I've been doing EDI (Electronic Document Interface) for about 2 decades now. In that time, I've personally written 3 different EDI frameworks, 2 in Delphi, and one in PHP, plus we're working on a node.js version. Our overall goal is to make it affordable for small and medium sized companies to do EDI.
EDI is by far the best way to exchange data between two companies. By the best, I mean the most robust. Yes, it's less technically challenging to use JSON API's or other means, but EDI is the best way to automate it. EDI has strict standards for all data, and detects missing or bad data, and aborts the data transfer when needed. Most API's fall short in the area of data integrity.
EDI Shack has some open-source software
If you are one of the tens of thousands of WooCommerce or Shopify store owners, EDI Shack will be able to set you up with a plugin which can be used to monitor your EDI systems, plus programs and/or daemons/services to automate the sending or receiving of data from your trading partners. Some of it is even Open Source and Free.
You can check out EDI Shack here
Chinglish X is a platform to facilitate communication between English speakers and Chinese speakers, and English companies and Chinese companies. Users or companies set their language (English or Simplified Chinese) and everything is translated automatically including real time chats.
Chinglish X is a website, PWA app, Android and IOS app. We have developed a mobile-first PWA app which effectively consolidates the most popular features of major social apps: Chat, blogs, and social groups.
The Chinglish X web app uses the latest technologies and was developed as a PWA (Progressive Web App), and is designed to load quickly and efficiently, and minimize bandwidth use on cell phones. The app is modularized and modules are downloaded as needed, most data is stored in the browser. The app functions as a phone app, but can be downloaded with a browser, and works like a native phone app. PWA apps are modular, and bug fixes and new features can be released incrementally such that the newer version of the app is automatically available to all users without any user intervention, making for a much better user experience.
Check it out at https://pwa.chinglishx.com
I just finished the first draft of Maadili World. Note that it's not ready for prime time yet. It's just on the internet so we can have our data entry people work on getting the data in, without having to come to the office. We still need a design team to make it look great.
Maadili World is based on a book by Nicolai Peitersen called "The Ethical Economy". Nicolai is a Danish economist who worked for the Danish Central Bank, and later Morgan Stanley in London. He moved to Chengdu, Sichuan, China, and I happened to meet him walking in a park in Southwest Chengdu one day a little over a year ago.
Although the book is several years old now, a Chinese version was just published in 2014. The book talks about how the valuation of companies has changed over the years. Companies used to be valued on their sales, and their brick and mortar assets (ie... their profits and the value of their salable assets). That started to change when companies began building brands, and outsourcing and distributed manufacturing became the norm. Now, companies like Apple (currently the highest valued company in the world), own few if any factories but are valued highly.
In the world of social networking, a new factor was added to how companies are valued: Their Ethical Values. People in the green movement have been particularly effective at changing company values by boycotting polluters and buying from non-polluters. Ethical value investing has become main stream, and there is little doubt that the publics' perception of a companys ethical values affect both their sales and their valuation in the stock market.
Maadili World is our attempt at quantifying and measuring ethical values worldwide and feeding that information to companies so that they can better adjust their business practices to reflect the ethical values of their consumers, shareholders, lenders and the general public.
We believe strongly that companies who want to prosper need to continually adjust their ethical practices, and we feel that Maadili World will give the people a voice, and the companies the information they need to improve.
Approximately two weeks ago (as of early Feb, 2011) we started work on a major project. It will most likely become an all consuming project for at least 6 months. The project is a website, Android App and supporting services for MaxHomeValue.com. MaxHomeValue is new entry into the home renovations market and we expect it will become a major player in the industry over the next 2 years or so.
MaxHomeValue gives Home Owners the ability to find good, reliable contractors for any project they have involving home renovations. The Home Owner can manage the project themselves or MaxHomeValue will manage it for them. Contractors can bid on projects, manage them and easily communicate with the Home Owner.
We've already started putting up publicly available information and Homeowners, Contractors looking for work, Realtors and the other group can register although the other account management features will not be available for a little over a month from now.
Check the MaxHomeValue site out, and let us know what you think about it! Just remember... it will be a work in progress until at least the middle of May, 2011.
If you've been keeping up with the Android World, you know that Android has been a tremendously successful cell phone platform. It's good to see.... I decided to concentrate on programming for Android over two years ago, and at the time I was fairly sure in my own mind that Android would do well... but it was certainly not guaranteed. I was working on my first Android App BEFORE there was even one cell phone running Android. I then pre-ordered and bought one of the first Android phones (the original T-Mobile G1) and received it on the first day on the first release.
Fast forward to today, and Android powered cell phones are being activated at the rate of over 300,000 a day. There are so many cell phone running Android that I've lost track of how many they are, and there are well over 140,000 Android programs available for download. Android has truly been the most successful launch of a new cell phone operating system EVER.
Of course, things haven't been quite as smooth for many Android Developers. The Google Android Market is a black hole of despair for most Android Developers. When I release a new Android App, I'm lucky if the app stays on the first page of the "Just-in" list for more than a couple of hours. Sometimes not even that long. And with over 140,000 apps and only 32 categories it's almost impossible for a new app to get noticed at all, even if it's a very good app. When I released my first "PriceBunny" app (a barcode scanner that parsed Amazon and eBay for prices), it stayed on the "Just-In" first page for a couple of days and could be easily found for over a week. In addition it showed up in the "Most Popular" in it's category almost right away. Now... when I release a new App I'm lucky if it ever shows up in the "Most Popular" because there are an average of over 4,000 apps in every category and some have over 7,000 apps, and most of them are terrible quality and it makes it hard to find the good apps.
Well.. about 2 months ago, I set out to cure the problem. I started my own Android Market called "No Crappy Apps" (for Android). All the way I developed some sophisticated software algorithms to detect SPAM apps and SPAM comments. Of course... as I am an Android Programmer I also developed a cell phone application, so users can now find good apps for their cell phone FROM their cell phone :). No Crappy Apps™ also developed a "Developer Support" index to help weed out those developers that release a crappy app, and then don't bother to support it and make it better. And we built ways to feature better quality apps and make them known to Android users.
Check out No Crappy Apps
I think you will agree that it's MUCH better than the Android Market... Let me know.
<p>Our website is now running on a Cloud-based server. We expect it will be considerably faster. As of now, we believe we have sorted out all the issues caused by the change in server, but if you experience ANY difficulties, please let us know :).</p>