effiTRAQ Installation

The installation instructions for effiTRAQ Enterprise GPS Tracking Server application can be obtained from the following link:

http://www.effikc.com/pdf/Installation_Guide_Win.pdf

effiTRAQ is now FREE!

effiTRAQ, is a powerful, web-based vehicle tracking solution from effiKC, offering comprehensive tracking and fleet management features. The user can not only track movement of his vehicles and fleet on Google Maps but also set up rules for automatic surveillance, manage notification (email/ sms) options, generate detailed MIS reports in various data formats including graphical format, remotely issue commands to vehicles, get access to sensor data from sensors connected to the Vehicle Tracking Unit and manage sub-users and their levels of access.

effiKC is offering this truly enterprise grade Vehicle Tracking Software  for FREE to its customers for up to 100 vehicles. License fees for additional vehicles are as low as Rs 250 per vehicle, one-time.

With this offer, effiKC hopes to reach out to the small and medium transport operators and owners who constitute the major bulk of the Vehicle Tracking Services market.

The details of this offer are available at: http://www.effikc.com/offers.html

The detailed features of effiTRAQ are available at: http://www.effikc.com/effitraqbasic.html

effiTRAQ Vehicle Tracking now with Graphical Reports

We at effiKC believe in the power of information. We also understand the need for analyzing the information to draw useful inferences.

In keeping with our quest for providing the best tools to our clients for analyzing the overwhelming volumes of real time data that is generated through our effiTRAQ Vehicle Tracking System, we have introduced powerful graphical reports.

Optimizing the fleet performance is now as simple as clicking on a button with the new version of the effiTRAQ GPS Tracking Application.

So go ahead and test it out today!

effiTRAQ Enterprise- Platform Independent

I am delighted to inform all our clients and readers that effiTRAQ is now Windows compatible!

effiTRAQ Enterprise Vehicle Tracking Server software has been designed and tested to run on both Linux/ Unix servers as well as Windows Servers. effiTRAQ would thus be able to power your company’s real time asset tracking and supply chain requirements  irrespective of the OS your company’s IT infrastructure supports.

To know more about the system requirements to run effiTRAQ Enterprise Server, please get in touch with our support team.

effiTRAQ- The Vehicle Tracking system for Service Providers

Real Time Asset Tracking is the buzzword today in the domain of Supply Chain Management.  The market is growing rapidly and the analysts expect it to grow to several billion dollars in the near future.

Every player in this segment is trying to come up with new features that would provide additional benefits to the end clients with the hope of differentiating itself from competitors. But in this mad race to add new features for the end clients, not all of which are actually useful, one forgets the need for building tools that would help the provider of such tracking services to manage the ever growing number of clients and assets under its portfolio.

We, at effiKC, understand that a successful product is not one which has the most number of features but one that has features that are actually useful and that can be managed easily to help scale the business as demand grows.

Our product, effiTRAQ, is a comprehensive feature rich asset tracking and fleet management application that is efficient, scalable and easy to use. It has been built keeping in mind the needs of not only the end customers (for supply chain management) but also the service providers offering the asset tracking services. It comes with an administrative portal for managing clients, vehicles, marketing campaigns, tariff plans, billing and payments- not just in one country but in several countries and with different languages.

We would be discussing about the various features of the effiTRAQ Enterprise Application in our upcoming blogs. So don’t forget to add our feeds if you want to know about the latest developments in the field of Location Based Services.

Write files using javascript

The following piece of javascript when run from Internet Explorer will write a file on to your desktop.

<script>
function WriteToFile(fileName,text)
{
var fso = new ActiveXObject(”Scripting.FileSystemObject”);
try{
//Open a file for writing. It will generate an error if it exists
var s = fso.CreateTextFile(fileName, false);
s.WriteLine(text);
s.Close();
} catch(err)
{
//If a file exisits, append to it
var s = fso.OpenTextFile(fileName, 8);
s.WriteLine(text);
s.Close();
}
}
</script>

This won’t work if:
1. You’re using a non-IE browser (which doesn’t support activex objects)
2. You’re using an IE browser on an XP machine with SP2 installed and the activex object is being blocked

Open Source – A philosophy not only to use but to adopt as well

Background – I joined the Indian IT industry about 6 years back. I started working with some of the so called big guns of the industry. I was taught there that your code belongs not even to you but to your organization so sharing it elsewhere is unethical to the extent that you can lose your job over it. I thought innocently, ‘We will get paid in any case for what we are delivering, what is the harm if other people can use some of this for their benefit? I wouldn’t have been able to develop any of this in the first place had someone thought the same way as you are right now? I will not breach on client privacy but this code that I have written for rendering an Ajax tree could well aid many others’

The Culture as it stands – We are taught not to re-invent the wheel right from our school days. Had Einstein not used Newton’s work, I am sure we would still be debating about mass-energy equivalence. Bringing things to context, monoliths like COBOL, BASIC and FORTRAN wouldn’t have become dinosaurs had not the concept of Object oriented programming emerged where you use objects, reuse objects and collaborate among objects to realize a flexible software solution. And hey, guess what, this concept was borrowed from real life situations where any goal is achieved not by an individual necessarily but by the collaboration among individuals each utilizing the others’ complementary capabilities to perform their part

