Forem: Soumya Roy

9 Powerful UI/UX Tools for Mobile and WebApp UX UI Prototyping

Soumya Roy — Fri, 14 Jun 2019 18:04:26 +0000

With the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), designers and developers are always left with fresh and unique tools to develop ground-breaking product designs. When bringing forth new ideas, using UI UX tools is definitely a great help to meet your creative requirements.

When it comes to UI-UX design, there are plenty of UI-UX design tools already available in the market that are innovative as well as viable. Finding a prototype and wireframe tool that fits your team's needs, can give your design process the strong foundation it needs. Besides, we all know that an intuitive design coupled with the right mix of internet marketing makes it a real success.

Without any further ado let’s check out the following nine UI and UX design tools that will help you to streamline your designing process from start to finish.

Axure RP 9

Axure RP is a simple yet powerful wireframing and prototyping solution for creating interactive prototypes and wireframes. This tool has been around for a while now and it is known for its effectiveness for evaluating web and mobile applications. The software is armed with powerful features such as the capability to use conditional logic and math functions, work on dynamic content, and apply animations.

Features:

You can create interactive prototypes, wireframes, and diagrams.
You can easily drag and drop the elements from the given inbuilt library.
It gives you the freedom to test the prototype on mobile devices
It is also used to create high fidelity results so that the end result can be tested through a realistic prototype.
It works on both MacOS and Windows operating systems.

Pricing:

Monthly plans: Axure RP 9 Pro - 29$ per user - per month, Axure RP 9 Team - 49$ per user - per month
Perpetual plans: Axure RP 9 Pro - 495$ per user, Axure RP 9 Team - 895$ per user

UX Pin

UX Pin is every designer’s one of the favorite wireframe tools because of its flexibility and the ease of use. It is a cloud-based wireframe tool. The main advantage of UXPin is that it allows designers to take their design concepts all the way through the process. It has unique design documentation. You can create everything from wireframe to presentation and gather user feedback.

Features:

You can create a robust and interactive wireframe and prototype using UXPin.
The simple drag and drop functionality allows you to drag the icons, custom UI elements and images to enhance a wireframe.
With UXPin you can easily create high-fidelity mockups.
It lets you customize the existing UI elements instantly by altering or adding custom CSS code.
UXPin has over 1000 UI elements for the web, cloud-based, and mobile wireframes.
It works with Windows, iOS, Android operating systems.

Pricing:

Free plan available
Monthly plans: Individual plan - 29$ per month, Enterprise - Contact sales
Annual plans: Individual plan - 23$ per month, Enterprise - Contact sales

Marvel

Marvel is a cloud-based UX prototype software with mobile support. It enables single or multiple users of varying sizes to create app prototypes within a centralized workspace. The software provides a browser-based environment and design mode. And that helps you to create interface assets and mockups based on imported Sketch or Photoshop compositions.

Features:

It gives you the freedom to test your design on any screen size, including iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, Apple Watch and Android devices.
Users can send their feedback through comments about your prototype.
You can share your prototypes with developers, clients or stakeholders.
You can present your mockups without internet connectivity.
Its WYSIWYG and drag-and-drop feature is codeless and requires no specialist development knowledge.
It is fully compatible with Android and iOS devices.

Pricing:

Free plan available
Monthly plans: Pro - $16 / month, Enterprise - Contact sales team
Annual plans: Pro - $12 / month, Enterprise - Contact sales team

Mock Flow

Mock Flow is a suite of applications that are very useful for a number of tasks in the project implementation process. Primarily it is a good alternative prototyping tool for you to use. It's great for working on initial ideas. Mock Flow enables you to build basic layouts quickly that is sometimes all you need to get through into a presentable form.

Features:

You can easily drag and drop the elements into the mockup and design a wireframe.
It allows you to choose third-party components, layouts, and templates.
Mock Flow lets you design and access your UI mockups from anywhere in the world.
You can get real-time reviews and feedback from your users.
You can use any custom image for your wireframe along with the images present in the library.
You can export created wireframes to a range of formats.

Pricing:

Free plan available
Monthly plans: Premium - 19$ per month, Business - 89$ per month
Quarterly plans: Premium - 17$ per month, Business - 89$ per month
Half yearly plans: Premium - 16$ per month, Business - 89$ per month
Yearly plans: Premium - 14$ per month, Business - 89$ per month

Fluid UI

Fluid UI is a website and mobile wireframe design tool. It provides an incredibly intuitive and easy-to-use platform to create stunning web and mobile prototypes in a matter of minutes. Fluid UI has a number of features including integrated widgets, low and high fidelity settings, collaboration tools, interactive linking and zooming, and cloud access among others. You can make interactive web and mobile prototypes using a few clicks and touch gestures.

