IBuzz the 13th Annual Day of InfoBeans was fultoo Bollywood style this year as “InfoBeans Star Award Nights – Viewers Choice” with theme “ Retro to Metro “ @ The Grand Omni for Indore team and at 10th Mile for Pune team. The award category was not Performance based but popularity based starting from team that party’s lot, to group of friends who are always together ,to team member who is always well Groomed in office.
The function marked a culmination of various cultural activities that gave InfoBee’s a platform to showcase their talent.The team members enthralled the audience with their performances which carried them back to the retro era. The opening was with a modern version of Ganesha vandana.The choreography of this dance was par excellence. Our CSR kids group amazed everyone with phenomenal dance. Team performed a spectacular moral based pantomime on Use of Helmet in Indore.
The performances also included melting melodies featuring many blossoming musicians with an assortment of unique musical combos of retro and metro music. Pune team also had melodious musical performances made by Saneeca ,Shilpa Pravin’s daughter and Gopal Chandola.
At Pune Kali & Mili Ambrish’s daughter stunned the crowd with their dance act. Electrifying Skit by Lovleet, Sandeep G, Prasad & Mohan was key attraction. Sheshant, Sinai & Ambrish’s performance brought a beautiful closure to the entire event.
A InfoBeans film festival organised, extended presentation of stars in the organization. There were overall 12 award titles as to recognize the uniqueness of team, group & individual.
Shahnawaz Khan won the award “Pran Jaye Par Project Na Jaye” ,team member who has been key contributor of the project for a very long time (7 years). Zainnudin Multani fetched “Phir Milenge” award, those who left InfoBeans family and then joined back again.” Hum Sath Sath Hain” award was adjudged to Ruchika & Noopur for being best friends forever. Gagandeep Sangar emerged as “Bol Bachhan” team member of InfoBeans.
Ajay Jain, Gaurav & Varun were titled as “Three Musketers” .QA team was tagged as “Pehle Pet Puja Fir Kaam Duja” team. “Nazar Na Lage” award was bagged by Jasdeep Singh Khanuja for being prim and proper dressed team member, “Tera Mera Dabba Gang” was awarded to Rashmi G,Usha,Laxmi,Neha Bajpai,Shilpi and Niharika. Java team emerged as an undisputed winner for”DND team”.
“Kya Cool Hain Hum “ award evidently won by Mobile team.Paridhi Jain ,first team member of InfoBeans was awarded as “Jame Hue Khiladi”.
The ambience of both the venues was fabulous and the dinner was sumptuous and mouth watering. It was a true entertainment with friends and family members.
Congratulations to all the winners and big thank you to the organizing committee.
In all the InfoBeans celebrities marked their way back home with reminiscence.
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Written by: Kanupriya Manchanda |
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May 16, 2013 | |
When it comes to Shopping… Coupon is the second name of saving,
but have you ever thought
“Where did I come from???”
A French word “couper,” meaning “to cut” was the first foundation element, which helped my father “Mr. Candler” (A genius businessman) in year 1887 to discover me. I helped him, when he decided to promote his new soft drink (Coca Cola for 5cent) into the market. Being with me for more than 100 years, I guess-millions of you must have clipped your way to savings.
Following my father’s trend, even others began to drag me for their business rivalries. C.W. Post – a patient and later competitor of the 19th-century breakfast food innovator, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, began offering coupons with a one-cent discount on Grape Nuts cereal in 1909. Later on the trend seized fire.
As I’m close to my 125th anniversary, let me share a brief timeline of my achievements:
1930 – Sudden rise of Coupon Usage:
During the Great Depression in 1930 I sharply penetrated into the market & achieved great heights. My fan falling grew by leaps and bounds as a means of drawing customers away from neighborhood stores & with passing years – a new industry called NCH (Nielsen Coupon Clearing House) was born to determine how much money was owed to each retailer.
Continuously the coupon usage was being encouraged & the period of ten years from 1965 was the boom for Coupon Industry, when it captured over 75% of the American households
Coupon Statistics (1965-75)
As people were finding me useful, many Industries began to spread me in variety of ways. Sunday newspapers printed inserts with me, promoting everything from fast food to bank checks. I appeared with magazines & even with door to door pamphlets distribution. I was grouped into a community of different offers & many booklets were printed to distribute me separately.
