Author Archive

Another Choice in Software Outsourcing Apart From India and China

Vietnam has strong potential because of the population of nearly 90 million people. Despite the fact that revenue of this sector in 2005 just reached $200 million, the constant growth rate of 25%, which is forecasted to be kept through 2010, certainly shows ambition and aspiration for technology development of this country’s government.

Currently, the software industry is one of the most subsidized sectors in Vietnam. It is eligible to enjoy privileges including tax and investment incentives, an exemption from VAT and tariff for imported materials which are directly used for the software production, etc. To illustrate, businesses involved in software production and services are exempt from income tax for 4 years no matter they are local or foreign invested ones. Software products are free from VAT (0%) and export tax.

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Party Jan 2010


39 Tools for Marketing Your Small Business Online

Thousands of free online marketing tools clamor for attention, with new ones popping up every week it seems. You know you should be doing more to reach out to your customers, but just researching which tools to use can be a vast time investment, even if they don’t require a big financial outlay.

Below is a compiled list of the most popular (or most useful) low-cost or free small business marketing tools. You might be using some of them already, but you’re sure to find a couple that will round out your small business marketing toolkit nicely. And, if you’re just starting out marketing a new business online, this list may help point you in the right direction.


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Software Compliance Issues in Outsourcing Code Development

By Dan Blacharski

The outsourcing of software development to both offshore and onshore development centers has become widely accepted as a part of the business model of many companies. And while outsourcing software development creates efficiencies both in terms of time and money, it comes with its own set of concerns.

By far, the most predominant development model involves the use of pre-built software objects and third-party components. There is enormous time pressure to produce quality software in a shorter timeframe. At the same time, developers mustn’t sacrifice quality for speed. Consequently, use of third-party components represents the most obvious path. There are several benefits, both in terms of more rapid development and also in terms of proven quality. There are, however, licensing issues involved, and these must be managed appropriately. Using third-party components without proper licensing, without paying the appropriate fees or without giving the appropriate attribution can cause a software project to end in disaster.
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Software Development Outsourcing Issues

1. Insurance
The outsourcer should have adequate public liability insurance against loss or liability through injury or damage.
2. Third party suppliers

The arrangements as to which party (purchaser or outsourcer) will hold and which party will administer the terms of any agreements currently in place between the purchaser and other third party suppliers. It is advisable to transfer the Maintenance contracts to the outsourcer unless the outsourcer has agreed to provide maintenance services for all equipment and software.
3. Software licenses

Where third parties supply software used to provide outsourced services, the appropriate licenses must be obtained. Any licenses currently held by the purchaser that relate to services being provided may need to be extended to cover the activities of the outsourcer.
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10 Outsourcing Trends to Watch in 2010

It was a long year of intense ups and downs in the IT outsourcing industry. Consolidation among vendors and interest in remote infrastructure management increased, while overall outsourcing demand and IT services pricing decreased.

The market for IT outsourcing is expected to rebound a bit in 2010, say industry watchers. For instance, more than 75 percent of the service providers polled by EquaTerra in the third quarter of this year reported continued growth in their deal pipeline, which was up 10 percent from the previous quarter and 34 percent from the same period last year.

But don’t expect too robust a revival. Outsourcing consultancy Everest predicts that although suppliers will see a resurgence in demand for IT and business process outsourcing services in 2009, growth rates are unlikely to return to pre-2008 levels.

Both suppliers and outsourcing customers could be in for a bumpy ride in 2010. Here are 10 trends to look out for as the IT services industry finds its feet in the “new normal” of the post-recession.

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35 CSS-based Layouts that Look Awesome

1. Magnifico


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Top 20+ MySQL Best Practices

Database operations often tend to be the main bottleneck for most web applications today. It’s not only the DBA’s (database administrators) that have to worry about these performance issues. We as programmers need to do our part by structuring tables properly, writing optimized queries and better code. Here are some MySQL optimization techniques for programmers.

1. Optimize Your Queries For the Query Cache

Most MySQL servers have query caching enabled. It’s one of the most effective methods of improving performance, that is quietly handled by the database engine. When the same query is executed multiple times, the result is fetched from the cache, which is quite fast.

The main problem is, it is so easy and hidden from the programmer, most of us tend to ignore it. Some things we do can actually prevent the query cache from performing its task.

// query cache does NOT work
$r = mysql_query("SELECT username FROM user WHERE signup_date >= CURDATE()");

// query cache works!
$today = date("Y-m-d");
$r = mysql_query("SELECT username FROM user WHERE signup_date >= '$today'");

The reason query cache does not work in the first line is the usage of the CURDATE() function. This applies to all non-deterministic functions like NOW() and RAND() etc… Since the return result of the function can change, MySQL decides to disable query caching for that query. All we needed to do is to add an extra line of PHP before the query to prevent this from happening.

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PHP Development: Turn Your Website into Multi-Featured Web Application

Are you looking for developing a web application with charming features which have a range integrated database?
PHP is one of the best technologies for web applications integrated with database. PHP is an open source, secure and popular web development framework, which has taken the web application development methodology to the new heights. PHP is a fully blown infrastructure, environment or framework for developing any type of web applications in real time. PHP is a very popular because it is proving to be a serious threat to the monopoly of .Net and Java in the other field of application development.

PHP can be a hard nut to crack when it comes to search engine optimization. PHP developers encounter a lot of technical issues while creating PHP scripts based on SEO guidelines. The web pages needed to be constantly, and manually, modified. The web development industry was lacking such web sites that were dynamic and would update automatically. The Born of PHP as a web application development language ended up this issue and the era of dynamic (or auto updating sites) has risen since the acceptance of PHP as a web application development language. Unlike ASP / ASP.Net and JAVA, PHP doesn’t require any specified framework to build a web application. PHP based web applications can be developed using any IDE on any platform with any local host installed. This means that unlike .net framework for asp applications and JVM for java based applications PHP doesn’t require any strict or specified framework or environment and this is one of the best benefits of PHP.
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How to Choose an IT Staffing Company

If you have made the decision to outsource some of your IT tasks to an external company then it’s important to make sure you choose a company who will look after you properly. Throughout the rest of this article we will look at some of the things that you will want to carefully think about when looking for an IT staffing agency.

The Location

You need to first consider the location of the staffing agency. Do you feel comfortable outsourcing your IT projects to a separate agency? Are you ok dealing with remote IT assistance or do you want to find a provider who is more local to your company and will be able to visit your premises? This is important to think about because not all IT tasks can be fixed remotely and may need someone to go and sort it out. If you are employing an agency who will deal with your customers then you will need to think about any language barriers which could create problems. If you are dealing with foreign customers then you might find it better to hire an outsourcing company in that country.
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