But Yes, Mindfire Solutions now has a new look. You and I both loved the older pencil sketch logo where M&F were written within that circle. While it certainly had started becoming a common sight, I am sure we will soon get used to the new logo and we will love it all the more. This new logo and the new brand of Mindfire brings about a change in how Mindfire is perceived by its clients, by peers and by people. This brand – Mindfire 2.0 is not just a logo change with a flickr of colors.

It is a promise. A promise to continue keeping clients exuberant and delighted. A promise to continuously raise the benchmarks of services delivery. A promise to continuously encourage and honor talent within and outside the organisation.

It is a commitment. A commitment to delivery quality to clients. A commitment to deliver best practices to the global community of Small and Medium businesses. A commitment to continuously invest in people and their careers.

It is a movement. A movement towards growth of relationship, harmony and engagement. It is the striving thirst within each Mindfirean to bend forward in an attempt to do more and do better. It is a movement to look forward into the future. It is a movement to move faster towards the goal.

As the new year paces in, Mindfire’s new brand makeover reaffirms Mindfire’s pledge to continue delighting customers and investing in people.

Mindfire Solutions New Logo

Some organisations your search leads you would excite you – their front end sales team would wow you with courtesy even when they are talking to you at 1 AM in the night their time – their delivery leads would amaze you with the depth of knowledge they have in your domain – their developers would surprise you with their technology skills and responsiveness.  Almost everything about them would factor into that great experience which would make you come back to them again and again. And there would be others.

Factwise, the odds are more that you will reach this ‘Others’ category more often. And you can feel that you are talking to an ‘Other’ company quickly based on few conversations or emails. Let us see how.

1. First contact – Sales: From the moment you fill up the contact form you have opportunity to know how responsive an organisation is and how agile its processes are. Slower response in the first time itself would give you the indication of what is going to follow. When the sales person finally speaks with you – you can get to know the second thing – What time of the day is he talking to you and his energy levels and enthusiasm in talking to you, whether he is flexible in scheduling the discussion at your suitable time in the day or he has a busy schedule! If he is busy – that is good because they are always occupied with clients so they may be doing good.. but that might also mean that your project might be lost in the sea of projects they are working in.

2. Second Contact – Tech Manager – The more rigid the technical project manager is.. the deeper the pit you are going to fall into once the project starts. Not only that, the lesser experience he has in your business domain, the more time you are going to have that stupid phone near your ears! There is more..  And you can always know if he wants to milk your wallet all the time or he is genuinely interested to get a good job done for you.

3. Third Contact – Developer – Almost 80% of who you or your team will talk to is this person. If at the end of the day, you are working with someone who does not understand your business or is not aligned towards your goals.. It might be a case of parallel train tracks being developed which would never meet.

When you discuss with a vendor who has a great culture of collaboration, you will see uniformity of thought and action across all levels, across all contact points. You would know not even feel that you are working with different people but you would see a sense of uniformity everywhere. When the developer would get stuck on something, there would be a common portal which would be used within the organisation where other developers would be pitching in with solutions when there is a problem in some section of your project. This ensures that your idea is protected within the organisation and yet you get the solution. When the vendor organisation is aligned towards your goals, you can clearly see the passion in action. No overtime work would be charged by the vendor, entire team would be up at 3 AM in the night because you are going live and what not! And best part is – you wont have to ask for this. A passionate organisation will give you all this without you batting an eyelid!

Are you still working with an organisation where you see lack of passion and collaboration? Time to change gears.

Would love to hear your thoughts on this article. Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section below.

Cheers

Sam

We dont have Sales people who keep pitching our services to you whenever you pick up the phone. You might wonder how different would a sales person be – What differently can he do things – It is his job to sell so when he talks to me – obviously he is going to talk about what he can do for me. But there is a difference.