Features:

You can test your wireframe on any device.
Fluid UI has over 2000 built-in components to choose from.
It offers live video-calling and Skype-chat features to get user feedback.
You can use transitions and animations in your wireframes.
Fluid UI lets you interact with the UI design via different screens such as Mobile, Tablet, Desktop, and various wearables such as Apple watch, Android, and Galaxy wear.
It supports platforms like Android and iOS.

Pricing:

Free forever plan available
Monthly plans: Solo - 15$ per month, Team - 65$ per month
Yearly plans: Solo - 8.25$ per month, Team - 41.58$ per month

Proto.io

Proto.io is a web application platform for creating a fully interactive, high-fidelity mobile application prototype. It allows you to create mobile app screens, apply screen transitions and define touch events for each design element on the screen. It comes with a great number of design elements and UI components for prototyping such as toolbars, navigation bars, tab bars, menus, forms, text, photos, and much more.

Features:

It offers you high fidelity interaction experience while working with complex logic and structure.
You can use a lot of mobile gestures, animations, and transitions.
You can speed up your workflow with its ready-to-use templates.
It allows you to test the prototype on mobile devices.
It offers you a sketch import facility and Dropbox synchronization.
Proto.io supports Mac and Windows operating systems.

Pricing:

15-day free trial available
Monthly plans: Freelancer - 24$ per month, Corporate - 160$ per month
Annual plans: Freelancer - 24$ per month, Corporate - 160$ per month

InVision

InVision is a cloud-based solution for designing wireframes for websites or mobile applications. InVision is considered as an ideal choice for the high-fidelity designs. It provides great prototyping tools and features that enable you to create a fully functional prototype.

Features:

With InVision, constructing clickable prototypes from scratch is quick and easy.
The drag-and-drop functionality gives easier access to the images and sketches to move them from one place to another.
It comes with a smooth collaboration facility. You can easily share the link with other designers and get instant feedback.
It supports iOS, Android, and web platforms.

Pricing:

Free plan available
Starter - 15$ per month
Enterprise - Contact sales team

Framer X

Framer X is considered to be one of the most interactive and fast-design UI platforms. It brings all your creative ideas and designs to life. Every graphic you create with Framer is interactive and responsive. Framer X is very fast in actions and bringing the content closer to production.

Features:

Framer X allows advanced, high fidelity prototyping and animations.
It has an app store for icons, UI elements, pre-made visuals and code components.
It allows you to code your components and bring in live data.
Framer X offers tools to design scroll, link and page interactions by adding a 3D effect or momentum.
You can create custom UI for every component, and reuse across multiple projects.

Pricing:

Monthly plans: Individual - 15$ per month, Company - Contact sales
Annual plans: Individual - 12$ per month, Company - Contact sales

Figma

Figma is relatively new in the world of UI and UX designing tools. From the design team to the people in development, everyone can collaborate together to make sure everybody is on the same plane. This helps make the process much more efficient and productive.

Features:

Figma lets you scale your design to fit any screen size by fixing objects to a parent frame.
You can combine any set of shape layers with precision by using union, subtract, intersect, and exclude formulas.
Its 60fps interactive editing brings pixel-perfect previews and exports.
With relative and manual positioning you have full control over where and how overlays appear.

Pricing:

Starter plan - Free
Organization plan - $45 per editor per month

Over to You

These are some of the powerful UI UX design tools for prototyping and designing websites and mobile apps. While choosing the best UI UX software for you or your team, start by considering your goal for the overall design process.

11 Top Open-Source Tools for Web and Android Developers in 2019

Soumya Roy — Tue, 28 May 2019 08:18:14 +0000

According to several studies, there are about 18.2 million software developers worldwide and that is expected to rise up to 26.4 million by 2019 end, with a 45% increase. So there is no doubt that web and Android development is one of the most popular jobs in the world today.

To become an expert developer in this cut-throat competition you need to master the programming, development process, and take full advantage of the best tools out there. In fact, learning how to use these tools is the first crucial step you have to take in your web and Android development journey.

