing climate anomalies have greatly impacted yields all across the board.</p>
<h3 id="foodwastage">Food wastage</h3>
<p>Official stats of food wastage in India look timid. Estimated post-harvest wastages in non-perishable crops such as cereals, pulses and oilseeds are in the range of 4.6-9.9%; in perishables such as fruits and vegetables in the range of 4.6-15.9%. Unofficial numbers may be much higher.</p>
<h3 id="storage">Storage</h3>
<p>The current availability of cold storage facility in India is highly skewed with nearly 70 per cent of the country’s total capacity limited to four states - Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Punjab and Gujarat</p>
<h3 id="pricingtechnicalknowledge">Pricing, technical knowledge</h3>
<p>Lack of transparency in pricing, technical know-how about soil, amount, time and timing of fertilizers, seed quality etc are major issues.</p>
<h2 id="technologyinagriculture">Technology in agriculture</h2>
<p>As of today, India has over a 1000 agri-tech startups. While most of them address the supply chain problem through e-commerce models, many are moving ahead with innovative and technological solutions to solve some of the key problems in the agricultural sector.</p>
<p>Here are the various information technology solutions being used in agriculture to solve some of the major problems.</p>
<h3 id="supplychainmanagement">Supply chain management</h3>
<p>This is the most favored problem across a lot of the startups we analyzed. From farm to plate solutions, to proecessed commodity supply chain management solutions, a wide range of solutions are using cloud and artificial intelligence and smart logistics to minimize time and cost of transporting agricultural goods to the end customer. Efficient supply chain solutions are bringing price transparency, managing demand and reducing wastage of food.</p>
<h3 id="drones">Drones</h3>
<p>In 2022, the Government of India is planning to launch Kisan Drones for crop assessment, digitization of land records, spraying of insecticides and nutrients. Various drone startups are already operational.
Micro climate and weather alerts
While the climate cannot be controlled, better predictability of weather helps farmers manage activities like sowing and harvesting. Various startups are using data analytics to combine meteorological data, satellite imagery and other sources to provide weather and climate alerts for the next 1-2 weeks.</p>
<h3 id="precisionfarming">Precision farming</h3>
<p>Precision farming means real time analysis of soil, plant and produce. Using IoT devices that transfer real time data from a farm to a cloud solution, various startups are now telling farmers what to grow, when to grow, amount and kind of fertilizer needed, soil conditions. Various blockchain solutions use satellite imagery to track changing soil conditions and help farmers manage activities.</p>
<h3 id="shelfmonitoring">Shelf monitoring</h3>
<p>Compared to developed nations, India has a very high rate of food wastage in the perishable category. Shelf monitoring technologies help manage that. These are IoT sensors in a smart warehouse that can indicate if the food quality is deteriorating, and in most cases be able to manage the storage environment to prevent that and prolong food life and quality.</p>
<h3 id="smartsortinggradingprecisionpackaging">Smart sorting, grading, precision packaging</h3>
<p>The best produce is exported. Artificial Intelligence is making the grading of farm produce more accurate and thereby increasing food quality and customer satisfaction. Precision sorting and packaging powered by artificial intelligence allow for optimizing packaging costs and type.</p>
<h3 id="benchmarkingqualitycompliance">Benchmarking, quality, compliance</h3>
<p>Combined with industry wide data, and solutions like geotagging, various industry wide benchmarking services are helping farmers gauge and thus enhance the quality of their produce for the markets they serve.</p>
<h3 id="financefasterpayments">Finance, faster payments</h3>
<p>Finance remains the backbone of the agriculture sector. Using collected data over produce, quality, revenues, various startups are bringing better financing solutions to farmers. Efficient supply chains are speeding up payment cycles for producers.</p>
<h2 id="governmentsinitiativesforincreasingtechnologyuseinagriculture">Government’s initiatives for increasing technology use in agriculture</h2>
<ol>
<li><p>The Indian government has initiated Digital Agriculture Mission for 2021-25 for agriculture projects based on new technologies such as artificial intelligence, block chain, remote sensing and GIS technology, drones, robots and others.</p></li>
<li><p>In September 2021, the Union Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare signed five MoUs with CISCO, Ninjacart, Jio Platforms Limited, ITC Limited and NCDEX e-Markets Limited. This MoU will have five pilot projects, which will help farmers make decisions on the kind of crops to grow, variety of seeds to use and best practices to adopt to maximize yield.</p></li>
<li><p>The Government of India is going to provide Rs. 2,000 crore (US$ 306.29 million) for computerization of Primary Agricultural Credit Society (PACS) to ensure cooperatives are benefitted through digital technology.</p></li>
<li><p>100% FDI in the agriculture sector in India is allowed through the automatic route in the following activities: Horticulture, floriculture, apiculture and farming of vegetables and mushrooms. Animal husbandry, fish farming, and aquaculture. Development of seeds.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>*References</p>
<p><a style='color:blue; overflow-wrap: break-word;' target='_blank' href='https://www.ibef.org/industry/agriculture-india'>https://www.ibef.org/industry/agriculture-india</a></p>
<p><a style='color:blue; overflow-wrap: break-word;' target='_blank' href='https://rbidocs.rbi.org.in/rdocs/Bulletin/PDFs/02AR_170120226CD582783DB44FECB7A07AC238270E5F.PDF'>https://rbidocs.rbi.org.in/rdocs/Bulletin/PDFs/02AR_170120226CD582783DB44FECB7A07AC238270E5F.PDF</a></p>
<p><a style='color:blue; overflow-wrap: break-word;' target='_blank' href='https://thewire.in/agriculture/india-agricultural-produce-wasted'>https://thewire.in/agriculture/india-agricultural-produce-wasted</a></p>
<p><a style='color:blue; overflow-wrap: break-word;' target='_blank' href='https://www.investindia.gov.in/'>https://www.investindia.gov.in/</a></p>
<h2 id="conclusion">Conclusion</h2>
<p>With pro-active government policies, and increasing expenditure around technology adoption the agriculture sector will continue to witness robust tailwinds. If you are looking to adopt technology for your agri business, we can help you.</p>

