Latest Articles by maneet

Structured Trade Finance: How It Helps Your Business Run

Tue, 16 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0500

What is structured trade finance?

Trade structured trade finance are inevitable tools for financing your business whether they are related to goods or commodities. Structured trade finance is basically a method that aids many importers and exports of goods and commodities to conduct their business without any hitch. This article will act as your trade finance advice tool and will introduce you to the benefits of trade finance and structured trade finance which you can take advantage of, if you run short of cash during any point of time of your day to day business activities.

Why do we need structured trade finance?

No one can disagree with importance of commodity trade finance for smooth operation of import and export business activities. It is needless to mention that today the business is virtually handicapped sans working capital which infuses life in your business. However, given the uncertainty and slow liquidation factors in the business, it sometimes becomes tough for a businessperson to arrange money for making fresh purchase. This is where the needs of structured trade finance come into picture.

How different is it from traditional form of financing from banks?

When you turn to a bank for financing your business in the midst of financial crisis, it might not help you much. Ideally, a bank may finance up to certain limit which largely depends on the financial picture of your business in the balance sheet. Where as the structured trade finance is tailor-made to assist you to finance you business just the way you like it. With structured trade finance in place, you can easily make purchase from your suppliers even when you do not have immediate money to pay your suppliers. Commodity trade finance acts as a useful tool to pay your suppliers at a later date ensuring you run your normal business process smoothly.

How does structured trade finance work?

In structured trade finance or commodity trade finance, as they call it, the bank takes the releasable stock of your finished products as collateral. The bank usually lends money against the total worth of the stock minus some amount which is calculated taking into account the price and other risk factors.

In the structured trade finance method, the bank also considers the way the deal is structured between both buyer and the seller. If something goes wrong, then the bank will take possession of the goods and commodities and sell them to realize money to reply any loan amount outstanding.

How does the structured trade finance benefit you?

The structured trade finance helps you get advance on your slow paying invoices, giving you the working capital to pay employees and suppliers. It also helps you get money to pay your suppliers enabling you to deliver your large purchase orders.

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Daniel John Day Robinson the Managing Director of Day Robinson International, a global consultancy and training provider based in the United Kingdom which serves the international trade finance and commodities markets. He offers expert trade finance advice on Structured Trade Finance & Commodity Trade Finance as well. Apart from managing the Day Robinson Group companies in the UK and in Asia as Chief Executive, he provides consulting services in the emerging markets. For more information log on to www.dayrobinson.com.

Source: http://www.articletrader.com

Make your website dynamic

Tue, 11 Sep 2007 00:00:00 -0500

Make your site dynamic! “What do you mean by a dynamic website?” – A website integrated with the database to generate information that visitors see is called a dynamic website. The antonym of dynamic website is a static website, which means that information displayed on the web pages is hard coded in them.

There are many benefits of having a dynamic website – the webmaster can make easy updates to information without fiddling with the source code of the website, generating different forms of information depending upon the visitor or input without creating separate pages for each possible output, give flexibility of adding as many pages as required without manually generating pages and uploading on the server, consistency while displaying information through out the website can be maintained, can offer different features for different type of users to avail services from the website respective to there domain, and the list goes on……

“How can a website be made dynamic?” – Embedding database related codes of any server side scripting language to the pages of website makes the website dynamic. Possible options for the server side scripting language you can use for your website depends on the operating system of the server on which your site is hosted. For Windows based server commonly used languages include PHP, ASP, ASP.NET, C#, Cold fusion etc., and for the Linux based server the options are PHP, Perl, Python, etc.

A considerable number of server side scripting languages are available to choose from but I am found of PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) and always suggest it as the scripting language, the reasons for this liking are: -

a)First it runs on Linux as well as Windows server.
bIt’s a freeware so no cost of purchasing
c)The syntax is easy to learn and get used to.
d)It has a wide range of in-built features
e)Offers connectivity with most of the available database servers
f)Easy installation on server and easy configuration with other third party components
g)Is an object oriented programming language
h)It does not require any plug-in on client’s machine to get executed, it is complied on the server end and outputs the result in the form of HTML.

There are many such features which makes PHP not just my favorite but is a preferred language of many web developers.