If you are a beginner or pro developer in the Android and web development space you need a rich source of the best open-source toolkit in your development workflow to build better and dynamic websites as well as Android applications.

So without any more preamble let’s have a look at 2019’s 11 top web and Android development tools that are open-source and will grow your development efficiency exponentially.

AngularJS

AngularJS is an open-source free JavaScript framework to build dynamic front-end web applications. Due to its powerful features, it has become one of the favorite tools among web developers worldwide. AngularJS was developed by Google and it is mostly used for building single page web applications.

It allows you to use HTML as your template language and you can extend the HTML syntax to express your web application components more precisely. Its data binding and dependency injection system eliminate most of the code writing part and you can access all the features from your browser.

Features:
MVC Framework - This framework is based on the concept of Model View Control (MVC) architecture and it helps you build the client-side web applications. You do not need to write extra code to fit all the elements together. It allows you to create all the MVC elements separately and it automatically combines them by using AngularJS Framework.

Data Binding - You don’t have to write special code to bind data; it automatically synchronizes data between model and view components.

Less coding - You don’t need to write a different set of code for different devices for running the application. A single code will do the work for you and that can be used for various platforms.

Unit testing - The code is divided into smaller units and that helps you to easily detect any mistakes in each line of the code. It has an in-built dependency injection system through which mock units are injected and tested to see whether the output is producing expected data or not.

Node.js

Node.js is an open-source and free JavaScript for developing server-side applications. Node.js is built on Chrome's V8 JavaScript engine to build scalable network applications. It uses event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight as well as efficient.

Most of the basic modules of Node.js are written in javascript and it also provides a rich library of various javascript modules that simplifies the web application development process.

Features:
Fast execution - As Node.js is built on Chrome's V8 javascript engine its library works very fast in executing different codes.

Highly scalable - Its event mechanism helps the server to respond in a non-blocking way that makes it highly scalable.

Asynchronous and Event-driven - Node.js library involves asynchronous APIs that means the server never waits for an API to return data, instead it moves to the next API after calling it. Its notification mechanism of events helps the server to receive a response from the previous API call.

No Buffering - Node.js applications never buffer any data, as it speeds up the whole process by giving output data in smaller chunks.

Single threaded - Node.js applications use a single-threaded model with event looping.

Android Studio

Android Studio is another open-source tool that contains all the features you need to build an Android app. This tool is also known as the official integrated development environment (IDE) for Google’s Android operating system. It contains features like APK analyzer, fast simulator, flexible build system, visual layout, and intelligent code editor etc. to provide you a smooth application development environment.

It has come up with the latest Android studio 3.2 version that is more stable and makes it the best for Android developers to build new android app bundles.

Features:
Intelligent code editor - It offers advanced code completion feature that allows you to write better codes and improve your productivity. When you type your code it provides suggestions in a dropdown list and you can simply select the one that is needed.

Run apps instantly - Its instant run feature understands the changes you make in your code and delivers them without restarting or rebuilding your app that helps you to see the effects immediately.

Testing apps - It helps you to test your Android apps with JUnit 4 and functional UI test frameworks.

All Android device optimization - It lets you build apps for Android phones, Android wearable, tablets, Android TV, and Android Auto.

Bootstrap

Bootstrap is another free, front-end focused framework that is used for developing websites and applications. The websites and applications developed using Bootstrap are compatible with both iOS and Android devices.

Bootstrap is an HTML, CSS and Javascript based framework that lets you create dynamic websites. It comes with an in-built code that provides a solution for most of the tricky elements such as responsiveness that often slows down web projects.

Features:
Easy to start - Bootstrap is very simple to begin and get started and that is one of its most appealing features.

LESS and CSS files - Bootstrap offers both LESS as well as CSS files.

Easy customization - Bootstrap is designed on responsive 12 column grids, layouts, and components that make it easy to customize.

Templates - The collection of templates makes things easier for beginners to create a website following simple tutorials available on Bootstrap.

Extensive components - Bootstrap comes with components like dropdowns, button, navigation bar, breadcrumbs, alerts, progress bar and many more.

Brackets

Brackets is an open-source text editor tool that helps you to build website and applications directly from your browser. It is specially designed for web designers and front-end developers.

Brackets is built with HTML, CSS, and Javascript and it currently runs as a desktop application that can access your local files. Brackets tool is available for download in Mac, Windows, and Linux operating system.

Features:
Highlight syntax - You can highlight specific code to denote them with a different color, font or background.