<h2 id="metaverseexplained">Metaverse Explained</h2>
<p>While your partner makes you wait at the shopping mall, you decide to log onto Facebook. The new Facebook you have heard so much about.</p>
<p>You update the app, click open it, and it asks you to validate yourself. Password, your voice, or your retina scan. You're wondering how did it get all these - you're almost scared. But it's Facebook. So you move ahead and click Login.</p>
<p>And lo and behold, the wall and the lists are all gone.</p>
<p>You see yourself, in 3D, constructed like a perfect lookalike. For anyone on your friends' list sharing their locations and in the same shopping mall, you see their 3D avatars around you.</p>
<p>You of course do not know where they are or what are they shopping or else it will be a blatant invasion of privacy. Yet you tap their avatars and a conversation opens between you two.</p>
<p>While you're virtually talking, Facebook tells you about Starbucks in the same mall. You ask your friend if they would like to meet you at Starbucks. But they prefer a McCafe - which they saw on their Facebook.</p>
<p>You agree on McCafe and before you step in there, your friend placed an order for the both of you to McCafe, your money deducted from a blockchain-based wallet that your regulations would have approved. Being in India it would be the Digital Rupee, but McCafe operates on other currencies. The conversion between currencies is made in real-time using a central payment layer integrated into Facebook Metaverse that can choose the best conversion rates.</p>
<p>And what of the Cappuccio, 2 Big Macs, and 1 chocolate muffin you ordered? Well, the McCafe inventory updates itself and the supply chain comes into the picture immediately to ensure they do not run out of the good stuff.</p>
<p>And when you and your buddy reach the McCafe, there you see your partner sitting, chatting, and laughing with friends while trying dress after dress through their virtual avatars from the LifeStyle one floor across them.</p>
<p>Welcome to the age of Metaverse.</p>
<h2 id="whatismetaverse">What is Metaverse?</h2>
<p>A Metaverse is a 3d virtual, connected world, that brings our digital experiences closer to your real-life experiences. Unlike the internet applications of today, it can connect more diverse services, and experiences in one place so you experience and interact with them as if you were there.</p>
<p>Contrary to the current disintegrated form of the internet, Metaverses will be more driven by platforms rather than disintegrated applications leveraging the common layer of the internet.</p>
<h2 id="whatimpactwillmetaversehaveonbusinesses">What impact will Metaverse have on businesses?</h2>
<p>Unlike the previous phase of the internet, the Metaverse will not impact a few businesses at a time. It will impact more diverse businesses and do it together. For it cannot function with lesser integration.</p>
<p>To function effectively, Metaverse will have to leverage all the latest technologies available. Imagine Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, Natural Language Processing, Augmented and Virtual Reality, the latest data encryption and transmission technologies powering your telecom service provider, and CPUs and servers that can process data much faster than they can today.</p>
<h2 id="howwillmetaverseimpactbusinessesandourlives">How will Metaverse impact businesses and our lives?</h2>
<h3 id="1personalidentitysecurityandreducingidentitytheft">1. Personal identity, security, and reducing identity theft</h3>
<p>Tired of a dozen usernames across a dozen websites? Imagine your 3d avatar stored as an <a href='https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-fungible_token' target='_blank'> NFT (NonFungible Token) </a> and used across all businesses accessing the connected Metaverse - after your permission, ideally.</p>
<p>The latest Computer Vision technologies will allow Metaverse to create your near-perfect 3D avatar using the pictures, and videos you uploaded.</p>
<p>Encrypted as a secure hash, they will be stored across central repositories and could be accessed only after an authentication method of your choice - voice, scans, text passwords, or a combination of some.</p>
<h3 id="23drealtimeinteractions">2. 3D real-time interactions</h3>
<p>You can buy a bag of chips online, you won't do that for a bike, a car, that expensive jewelry or dress, or a house. What if your 3D avatar could visit the 3D model of a house? You may even be able to see how the sunshine brightens the roof, as unseen by the patron, you lie down on the 3D bed and admire the changing shadows with time.</p>
<p>And as you are entering - interact with other 3D avatars in real-time as they are leaving the property, and getting their feedback. Priceless.</p>
<h3 id="3connectedinventorysupplychainandbetterbuyingdecisions">3. Connected inventory, supply chain, and better buying decisions</h3>
<p>Imagine feeling like splurging on yourself on your birthday. Your heart stops on that awesome Louise Vuitton bag. It just goes with your personality, or so you conclude when your beautifully dressed 3D avatar picks it and turns to you so you could size it up. And you just want it.</p>
<p>You're instantly all buying options, ranked in the order of price or delivery time. You choose the one from
some store, pay using your digital wallet and wait.</p>
<p>The store gets the order, gets instant quotes from 3 delivery services again ranked in order of price and delivery time, and the store chooses one.</p>
<p>As soon as the bag is picked up from the store physically, the inventory system kicks in and places realtime orders with the supplier to update the required inventory.</p>
<h2 id="conclusion">Conclusion</h2>
<p>The Metaverse revolution is a little while away. It will need expensive technology, more connected businesses, and more centralised information. The high operational costs may make it a barrier for small and medium businesses to enter.</p>
<p>The concentration of users' information will also add to the already increasing risks to personal identity.</p>
<p>For those who are making platforms to do it all will take all the winning share.</p>
<p>Users, as always, will be in for a treat of experience.</p>
<p>Many startups specially in Asia Pacific and the west are building applications on Metaverse ideas. It will
be interesting to see how they shape our day to day lives.</p>

<h2 class="text-4xl">The Problem</h2>
<p>Most businesses spend more on cloud setups by not knowing which cloud vendor charges how much for
which service or component. It is not commonly known that different cloud vendors have their pricing
suitable for different workloads. Understanding the application workload profile and corresponding cloud
pricing can mean a saving of as much as 30% on annual cloud costs.</p>
<p style="color:#4285f4">
We compared a few cloud vendors to draw price differences between their components.
</p>
<div style="display:flex; justify-content: space-around;" class="logoDiv">
<img src="/blogImages/cloudPrice/A comparison between prices of the major cloud vendors (2).png" alt="aws-logo" style="width:100%">

</div>
<h2 class="text-4xl">Methodology</h2>
<h4>Cloud Platforms compared</h4>
<p>
We compared 
<u> <a href='https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator' target='_blank'> Google Cloud Platform (GCP), </a> 
</u>
<u>
<a href='https://calculator.aws/#/' target='_blank'>Amazon Web Services (AWS), </a> 
</u> and 
<u> 
<a href='https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/calculator/' target='_blank'>Microsoft Azure </a>
</u> for theirpricing. We used their respective pricing calculators.
</p>
<h4>Components compared</h4>
<p>
We looked at compute (servers, Linux), database, cloud storage, managed containerized solutions, load
balancers, NAT gateways, Content Delivery Networks (CDN), serverless functions, Secrets Managers,
logging and monitoring components, standard support costs and some Artificial Intelligence
components.
</p>
<p>
They were compared for similar workloads, as much as possible. In cases where an exact comparison
was not possible (for example where say GCP offers a 2 vCPU compute engine with 3.75 GB RAM, AWS
may offer 2 vCPU with a 4GB RAM), we took the closest matching configurations
</p>
<h4>Limitations</h4>
<p>
This study is only indicative and actual prices vary with your usage. These prices are also subject to
change at the discretion of the cloud vendor
</p>
<h2 class="text-4xl">Cloud Price Comparison Results</h2>
<h4>Compute instances</h4>
<div class="c2">
    <div class="up-content" style="display:flex;">
        <div class="uniquebox">
            <img src="/blogImages/cloudPrice/image.png" alt="aws-logo"  style="width:75%; ">
        </div> 
        <div class="uniquebox2">
            <p>
                Compute instances are servers on the cloud that you can use for running your
                applications. You can choose the operating system, CPU, RAM and persistent storage
                attached.
            </p>
        </div>
    </div>
    <div class="mid-content" style="background-color:#7ac0f8; padding:10px; color:white; font-size: 17px;">
        <h4>Compared capacity</h4>
        <p>2 vCPU, 8 GB RAM, 100 GB storage, 100% monthly utilisation</p>
        <div class="list" style="margin-top: 25px;">
            <p>GCP  USD 62</p>
            <p>AWS  USD 40</p>
            <p>AZURE  USD 70</p>
        </div>
    </div>
    <div class="lower-content" style="display:flex;">
        <div class="uniquebox_tips">
            <img src="/blogImages/cloudPrice/image (1).png" alt="aws-logo"  style="width:100%; ">
        </div> 
        <div class="uniquebox2">       
            <p>
                You can reduce your compute costs by opting for longer duration commitments.
            </p>
        </div>
    </div>
</div>
<h4>Database</h4>
<div class="c2">
<div class="up-content" style="display:flex;">
    <div class="uniquebox">
        <img src="/blogImages/cloudPrice/mysql.png" alt="aws-logo"  style="width:100%; ">
    </div> 
    <div class="uniquebox2">
    <p>
        Comparison was carried on a dedicated, managed cloud MySQL instance. Managed
        databases are generally expensive components on all cloud vendors.
    </p>
</div>

</div>
<div class="mid-content" style="background-color:#9a86ff; padding:10px; color:white; font-size: 17px;">
    <h4>Compared capacity</h4>
    <p>1 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, 30 GB storage, 100% monthly utilisation</p>
    <div class="list" style="margin-top: 25px;">
        <p>GCP  USD 65</p>
        <p>AWS  USD 79</p>
        <p>AZURE  USD 85</p>
    </div>
</div>
<div class="lower-content" style="display:flex;">
    <div class="uniquebox_tips">
        <img src="/blogImages/cloudPrice/image (1).png" alt="aws-logo"  style="width:100%; ">
    </div> 
    <div class="uniquebox2">       
    <p>
        Depending on your solution requirements, you may benefit by on-demand instances to
        save costs.
    </p>
    </div>
</div>
</div>
<h4>Cloud storage</h4>
<div class="c2">
<div class="up-content" style="display:flex;">
    <div class="uniquebox">
        <img src="/blogImages/cloudPrice/image (2).png" alt="aws-logo"  style="width:100%; ">
    </div> 
    <div class="uniquebox2">
    <p>
        Cloud storage is largely used for storing images, videos, documents, websites etc. This
        storage can be public (accessible on the internet) or private (accessible only from inside
        the cloud platform). Storage is often associated with network transfer costs.
    </p>
</div>