But then I was replaced by a new form of direct mail co-ops which provided local businesses with an inexpensive way of distributing coupons.
1990 – My Replacement: E-Coupon
Since I was a paper coupon… as the technology advanced & later in the 1990s; I was replaced with a coupon which was almost similar to me but, it received a new place for existence in the market, i.e. “Internet”. Here my opponent got a new name as “E-Coupon” because it was easily able to reach consumers through E-mails & they enjoyed all the benefits of printing it & clipping it whenever required. This replacement of mine, allowed thrifty Americans to trade scissors for websites which helped them to download this printable versions and access online coupon codes.
I was slowly losing my identity, because my cost per year for retailers was almost $7Billion and my users saved only $2.9 billion with my redemption. My average face-value in my ending years was $0.64, quite a bump from the five-cent offer from Coca-Cola of 1887, but I was happy… because I had been popular as a money-saver with astonishing popularity levels for almost a century.
After various ups & downs due to recession, Paper Coupon & E-Coupon Changed Consumers’ Behavior & Their Perceptions Of Economic Conditions-Resulting into the Increase in Regularity of Coupon Use for Shopping, Since 2007
Step towards Mobility:
With the introduction to Scan-able Mobile Phone Coupons in 2008, I & E-Coupon both met our new rival. It was highly advanced with its scan-able feature and named as “Mobile-Coupon”.
Now the things are changing as, earlier only 6.0% of mobile phone owners used Mobile-Coupons in 2012, the number rose to 16.3% by mid-2012 and is projected to leap to 24.3% by 2014, according to e-Marketer, an independent research company.
Even retailers are looking at new ways to incorporate mobile into their strategies and use it as a delivery channel to drive in-store traffic, consumer engagement and ultimately retention.
Mobile isn’t just something that retailer ought to do; it’s something that they have to do if they wish to remain competitive. Mobile allows retailers to engage with the consumer at every touch-point from product discovery through to product purchase – and indeed beyond, with repeat purchases.
“Mobile-Coupons are very much part of the process: they do so much more than drive retail footfall, they enhance customer engagement and retention.”
Benefits of Mobile-Coupons:
Praising my opponent (Mobile-Coupon)-sounds sick, but the truth is…
“Mobile-Coupons are great ways to offer garner loyal consumers. They are easier and faster to use for people, than cutting us- “the paper coupons” and storing them in a wallet. They are also handy for impulse purchases; users may have a selection of coupons on their phone that they could choose to use, or may search and download relevant coupons when in-store – the attraction of a 10 percent discount might just tip the balance for that impulse purchase”.
“However I appealed consumers for my money saving offers, but most of the times… I sheltered into the dustbins, because for most of the people, I was nothing, but a piece of garbage, whereas Mobile-Coupons when carefully targeted to the consumers, appeal them not only for the money they save but also for the uncanny immediacy and relevance they represent”. Mobile-Coupons appeal to marketers over me because they are highly targetable and granularly track-able; can be issued on the fly in response to changing business conditions; are cheaper and more reliable to distribute, non-intrusive as compared to me-”a printed circular” and also doesn’t require high speed data network – perhaps best of all – much more likely to be redeemed.
Merchants are now able to reduce overheads with it while cutting out the middle man, so the consumers and marketers rapidly embrace the power of mobile phones to deliver the right deal at the right place and time to exactly the right customer.
Mobile-couponing can be personalized and targeted at the individual, and it’s far more appealing to receive targeted coupons than encounter a scattergun approach.
So as we see…Mobile-Coupons are clearly on the rise.
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April 17, 2013 | |
As a part of our CSR initiative InfoBeans Indore team hosted 25 underprivileged kids whom we have been educating since last few months. It was a great experience for the kids and InfoBeans team as well. Team members played, danced and enjoyed to fullest with the kids.
Check some photos of kids enjoying at InfoBeans office.