Find and replace code - It helps you to find a specific line of code and replace them with new command without scrolling through the whole code that saves a lot of your time.

Cross-platform support - You can access your data for various device types and operating systems.

Language support - It supports various programming languages such as c, Java or Python and at the same time, it supports front-end languages like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Instabug

Instabug is an essential tool for every developer to build error-free android apps. You can share screenshots, audio-video recordings, detailed error logs to identify and fix the bugs easily.

Popular Android apps like Paypal, Yahoo, Buzzfeed, Dubsmash, Scribd and many others use Instabug to check vulnerability issues.

Features:
Bug and crash reports - Receive detailed bug and crash reports, and track every step before a bug or crash to reproduce the crash and network request logs.

Improve user communication - Your users can easily report bugs and submit their feedback. After fixing the issue you can reply back to them through the app. This makes a huge impact on retention and engagement rate of your users.

Integrate with tools - You can integrate Instabug with tools like Jira, GitHub, Slack, Trello and more directly from your dashboard.

LeakCanary

LeakCanary is a powerful open-source memory leak detection tool developed by Square. It attempts to find out any memory leaks within your applications and provides a leak trace system to help you identify and eliminate those leaks.

Features:
It automatically displays leak information whenever any memory leak occurs, that enables developers to address the issues immediately and fix them as early as possible.

Once you set up LeakCanary it automatically sends you a notification when memory leaks happen in your application with a complete tracking option to help you fix the problem.

LeakCanary highlights the possible causes of the leak with a red underline wave that helps you find which reference is causing the leak.

LeakCanary should be used in debug builds and it should be disabled in release builds.

Bower

Bower is another popular open-source web development tool built by Twitter that helps you manage various web components such as HTML, CSS, Javascript, frameworks, fonts, libraries, assets and many other elements.

Features:
Bower helps you fetch and install right version packages, update, and manage all front-end development dependencies.

You can track all your packages and make sure that they are updated or set to some specific version for programming.

Bower fetches and installs packages from all over, taking care of hunting, finding, downloading, and saving the data you need.

It is generally optimized for front-end developers. If multiple packages depend on a single package, for example, jQuery then Bower will download jQuery only once. This phenomenon is known as flat dependency graph and it helps to reduce page load.

GitHub

GitHub is a web development platform where programmers and developers work together to review code, manage projects, and build software. This open-source platform hosts plenty of projects and codes of multiple programming languages.

Github simplifies the whole documentation process and as a developer, you can host your documentation directly from repositories. Github is available as a desktop application for both Windows and Mac that allows you to integrate it into your workflow comfortably.

Features:
Drag & drop Gist code - Github’s Gist allows you to host code snippets. Using Gist you can add codes directly from files. You just need to drag and drop the files on the Gist and the codes present in the file will be copied immediately.

Create folder via the web interface - It allows you to manage repositories through its web interface and that is how you can create new files or folders in Github.

File finder - Besides creating new files you can search for files in any repository easily.

Linking lines - Github allows you to specify lines within the file of your repository by adding line number at the end of file URL.

Eclipse

Eclipse is an integrated development environment (IDE) written primarily in the Java language for developing applications in Java as well as in various programming languages such as C, C++, Python, Ruby etc.

Features:
You can use its Mylyn feature to track your own task-list using a local repository. You don't need to keep your browser open to see your tasks, you will get them by system tray notification.

With its software update mechanism, you will get the latest version of any framework or plugins that make developers job easy.

Eclipse platform can be used to develop rich client applications using plugins, including Ada, ABAP, C, C++, and more.

Grunt

Grunt is a JavaScript-based task runner that automates all repetitive tasks in a workflow and can be used as a command line tool for JavaScript objects. It reduces the workload from you while performing repetitive tasks like unit testing, minification, linting, compilation, etc.

You can use Grunt to automate any of your tasks with a minimum effort using hundreds of plugins. After configuring Grunt the task runner will automate most of your mundane work process that makes your life a little easier as a developer.

Features:
Grunt minifies JavaScript, CSS files, testing files, CSS preprocessor files such as SAAS, LESS etc.

Grant includes in-built tasks for extending the functionality of plugins and scripts.

It accelerates the development process and increases the performance of your projects.

It has a simple approach that includes tasks in JS and configures in JSON.

This tool reduces the chance of errors while performing repetitive tasks.