</div>
    <div class="mid-content" style="background-color:#7ac0f8; padding:10px; color:white; font-size: 17px;">
        <h4>Compared capacity</h4>
        <p>30 GB storage, 100 GB network egress, 100% monthly utilisation</p>
        <div class="list" style="margin-top: 25px;">
            <p>GCP  USD 9</p>
            <p>AWS  USD 12</p>
            <p>AZURE  USD 5</p>
        </div>
    </div>
    <div class="lower-content" style="display:flex;">
        <div class="uniquebox_tips">
            <img src="/blogImages/cloudPrice/image (1).png" alt="aws-logo"  style="width:100%; ">
        </div> 
        <div class="uniquebox2">       
        <p>
            Some cloud vendors offer cold storage to store data not accessed frequently. They are
            cheap compared to regular cloud storage components.
        </p>
        </div>
    </div>
</div>
<h4>Fully managed containerised solutions</h4>
<div class="c2">
    <div class="up-content" style="display: flex;">
        <div class="uniquebox">
            <img src="/blogImages/cloudPrice/image (3).png" alt="aws-logo"  style="width:80%;">
        </div>
        <div class="uniquebox2">        
        <p>
            Containers allow you to bundle your applications, dependencies and hardware resources
            so you can execute with restart-ability, efficiency and cost effectiveness. They virtualize
            any operating system so you can run your applications anywhere
        </p>
    </div>
    </div>
    <div class="mid-content" style="background-color:#9a86ff; padding:10px; color:white; font-size: 17px;">
        <h4>Compared capacity</h4>
        <p> <a href='https://kubernetes.io/' target='_blank'> Kuberenetes,</a> 200 concurrent requests, 3000 ms of execution time per request, 100,000 requests per
            month, 1 vCPU, 256 MB RAM, CPU allocated during request processing</p>
        <div class="list" style="margin-top: 25px;">
            <p>GCP  USD 41</p>
            <p>AWS  USD 73</p>
            <p>AZURE  USD 89</p>
        </div>
    </div>
    <div class="lower-content" style="display:flex;">
        <div class="uniquebox_tips">
            <img src="/blogImages/cloudPrice/image (1).png" alt="aws-logo"  style="width:100%; ">
        </div> 
        <div class="uniquebox2">     
        <p>
            Opting for on-demand containers is often cost effective.
        </p>
        </div>
    </div>
</div>
<h4>Serverless functions</h4>
<div class="c2">
    <div class="up-content" style="display: flex;">
        <div class="uniquebox">
            <img src="/blogImages/cloudPrice/image (4).png" alt="aws-logo"  style="width:100%; ">
        </div>
        <div class="uniquebox2">       
        <p>
            Serverless functions allow you to run standalone functionalities without needing a server.
            They get executed on demand. They are often accompanied by some sort of API
            management solution needed to invoke them. 
            <a href='https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serverless_computing' target='_blank'> Know more </a>
        </p>
        </div>
    </div>
    <div class="mid-content" style="background-color:#7ac0f8; padding:10px; color:white; font-size: 17px;">
        <h4>Compared capacity</h4>
        <p>10000 invocations, 10 MB network bandwidth per invocation, 256 MB RAM, 1 vCPU, 3000 ms execution
            time</p>
        <div class="list" style="margin-top: 25px;">
            <p>GCP  USD 0</p>
            <p>AWS  USD 0</p>
            <p>AZURE  USD 0</p>
        </div>
    </div>
    <div class="lower-content" style="display:flex;">
        <div class="uniquebox_tips">
            <img src="/blogImages/cloudPrice/image (1).png" alt="aws-logo"  style="width:100%; ">
        </div>
        <div class="uniquebox2">
        <p>
            With the right architecture, you can shift most of your functionality to a serverless function
            and save on your compute instance costs.
        </p> 
    </div>
    </div>
</div>
<h4>Load balancers</h4>
<div class="c2">
    <div class="up-content" style="display: flex;">
        <div class="uniquebox">
            <img src="/blogImages/cloudPrice/load.png" alt="aws-logo"  style="width:100%; ">
        </div> 
        <div class="uniquebox2">       
        <p>
            Load balancing refers to efficiently distributing incoming network traffic across a group of
            backend servers, also known as a server farm or server pool. While not needed in
            development or testing environments, they may be critical for production setups. 
            <a href='https://www.nginx.com/resources/glossary/load-balancing/' target='_blank'>Know more </a>
        </p>
        </div>
    </div>
    <div class="mid-content" style="background-color:#9a86ff; padding:10px; color:white; font-size: 17px;">
        <h4>Compared capacity</h4>
        <p>5 forwarding rules, 30 GB ingress, 100 GB egress</p>
        <div class="list" style="margin-top: 25px;">
            <p>GCP  USD 22</p>
            <p>AWS  USD 17</p>
            <p>AZURE  USD 13</p>
        </div>
    </div>
</div>
<h4>Internet Gateway</h4>
<div class="c2">
    <div class="up-content" style="display: flex;">
        <div class="uniquebox">
            <img src="/blogImages/cloudPrice/IG.png" alt="aws-logo"  style="width:100%; ">
        </div>
        <div class="uniquebox2">
         <p>
            An internet gateway is a horizontally scaled, redundant, and highly available VPC
            component that allows communication between your VPC and the internet. In some
            cases it can be highly recommended to have as an additional layer of security between
            your application and the internet.
        </p>
        </div>
    </div>
    <div class="mid-content" style="background-color:#7ac0f8; padding:10px; color:white; font-size: 17px;">
        <h4>Compared capacity</h4>
        <p>1 gateway, 100 GB egress</p>
        <div class="list" style="margin-top: 25px;">
            <p>GCP  USD 6</p>
            <p>AWS  USD 17</p>
            <p>AZURE  USD 13</p>
        </div>
    </div>
</div>
<h4>Content Delivery Networks (CDN)</h4>
<div class="c2">
    <div class="up-content" style="display: flex;">
        <div class="uniquebox">
            <img src="/blogImages/cloudPrice/CDN.png" alt="aws-logo"  style="width:100%; ">
        </div> 
        <div class="uniquebox2">      
        <p>
            A CDN caches your content across various geographical locations so that users
            accessing your services from that location do not see significant delays in responses. This
            is highly recommended if say your website needs to be accessed from different
            continents.
        </p>
        </div>
    </div>
    <div class="mid-content" style="background-color:#9a86ff; padding:10px; color:white; font-size: 17px;">
        <h4>Compared capacity</h4>
        <p>Cache 100 GB egress, 100,000 requests per month</p>
        <div class="list" style="margin-top: 25px;">
            <p>GCP  USD 2</p>
            <p>AWS  USD 2</p>
            <p>AZURE  USD 1</p>
        </div>
    </div>
</div>
<h4>Logging and monitoring</h4>
<div class="c2">
    <div class="up-content" style="display: flex;">
        <div class="uniquebox">
            <img src="/blogImages/cloudPrice/LM.png" alt="aws-logo"  style="width:100%; ">
        </div>
        <div class="uniquebox2">        
        <p>
            While not always used, monitoring and logging components can help you trace back
            issues, track unintended accesses and serve as a general audit tool.
        </p>
    </div>
    </div>
    <div class="mid-content" style="background-color:#7ac0f8; padding:10px; color:white; font-size: 17px;">
        <h4>Compared capacity</h4>
        <p>10000 evenr=ts</p>
        <div class="list" style="margin-top: 25px;">
            <p>GCP  USD 41</p>
            <p>AWS  USD 15</p>
            <p>AZURE  USD 10</p>
        </div>
    </div>
    <div class="lower-content" style="display:flex;">
        <div class="uniquebox_tips">
            <img src="/blogImages/cloudPrice/image (1).png" alt="aws-logo"  style="width:100%;">
        </div>
        <div class="uniquebox2">       
        <p>
            Monitoring and logging components often work in conjunction with other cloud
            components which will also add to the cost.
        </p>
        </div>
    </div>
</div>
<h4>Artificial Intelligence - NLP</h4>
<div class="c2">
    <div class="up-content" style="display: flex;">
        <div class="uniquebox">
            <img src="/blogImages/cloudPrice/image (5).png" alt="aws-logo"  style="width:100%;">
        </div>
        <div class="uniquebox2">        
        <p>
            Just to keep the study indicative and concise, we only focussed on Natural Language
            Processing APIs across the given cloud vendors.
        </p>
    </div>
    </div>
    <div class="mid-content" style="background-color:#9a86ff; padding:10px; color:white; font-size: 17px;">
        <h4>Compared capacity</h4>
        <p>4000 requests</p>
        <div class="list" style="margin-top: 25px;">
            <p>GCP  USD 13</p>
            <p>AWS  USD 30</p>
            <p>AZURE  USD 70</p>
        </div>
    </div>
</div>
<h4>Support costs</h4>
<div id="c2">
    <div class="up-content" style="display: flex;">
        <div class="uniquebox">
            <img src="/blogImages/cloudPrice/image (6).png" alt="aws-logo"  style="width:100%;">
        </div>
        <div class="uniquebox2">       
        <p>
            Support is not included by default. While email support may be available, any other
            support is chargeable and is often a percentage of your average monthly bill.
        </p>
        </div>
    </div>
    <div class="mid-content" style="background-color:#7ac0f8; padding:10px; color:white; font-size: 17px;">
        <h4>Compared capacity</h4>
        <p>Standard support, over a USD 100 monthly bill</p>
        <div class="list" style="margin-top: 25px;">
            <p>GCP  USD 32</p>
            <p>AWS  USD 10</p>
            <p>AZURE  USD 100</p>
        </div>
    </div>
</div>
<h2 class="text-4xl">Conclusion</h2>
<div class="conclusion">
    <div class="up-content" style="display: flex;">
        <div class="uniquebox">
            <img src="/blogImages/cloudPrice/AWS-logo-2.jpg" alt="aws-logo"  style="width:100%;">
        </div>
        <div class="uniquebox2">        
        <p>
          Cost efficient for server based, serverless or stand alone applications with persistent
        storage. Logging and monitoring is cheaper too. Generally cheaper for CPU intensive
        applications.
        </p>
        </div>
    </div>
    <div class="up-content" style="display: flex;">
        <div class="uniquebox">
            <img src="/blogImages/cloudPrice/gcp.png" alt="aws-logo"  style="width:100%; ">
        </div> 
        <div class="uniquebox2">       
        <p>
            Cost efficient for network intensive, storage intensive applications.
        </p>
        </div>
    </div>
    <div class="up-content" style="display: flex;">
        <div class="uniquebox">
            <img src="/blogImages/cloudPrice/azure.png" alt="aws-logo"  style="width:100%; ">
        </div> 
        <div class="uniquebox2">      
        <p>
            Generally expensive across the board.
        </p>
        </div>
    </div>
</div>

