Tag Archives: app

Top Strategies of Mobile App That Improves Revenues for Small & Mid-Sized Businesses

These days, mobile applications become the must have for businesses of varied industry according to Global mobile traffic that represented roughly 60% of internet traffic. However, consumers progressively expect an “Amazon-like experience” online.

There are many small businesses, who have not yet come up with an interesting approach for the mobile app; they need to build a great one. Moreover, the fault dishonesties at least partly with small business owners. As per the Research by Clutch, it has been known that less than a quarter of small businesses have a mobile application, and approximately a third are doubtful to build one.

Mobile Strategies of Field-Tested

Do you know that it is a mistake if you see what mobile applications have done for some small businesses? A Pennsylvania-based consignment store ‘Mommy’s Lil’s Rascals has launched an adopted Total Loyalty Solutions mobile application, allowing customers to access a loyalty card program, special events, and exclusive mobile offers.

Providing more information, the company has been rewarded with 1000 downloads, comprising 223 downloads in the first 24 hours – 350+ redemptions, $12000 in revenue and a repetition of sales while their fall sales event.

Elizabeth Sowers, an owner of Mommy’s Lil’ Rascals, says “For us, what really worked were in-store promotions. She also added, “We set out a challenge to employees on who could get the most apps downloaded in one day. Every time someone came to the register, employees would ask customers to download the app. By doing this, we were able to get quite a few downloads for the app each day.”

She came to know that how important it is to have an application for reaching out to her customers. After some time, she let her all customers aware of Mommy’s Lil’ Rascals application through her social media page and Facebook page. She explains, surely, I would commend businesses to make use of push notifications within their application in order to stay in touch with the customer.

There is one restaurant in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania that named the Caddy Shack supervises the Armitage Golf Course, introducing the application with Total Loyalty Solutions was the answer.

Karen Blazina, a restaurant manager, says “Were in a bit of an unusual situation in that we are a restaurant overlooking a golf course”. He also added, “We are constantly busy — especially when the weather is nice — and the app has really helped customers know about changes to the menu. For example, when we have a seafood bash, we can add the whole program to the app.”

About using an application, he also cultured some essential lessons. “One piece of advice I’d give to business owners launching an app is to definitely open up with a coupon — this gives a true actual response rate. And, make sure to put the time into the app to make it successful and make sure people know about the app.”

About testing their applications, both the companies have learned important lessons. Blazina of the Caddy Shack explains, “When it came to testing the app, we only did testing internally. Our management and staff checked to see if everything was entered correctly and was functioning right.”

It helped a lot, but that was not enough still. There were some bugs and mistakes, which could have been fixed by testing with an outside vendor.

Sowers of Mommy’s Lil’ Rascals checkouts a similar story. “We found some issues with some different network providers — some were a bit slow and it was a time-consuming process or the app would sometimes unexpectedly close out.”

She said that it should have been a lot better in order to test the applications on varied of network providers before launching it. With an increasing number of businesses, who have been launching these mobile applications and testing for errors and bugs, it becomes essential for businesses as small business owners look for outside suppliers to deliver those testing services. As like they require outside accountants to do their taxes or outside vendors in order to look for insurance.

Matthew Cordasco, a CEO and Head of Product at MyCrowd QA, says “Small businesses may not always have the resources to hire a full-scale QA team, that’s where we come in. He also added, “With our platform, businesses can root out their bugs at 50-75 percent of the cost of doing it in-house, boosting both the speed and quality of their testing.”

With increasing demand for smartphone and smartphone apps, it is must have a well-developed and well-tested application that turns into a highly effective marketing strategy, giving results.

Neural Networks Used By Researchers to Turn Face Sketches Into Photos

These days, we all are becoming crazy for the Prisma application that turns smartphone photos into stylized artwork. A newly launched application Prisma is an art filter photo editor that launched by Alexey Moiseenkov, a Russian programmer.

algo-photos

Talking about Alexey Moiseenkov, he is the leading programmer at Apple’s App Store ranking in Russia and many neighboring countries also, including Moldova, Latvia, Kazakhstan, Estonia, Uzbekistan and more.

At Radboud University, a team of four neuroscientists is occupied on one model for inverting face sketches to synthesize photorealistic face images by using deep neural networks. However, the results of the study first made obtainable in the online archive arXiv and have recently been accepted at the European Conference on Computer Vision in Amsterdam.

However, scientists also said that the applications of their designed model could also comprise fine arts in order to turn self-portraits into something more similar to a photo, but also in forensic to turn sketches based on eyewitness accounts into a photo-recognition tool.

Moreover, the article Yagmur and Umut mentioned to defined one tactic to reimagine a photo of the city of Tubingen, Germany, in the style of The Starry Night, an oil on canvas painting by Vincent van Gogh.

This is one such example that got us think about its inverse problem. That is what the artwork of Vincent van Gogh would look like as photos,” Güçlütürk and Güçlü wrote.

Below, you can see how Güçlütürk and Güçlü define how their software that uses an artificial neural network, works:

sketchalgo

“Let’s say that I, scientist, want to teach you, artificial neural network, how to convert sketches (inputs) to photos (outputs). First, I construct a very large dataset composed of sketch and photo pairs. I give you the sketches and ask you to convert them to photos. Randomly, you choose a strategy and give it a go. At first, your photos would not look like the photos in my dataset. I compare your photos with the photos in my dataset and point out your mistakes. Based on my feedback, you adjust your strategy and give it another go. Gradually, the quality of your photos would improve.”

While teaching the model how to match sketched and pictures, repetition plays a very significant role.

“We repeat the last two steps over and over again,” Güçlütürk and Güçlü wrote. “Finally, your photos would look like the photos in my dataset. If everything goes well, you can use your newly learned skill to convert not only the sketches you have already seen but also the sketches you have not previously seen in high-quality photos.”

The scientists also used computer-generated sketched that based on the photos in the CelebA dataset, an online resource with 200,000+ celebrity images, and in the LFW dataset, a collection of 13000 images of faces from the web. In addition to this, the hand-drawn sketches are taken from the CUFS dataset.

The first things the two Ph.D. students did is converting some sketches of their own faces that drawn by Yagmur. They also tried to get some photorealistic representation of the face of the three famous Dutch artists, so all thanks to the algorithm.

Both the researchers now working to see that how they can bring their work among all people. They are looking forward at the apps in the fine arts and forensic arts in order to monetize their work.

“Our spinoff company, Neurant, is already working on such applications, and we hope to bring them to market soon,” Güçlütürk and Güçlü concluded.