Conclusion:
Certainly, this not the end of the list, instead, this is the beginning of it. Further, at PromozSEO (Android, PHP web development, Digital Marketing, and SEO training in India), we recommend you to discover and explore other powerful open-source tools and software during the course of your web and Android development projects. All you need to do is dig deeper and find out the one that lets you develop the next big thing.

13 Open-Source Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Tools to Watch in 2019

Soumya Roy — Thu, 11 Apr 2019 06:54:04 +0000

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are the buzzwords in the technology world today. AI has already influenced many aspects of our lives from the voice recognition system in our smartphones to driverless cars and robots that are performing human tasks.

Big companies like Google, Facebook, IBM, Microsoft, and Amazon are taking advantage of this rapidly growing future technology and investing in their own Artificial intelligence and Machine Learning Research and Development.

In this article, we are providing a list of 13 best open sources AI and Machine Learning tools that you can use to build your own upcoming projects.

Caffe

Caffe (Convolutional Architecture for Fast Feature Embedding) is an open-source artificial intelligence based deep learning framework developed by Berkeley AI Research (BAIR) center. This powerful framework is written in C++ programming language and comes with a Python interface.

This tool mainly focuses on expressiveness, speed, and modularity and it is a popular choice for computer vision related applications. Now Caffe is being extensively used in academic research projects, startup prototypes and even for large-scale industrial applications.

Features:

Its expressive design helps in quick processing of data and encourages application and innovation.
You can easily switch between CPU and GPU with its impressive looking architecture.
It is able to process over 60 million images per day with NVIDIA K40 GPU.
Its extensive code facilitates active development, fast performance for a huge number of different projects.
Speed is one of Caffe’s major factors that makes it perfect for research experiments and industrial applications.

TensorFlow

TensorFlow is an open source machine learning framework developed by researchers and engineers of Google. It is one of the most extensively used frameworks for performing numerical computation using data flow graphs. Its flexible architecture allows you to perform computation on multiple CPU or GPU using a single API.

TensorFlow is available on various programming languages such as C++, Java, Python, etc. and you can also find packages for other third-party programming languages.TensorFlow allows you to develop neural networks and it is now widely used by various reputed companies like Twitter, Dropbox, eBay, Intel, and many others.

Features:

With TensorFlow, you can easily check each and every part of the graph of a model and makes the necessary changes while debugging it.
TensorFlow is flexible in its operation that means it offers you the option of modularity and the parts of it you want to make standalone.
It lets you develop deep learning neural networks using flowgraphs that makes the models more efficient for large scale projects.
TensorFlow has feature columns that work between raw data and estimators to send or receive input data with your model.
With its LSTM (Long short-term memory) model you can automatically generate email responses.

Apache Mahout

Apache Mahout is an open source machine learning framework mainly used for creating scalable machine learning algorithms. This tool was designed by the Apache Software Foundation and it is built on a platform called Mahout Hadoop. It mainly focuses on simplifying common math problems involving statistics and linear algebra and it helps mathematicians, statisticians and data scientists to quickly implement their own algorithms.

It helps in processing and grouping big data in the Mahout Hadoop distributed file system. It has a cross-platform operating system and it gives you an environment with R-like syntax. Mahout is being utilized by organizations like Adobe, Accenture, Foursquare, LinkedIn, Twitter and others.

Features:

The algorithms are written on top of Hadoop, so it works well in a distributed environment.
Mahout offers you a ready to use framework for performing data mining tasks on large volumes of data.
It lets applications analyze large scale of data effectively in quick time.
It includes matrix and vector libraries.
It offers a wide variety of premade algorithms for tools like Spark, H2O, Apache Flink, etc.
It includes various Map-Reduce enabled clustering implementations such as k-means, fuzzy k-means, Canopy, Dirichlet, and Mean-Shift.
It supports Distributed Naive Bayes as well as Complementary Naive Bayes classification implementations.

Deeplearning4j

Deeplearning4j is another well-known open source AI based deep learning tool for Java Virtual Machine (JVM). It was developed under the Apache License 2.0 by a group of AI researchers of San Francisco and Tokyo.

Deeplearning4j can use different API languages like Python and Clojure and it integrates with both Hadoop and Apache Spark. This framework is used for building neural nets and it contains many advanced visualization tools. Deeplearning4j has many diverse academic applications for research-based projects and in the fields of cybersecurity, fraud detection, and image recognition.