“How to check if your server support PHP or not?” – Copy the piece of code below in a text editor and save the file as phpinfo.php, now upload it on your web server in the folder where you upload HTML pages. If it’s root of the server then type the URL http://www.yourdomainname.com/phpinfo.php in the address bar. If the output is a configuration then it means your server supports PHP and if it prompts to save the file then your server does not support PHP, you will have to ask your ISP to enable it for your domain.

phpinfo();
?>

Go to http://www.php.net/ to find more, learn and download PHP. Give it a try and you will realize how easy it is to use and to what extent it gives you the flexibility to make your website interactive and feature rich.

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Maneet Puri having an extensive experience of web based applications has assisted him to implement various knowledge driven process for his clients, and at the same time he provides consultancy to his clients for their website maintenance. With this expertise he has successfully added KPO and website maintenance as verticals to the Web Development company he is heading.

Source: http://www.articletrader.com

OOP Concept – Object Oriented Programming Concept

Tue, 11 Sep 2007 00:00:00 -0500

OOP stands for Object Oriented Programming. It’s all about classes and objects; a class is collection of member functions and variables with different scope of use and accessibility. An object can be a referred as an entity which gets properties and attributes from the class for which it has been created. It will be easy to explain classes and objects using real life example as below: -

Let’s say we call Car a class, every car has some properties and features. The properties includes speed, number of gears it has, its mileage, suspension etc, whereas the features includes power windows, staring, breaks etc. Now Honda Civic will be called an object of the class car, and this object inherits all the features & properties of the class car and which can have values respective to the object.

Inheritance – This is the first feature of an object oriented programming language, it means as soon as an object it created for a class its properties are automatically given to the object. Now depending upon the type of property the object can have value respective to it and there could be a property which will stay fixed. This is known as scope of the member variables & functions defined in the class. For example the class car has a property that it will have 4 wheels, which will remain same for almost every object that will be created from this class. So we can say that the scope of this property is private and can not be changed at objects level, whereas as a property maximum speed will have a scope public i.e. for every object that will be created this property can be different for every object.

Polymorphism – This is the second feature of an object oriented programming language, and it means a function defined performing different functions as the variables passed to it changes. For example we define a function called ‘concat’ which can take two parameters. Now if the parameters passed are of the type integer the function will return sum of two numbers whereas if the parameters passed are characters then the function will return two charters concatenated.

Encapsulation – Third and most important feature of any object oriented programming language. This is associated with data hiding, which means the value of a variable is accessible to the objects of class but they can not change the value assigned to the variable. If scope of a variable is defined as private then the same will also not be accessible to all objects of a class.

Abstraction – Last but not the least this feature of any OO programming, this feature gives the option to represent the needed information in program without disclosing all details. Also this feature gives the possibility of creating user defined data types increases the power of programming language.

Thus to conclude classes are data types on which objects are created. So while a class is created no memory is allocated only when an object is created memory gets allocated. Object is the basic unit of object oriented programming bundled together using functions to operate on data.

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Maneet Puri having an extensive experience of web based applications has assisted him to implement various knowledge driven process for his clients, and at the same time he provides consultancy to his clients for their website maintenance. With this expertise he has successfully added KPO and website maintenance as verticals to the Web Development company he is heading.

Source: http://www.articletrader.com

ODP- Not overdose please!

Thu, 16 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0500

In case you are not aware, there is no OD’s happening here. ODP refers to the Open Directory Project which is the most comprehensive human-edited directory available on the web. Owned by “Time Warner”, ODP is also known as DMOZ (the domain name of ODP), basically is a large, categorize directory of websites and pages which is maintained by pure volunteers. Because of the tedious involvement of manually reviewing all material that is included on every website and page, it is surprising that people volunteer their time and effort to do such a mundane job. But such work has its boons, because the index that gets created is manually constructed and edited, the categorization an relevancy that is made as a consequence is extremely superior to any other index of its kind and also completely unique. On top of that, the data that is available is open and free to the public and can be replicated.

Free! Is it reliable?
As a user, you can browse and search categories of websites and then utilize these scripts by adding live data of the Open Directory Project at dmoz.org to your own website. The template based system that is used is very easy and the user can upload the small scripts onto one’s server and customize it to suit your own needs. Webmaster does not like Dmoz clone websites because they do not have any original content but only contains duplicate contents. The choice lies in your hands but remember most people will not even browse through your directory when they realize it contains duplicate contents and will leave and never return.