<h4 id="blackswanevent">Black Swan Event</h4>
<p>A Black Swan event is one whose occurrence is rare but causes a massive impact when it happens.</p>
<p>Think of the great depression, both world wars, the twin towers, and the 2008 housing crisis, and you have some black swans from recent history.</p>
<p>And now the COVID-19!
While the list of areas disrupted by COVID-19 is long, this article is about one on the business areas that addressed the disruption head-on and adopted technology like never before to come on top of it.</p>
<p><b><span style="color:#DB50EC;" >This one is about the beauty industry.</span></b></p>
<h4 id="thedisruption">The Disruption</h4>
<p><img src="/blogImages/hero/the-disruption.png" alt="the disruption" title="the disruption" /></p>
<p>Imagine a beautiful woman walking into a beauty store, slowly scanning the lipsticks just waiting to be picked by her. In an ideal world, she would have picked a tester and tried it on, taking her sweet long time in front of the oblong mirror as she decided.</p>
<p>The COVID years, the prolonged business shut downs closed those opportunities.</p>
<p>The post COVID years saw consumer behaviour changing to become more hygience oriented.</p>
<p>The eagerness to try on a tester was replaced by the cautiousness of the new times.</p>
<p><b><span style="color:#DB50EC">COVID-19 changed the beauty industry forever.</span></b></p>
<h4 id="mirrormirroronthewall">Mirror Mirror On The Wall</h4>
<p><img src="/blogImages/hero/mirror-mirror-on-the-wall.png" alt="mirror-mirror on the wall" title="mirror-mirror-on-the-wall" /></p>
<h5 id="howsmarttechtookupthechallenge">How Smart Tech Took Up The Challenge</h5>
<p>Our challenges always meet our opportunities. And capabilities.</p>
<p>Artificial Intelligence, Augemented and Virtual Reality and other technologies came together to solve this and many other problems for the beauty industry.</p>
<p>Now imagine walking into a beauty store, standing in front a touch enabled mirror, where on your live reflection, the chosen lipstick shows applied to your lips. You tap another shade and in an instant you can see in your live reflection how it will look on hour lips.</p>
<p>Fiction? No. Check this video out of one such magic mirror.</p>
<div class="yt-container">
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/snb7RoaFbZQ" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
</div>
<p><b><span style="color:#DB50EC">Let's see what all technology solved.</span></b></p>
<h4 id="personalization">Personalization</h4>
<p>Let's start with a simple statistic - the return rate for apparels ordered online is quite high.</p>
<p>While cosmetics do not suffer from this problem owing to return policies and hygiene factors, customer discomfort does play a role in their return.</p>
<p>AI, AR and VR have managed to provide a personalized experience to users minimizing such instances.</p>
<p>Now imagine trying to buy a face cream from a relatively new brand. A smart assistant may ask you a few questions about your skin type, and then make the best recommendations out of its catalogue..</p>
<p><b><span style="color:#DB50EC">Using available customer data, pharmacological information, AI is now able to increase customer satisfaction and purchase.</span></b></p>
<h4 id="virtualtryons">Virtual Try-Ons</h4>
<p><img src="/blogImages/hero/virtual-try-ons.png" alt="virtual try-ons" title="virtual try-ons" /></p>
<p><b><span style="color:#DB50EC">Here is another statistic - only 20% items put in the cart and converted to a purchase.</span></b></p>
<p>Imagine not being able to buy a cosmetic due to concerns around physical hygiene or not being sure about whether it will suit you or not.</p>
<p>Virtual try on solutions, powered by AR/VR, allow buyers to see how a product would look on them in a virtual way.</p>
<h4 id="smartproductdesign">Smart Product Design</h4>
<p><b><span style="color:#DB50EC">Technologies like Natural Language Processing are being</span></b> leveraged actively to use customer feedbacks on various social forums and discover pain points, product expectations etc.</p>
<p>Such insights are fed directly to design, marketing, sales and research teams to optimise the products.</p>
<h4 id="industryadoption">Industry Adoption</h4>
<p><b><span style="color:#DB50EC">AI in beauty industry is over a 7 billion USD business today.</span></b>
Most major cosmoceutical companies have made AI investments to enhance customer experience.</p>
<p>Beauty brands as <a href="https://www.ysl.com/en-en" target="_blank">Yves Saint Laurent</a>, <a href="https://www.lorealparisusa.com/" target="_blank">L'Oréal Paris</a>, MAC Cosmetics, and <a href="https://www.macys.com/" target="_blank">Macy's</a> used <a href="https://www.perfectcorp.com/" target="_blank">Perfect Corp</a> technologies for customers to have a virtual try-on experience.</p>
<p>L'Oreal acquired Modiface for an AI makeup app with augmented reality in cooperation with Facebook.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.coty.com/" target="_blank">Coty</a> launched "Let's Get Ready" in 2018. to allow buyers to create personalized makeup, hair, and nail looks for any event.</p>
<p>About 75% of the others are planning to make major AI investments in the coming year.</p>
<p>If you are a beauty company looking to benefit from AI, AR, VR technologies, <b><span style="color:#DB50EC">we can help.</span></b></p>