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Written by: Kanupriya Manchanda |
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March 4, 2013 | |
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla., Jan. 25, 2013
Patriot National Insurance Group, a leading provider of workers’ compensation insurance solutions is thrilled to announce the release of their company iApp on the Apple App Store. The Patriot iApp provides targeted information to Patriot’s customers, agents, and employees.
Patriot National’s iApp is designed to provide convenient access to information about the company on mobile devices. The application was built using cutting edge technology, and gives Patriot’s clients access to up to date information about the company: who to contact and how to easily do business with local offices around the country.
Steven Mariano, Chief Executive Officer of Patriot National Insurance Group said, “Patriot prides itself on innovation and has a true commitment to embracing technology. Our new iApp brings information about Patriot National to the general public, our clients and employees.” CIO Judith Haddad added, “Apple’s technology allows us to reach a large customer base, so our goal was to partner with a key vendor to deliver applications to mobile devices. InfoBeans has served in that role, performing above and beyond. We couldn’t have been more pleased with the outcome.”
Siddharth Sethi, CEO, InfoBeans said “We are very proud of our association with Patriot National Insurance Group and together we have helped deliver a highly intuitive iOS app for Patriot. This partnership has brought into perspective the importance of bringing together technology and business in a cohesive manner to create value for all stakeholders. We look forward to continue to help Patriot stay on the cutting edge.”
In the most recent update of Patriot’s application there have been additions such as mapping the location of an event, adding events to your calendar, social media presence, and application sharing. Patriot plans to continue to add innovative and useful features to its iApp in the future.
About Patriot National Insurance Group
Patriot National Insurance Group is an insurance holding company focused on workers’ compensation insurance. Patriot National Insurance Group has two operating subsidiaries- Guarantee Insurance Company and Patriot Underwriters, Inc. For further information, please visit www.pnigroup.com.
Media Contact: Nicole Brewer 954-670-2946 nbrewer@pnigroup.com
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January 30, 2013 | |
It is pleasure to share that we recently got associated in initiative to help educate the underprivileged children.
We got in touch with Mr S K Jain (Retired MP Electric board member) who is currently working towards educating the kids of labor working on construction site in Scheme No 114 near Vijay Nagar. It is a group of 25 kids. He got them admitted to government school and arranged a private tutor in evening with objective of getting those kids equivalent to our kids currently studying in First Class. They are not associated with any organization or brand but the real needy people who lack awareness. The classes are actually been taken on street.
We thought of joining hands with S K Jain to fulfill his mission and make it Ours.
- To begin with we had fun doing the following:
- Taught those kids for a week
- Shown them Cartoon movie to entertain have fun
- Taken session on Hygiene habits
- Distributed writing tables to provide the basic infrastructure
What really creates a WOW is the satisfaction you get by spending time with them.
Special thanks and Kudos to Aarya Bhosale, Jeevan Sharma, Saji Koshti, Rafat Ali, Vikas Nema,Amit Panchal, Ritu Choudhary, Divya Jain; Tarulata Champawat; Rajni Mulchandani; Sumedha Wani; Anjali Pillai; Sonali Malu, Shyam Vyas, Gagandeep Sangar, Priyanka Bhalekar and Aishvarya Pathak who have joined hands with us for same.
If you are also interested in joining please write to us at ibcare@infobeans.com.
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Written by: Kanupriya Manchanda |
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January 4, 2013 | |
IB Care’s Team mission for 2012 was to get everybody involved and moving locus from CSR to ISR( Individual Social Responsibility).
We organized multiple events in this umbrella this year including Tree Plantation, Health Awareness Campaigns, Child Education Sponsorship Programme, Association with CRY, Sewadham Ashram and many more to take small steps to give back to society.
Pleasure to share the same got recognized at Amity CSR Conclave and we became the winners this year as well.
Kudos to the efforts of IB Care team and all of us for making conscious effort to give back to society.
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Written by: Kanupriya Manchanda |
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January 4, 2013 | |
With last year’s memorable sojourn to Ranthambore; this year was the Eighth Annual Mega Outing at the Pink city Jaipur from 21 – 25 Nov 2012. Spending four nights with all your team members from various locations and family together is the real attraction of this annual event.
