Interview with Vinod Jhajharia – CEO, Dark Bears
Experts’ Participation Survey – Trends That Will Shape The Mobile App Industry In 2018
Few lines about Vinod Jhajharia – CEO of Dark Bears
Vinod Jhajharia is an amalgamation of sorts. Part strangely innovative sales and marketing professional, part software and application whisperer. He has a savant-like ability to sense an application’s feasibility and take it to market with freakishly stunning results. Web, iOS and Android platforms bend to his careful manipulations and deliver unexpected results for his clients.
1. Tell us about your company in brief.
DARK BEARS is a company founded by a team of highly qualified professionals, specialized in delivering original and creative services. For more than 9 years since our inception, we have been delivering outstanding results in software development to all of our clients around the world. We have a verifiable history of working with clients in USA, UK, Holland, Germany, Australia, Middle-East and India. We will be very happy to provide references on demand. We at Dark Bears possess the best skills and culture to give any business that needed technical-edge over their competition. We love what we do and the apps we build are efficient, secure, scalable, and are future ready. We enable businesses to connect to their customers more efficiently.
2. How do you describe your mobile app development team in terms of experience and expertise?
We have a team of highly qualified and experienced individuals who have grown with the company and have become experts not only on the technology front but also on the business side of things for various domains like hospitality, finance, real estate and aviation to name a few.
The app developers working with us possess an in-depth expertise in designing and developing highly robust solutions which are feature complete, secure and scalable. We ensure that the apps developed by our experts are fully compatible with both the existing and upcoming mobile platforms for smooth and continuous workflow operations.
Our average mobile app developers have over 5+ years development experience in their respective technologies. The key technologies we have expertise in are Swift3, React Native, ionic & Java. Our team also has a good exposure on ibeacons and IOT based mobile apps.
3. How would you drive your team to meet technology demands of 2018?
Our technology experts keep great focus on new technological developments and train the team beforehand on any upcoming shift in technology. We believe in constant training and skill upgradation, as it will give you an edge in ever evolving technological world.
Like previous years we will keep evaluating our processes and skillset level of our team to ensure that we have what the time demands. Dark Bears as a company believe in the phrase “Better people makes better company”. So, we always invest in enhancing and upgrading our people’s skillset, as they are the ones who will enable Dark Bears to stand and win against all latest technological challenges in the current competitive market.
4. How do you help your clients in choosing the right yet profitable platform for app development?
Our team at Dark Bears advises each client on a case-to-case basis. No two applications can exactly be the same, there could be a difference in region, there could be difference of target audience, there could be a difference in urgency of a project delivery. All these things have to be factored in, before we propose a particular platform to a client.
The choice of platform also depends on the nature of the business, the scale of the application, initial budget and finally on the functionality of the app itself. We also consider a host of other factors such as required efforts, scalability, reusability, compatibility and environmental considerations for selecting the right choice of platform. In addition to this, we also take a note of the geographical area of the client, before we suggest a platform to our clients. Since internet connectivity varies drastically from one geographical location to another, it will highly impact the choice of DataBase technologies we should use to ensure we don’t lose data due to intermittent internet connectivity while using the app.
5. What all services do you think you would add to your offerings in 2018?
We have recently added IOT, Embedded software development & Blockchain development to our list of services. Moving ahead, we would like to add services such as AI & Chat bot Development in the year 2018. For a list of all the services that we offer at Dark Bears you may like to visit our website Darkbears.com.
I can say 2018, is going to be an exciting year for Dark Bears, as AI is the future.
6. How are you going to differ in processing solutions and applying methods in the coming future?
At Dark Bears, we believe in delivering the most optimum solutions to our clients, at exceptionally competitive prices. Not just that, I GUARANTEE our post deployment support is the best in industry.
Most of our clients are with us since our inception. We believe in the success of our clients, as in their success lies the success of Dark Bears. We will continue to focus on the success of our clients in their respective businesses. With our experience, we are continuously upgrading our processes and tools to so we can develop faster and build more robust apps. Plus, we always keep an eye on the shifting technological trends and keep our clients updated of any new technologies that they can get benefited from.
Besides this, we continuously work towards the betterment of our Client Communication, Project Coordination and Project Management. We do so by constantly evaluating and upgrading the tools we use for project management and other communication with client for support and project coordination.
7. How do you scheme your pricing model? How do you fix your budget?
Our pricing model is quite flexible and depends mostly on the type of project and customer’s convenience. Most important is that it should be the best fit for the client’s business needs. We generally work on the following pricing terms.
> Fixed cost – We recommend this model to our clients, where we know the exact scope of work and there are no technical challenges which needs research.
> Pay per milestone. This model is recommended when usually the project size is quite big and the client wants to do the project in phases.
> Pay per month, Many a times the project idea is just a trend setter and the development needs a lot of research. In this case we offer dedicated researchers to work on a solution that meets client needs.
The actual hourly price in of any of these models depends on the project needs, as that defines the experience and expertise needed to accomplish the task. Urgency to deliver a project is also a deciding factor in pricing a project. If any client wants an app delivered faster by adding more resources, based on availability we do offer more resources, but this would cost more than usual.
8. Define your future prospective and vision regarding new technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Chatbots, IoT apps, Augmented Reality apps and Virtual Reality apps?
We strongly feel 2018 and coming years will see a great surge of IOT and AI in all walks of software development. Good thing is that we are already have had a chance to work on some IoT apps that also uses AI engines like Alexa, Siri and Google Assistant.
We are currently working on a client’s AI project where you can speak in your language and the output of app would be a translation in your choice of language in YOUR OWN voice. Frankly, I would love to hear myself speaking Chinese or Japnese without knowing a word about the two languages, with AI this is possible.
The technology is shifting towards automation. No one wants to type or tap, where you can speak and get things done. Similarly, why would you need a human being sitting there and answering a chat or telephonic inquiry which easily can be handled by a chatbot. It is the next level of evolution in technology that we are going through.
The other day I was watching this presentation of Mr. Sundar Pichai, where he demonstrated some google assistant calls. The AI handled the calls better than many human beings would and it was surprising to watch.
Google VPS(Visual Positioning System) is an absolutely beautiful use of Augmented Reality, where now you don’t have to see the arrow direction to find a location on map, you just turn on the camera and you will see an animated character guiding you to your location. Pretty NEAT I would say!
9. What are your favorite industry verticals for 2018 and why?
For us, saying one industry or a few industries as our favorite would be like doing unjust to the other industries. We are a hardcore technology company and we want all the businesses from every industry to be benefited from the latest technological advancements. Our prime goal is to go the extra mile in terms of user experience by using technologies like AI, IoT, ChatBots etc, to create a difference in how people are using mobile apps currently.
So, In the year 2018 I would say, at Dark Bears we would like to lean or focus more towards use of latest technologies across all industries rather than leaning towards one particular industry or group of industries.
10. What product/service and in which category you would like to build/offer to establish or redefine your authenticity and expertise in your operational domain?
As far as services we will continue our focus on IOT, AI and Mobile App Development. Apart from this we are also focusing our efforts towards embedded technologies so that we can work seamlessly when it comes to integration of Web, Mobile and The Things.
We also would like to promote one of our revolutionary app UKEY, that we have developed for hospitality industry which uses the best in class IOT, AI and Mobile technologies. This will allow online hotel check-ins and will save over 20-30 minutes every time you check in a hotel. You may like to know more about our product at www.ukeysmart.com
Dark Bears
darkbears.com
[email protected]