Features:

It works with distributed CPUs and GPUs.
It can be used for multiple API languages including Java, Scala, Python, Clojure, and Kotlin.
It can import models from Python frameworks such as Keras, Tensorflow, Theano, and CNTK.
Deeplearning4j has integrated with other machine-learning platforms like RapidMiner, Prediction.io, and Weka.
Deeplearning4j allows to configure deep neural networks and it is compatible with Java, Scala and other Java Virtual Machine languages.

Apache SystemML

Apache SystemML is a flexible open-source artificial intelligence tool created by a group of researchers at IBM. SystemML focuses on big data and has been designed to simplify complex mathematical problems.

It runs on R-like and Python-like languages and it automatically scales your data line by line as well as determines whether your code should be run on the driver or an Apache Spark cluster. At present, this tool is being utilized by businesses like automotive or airport traffic control.

Features:

It comes with automatic optimization based on data and cluster characteristics that ensures both efficiency and scalability.
Apache SystemML has multiple execution modes like Spark MLContext, Spark Batch, Hadoop Batch, Standalone, and JMLC (Java Machine Learning Connector).
SystemML considered as SQL for machine learning and latest version (1.0.0) of SystemML supports Python 2.7/3.5+, Hadoop 2.6+, Java 8+, Scala 2.11+ and Spark 2.1+.

H20

H20 is an artificial intelligence based open-source deep learning platform designed by H2O.ai. This tool is used by developers and AI researchers that helps them to make decisions from data and draw insights. There are two open source versions available for H2O, one is standard H2O and the other one is paid version Sparkling Water.

Having two open source versions available this tool can be used for risk and fraud analysis, predictive modeling, advertising technology, insurance analytics, customer intelligence, and healthcare.

Features:

It supports various operating systems like Microsoft Windows, Linux, and MacOS.
Familiar and easy to use web UI and interfaces.
Real-time data scoring.
It can analyze data present in the cloud and Apache Hadoop file systems.
Comes with, the best of breed open source technology.
Hugely scalable big data analysis system.
It provides data diagnostic support for all common database and file types.

MLlib

MLlib is an open source machine learning library launched by Apache Spark for learning algorithms. This tool uses different programming languages like Scala, Java, R, Python and runs on many different platforms such as Kubernetes, Hadoop or Cloud.

This library contains many deep learning and core machine learning algorithms for classification, recommendation, decision trees, clustering, topic modeling, regression, model evaluation, feature transformations, ML persistence, ML pipeline construction, and survival analysis.

Features:

ML algorithms form the core of MLlib and it includes common learning algorithms such as clustering classification, regression, and collaborative filtering.
Pipelines offers tools for constructing, evaluating and tuning ML Pipelines.
Persistence helps you to save and load algorithms, models, and Pipelines.
Featurization includes feature extraction, dimensionality reduction, transformation, and selection.
Utilities provides support for linear algebra, statistics and data handling.

OpenCyc

OpenCyc is an open source general knowledge database launched by Cycorp that makes text understanding possible. OpenCyc has been designed to make sure that users have unrestricted access to the knowledge base and they can use it in different applications.

OpenCyc enables apps to go through a large database and process the relevant information to come up with an accurate result. It is compatible with Apache and its own built-in HTTP server.

Features:

It is helpful for rich domain modeling, text understanding, semantic data integration, domain-specific expert systems AI games and more.
This AI tool is valuable for conducting quiz contests, understanding text and learning knowledge within specific domains.
It helps in differentiating relative words and synonyms of a particular key search word and ensures the app performs like a person by showing human cognitive abilities.

OpenNN

OpenNN (Open Neural Networks) is another open-source class library written in C++ programming language for deep learning. It is used for creating neural networks, the main area of machine learning research.

This open source library is used in the logistics and marketing field and it allows high-performance computing as it has a higher processing speed.

Features:

OpenNN contains data mining algorithms for a number of functions.
OpenNN is based on the multilayer perceptron.
It uses machine learning techniques for solving data mining and predictive analytics tasks in different sectors such as energy, chemistry, and engineering.
To increase computer performance it allows multiprocessing programming by means of OpenMP.

Torch

Launched in 2002, Torch is a machine learning library that offers a wide range of algorithms for deep learning. It is written on fast scripting language LuaJIT, and an underlying C/CUDA implementation that makes it easy to use.

This open source framework provides you with optimized speed and flexibility when handling machine learning projects without causing complexities in the process. Torch is used by various popular companies like Facebook, IBM, Yandex, and the Idiap Research Institute. Now it has been extended for use on Android and iOS devices.