<h2 id="thepowerofboring">The Power of Boring</h2>
<h5 id="frommanagingforefficiencytomanagingforreliability">From Managing For Efficiency To Managing For Reliability</h5>
<p>Routine is predictable. Predictable is boring. But put that predictability of a routine in environments where the right outcome is critical and routine becomes uber valuable.</p>
<p>One would want very high predictability in running their IT operations day in and day out. Yet predictability becomes more elusive as the organization, platform, or solution grows.</p>
<p>Lack of predictability costs money, unhappy customers, and regulatory issues.</p>
<p>The Information Technology Infrastructure Library, or ITIL, comes in handy in reigning in that predictability.</p>
<h1 id="69organizationsbelievethatlackofitservicemanagementmaturityledtocostandtimeoverruns">69 % Organizations believe that lack of IT service management maturity led to cost and time overruns</h1>
<p><strong>ITIL</strong></p>
<p>The <strong>Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL)</strong> is a set of guidelines that allow IT projects to remain organized despite their growing scale and complexity.</p>
<p>ITIL describes organization and technology independent processes, procedures, tasks, and checklists that can be used to plan, implement, and manage IT services and assets.</p>
<p><strong>ITIL versus Project Management</strong></p>
<p>There are overlapping areas between the two. Yet they are starkly different. A project on one hand has a definite boundary, milestones, deliverables, and resources. A service has all that except it is an ongoing engagement.</p>
<p><strong>ITIL versus Program Management</strong></p>
<p>Program management can encompass diverse activities required to run a big engagement. Building a customized CRM for a Fortune 5 00's global operations may involve setting up IT development projects, data sourcing projects with vendors, cloud service management projects et cetera under one umbrella.</p>
<p>While program management remains more strategic, service management often tends to be more tactical and deals with day to day operations of commissioned programs.</p>
<p>Project Management is centered on a few core deliverables while additionally managing time, risk, resources et cetera. Service Management has multiple core deliverables in the form of change management, incident management, problem management et cetera.</p>
<h4 id="elementsofitilincidentmanagement">Elements of ITIL Incident Management</h4>
<p>An incident is defined as an issue or a bug in the expected behavior of a commissioned software. While bugs may be a result of a miss during the IT development phase or earlier, other issues like server failures, data corruption, nonavailability of data to process, or an expected processing workload et Cetera can cause the service to fail.</p>
<h2 id="incidentmanagementaimsto">Incident Management aims to:</h2>
<p>Categorize issues into different priorities ranging from very high to low</p>
<p>Define and track the occurrence of incidents Is responsible for ensuring incidents are fixed within expected timelines.</p>
<p>Measure the efficiency of fixing the incidents and improving it.</p>
<p>Performing root cause analysis on incidents so any reoccurrence can be avoided.</p>
<p>Problem Management</p>
<p>An incident recurring frequently is termed a Problem in ITIL. These cause resource drainage by keeping Operations occupied.</p>
<p>Problem Management aims to:</p>
<p>Identify problems from incidents.</p>
<p>Assess impact, coordinate their resolution with corresponding teams.</p>
<p>Is responsible for ensuring problems are resolved within expected timelines.</p>
<p>Change Management</p>
<p>Any new release, or fix to the existing code base, servers, configurations et cetera is called a Change.</p>
<p>Change Management aims to:</p>
<p>Ensuring new changes won't disrupt service stability.</p>
<p>Implementing a change can be disruptive to normal business operations. Change Management shall
ensure such disruptions are minimal, well planned, and agreed with all stakeholders.</p>
<p>Minimize unplanned changes.</p>
<h4 id="elementsofitil">Elements of ITIL</h4>
<p>Service Delivery Management.</p>
<p>While a full fledged ITIL implementation caters to various verticals, overseeing them is the service delivery management profile.</p>
<p>Responsible for overall service level agreements, key process indicators the service delivery manager ensures quality delivery and continued service.</p>
<h4 id="elementsofitilisitilformyorganization">Elements of ITIL Is ITIL For My Organization?</h4>
<p>Every process framework comes with overheads of training, manpower and compliance. If you're a small organization you may not benefit from a full fledged implementation of ITIL. Yet carefully selecting areas for implementation can benefit you.</p>
<p>If you're a large organization and looking to scale, then ITIL is definitely the way to go.</p>
<p>The costs of an early implementation will be far offset by savings from wasted efforts and lost customer confidence.</p>
<p>About itmtb Technologies.</p>
<p>itmtb is a global professional services company with leading capabilities in digital, cloud and blockchain. Combining unmatched experience and specialized skills across more than 10 industries, we offer Consulting, Technology and Operations services. Our people
deliver on the promise of technology, innovation, and quality every day, serving clients in more countries than 1. We operate with a very simple belief - our customers' success is our success. Visit us at <a href="http://www.itmtb.com.">http://www.itmtb.com.</a></p>
<p>This content is provided for general information purposes. Copyright © 2022 itmtb Technologies. All rights reserved. itmtb and its logo are registered trademarks of itmtb Technologies Private Limited.</p>

<p>A large US bank approached a global IT firm seeking solution for a painful problem - 3 million USD annual losses due to frauds.</p>
<p>This is how it worked: a new customer takes a loan from the bank, and links the bank account details of another customer for payments without their knowing. The fraudulent loan seeker had access to the victim's bank details.</p>
<p>The global IT company built an integrated solution comprising of validation APIs that can validate the ownership of bank accounts, in addition to an artificially intelligence layer that, as a second layer, could detect potentially fraudulent applications and warn the back office.</p>
<h1 id="firstastory">First, A Story</h1>
<p>While the validation APIs alone brought in a major reduction in fraudulent cases, the AI based warning system flagged over 53 % of the 1 million applications checked as potentially fraudulent.</p>
<p>While it is yet to be established how many of those 53 % applications were actually fraudulent, and how many of those 47 % flagged appropriate were indeed appropriate, the eye catching detail remains the fact that a half of the applications were flagged.</p>
<h3 id="ifoneflipsacoinandguessestheywouldberighthalfthetimesisanaisolutionpredicting53offraudsaddingvaluehowbigistheproblem">If one flips a coin and guesses, they would be right half the times. Is an AI solution predicting 53 % offrauds adding value? How Big Is The Problem</h3>
<p>Deloitte reports that between companies who do AI really well versus those who don't, the return on investments vary greatly.</p>
<p>Average ROI on AI investments came to be around 4.6 % with many companies generating no or negative ROIs.</p>
<p>In last 4 years, banking and public sector have made the most incremental investments in AI. Travel, healthcare, chemicals and core industrial applications have been the next leaders in incremental investments.</p>
<h5 id="automotiveanddefencehavebeentheleadersinabsoluteinvestmenttermswithsuchcriticalindustriesmakingsuchinvestmentsintheiraiinitiativesitbecomesimperativethatailivesuptoitspromiseofvalueanddeliveryhowdowefixthis">Automotive and defence have been the leaders in absolute investment terms. With such critical industries making such investments in their AI initiatives, it becomes imperative that AI lives up to its promise of value and delivery. How Do We Fix This?</h5>
<h4 id="rightsponsorship">Right Sponsorship</h4>
<p>Even the most excellent brain surgeon cannot perform the surgery without an anesthesiologist.</p>
<p>AI initiatives are very similar. AI cannot perform by itself unless supported by the the right data strategies,
processing and storage framework (cloud), and most importantly without the right AI strategy behind it.</p>
<p>While the senior management may recognise the value AI investments may bring, they must be willing to invest
in getting the ground ready for all the above before their AI investments start to bear fruit.</p>
<h2 id="rightstrategytrainingandtools">Right strategy, training and tools</h2>
<p>It is not enough to have investments behind an AI strategy. The strategy must align to the overall
business strategy for the management interest to persist.</p>
<p>Skilled AI people are not common. Even more rarer are training infrastructures that can deliver the quality
manpower needed to deliver complex AI solutions.</p>
<p>The framework needs to be nurtured and augmented with the right tool set.</p>
<h2 id="datastrategyandgovernance">Data strategy and governance</h2>
<p>An AI model does as it sees.</p>
<p>Over 90 % of the world's digital data was created in the last 5 years, most of it either remains unusable to
individual use cases, or leaders are still figuring our how to leverage what they have.</p>
<p>A good data source if not present, can be bought, or augmented. Which then needs to be enhanced with
data processing pipelines, staging infrastructure in order to deliver value.</p>
<p>The value of data keeps reducing with time. Hence a mature Data Governance practise is vital to keep data
sources relevant.</p>
<h2 id="cloudandopex">Cloud and opex</h2>
<p>For most organizations, IT is still seen to be very low in the value chain, as a mere enabler, far removed from
the core revenue generation functions.</p>
<p>While nothing can be far from the truth, this is a cultural problem and is not going to fix in weeks.</p>
<p>Until then if IT and AI investments have to continue they have to remain cost efficient. Cloud provides the
greatest possibility for keeping IT lean.</p>
<p>A good cloud strategy needs to be in place for AI to function.</p>
<p><strong>About itmtb Technologies</strong></p>
<p>itmtb is a global professional services company with leading capabilities in digital, cloud and blockchain. Combining unmatched experience and specialized skills across more than 10 industries, we offer Consulting,
Technology and Operations services. Our people deliver on the promise of technology, innovation, and quality every day, serving clients in more countries than 1. We operate with a very simple belief - our customers' success is our success. Visit us at <a href="http://www.itmtb.com.">http://www.itmtb.com.</a></p>
<p><em>This content is provided for general information purposes. Copyright © 2022 itmtb Technologies. All rights reserved. itmtb and its logo are registered trademarks of itmtb Technologies Private Limited.</em></p>