If the Sales person is trying to sell oranges and you want lemons. Most of the time when such a scenario happens, sales people give you a hefty discount and try justifying to you that anyways you are getting so much at such a cheap price – rather than leaving it on the table you should buy it. End of the day what happens is you have two bags of oranges at dirt cheap rates when you just wanted a small lemon for your morning herbal tea! It takes guts for a Sales person to say NO and usually the good ones are those who can confidently say NO when they dont have the expertise.

At Mindfire – when you speak to any of our Sales people, you would realize what I am saying is true. Best way to know this would be to contact us for a small application development project and see for yourself if you have a totally different experience.

Cheers

Sam

Let us each work on our core competencies!

Interest in other people’s lives, interest in their interests, their status updates, their birthdays and the ‘Like‘ etiquette. Even Facebook understood this so the layout in which other people’s news stories are being fed into our dashboard grew like anything. Better arrangement and this unspoken courtesy prompts us to Like the pages and by now it is almost second nature to Like something. This is all good but the photos. But somehow there has been a problem with photos on the largest social media platform. Thats the very reason why Facebook is buying Instagram at whooping 1 billion! Even though Instagram is only photos in a mobile app! And this new app’s valuations have increased significantly over the past year from 100 million to a billion. With just the addition of Android version of the app, Instagram added 20 million new followers!! Now thats big and thats why Facebook chose Instagram.

Now coming back to Pinterest. Now when it is known that Facebook is trying to make up for its content heavy thing, others are realising it too and Pinterest does it best. Pinterest is a virtual pinboard to organize and share the things you love. Many brands are now flocking to Pinterest as images/photos are ‘Pinned‘ best in pinterest. Brands which are doing average in their marketing in Facebook are writing far bigger success stories with Pinterest. Checkout Pinterest and Instagram both and you would see what I mean.

Forbes recent article dated – 10th April states that A picture is worth a thousand words especially if you are looking to speak to female consumers. That’s why Pinterest boasted 104 million total visits in March, and is now the third most popular social media platform behind Twitter and Facebook.

Women are almost completely responsible for Pinterest’s success—according to Inside Network’s AppData. In fact, 97 percent of the site’s users are women. Why? Because women trust other women in their circles more than anyone else. As a result, 47 percent of women bought something based off a recommendation from Pinterest where as only 33 percent bought because of a recommendation on Facebook.

What does this mean to you and us?

Other than signing up to test the service, what you might contemplate of doing is develop Pinterest apps to reach out to this audience base and we at Mindfire can help you do that once you have your idea conceptualized. Read more on Pinterest app ideas. Know more about how we can assist.

Mindfire runs on code

Participation in a 1-day, 3-days long conference – Does it help the developer? Does it help the clients? Does it help the organisation? How? Who are chosen to attend such conferences?

Benefit to people: Yes – Each of the programmers, developers who have represented us at the technical conferences would say that it has been immensely helpful. More than the learning, it is the outlook, it is the perspective gained. Think of a developer who is in Java or say Sharepoint – why they have been working in the technology for years and then they attend a Microsoft Sharepoint conference, the sense of pride magnifies. Reason – they see a huge fraternity of people who are some or the other way associated with the technology and events as this provides excellent networking opportunity and provide a platform to see the future of the technology in the eyes of technology evangelists.

Benefit to Clients: Definitely Yes. Clients get people who are already highly experienced professionals and on top of it – people who are charged up and who know what they are working on what their technologies are capable of. Working with such developers not only ensures that clients get suggestions from the developers themselves about “good and not so good” implementation option but also enables easier thought-process flow from the client side to the developer end.

Benefit to the Organisation: Needless to say when both Mindfireans and our esteemed clients see a value addition in this process, Mindfire automatically stands to gain from the goodwill of both sides.

Who are chosen to attend such conferences at Mindfire? Everyone. Everyone who has a passion to learn and a passion to know more.

Are you still working with an organisation where you just read about such technology conferences? Time to shift gears! Invest your time in a company which cares.

Talk to us at Mindfire to know how we can assist.