Features:

Comes with a powerful N-dimensional array.
Numeric optimization routines.
It consists of lots of routines for indexing, slicing, transposing, etc.
Neural network and energy-based models.
Fast and efficient GPU support.
Embeddable with ports to iOS and Android backends.

NuPIC

NuPIC (Numenta Platform for Intelligent Computing) is an open-source artificial intelligence project based on a theory called Hierarchical Temporal Memory (HTM). NuPIC was developed by Numenta, a machine intelligence company that has developed technology and applications based on the principles of the neocortex.

NuPIC is an AI learning framework that can be implemented in various programming languages like C++, Java, Python, Clojure, Go, or JavaScript. It gathers analytics from live data streams and it is a perfect tool for detecting inconsistency within live data.

Features:

Grok – Detects inconsistency for IT servers.
Cortical.io – This feature is used for advanced natural language processing.
HTM Studio – This tool finds irregularities in time series.
Numenta Anomaly Benchmark – It compares HTM with other irregularity detection techniques.

Distributed Machine Learning Toolkit

Distributed Machine Learning Toolkit is an open source project developed by Microsoft. This toolkit is designed to analyze big data applications and to run AI systems faster. It consists of three key components such as LightLDA topic model algorithm, DMTK framework, and the Distributed (Multisense) Word Embedding algorithm.

Microsoft’s Distributed Machine Learning Toolkit (DMTK) contains both algorithmic and system innovations. These innovations make machine learning tasks on big data highly scalable and efficient.

Features:

LightLDA is a very fast and scalable model algorithm with a O(1) Gibbs sampler and an efficient distributed implementation.
Distributed (Multi-sense) Word Embedding is a top quality word feature for natural language processing.
LightGBM is a very high-performance gradient boosting tree framework that supports different algorithms like GBDT, GBRT, GBM, and MART.

ONNX

ONNX (Open Neural Network Exchange) is an open source AI tool that is extensively used by AI researchers in deep learning models. It is primarily a Facebook open source project that is supported by Microsoft and AWS. With ONNX, AI developers can easily move models between state-of-the-art tools and choose the combination that is the best for them.

Features:

ONNX enables models to be trained in one framework and transferred to another for inference.
This tool allows you to apply innovative contents like extensible computation graph models and you can make changes in their networks according to the requirements.
Its compatible runtimes and libraries are designed to maximize the performance of some of the best hardware in the industry.

Conclusion:

The use of the above AI and Machine Learning tools is revolutionizing industries at a rapid pace. There is a vast scope to use these open source tools in internet marketing training, education & services, jobs & employment, medicine & healthcare, foods & environment, robotics, financial trading and many more. No doubt AI & ML offers you the most extraordinary possibilities to expand it worldwide and harness the untapped potentials of modern technologies and developments.

9 Reasons Your Organic Rankings Dropped in Google and How to Fix That

Soumya Roy — Wed, 16 Jan 2019 14:36:45 +0000

Perhaps you know that having a website today is not going to be enough. Unless it is ranking for your targeted keywords organically on Google and other search engines, your website is literally of no use. In today’s competitive market every business is doing their best to rank on top positions of Google for their business keywords. But most of those are failing repeatedly. This happens mostly because of the lack of SEO knowledge and budget. If you are too finding it difficult, then it is the time to dive deep into this.

SEO is not a one-day job. SEO takes time before it starts getting the results. SEO needs continuous efforts and investments as well. If you are hesitant of investing in SEO, then this is most probably not for you. Hiring a cheap SEO company will only waste your money and time, instead onboard a reputed and expert SEO consultant who has a strong track record.

Here we are going to list 9 most probable reasons why your website’s SEO rankings dropped in Google and other major search engines.

You Picked up The Wrong Keywords

Keywords are important and crucial for rankings. Users search with various search-queries related to their needs. Google understands these search-queries with relevant keywords with the help of their algorithms like Hummingbird, RankBrain etc. Thereafter, Google shows us the web results which are most relevant and of high quality.

If your website doesn’t contain the right set of keywords, then it’s very hard to rank for the competitive keywords related to your business, products, and services.

If you have already hired an SEO agency, ask them to send detailed reports of the used keywords page wise along with the monthly average search volumes and KEI (Keyword Efficiency Index). Additionally, you need a fresh keyword analysis for each important page of your website. This will get you a much clear idea about whether the right keywords are already used or not.