The hidden message?
Search Engines are against Dmoz Clone for various reasons. We have already mentioned that since there is no original content, the site fails to qualify as a Quality Site. In addition, thousands of similar pages are created on the web because Duplicate contents are created as all scripts extract live data from Dmoz. This creates a junkyard of the web. Also, since thousands of pages can be created without any real effort, spammers are utilizing it for advertising or Google adsense program. A section of Dmoz has been created in order to get inbound links from thousands of pages only to increase link popularity and search engine ranking. Another drawback is that text link advertisers had created the Dmoz clone to sell links on thousands of pages in order to falsify an increase in artificial link popularity of text link ads buyers. After having all this information, the final choice lies in your hands.

Moral of the story?
Search engines want to provide users with quality results. If you are able to use, modify and enhance the data that has originally (?) been retrieved from Dmoz by presenting it in a unique format you will definitely achieve preference from Search Engines, Webmaster and Web Surfers. Google has created its own directory after having received data from Dmoz. The difference being that enhancement has been achieved through Google technology i.e. ranking of sites on each directory by Page by Page rank. If you are using ODP Clone Scripts to make a simple ODP clone, be prepared to face the consequences. Your site would get banned from search engines because of duplicate contents and you would not be able to repair the damage later. Word of caution- Do Not Use Useless Scripts on Important Sites or Sites that rank well on search engines!

Reality strikes!
In the past, a lot of ODP Clone Scripts makers’ sites were banned because too many websites had duplicate contents as they all had Dmoz clone linked to them. As a consequence, these scripts owners require that their URL is linked with footer “Powered by…” which in addition results into link farming or inbound links from similar pages. Word of advice- Have original and unique contents on your site! This will not only create a reputation for your site or directory as being safe and run for longer times, it will also make it ran and provide good traffic on your site and as a result increase its popularity for users.

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Maneet Puri - 10 years of industry experience has made him expert in all aspects of deploying a web based application. It could be web design, web development SEO or SEM. This not just enables him to develop & promote any website rather also enables him to act as a consultant for his clients to convert their requirement into a workable solution. Now he is heading a Web Development company, based in India with roots from the UK.

Source: http://www.articletrader.com

Let’s shake a Google!

Mon, 13 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0500

The Google Dance has been named by webmasters after the name of Google to explain a concept associated will all search engines. It is not surprising that Google’s reputation as a search engine reaches all over the world and thus has been minutely scrutinized by other search engines always. When Google shuffles the rankings of websites in its search engine results pages (SERPS), the results of a particular search on Google is very fluctuating. This is simply what is termed as ‘dance’. While the dance is taking place, the results of a particular search on Google varies from minute to minute. This change in the index in terms of outcome is instantly reflected on the SERPS, but the actual process takes over the next few days. It is not feasible for Google to shut down its operations or go offline till the updated index has been completely transferred. Thus, the results for a particular index ‘dance’ till the index update can reach all Google servers and be transferred.

What we need to remember
Google has three main servers which are www.google.com, www2.google.com and www3.google.com. While an index update is taking place, the results that will be visible on the three servers will vary to a large extent. Why is it so? Simple, this is because one server is reflected the updated index while the other is still showing the results of the old index.
Simple ways to know whether ‘the dance is on’ is by first making a search request on www.google.com and observe the blue bar that appears on top of the page. It shows ‘pages 1-12 of about 564,000’. The next step would be to do the same on www2.google.com and www3.google.com. By seeing if the number of total pages differs in each other, one will know if the dance is on. Once the numbers do not vary and the order of the results is the same on all the servers, we know that the ‘dance is over.’

Does the dance still happen?
Experts in the field believe that this does not occur now. However, the monthly update of the index list is a direct result of the deep crawl employed by Google’s spiders to crawl the web. People who regularly search the net strongly believe that the results fluctuate more than just once a month. This happens because Google employs a fresh crawl and continuously carried out to keep the index updated. ‘Everflux’ is a term that describes this frequent fluctuation that emerges in the results of a search. The fresh crawl does not determine whether the dance is on because this does not explain the variation in the total number of search pages. Remember a rule, if the three Google servers show a variation in the number of back links to important sites such as Yahoo or AOL, then just know that the ‘Google dance is on.’

