Zume Pizza is a Silicon Valley punchline, but investors are pouring millions into it.

You wouldn’t be the first person to roll your eyes if told that a Silicon Valley startup that uses robots to make pizza is worth almost $2 billion.

Nor would you be the first person to question about how that same startup, a year later, could soon double in valuation.

But indeed, Recode has learned that this startup, Zume Inc., is in talks with investors to be valued at about $4 billion in a new round of fundraising, according to people familiar with the matter. One part of the story that isn’t so surprising: One of Zume’s biggest investors is SoftBank, the controversial investor behind WeWork and Uber that has become emblematic of Silicon Valley’s excesses. SoftBank pumped...

Unless you have been living under a rock for the past few years, you must have heard of the hype around AI (artificial intelligence) and ML (machine learning). These are among the most popular terms within the technology industry these days. Companies claim to apply AI in their product development, people say they have ML expertise. Hype may come with reality, but AI/ML has no shortage of challenges. 

User-centered design brings about many benefits in product development (Read more: What Is User-centered Design) but it also comes with no shortage of challenges.

For software engineers, writing code is not a problem but writing maintainable and testable code is a difficult task. This requires a whole lot of time and effort. However, with maintainable code, the development process will be much easier in the later stages. No developer wants code that is difficult to work with or impossible to change. 

“The most valuable assets of a 20th-century company were its production equipment,” said management guru Peter Drucker in 1999. “The most valuable asset of  a 21st-century institution, whether business or non-business, will be its knowledge workers and their productivity.” East Agile thinks the exact same way. To East Agile, human capital is the most important asset of an organization - more than technology, intellectual and physical property. Therefore, we are really careful in recruiting and investing in our people. In this article, we will walk you through our recruitment approach and how it’s like to work at East Agile. 

Messaging services are an invention that has transformed into a way of life. Our phones are filled with notifications and constantly ping throughout the day. 

The number of mobile messaging app users worldwide is still growing at a significant rate, even after three years of double-digit growth. eMarketer expects growth will drop to single-digit rates in 2019, as penetration among smartphone users nears 80%. Chat apps are considered to have a higher retention and usage rate than most mobile apps. As a software provider company, we constantly watch out for trends going around this social preference.

Here are some trends we think will shape the future of messaging apps:

1/ Instant payments through messenger: Instant payments are available on many apps and websites and it...

With the exception of these holidays, East Agile Vietnam’s core operating hours are from 8am to 5pm, Monday through Friday (ICT, Indochina Time, UTC+7).

- In Pacific Time (PST, UTC-8), our working hours are from 5pm to 2am. During Daylight Saving Time, our hours are from 6pm to 3am PDT.

- In Eastern Time (EST, UTC-5), our working hours are from 8pm to 5am. During Daylight Saving Time, our hours are from 9pm to 6am EDT.

- U.S. Daylight Saving Time begins on Sunday, March 10th, 2020 and ends on Sunday, November 3rd, 2020. Vietnam does not follow Daylight Saving Time.

See http://bit.ly/2BDXuHl to translate to your time zone.

Holidays

Our office in San Francisco has limited staff during the following business days in 2020:

Within the last few years, many companies have started to move from MongoDB to PostgreSQL, including the giant newspaper and online publication - The Guardian. The famous American question-and-answer platform Quora is also an example of companies that heavily use MySQL as a data-store instead of NoSQLs such as Cassandra, MongoDB or CouchDB. In this article, let’s examine why MySQL and PostgreSQL are more favorable than MongoDB over time. 

1. Better structured management system. In case you plan to move to a mix of structured and unstructured data or if you think ACID (atomicity, consistency, isolation and durability) compliance will be important for your product in the future, PostgreSQL is a great option to choose. According to Adam D’Angelo, Quora Founder,...

User-centered design (UCD) is an iterative design process in which designers focus on the users and their needs in each phase of the design process. In UCD, design teams involve users throughout the design process via a variety of research and design techniques, to create highly usable and accessible products for them. East Agile uses the following core design practices as part of our product offering:

• User Interviews
• Ethnographic Studies
• Persona Definition
• Prototype Creation

Personas are fictional characters, which you create based upon your research in order to represent the different user types that might use your service, product, site, or brand in a similar way. Creating personas will help you to understand your users’ needs, experiences, behaviours and goals....