<h2 id="whenserverlesschillednetflix">When Serverless Chilled Netflix</h2>
<p>We love Netflix (and chill, too!) The collection, the responsiveness, and personalized recommendations have entered the computing folklore long before many of us had even heard of the technologies that made it all possible.</p>
<p>But there is another technology that Netflix went big on, and saved even bigger on - Serverless.</p>
<p>Netflix moved a large of chunk of IT processes ranging from encoding videos parallelly before they are streamed to you, to backup systems validating data integrity, to managing alerts and notifications, and to managing security events, to serverless architecture. This saved Netflix millions of dollars of IT operational expenses.</p>
<p>What Is Serverless Serverless?</p>
<p>Serverless architecture allows running code, managing data, and integrating applications, all without managing servers.</p>
<p>They feature automatic scaling, high availability, and a pay-for-use billing model to increase agility and optimize costs.</p>
<p>This eliminates the need for infrastructure management tasks like capacity provisioning and patching.</p>
<p>It works by allocation hardware as and when needed by your applications. A serverless architecture can start running your applications within a few milli seconds of being triggered. The utilised hardware is relinquished as soon as the application finishes executing.</p>
<p>You make a huge saving on costs since you're only using the hardware for a very small fraction of time. Serverless Use Cases And When Not To Use It Use It For</p>
<ul>
<li>Scale chat bots with demand APIs and backend processing</li>
<li>Batch processes</li>
<li>Stream processing</li>
<li>Business logic processing</li>
<li>CI/CD pipelines</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="donotuseitwhen">Do Not Use It When</h2>
<ul>
<li>You have long running processes</li>
<li>You are using unsupported languaues</li>
<li>Your workloads are consistent</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>About itmtb Technologies</strong></p>
<p>itmtb is a global professional services company with leading capabilities in digital, cloud and blockchain. Combining unmatched experience and specialized skills across more than 10 industries, we offer Consulting, Technology and Operations services. Our people deliver on the promise of technology, innovation, and quality every day, serving clients in more countries than 1. We operate with a very simple belief - our customers' success is our success. Visit us at <a href="http://www.itmtb.com.">http://www.itmtb.com.</a></p>
<p>This content is provided for general information purposes. Copyright © 2022 itmtb Technologies. All rights reserved. itmtb and its logo are registered trademarks of itmtb Technologies Private Limited.</p>

<p>
    When our discussions started, the customer was facing challenges on
    various fronts. Vehicle breakdowns in remote locations were frequent,
    estimates of delivery had deviated far from expected, and fleet
    optimization was not happening as much as possible. And these were
    just scratching the surface.
</p>
<p>
    Let's look at one of them in detail for it is interesting - a full 11%
    trips encountered vehicle breakdowns. In about 0.7% of cases, the
    replacement vehicle broke down too. While 11% may seem a small number,
    in most cases these vehicles carried deliveries for more than 1
    customer, every breakdown meant more than 1 angry customer. The
    payment cycles were impacted and there was a cascading effect on
    future planned deliveries.
</p>
<p>
    Our analysis of the problem led to many initial findings. Some of them
    being, a full 71% of breakdowns were concentrated - they were
    happening around a particular load profile, on a certain terrain,in
    vehicles of a certain make, size and age.
</p>
<p>
    At this point it was tempting to dismiss this as a vehicle maintenance
    problem, we continued to look deeper.
</p>
<p>
    The eventual conclusion was different. As it turned out, most of the
    vehicle breakdowns were happening on orders taken at later stages. In
    some cases, it led to vehicle overloading, and in others in leasing
    extra vehicles from third parties without getting a chance to vet the
    vehicle quality in detail. The previously listed causes still played a
    role in the problem, but they were not the root cause.
</p>
<p>
    It took us a painful documentation of paper work, analyzing
    computerized data spread across various documents, emails, pictures
    etc. Various data analysis models were made and refined until we
    reached the surprising conclusion.
</p>
<p>
    To solve this problem, we created a machine learning model (complex
    enough to border an artificially intelligent solution, yet simpler
    than that to avoid unnecessary complexities and running costs) that
    could predict the vehicle demand from various customer sections. With
    demand prediction in place, third party scoring models were created to
    understand who can be relied on for what kind of vehicles across what
    routes (Now they could select a soda ash carrier supplier depending on
    loading weight and whether the route was hilly or flat). A cataloguer
    was designed to feed and analyze the vehicle condition if leased from
    a third party and take real time decisions.
</p>
<p>
    At this stage, loading optimization was implemented for smaller
    deliveries. How best to load deliveries so as to save unloading time?
</p>
<p>
    The final step was to include preventive maintenance across all
    vehicles owned by the company. While predictive maintenance would have
    been the way to go, owing to customer preferences, we settled for the
    preventive format.
</p>
<p>
    Net, net, the customer reduced its unplanned vehicle breakdowns by
    69%, improved its delivery turnaround times by 13%, and asset
    utilization by another 7%.
</p>
<p>Want to know how we can help here? Get in touch.</p>