Although Jaipur had lot to offer but the old walled quarter packed with royal palaces, temples and colorful bazaars scattered all over the chaotic city really fascinated me.Visit to Birla Temple, Jal Mahal & Amer fort became the favorite of many including me. A tour without paying a visit to prominent Bapu bazaar at Jaipur would have been incomplete. Ethnic jewelry handicraft and textiles were picked by lot of us.
Entire day sightseeing and than having fun with team till late nights never made me realize how quickly the four days passed. Hum Apke Hain Kaun event with the fashion show tadka and rocking dance floor till 1am on DJ night was amazing.
Our stay at Jaipur Greens, beautiful & well maintained four star property, and sumptuous food were the icing on the cake. I never ate so many varieties of dal batti ever before in my life .
All of this been possible just because of IB Travelers whose efforts, planning ,execution & commitment made Jaipur, JoyPur for us.
Thank you IB Travelers 
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Written by: Kanupriya Manchanda |
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December 4, 2012 | |
Living up with the spirit of working hard and partying harder, InfoBeans Indore team enjoyed an evening and partied with kids of InfoBeans team members.
It was a fun filled Friday evening when kids as small as 3 months to 10 years joined the party at InfoBeans terrace. It was an exciting time for all team members to enjoy with kids from various age groups. Team members danced and played with them. This event reminded us of our childhood days and we became kids with our kids.It was a great time and we are looking forward for more such exciting events with our kids.
Check out some photographs of the event.
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Written by: Manish Malpani |
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June 14, 2012 | |
It is a proud moment for us. InfoBeans is now CMMI Level 3 company.
We have always had our focus on delivering quality software solutions to our clients and this just reinforces our vision to the outside world. We are a proud and happy team today.
For more information on how this was achieved go here.
I would like to thank everyone in my team. I work everyday with an awesome set of people who make things happen and Create WOW! everyday for all of our stakeholders.
We do not rest here. We continue with our journey and our mission to Create WOW!
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May 17, 2012 | |
Recently in one of my project, I used T4 Template for quick code generation and it turns out to be a really helpful tool for accomplishing repetitive coding tasks, this inspires me to write this blog.
Challenge
Many times in various parts of code development cycle we require similar piece of code with a little variance. It may be UI related code or business logic classes (Manager Classes) or Entity classes or could be stored procedures. I always felt that, this kind of code can be auto generated with the help of some tools instead manual efforts.
In my project I wanted to auto generate all the “Admin Web Site” pages which includes seed data editing as these may have similar kind of UI & functionality, like showing all the records into an Ajax grid and allowing them to edit on popup window etc.
Candidate Solutions
There are number of third party tools available in the market today which are capable of generating reusable code. The only limitation I see is they have their predefined architecture and code generation strategies. Fitting auto generated code from different architecture to current application architecture is always a frustrating task at least for me.
Then another option I thought of is Code Dom, which comes along with .net framework itself especially for code generation purposes. When I explored this option in much detail, I realized that it requires huge learning curve which mainly includes writing code into “Intermediate Language” (IL). Of course it has many pros, like it can generate code for multiple languages from a single source template, but this is not what I want. I want very simple and easy to implement solution for generating similar kind of reusable code.
Now here comes Entity Framework code generation approach which uses T4 templates to generate all the source code files. When I dig more into it I found that it is pretty easier to implement this instead of “Code Dome” because it uses simple C# syntaxes for template writing. I was sure that T4 approach will serve the purpose so I decided to opt for it.
A brief Introduction about T4 Template
In Visual Studio, a T4 text template is a mixture of text blocks and control logic that can generate a text file. The control logic is written as fragments of program code in Visual C# or Visual Basic. The generated file can be text of any kind, such as a Web page, or a resource file, or program source code in any language. You can find more detail in following link:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb126445.aspx.
My Approach
First I wrote one complete functional web page which I wanted to replicate for rest of web pages. Then I created two separate T4 templates, one for “ASPX designer file” and other for “Code behind file”. After this I copied previously developed Webpage into respective templates. Then I replaced hard coded entity names and column names with dynamic column names by using reflection. I also add logic to generate UI and data operations based on columns data types.
We are pretty much done here, now the only thing left which is to change entity name in the template and complete code will be automatically generated in minutes. Every time you need to generate code for different entities just replace the entity name in the template file.