But then now, among many others, there is one huge physical lure, money, and one huge abstract fear, competition. Both of these have played nicely on the minds of us mortals and hence we have naturally learnt how to earn money by protecting ourselves from competition. Put a patent on your stuff, show what you have done not how you have done it and sue someone who gets too nosy and finds out the answer to that ‘how’. Ironically though, the code which we protect with our dear lives could never have been conceived in the first place had we not ‘googled’ our way to discover some ready and juicy tit-bits (remember sorting, hashing, trees, menus, tabbed panes to recollect a few), sometimes even entire ‘frameworks’ (remember Struts, Spring, FreeMarker…) and hold on, what is the language that we use by the way (Java, Groovy, JavaScript, PHP….). So the essential point to take away is that we are constantly looking out for stuff which somebody has generously shared freely on the internet so that we can plug it readily or build on top of it to produce our source code which we then happily put a seal on and claim that its copyright protected

My Take – Yes, we are humans and yes, we need money and yes, we are not working in non-profit organizations. But we as individuals have a role to play however small it might be towards the improvement of society in general. And since we belong to IT, why not start from there. Why always wait like vultures to scavenge on others’ source code, why not make a contribution ourselves too. We definitely are capable but we have to start thinking beyond business. Open source has now become a mantra and more and more organizations and individuals are making their code available publicly, so lets take a clue from them and start adopting this philosophy in right earnest. I do not say make everything available to everybody, it never can work, but yes, if we really think some piece of code or some customization of a framework is reusable and can reduce the work of a fellow developer wherever he might be, then please do share it publicly on the web

By the way, I am blogging to my heart’s content here using an engine called WordPress. Interestingly it is Open Source

Physics of Startup

Physics_of_a_Startup

Office Tools

As an entrepreneur who is using his savings to start up his dream company, it is important to cut down on one’s expenses without compromising on productivity.  The OS (operating system) for office PCs and the business software like word processors, spreadsheets and slides that one takes for granted while working in a large corporate house, can actually burn a deep hole in one’s pocket.

Given the popularity of Mr. Bill Gates and his company’s ubiquitous presence, I’ve always been a religious user (if not a fan) of Windows and all Microsoft Office products. It was only when I started effiKC and wanted to setup my own office did I realize how expensive they were.

It cost me around Rs 20,000 to get an assembled PC with a high end configuration. However, to equip it with MS Windows and MS Office, I found out that I would need to spend around Rs 7,000 for each (including taxes). Using simple Mathematics, the cost of using a day to day software was coming out to 70% of the hardware cost.

These software which would go down my accounts books as long term assets (that too I doubt because Microsoft licenses are valid only for 3 years) were turning out to be liabilities for me.

The decision was obvious and instantaneous. I had always read about it and discussed about it with Microsoft haters. I now tried it for myself.

I decided to go ahead with the Linux OS and was pleasantly surprised with how it had progressed since my college days 5 years back. I tried out two flavors – Open Suse and Ubuntu. Both have UI based software installation and update features that I found to be a major relief given my short term memory in remembering commands. Moreover, I found out that mounting and un-mounting memory sticks, CD and DVD ROMs were as easy as that in Windows. Moreover the crisp and easy to use graphical user interface with Windows like file and directory structure further helped in easing the transition process.

The best feature was yet to be realized. The Linux machines were practically indifferent to the innumerable Viruses that have been specifically designed for their Windows counterparts.  Usually one learns about the benefits of using an anti virus only when one’s valuable data gets seriously affected.  Sooner or later every Windows user realizes that an annual purchase of anti virus software license is like getting an annual dose of flu shot.

The day when I found a file called ‘jim.carry’ that carries the seeds of the famous Jim Carry virus lying as an incapacitated creature on one of the USB memory sticks that had come in dangerous contact with several Windows machines, I could not thank my lucky stars for having saved me another Rs 3,000 a year.

Now, that the purpose of a cheap and efficient OS had been served, I needed to find out similar office processing software. The Linux distributions usually come loaded with Open Office products that resemble MS Office in look and functionality and provides a good transition. Moreover, it comes with a free (yes absolutely free) pdf maker to make any number of pdfs that your heart desires.

In spite of all the benefits of the Open Office suite, it is not Open Office that I selected. I happen to be a regular user of GMail. One day when I was checking my emails for the umpteenth time and wondering what else I could do that I had not already done, I happened to chance upon the link called ‘Documents’ on the top left hand corner of the GMail screen. Once I started exploring the link, I found that Google Docs is actually a far superior substitute. Firstly, it provides for easy sharing of documents across networks and continents. Secondly it does not consume any hard disk space as everything is stored remotely on Google’s servers. Third, it maintains history of all revisions to it along with the names of the editors and the timing of editing, making it even more effective for collaborative work.

With Google Docs now offering a folder structure that makes it easier to store and manage documents online, there is no turning back to Microsoft.

In addition to the office productivity suite from Google, it also provides a wonderful calendar facility that can be used to plan daily agenda, setup meetings and also generate reminders that would be directly deliverd to your cell phone when you are on the move. This is something that I would not even expect from Outlook.

It is not that I am a big fan of the Google founders (although they happen to be alums from the same university that I went to ), but there is no doubt that it is difficult to find an alternative to Google’s office products.  Today it is only small organizations like ours who are adopting Google as the official business software provider. The day when large organizations would take it up as another way of ‘cost-cutting’ when the economy is hit by another downward surge, is not too far to visualize.

The Power of Simplicity

Hello World!

What if there was a global ID card? You know what I mean right ? Today I walked into my swanky office, swiped my ID card and the doors flapped open.

I was just wondering, if this single ID held the key to everything? Open ID to the extreme , yeah! You could vote with that card, its your voters Id card. You could also double it up as a driving license ( If you wanted to upgrade from a two wheeler license to a four wheeler, its just a database upgrade at the central db!) , it could also be your ration card ( if you still have one) , it could be the account to your multiple bank accounts, credit cards, phone bills etc.

You get the drift right?

Also the security ( and backup ) of such an important piece of real estate needs to be primal. But thats another story altogether