<p>
    I often tell this story, both as evidence of what Artificial Intelligence is capable of, and what its limitations are.
</p>
<p>
    Let's start from the year 2003, when Palantir was founded by Peter Thiel (one of the earliest investors in Facebook) and others. Palantir was made to provide technological solutions to modern organizations using data and analytics. US government was their earliest customer. They wanted their help with problems like detecting patterns in child trafficking, drugs, cross border terrorism on social media platforms. And preventing financial fraud.
</p>
<p>
    This story is about an attempt to prevent financial fraud through credit cards. It is said that the smart people at Palantir build sophisticated AI models that could look at a presented transaction and predict whether it had come from a fraudster using someone else's credit card or not.
</p>
<p>
    A control room with a wall full of TV panels was set to show real-time credit card fraud rates across the concerned territories. They switch on the model, and wait with their breaths held…
</p>
<p>
    And voila, the rates started to go down as they watched. Their model was able to identify fraudulent transactions and prevent them in real-time.
</p>
<p>
    But the next day brought a different story. Fraud rates started to go up. Their super smart model was not good anymore. Something had changed. Was it a bug?
</p>
<p>
    They fine-tuned the model again. And voila, it started detecting frauds again. But only in a few hours, did the frauds start rising again.
</p>
<p>
    When they analyzed, the findings were no short of incredible. As it turns out, on the other end of the fence, the bad guys were also using smart AI models. They soon figured out the rules of the system that was preventing their transactions and they modified theirs.
</p>
<p>
    In other words, the jailors made a higher fence and the thieves learned to jump higher.
</p>
<p>
    AI by itself was not proving useful. It is then that Palantir changed their approach radically — they combined their AI models with human beings. Now a model would flag a transaction as fraudulent, and the human being would verify it using other markers.
</p>
<p>The model has since been running successfully.</p>
<p>References : </p>
<p><span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Zero-One-Notes-Startups-Future/dp/0804139296" target="_blank" >Zero To One,</a></span>  by  <span ><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thiel"target="_blank" >Peter Thiel</a></span>  </p>
<p><a href="https://www.palantir.com/"target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">https://www.palantir.com/</a></p>
<p>Want to know how we can help here? Get in touch.</p>

<p>
    Having good software helps. There is never a doubt about it. Question
    remains, what is good software? And what was good yesterday, is it
    equally good today?
</p>
<p>
    Take softwares like CRM, ERP, HRM. In their very first avatars, they
    did a fabulous job of bringing all departments from paper to
    computerized records. It was not far-fetched to think that soon the
    departmental data could be shared across each other with ease.
</p>
<p>The rise in efficiency was tremendous.</p>
<p>
    But then things seemed to plateau. Beyond moving software to the
    cloud, automated workflows, or some rudimentary intelligence, these
    softwares did little to evolve. In most cases, the price benefits of
    moving to cloud were not passed on to the customer.
</p>
<p>
    Over the past 30 years, businesses, methods, process flows have
    undergone a world of change yet the CRMs and ERPs stick to their old
    rigid self, allowing little (and expensive) or no customization at
    all.
</p>
<p>
    From a time where a manufacturing company could just call up a
    software vendor to come and install one at their premise, now they are
    faced with the obstacle of a monolith that does not align with their
    processes.
</p>
<p>
    The software does not work for you. It makes you work like it pleases.
    That is why most small and mid scale businesses are beginning to have
    specialized software designed as per their needs and protocols. These
    custom softwares are scalable and can accommodate any number of
    growing users, can have any new module developed and integrated with
    little or no cost, and can be deployed on cloud or in customer's
    premises. If the software development company has mature practices,
    experienced personnel then such development can not only be
    cost-effective, but also have lesser operating costs.
</p>
<p>Want to know how we can help here? Get in touch.</p>

<p>
    In the past 2 years, the stockbroking industry has seen the most
    opportunities and growth. It also has seen many old brokers winding
    their businesses up.
</p>
<p>
    They could not compete with the discount brokers whose reach appealed
    more to the newcomers.
</p>
<p>
    Lately, new Mutual Fund accounts and trading accounts grew by a huge
    margin, primarily driven by the millennial, tech-savvy investors, many
    existing brokers could not ride that wave. Lack of technology adoption
    was one of the major reasons for it.
</p>
<p>
    But it will be unfair to say they did not understand the value of
    digitization. Most brokers we spoke to simply did not have the
    technical know-how to build these digital platforms, and they did not
    have access to a reliable IT partner who can build and run such
    solutions for them.
</p>
<p>
    In other words, while they saw digitization as crucial, they did not
    want to divert into running IT verticals.
</p>
<p>
    How we can help stock brokers digitize their business Take our
    plug-and-play Mutual Fund solution. It allows brokers to provide
    mutual fund facilities to their customers seamlessly. They can perform
    KYC, bank account verifications, pay, subscribe to new funds, switch,
    redeem their funds etc.
</p>
<p>
    Onboarding new customers for trading accounts can be also be
    integrated seamlessly through our solutions.
</p>
<p>
    For one of our customers, we also built a custom mobile application
    that allows their customers to get news about stocks of their choice.
    Behind the scenes, an artificially intelligent system is able to judge
    the relevance level of a news item for a customer. Click here to find
    it on Play Store.
</p>
<p>
    We were able to provide all these solutions as a fully managed service
    so brokers can continue to focus on their core business.
</p>
<p>Want to know how we can help here? Get in touch.</p>

<p>
    Urbanization is all we see. But this country is much more than the
    glistening urban centers. The deeper one goes, one finds new ways in
    which businesses are grappling to stay abreast of the ever changing
    regulatory frameworks, and in some cases, of the customers who are
    looking to exploit the loopholes left behind.
</p>
<p>
    Take the example of purchasing a vehicle for yourself. If you did that
    recently, it wouldn't have come as a surprise, or as a challenge, when
    you were asked for your PAN card.
</p>
<p>
    This wasn’t always the case. The regulation was modestly recent. And
    it was not a welcome regulation in some of the rural corners of this
    country.
</p>
<p>
    Which is why when this regulation came into being, some vehicle
    purchasers resorted to submitting fake id documents. These instances
    were very very small, but if even one comes to light the onus would
    have been on the automobile dealer who made the sale. One vehicle, one
    instance of bad luck, would have meant a regulatory mess for the
    dealer.
</p>
<p>
    So, our customer decided to do the smart thing. They started to seek a
    solution for this problem using technology.
</p>
<p>
    While many of us fail to admire the value that the entire digitisation
    push of this government has brought, it is apparent in these corner
    cases. Most of these technology stacks are powered by technologies by
    computer vision, artificial intelligence and can compare provided
    details against securely managed government database. Leveraging these
    technology stacks allowed us to do instant, online verification of
    provided government identifications. Now they could simply upload an
    image of a document, or enter the details manually, and they could
    verify the authenticity. While doing so involves a very small price,
    it saves them from a million times bigger liability that could
    otherwise arise.
</p>
<p>Want to know how we can help here? Get in touch.</p>

<p>
    Drug formulation has come a long way. From days when formulation used
    to be an in-house activity for all pharma companies, today most
    formulation is conducted by companies specializing in R&D and
    formulation development while the pharma companies take care of the
    wider business aspects.
</p>
<p>
    The industry has grown leaps and bounds too over the years. Segments
    like pet care, men's personal care have come to the fore, and demand
    for specialized products is finding its takers. 10 years ago, who
    would have thought FMCG companies would be competing to market the
    best beard oil.
</p>
<p>
    While one would be tempted to think of formulation as a separate
    vertical altogether, in many ways it parallels conventional
    manufacturing at a modest scale and faces the same challenges.
</p>
<p>
    For example, consider the fact that an end-to-end contract formulation
    project may involve finding what chemical ingredients will constitute
    what proportions to make the next best moisturizing cream, and how the
    packaging should look.
</p>
<p>
    If the cream is to be sold in Germany, what regulatory compliances
    impact the product, and accordingly. And since a finished product is
    as compliant as the raw materials used, which ones meet the European
    compliances.
</p>
<p>
    Managing raw material inventory used in-house by the chemists as they
    work to finish the best possible product, iterating repeatedly, and
    keeping track of all findings, observations, lab test results is a
    task described as tedious at best.
</p>
<p>
    There is a big margin of error in all of them. Plus there are costs
    involved in making small mistakes.
</p>
<p>
    No wonder companies specializing in building pharma software have been
    catering to this area for a long long time, however, they come with
    prohibitive costs. And since mostly this will be a cloud-based
    software, there are chances its modules may not align with the
    protocols used by the formulation teams.
</p>
<p>
    An easy alternative will be to have software developed according to
    the formulation team's requirements. If done properly, this option not
    only saves money but provides security and flexibility of a
    cloud-based solution whose customization truly allows them to bring
    efficiency and save costs.
</p>
<p>Want to know how we can help here? Get in touch.</p>