So what does it all mean?
An important aspect to remember is that the monthly update does not lose its significance. Fresh crawls ensure that a continuous search of the web is taking place which causes pages to keep getting included in and excluded out of the result pages on a daily basis. Remember that Google’s ranking of web pages is determined by the deep crawl of the web. Don’t lose heart when your ranking drops suddenly among Google’s rankings. This is temporary and related to the Google dance, after five or six days you will be relieved when you observe that the rankings have stabilized. Do not try to compensate by panicking, keep the content quality high on your website and you will emerge the victor!

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Platform Compatibility

Mon, 13 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0500

‘Platform Compatibility’, in literal terms means something which needs a platform to function and is able to function well on various platforms is called Platform Compatibility. Generally this term is used while talking about software applications, where the platform is the operating system installed on the computer on which the application will run. Windows, Linux, Unix, OS/2, IBM, Solaris, Mac etc are the platforms available for different configuration and types of computers. Of these Windows and Linux are commonly known and Mac also takes a good share of popularity.

What makes an application platform compatible? – The choice of tools opted for developing the application. To elaborate say I wish to deploy a web based application, which will be a CRM system to back my business. Now I say I will use PHP as scripting language and MySQL as the database server. The application developed is platform compatible for Windows as well as Linux because both these support PHP as well as MYSQL. But if I would have opted ASP.NET and MS SQL server for development then would have needed a Windows platform to host it, it can not run on Linux platform. Any programming language developed is done for a specific platform then it is enhanced to be supported on different Platforms. If we talk about PHP it was developed for Linux, but now there are compilers available for Windows as well, whereas .NET is developed for Windows platform and till date it does not have complier that can be installed on a Linux server.

Thus if an application is platform compatible or not will depend on language opted for development. With the change of platform definitely certain things do change but mostly it remains the same. When I say few things it means handling of environmental variables, accomplishment of database connectivity etc. Please do note that these examples may vary from language to language but I have mentioned this keeping PHP in mind. What is the reason for platform incompatibility? – The main reason for this is the kernel(core of the operating system) being used by different operating system is designed in a different manner. Since the kernel is different so it would need the compilers to be installed on it to function and work depending on it. And if there is a language that runs of different platforms it means that it has a different compiler for different platforms.

Since I am more associated with web based application, thus for its context I would say if you are looking to deploy a website that will have huge database with it then PHP as scripting language with MySQL as database server is the best option. The application that will be developed using this combination can run on Windows as well as Linux. In other words PHP with MySQL is the combination of choice when deploying a web based application and giving consideration to platform compatibility. While talking about websites some times the term platform compatibility also means that website being deployed functions properly on all browsers – Internet Explorer, Netscape, Mozilla, FireFox, Opera etc.

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Maneet Puri - 10 years of industry experience has made him expert in all aspects of deploying a web based softwares or applications. It could be web design, web development, SEO or SEM. This not just enables him to develop & promote
any website rather also enables him to act as a consultant for his clients to convert their requirement into a workable solution. Now he is heading a Web Development company, based in India with roots from the UK.

Source: http://www.articletrader.com

Web Development – Choosing platform ‘Linux OR Windows’

Fri, 03 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0500

If you will talk about developing a website with anyone, apart from gathering information about the type of website you need, an important (mandatory) question will come – “do you have any preference for the technology to be used for deploying this website?”

Most of the time answer is a question back “What do you suggest?”, reason being clients are not tech savvy so they really do not understand this question. And it’s logical too, if I am associated with implementing the technology I can better understand this question and directly say .NET or PHP as the answer, but if I am a cloth merchant looking for a website this question will sound like Greek to me.

Now here the service provider takes the advantage that they suggest the technology in which they expertise, rather it should be decided depending upon the nature of the application to be deployed, scope of the future enhancements and to an extent the budget the client has allotted for the same. While talking about deploying web based applications Linux and Windows are the most popular platforms. Now depending upon the platform of the server on which the site is to be hosted defines the options of the scripting languages and the database servers that can be used for developing the application. If we talk about Linux as the platform the most commonly used scripting languages includes – PHP, CGI, Perl, Python etc. For Windows platform the scripting languages used are ASP, ASP.NET, C#, Cold Fusion etc. For the database servers Linux offers support for MySQL, PostgreSQL, Sybase etc and MS SQL Server, MS Access, Oracle are the database servers of choice for Windows platform. Its not mandatory that these are the categorizations for the scripting languages and database servers for the said platforms, the scripting languages for Linux also come for as Windows binary and visa versa.