Below is the snap of my ASPX file generation T4 template.
Below is the snap of my code behind file generation T4 template.
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Written by: Dharmendra Baghel |
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March 1, 2012 | |
I am personally very fond of working with ORMs and familiar with Entity Framework 4.1 and nHibernate which was an obvious choice here but other people involved in this project suggested not to use this as they had some bad experiences with “Entity Framework”.
I guess you might have come across same situation like this. So I thought to write down my own ORM using T4, Which was absolutely not the right choice as per the tight deadlines.
So I thought of another solution which involves writing a base manager class which will serve the same purpose.
Features
- Supports stored procedures
- Enables use of “BaseEntity” class which is missing in Entity Framework Database first Approach
- Ability to work with business entities without manually filling business objects from data tables
- Single function is able to fill all the Complex/Navigation properties of a particular entity, up to N Level whether it is “One to One”, “One to Many” or “Many to Many” relationship. And same behavior is required in the case of saving the data
- Ability to perform basic data operations without writing repetitive code
- Ability to use eager loading as well as lazy loading
Solution
- Create all the tables in database along with their relationship. Make sure every table has a column “ID” in it as a primary Key
- Create Stored Procs for all the data manipulation tasks. Make sure that the entire stored procs name will have a special naming format “prefix + Table” Name like “Get+Table Name” and “Save+Table Name”
- Create a simple DAL, using plain ADO.NET, that has the ability to execute stored procedures, and return DataTable objects
- Create a base entity class for common properties in all the tables
- Create a class for every entity of database. Make sure that all its properties of entity matches with all the columns of a certain Stored Procs result set. Also all the entity must inherit from the base entity class
- Include “Base Manager” class which has basic data interaction methods. You need to inherit all manager classes from this base manager class. Now you can work with all the business data as objects and not Datatables
Here is a snap of my base manager class.
Here is how fast and easy to create your manager class. No method required for basic database operations.
If you have complex Entity which has a complex or Navigation properties with different kind of relationship in between, You can specify relationship by “ChildEntityInfo” object. In this case Manager class would look like below code.
Now you can use manager class as a normal manager class. Like below
Conclusion
This obviously isn’t the best solution to this case, and obviously isn’t something ground-breaking either. I just tried a simple solution that helps a lot when it comes to trying to deal with such circumstances. Hope this will be helpful for others as well.
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Written by: Dharmendra Baghel |
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February 23, 2012 | |
The most awaited event of the year at InfoBeans is mega outing in which entire InfoBeans team along with their families come together for 4 days holiday. This is when all offices across geographies are not operational.
This year also InfoBeans Pune team along with their families went for Mega Outing to land of beaches Goa often called as “Pearl of the Orient” and a “Tourist Paradise”.InfoBeans Pune team had a scintillating time there and enjoyed the holidays at the fullest.
Check out some photos of our Mega Outing 2011.
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Written by: Manish Malpani |
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January 3, 2012 | |
At InfoBeans, CSR is considered as not a responsibility but an ideology that got imbedded in the culture of InfoBeans. The founders are strong believers of the concept and motivate the entire team to participate in various initiatives at organization and society level.
InfoBeans team participated in AMITY CSR Conclave 2011 and it gives me great pleasure to announce that we have won the award for CSR Excellence (Small Scale category).
Kudos to the entire IB Care team and all of us for making conscious effort to give back to society.
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Written by: Kanupriya Manchanda |
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December 12, 2011 | |
The most awaited event of the year at InfoBeans is mega outing in which entire InfoBeans team along with their families come together for 4 days holiday. This is when all offices across geographies are not operational.
This year also InfoBeans team along with their families went for Mega Outing to Ranthambore National Park in Rajasthan. Check out some photos of our Mega Outing 2011.
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Written by: Manish Malpani |
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December 12, 2011 | |
Quality is simply an obsession. An obsession to deliver nothing but the best. Obsessively and compulsively engaged in delivering what is required without deviating even a small pixel.
Only with this spirit will one see great results, great products, great success.
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Written by: Siddharth Sethi |
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November 29, 2011 | |