<p>
    They say that change is the only constant. But most effective changes are deceptive. Their complexity makes them ignored by most but a few tenacious ones who understand the potential.
</p>
<p>
    Web3 is no different. Most still ignore it as a fad. Few are early movers already and by the time the world notices, they would have taken the lead.
</p>
<p>
    Let us have a quick look at why web3 deserves attention? Why most businesses must change themselves or face being obsolete?
</p>
<p>
    Early web, Web 1.0, had most websites as static webpages, and the vast majority of users were content consumers. The web became a platform in Web 2.0 and centred on user-created content uploaded to popular 3rd party websites. These websites became the distributors of everything that we created and if we earned revenues, these websites took their share from it.
</p>
<p>
    Imagine buying something from Amazon which shows you products sold by an independent seller. Amazon earns a fraction of the price you pay.
</p>
<p>
    An advertiser pays Youtube when someone clicks on their ad when someone clicks on it.
</p>
<p>
    Web 3.0 changes that. With blockchain technologies powering peer-to-peer networks, if someone created an educational video, it will be hosted (and served by) on all computers in a peer-to-peer network rather than a few centralized servers owned by one company.
</p>
<p>
    When someone watches an ad on your content, you earn entirely (with a minor portion to be shared with the network). The best part is, that by using smart contracts, you will be able to decide how much revenue you share with the network.
</p>
<p>
    Look at physical goods now. A decentralized network has replaced Amazon for all aspects of order processing. You can decide on revenue sharing by smart contracts. The network will modify revenue sharing dynamically depending on user feedback coming about your product/services directly.
</p>
<p>
    I cannot think of a business that will not be disrupted by Web 3. It is time businesses take a hard look at their business models and start adapting sooner than later.
</p>
<p>Want to know how we can help here? Get in touch.</p>

<p>Identity verification is not a new problem. It just has new forms. One of the most common forms 
of identity fraud is people creating fake copies of government documents like PAN card, Aadhar 
card etc.</p>
<p>In the last few years, reported cases of identity fraud done through forged documents have 
been on the rise.</p>
<p>However, the pandemic brought a new, interesting form of this problem. With work shifting to 
homes, many people started taking up multiple jobs at a time.</p>
<h3>How Does It Impact Businesses</h3>
<p>In most cases, work contracts prevented an employee to work in more than one place at a time. 
Multiple jobs with the employer's knowledge have led to a loss of productivity and revenue. </p>
<p>While work was assigned to an employee assuming a certain amount of availability of that 
person, the employee did not have that much time on their hands due to their multiple 
assignments.</p>
<p>Another indirect issue was the leakage of proprietary information through such employees if the 
said employee was working for two competing companies at the same time.</p>
<p>This scenario is now not limited to IT organizations but has spread to various other roles.
Even as the offices start to call employees back, or most companies adopt a permanent hybrid 
work mode, these problems are going to stay.</p>
<p>Even with freelancers, their actual availability is not clear.</p>
<p>Businesses today are looking at a productivity loss of anywhere between 12-17% on account of 
employees double-timing them against their contracts.</p>
<h3>How Can Identity Fraud Be Solved</h3>
<p>The first step for us to solve this problem was to understand that this cannot be solved in 
isolation. Solving this problem needed a collaborative framework that can allow businesses to 
share information securely and seamlessly over a technology stack.</p>
<p>The technology stack itself needed to be reliable and robust against any possible misuse by the 
organizations.</p>
<p>It will still be some time before this problem can be solved completely, however, the first few 
steps look promising.</p>
<p></p></p>
<p>Want to know how we can help here? Get in touch.</p>

<p>Alpha is the last man standing. More so, if you are an investor.</p>
<p>Alpha is loosely defined as the profits one makes above the average profits. So if the Index
generated 20% a year, and your trading generated 24%, you had an alpha of 4%.</p>
<p><p>Alpha is nice. It has a little problem. It naturally reduces over a period of time.</p>
<p>Let me explain, alpha is a result of a special trading strategy that is not known to a lot of people.
But over a period of time, in a complex ecosystem of investing, the trading strategy starts to lose
its effectiveness. This always happens to every wonderful strategy.</p>
<p>Combine this with the fact that now there is so much data to be analyzed, so much testing to be
done before one can zero down on a good strategy.</p>
<p>It is obvious that manually it will not be feasible.</p>
<p>That is why when we were approached by a small group of individual investing professionals
who wanted their strategies to be enhanced through technology, we latched onto the
opportunity.</p>
<p>Their methods were manual, so they could only analyze a few stocks. Doing things manually
often meant execution delays, wrong decisions were just some of the problems.</p>
<p>The next few months resulted in creation of a cloud based, state of the art reinforcement
learning model that could solve this problem for them.</p>
<p>A cloud based system could ingest and process price, volume and open interest data from third
party APIs at any frequency they wanted. Post processing prepared data for the final analysis
step that would be executed by a carefully tuned reinforcement learning model that took over 38
different dimensions before it could decide the trade strategy.</p>
<p>The output was an automated email that informed of the next trading decisions, and updates on
existing ones.</p>
<p>Building this using reinforcement learning might seem like an overkill in the beginning but it
allowed this solution to find new insights regularly, without losing so much of its alpha for long
periods of time.</p>
<p>Want to know how we can help you automate your trading algorithms
</p>
<p>Want to know how we can help here? Get in touch.</p>

<p>
    Let's start by a simple primer on ONDC. Say you're a medicine seller with a physical shop, and losing hair watching Netmeds & Pharmeasy taking away your customers. From the comfort of their homes, your customers visit these portals, find medicines, pay, and get them delivered.
</p>
<p>
    Imagine one fine day, your phone starts to buzz with customers looking for medicines. From all across the town. Some app has told them that along with netmeds/pharmaeasy you have that medicine in store too. Through that app, they not only ordered the medicine from you, but also made a payment to you through an integrated payment service. And there was a delivery service to pick it from your store and deliver it to them.
</p>
<p>
    You did not move a muscle in setting all this. It just happened. You're suddenly back in business and can, theoretically, think of gaining customers back from these med-tech companies.
</p>
<p>
    That, and more, is what ONDC will do to your business. It will bring all individual service providers in one place and arrange the buying experience for your customer as if they were shopping from Amazon.
</p>
<p>
    If you're a business, you will now have access to every customer looking for whatever you have to sell. Which is good. Just the perfect wet dream of businesses!
</p>
<p>
    Except for one thing! The customer mindset.
</p>
<p>
    If you're selling a commodity product, which most businesses do, the customer will be exposed to your competition too. And the customer will choose the lowest priced offerings. It's a no-brainer.
</p>
<p>
    Companies and service providers will have to rethink their supply chains, rethink every single ounce of efficiency in their business process if they have to remain cost-effective.
</p>
<p>
    Payments, delivery, procurement, storage, just-in-time manufacturing, and the entire supply chain will have to evolve now. The only alternative to not evolving in the ONDC age is going out of business.
</p>
<p>
    This is like the 90s again. The Internet is public, the world is connected. And those who are willing to change themselves will have a very long laugh.
</p>
<p>Here's to exciting times ahead!</p>
<p>Know how you can adapt and benefit from ONDC? Write to us at hello@itmtb.com.</p>

Decentralized Oracle

Psychology in Design

CBDC and the Future of Blockchain in India

Next.js 13 is here

Common Human Factors That Inform Design

Industrial Digital Twins

The Future of Virtual Reality

Technology In Agriculture

How metaverse will impact our lives and businesses

Cloud Price Comparison

The Beauty & The Beast

The Power of Boring

The Search For Value

When Less Is More

Artificial Intelligence For Freight Carriers

Artificial Intelligence is smart (as a 7year old)

Beyond CRM and ERP.

Digital Solutions for Stock Brokers.

How Artificial Intelligence Helps Automobile Dealerships.

How Digitisation Helps Formulation Companies.

How Web 3.0 Will Change Businesses.

New Problems (& Solutions) of Identity Verification.

Reinforcement learning for custom trading algorithms.

Why the ONDC will give birth to a series of innovations never seen before