| Daniel Anandaraj Garnipudi | - @dodosamuel

The other day, Harish and I were talking to a new associate who had joined us recently. We got around to discussing the values we see as important in an Influxian. With our strategic plans taking shape, I thought I would pen them down for the world to see!

If you feel you relate to these, what are you waiting for? Read this - Influx Insider I — Want a bus ticket to success? and email us on careers@influx.co.in. Let’s see if we can find you a spot here with us.

There are many values that we consider important at Influx and, in no specific order, I have listed the most important ones here.

Intelligence

Understanding the needs of the clients and being creative in the digital space is what we strive for. This is the key Influx differentiator when we work with clients. There are many organisations that could build websites and apps, and do...

This month’s guest writer, Sabina Narayan, combines practicality and responsibility with ease and is, in her own words, a “community advocate”. Passionate about the environment, she works to help clean up her part of Chennai, the city in which she lives and works. Here are her thoughts on how we can keep our spaces at home and work healthy and safe.

Do share your comments and suggestions with us on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. It does make a difference.

I am a mother, daughter, wife, sister, friend, animal-lover, community advocate, and victim of having a sweet tooth. I clearly do not mention these roles in any particular order of priority since “victim of a sweet tooth” is at the end.

All my roles are incredibly important to me because each one feeds a part of my being. But, reflecting on it, I realized that seven of them can be described as being a part of the broadest one...

| Mohan AC | - | Hardik Goswami | - | Manikandan R |

At Influx we are always on the lookout for best practices in software development. So, naturally, we were excited when we came across the event called BotsUp - Best Practices for ChatBot Technology and Development, in Bengaluru.

This MeetUp focused on bringing tech leaders and chat-bot enthusiasts under one roof to discuss the current state of the industry, the frameworks that go into building a great chat-bot and what the future holds from a technical standpoint. Three of us from Influx participated in this event.

Some of the key points discussed at the MeetUp by Swapan Rajdev, CTO of Haptik, were,

? Conversations > UI

When designing a chatbot, words are more powerful than UI. Because people think and express themselves differently, you need to see each conversation in context.

Focus on:

• Where the conversation starts?
• ...

| Vaidehi Mehta | - @mehta_vaidehi

On 6 February this year, Facebook’s COO, Sally Sandberg’s non-for-profit, Lean In, launched MentorHer, an initiative to counter the hashtag campaign MeToo. Sandberg believes that MentorHer will bring parity and balance the scales with MeToo, the hashtag that went viral the world over with hordes of women (and some men) speaking up about sexual harassment and assault.

How it started

Well before hashtags were used, Tarana Burke coined the phrase Me Too for a campaign to express empathy for, and solidarity with, survivors of sexual harassment, especially those who are underprivileged socially, economically or due to race and rank, for women of colour, especially minimum wage earners and underprivileged women, who had experienced sexual harassment/assault.

Alyssa Milano’s MeToo in October 2017 was a call-out to women, to speak up against sexual...

| Deepa Sai | - @deepasai_pr

Businesses are now thriving on social media at such levels that Mark Zuckerberg had to update the Newsfeed algorithm to restrict the display of branded and public content on Facebook. Brands now have to hustle harder to gain customers’ attention, especially before they are further bombed with algorithms on other social media channels.

An alarming number of brands are active on social media with ill-formed strategies and getting their reputations butchered. This article is to give such brands a harsh reality-check.

As a brand you just cannot afford to:

• Have an social account with zero posts on them
• Post on social media actively for a while and then “ghost” on your audiences
• Survive solely on piggybacks (retweets, reposts, etc.)
• Borrow tacky photographs and videos of low-res and claim them as your own

Otherwise, your brand will get sucked into the...

| CA Abhishek Murali, M.Com, FCA, ACMA, CGMA, CIMA(Lon.), CISA, DISA |

Abhishek Murali gives us a snapshot based on Finance Minister, Arun Jaitley’s, Budget 2018.

The Finance Minister, Arun Jaitley, has presented the Budget for 2018, and people have been keeping a watchful eye on what it has in store for different segments of the economy — individual as well as corporate taxpayers.

Here is a summary. A detailed write-up from Mr Murali will follow.

DIRECT TAXES

The Statistics

• There has been significant growth in direct tax collections – 12.6% DT and 18.7% till Jan 2018

• Average Tax Buoyancy till 2016 — 1.1%. Risen to between 1.95% and 2.11% in last 2 years due to anti-evasion measures

• There has been an Increase in the number of tax returns filed with new tax payers numbering 85.51 lakh

• Under the Presumptive Income Scheme, 41% more returns have been filed; 5.68 lakh returns...

| Amit Mehta | - @AmitKO84

Q) Why did we join Facebook?

A) So that we could connect with our family and friends. Get to know which friend’s been on a vacation to Bora Bora, or which cousin’s had a baby (Comment immediately- Awwww! Beautiful :) )

And that’s all we wanted to see. People we know/people we’re forced to add as friends (let’s be polite) and what they’re up to.

Correct?

Slowly, along the way, content from companies/brands crept in. Contests, news articles, promoted content and a whole pile of video junk. All of which took the soul of Facebook away from us.

We steadily saw less of personal connected posts/ images and more of ‘news’ (fake alert!). The company had moved away from being a social networking platform to a news organisation. So much that there’s a massive conspiracy theory about how Russia used Facebook to propagate fake news and rig the US elections (and...

| Vaidehi Mehta | - @mehta_vaidehi

Many, many, moons ago, before the Worldwide Web became par for the course in India, a young girl in the fifth grade won the second prize in a poetry-writing competition conducted by a leading newspaper. Friends and family, and her school, were thrilled to bits. She was feted and everyone believed she had great potential. Two weeks later, the newspaper wrote rescinding the prize, saying the poem had been plagiarised. They sent the original text too. The girl and the people who feted her were left with egg on the face.

Clearly a case of copying.

More recently, I was witness to a situation where a stink was raised in an organisation about what was perceived as plagiarised content in an article that was written on the company blog. It was about a Reserve Bank regulation that would impact several sectors of the Indian economy. In truth, the topic was...

| Mohan AC | - @MohanAC91

If you follow tech news even occasionally, I am sure you would have come across the word Bitcoin in the last few weeks. In this post, I want to explain some basic elements of Bitcoin.

• Do you know what Bitcoin is?
• What base technology is used in it?
• What are the hidden potentials of Blockchain?

Origin

Satoshi Nakamoto was the inventor of the Bitcoin protocol, publishing a paper via the Cryptography Mailing List in November 2008.

Nakamoto (who I’m going to refer to as “he”), a shadowy figure, whose identity — or even gender — is unknown, then released the first version of the Bitcoin software client in 2009, and participated with others on the project via mailing lists, until he finally began to fade from the community toward the end of 2010.

He took care never to reveal anything personal about himself, and the last anyone heard from him was in the...

| Aum Janakiram | - @axemanaum

“A trusted referral influences people more than the best broadcast message. A trusted referral is the holy grail of advertising.” – Mark Zuckerberg

It’s no secret that people influence people. From the dawn of time, word of mouth has always been the best way to inform or find out if a product is as good as it says it is. Most times, people will blindly listen to a trusted source even when people are saying the product is bad. Such is the power of an Influencer. In this blog, I’ll briefly explain the concept of Influencer Marketing, how it began, its impact and the pros and cons.

Some of you may already know about the facts that follow, but rest assured that I will be covering more advanced topics in the future. For the sake of the newbies, here are the basics first.

Definition

Influencer Marketing is a form of marketing which focuses on influential...