Cheers

Sam

Drupal Vs joomla

When you are deciding to build your website, your decision making comes to decide between various content management platforms. If you narrow down to Joomla and Drupal, decision making becomes tougher because with Joomla you get to get your website up sooner, with greater relative ease than if done in Drupal. The advantage with Drupal however is it is upward compatible and its core architecture is built in a manner where expansion of the structure is easy. Drupal’s codebase focuses more on its extendibility, allowing developers to easily hook into core functionality. Thus, Drupal doesn’t try to pack in every little feature, rather it includes the essentials and elegantly exposes itself to enhancement.

Drupal.

That said, I want to be clarify that Joomla is surely a great CMS and I mean no disrespect to its community of developers. Joomla has many strengths and powers many great websites. However, when it comes to building a robust, feature-rich website, Drupal wins.

In this short post, although I have tried glorifying Drupal and have NOT mentioned many strong points of Joomla, I welcome debate from the other end. And I do believe that this discussion and debate which springs up eventually will lead to a healthy competition which with strengthen the two leading open source CMS solutions, and the developer community at large will only learn and benefit further.

Decision to choose the CMS should be based on what exactly the end-product is envisioned to be and a team with cross platform expertise in all CMSes can only be able to aid your decision making process. Take a step back now before deciding your CMS because if you choose the wrong one, you might well have to keep updating, changing the CMS with every release!!

Talk to our Open Source Experts at Mindfire to know what will suit your business best!

Cheers

Sam

The software vendor spends time and resources in this learning process as you do. In this learning curve period, you dont get any work output from your software partner, but you surely lose time. In addition to that you are asked to pay. When should you draw the line on how much learning curve you want to pay? How would you choose a partner which gives you the shortest “billed” learning curve? How would you be sure that the partner you have chosen would have the least learning curve and your project could get kickstarted sooner?

Dozens of such questions peep up when you are choosing the right offshore partner for your company. And there is no shortcut to success. No bypassing research. There is a gap between Knowledge and Action. Every partner you choose can surely get the knowledge of your domain, of your technology, of your systems by learning. This learning period is the gap between your decision and they starting execution of your project. The well-researched choice would be choosing the partner with the smallest gap!

Experience the Shortest Learning Curve with Mindfire Solutions

Joy is in the Finite Journey.

While balancing client expectations and serving client requests, software developers like us often spend late nights fixing that last piece of code, owning up every bit of it. We keep sipping coffee at 2 AM in the morning in office and yet keep looking at that screen. We sit on the chair, clasp our raised hands, bend over backwards till we can and then look up at the ceiling and ask – How much to stretch?

Ironically again, when tables turn, and the same person becomes the client and there is the vendor on the other side of the table – we demand. And when we demand, we forget that to meet our demands, the vendor would actually need to bend over backwards and that stretch is because he wants to delight us. While testing the vendor to see his flexibility and commitment to our goals is needed for sure, increase in the frequency of heightened expectations might impair the vendor altogether. Inadvertent load on server can crash systems while planned distributed load with periodic maintenance and scheduled down-time on the server can even help fine tuning the performance of the server.

What it boils down to is managing expectations at the end of the day. This in no way means that you tone down your expectations affecting delivery quality or timelines. This just means better planning and careful execution of the plan. Setting expectations at the beginning of any relationship, laying out periodic milestones for tangible measurement of progress of work, discussions about work and periodic evaluation and feedback and next set of goal sharing with the vendor surely helps ease of lot of situations.

The biggest beneficiary is the client who saves on time and costs. Stats from secondary sources show that well planned software projects get completed sooner 30% ahead of time. And planning comes with documentation of steps, methods, processes and frameworks and change management. That is the core reason why we focus on change management, prioritization of ‘Must haves’ and ‘Good to haves’ so that the effort is spent in the most optimal way. It has worked well for us and also for our clients since the last 12 years..

Both our clients and us know that we at Mindfire will bend over backwards in any situation when it is related to our delivery. And yet, we focus on planning and prioritization right when we have our first discussion and strive towards executing the plan.

Talk to us at Mindfire with your development needs. You sure would feel glad that you chose us to work for you.

Cheers

Sam