Though there are certain differences among these two as listed below, but both of them are platforms of choice for deploying functionality rich web based applications: -

- Linux is an open source freeware whereas Windows is a Microsoft brand.
- Additional components for Linux are generally free whereas the components for Windows need to be purchased.
- Linux is considered to be more virus proof then Windows
- Web space for Linux being freeware is less costly then Windows
- The cost of Linux web space includes the cost for database server whereas for windows if MS SQL server is opted it costs additional.

For the purposes of listing factors to choose which platform, we can say: -

- The budget the client has for hosting.
- If the specific requirement requires a specific component then identifying weather it is available with Windows or Linux
- If the size of database is going to be huge MS SQL sever is preferred because of the additional features it offers for the data management.
- Both Linux and Windows are equally reliable and robust, but yes on Windows special software are required for providing safety from hackers and non-authentic access.
- Is the client specific about brand then Windows is the only choice.

Thus to conclude, both these platform are platforms of choice for deploying feature rich websites and offer flexibilities of deploying interactive and data rich websites.

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Maneet Puri - 10 years of industry experience has made him expert in all aspects of deploying a web based application. It could be web
design, web development, SEO or SEM. This not just enables him to develop & promote any website rather also enables him to act as a consultant for his clients to convert their requirement into a workable solution. Now he is heading a Web Design & Development company, based in India with roots from the UK.

Source: http://www.articletrader.com

How KPO is different from BPO

Fri, 03 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0500

To distinguish between KPO and BPO, it would be better to first have a small brief about what these two terms means.

KPO, abbreviation of Knowledge Process Outsourcing, in literal terms means outsourcing a process which requires processing knowledge in one form or another. Supposing your processes cannot be easily automated, in other words, you require people to think and be proactive on your behalf, rather than simply following a checklist of activities? You will need a much more sophisticated firm to help you, one with a highly skilled team of people, acting upon and processing information of all kinds in order to deliver successful outcomes to you. Such a third party firm processing information for creation/formatting and/or dissemination of information for you is known as Knowledge Processing Outsourcing (‘KPO’).

BPO stands for Business Process Outsourcing, which means getting a business process implemented using the channel of outsourcing. Let's say you are running a business which requires various different processes to be implemented in order to accomplish different tasks crucial to your business model. As your business expands, more and more new processes are introduced - and implementing such processes calls for increased manpower, resources, administration, HR activities etc., adding the burden of both administration and cost to you. An alternative must be found; one which enables you to manage these burdens by outsourcing them to a third-party firm who is equipped to implement the solutions to them (i.e. to manage your processes). This is called Business Process Outsourcing (‘BPO’).

Knowing the literal meaning anyone would say, If I am a business and have knowledge that needs to be processed it’s my business process so what exactly is the difference in these two terms?

The answer is KPO is an advanced from of BPO. To further explain it I will use this example, say there is a company which organizes conferences for various different industry sectors. This business always would want its database of contacts to grow and should be updated for details of contact that might have moved, another thing which this company would want to have as a process i.e. calling the contacts they have in there database to inform about the new events being produced to generate participations.

Now if this business decides to outsource both these process, then the first process will fall under KPO and the second one will fall under BPO. The second one actually does not require any research or special intellect to be implemented it will have a simple checklist with a pitch script. Whereas the first process will fall under KPO because it can not be implemented by following a checklist rather it need intelligence and understanding of the industry to be able to research and verify the details of the contacts.

Following points can be used to distinguish between these two terms: -

a) KPO requires more of intelligence and level of skills, whereas for a BPO it is not mandatory.
b) A checklist can not be the basis of implementing a knowledge based process.
c) New and unpredictable scenarios can occur while implementing a Knowledge based process.

KPO will be the next big boom after BPO and reason for this could be that KPO not just restricts itself to information technology but also looks at other sectors like business research, data acquisition, Clinical research etc.

Future of KPO is bright and in next 5-7 years is will be on higher end then BPO. The KPO regime is all set to accept challenges of high training cost and a much higher attrition rates. But industry is accepting all challenges with the objective to set mark like BPO has done.

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Maneet Puri - 10 years of industry experience has made him expert in all aspects of deploying a web based application. It could be web solutions, SEO or SEM. This not just enables him to develop & promote any website rather also enables him to act as a consultant for his clients to convert their requirement into a workable solution. Now he is heading a Web Design & Development company, based in India with roots from the UK.

Source: http://www.articletrader.com