In future, whenever you create a new sales page or article/ blog page on your website, before doing any optimization, you ask for an in-depth keyword report related to the page topic along with the data.

Your Website Meta-data are not Properly Optimized

When you know that you picked up the right set of keywords for one webpage, your next job is to confirm the metadata optimization quality.

There are three important metadata to optimize for one webpage; Page title, Meta description, and image alternative text (not exactly metadata).

Check whether the best keyword is used on the page title and description of the page or not. These two are to be completed in 70 and 150 characters respectively. Both these have to be meaningful, human-readable and not stuffed with keywords.

Image alternative or image alt text shouldn’t be blank and must contain one keyword related to the page and image. This also has to be contextually meaningful.

Additionally, check if the page has the H1, the content header with the best keyword or not (one H1 per webpage). Similar to H1, one page should have a couple of H2, H3 etc. Each of these paragraph headers should contain one keyword which fits into the context of the paragraph meaningfully.

Your Webpage Contents are Poor

First and foremost, you can compromise on anything but not on the website’s content. Each important page of your website must have sufficient fresh contents related to its topic. Failing to do so will not only make the search engine rankings poorer but will make your visitors disappointed as well.

Generally, long contents are better for ranking. Therefore, create contents with as many details as possible, while keeping it human-friendly.

Break contents into small paragraphs and try not to repeat the same thing again and again. This won’t help in the long run, as well as this will create a bad user experience.

Link pages internally and contextually to increase page-views and audience dwelling time. This is one of the best practices to improve the user experience as well as the rankings.

If you used to outsource contents, make sure to check their originality. There are many online tools available on the internet, which will tell you if the content has already been published earlier. Duplicate and spun contents will do more harm than good for the website.

Besides, you should periodically update your website contents to keep them fresh and relevant. Google’s caffeine algorithm tends to rank recently updated contents on search results.

Your Website doesn’t Have (Good) Backlinks

Like contents, backlinks are equally important and powerful for organic ranking. Google and all major search engines use backlinks as important parameters to measure the authority of one website.

If your website is not ranking, your site’s backlinks can be the reason. If your site has a handful of backlinks, then most probably this is the time to focus on acquiring more top-quality links. Additionally, those links must come from authoritative websites or webpages which are related to your business and industry.

If you have outsourced your site’s SEO, ask the agency to send a daily backlink report which should have the complete details of all links built or earned along with the date, linking sites’ Domain Authority, Spam Score and linking page URLs. Cross check those one by one and monitor details regularly.

Additionally, you should also monitor if you are losing any high authority links. This may happen due to many reasons; maybe the linking page is removed or the linking site has deleted your backlink. When losing many such powerful links can be a reason for your site’s low organic ranking, the solution is to keep on acquiring high authority backlinks naturally and consistently.

Remember, the total number of backlink is important but relevancy and authority of those links are more important. Therefore, invest more in high-quality link building than building low backlinks from poor or irrelevant websites. Moreover, your primary target should be creating high-quality contents more than building low-quality backlinks. Because, if you consistently indulge yourself in creating superior quality contents, those will automatically attract high authority backlinks naturally.

Your Website isn’t Technically Sound

This is one of the crucial things in SEO and most of the new websites face troubles here. As a website owner, you have many things to check and confirm in technical optimization.

First and foremost, check whether the site’s domain version is set or not. It should either open with www or without it. The non-set version must redirect itself permanently to the set version.

Second, check whether each of the webpages has right canonical tags or not. Canonical URL tells search engines the version of URL to index and rank.

Next, you should take care of the site’s broken links as and when needed. You can use Google Search Console tool or any other broken link analysis tool to find out the 404 error pages of the site. The solution is to permanently redirect the 404 URL to an existing, relevant, internal page URL.

HTTPS is always better than HTTP. Google recommends HTTPS and introduced it as a strong ranking signal. Therefore, if your website is not yet hosted on HTTPS, consider getting it as soon as possible.

Make sure your website’s robots.txt file has right directives written and it’s properly placed. Confirm if anything is blocked using robots file unwantedly. Blocking any resources, such as .css, .js, or image files are bad SEO practices.

When sitemap files are not must, keeping it on websites helps search engines to understand the internal URLs easily and quickly. Hence, keep small sitemap files containing important internal URLs logically.

Monitor Google Search Console tool and Google Analytics tool regularly to know many technical and usability errors of the website.

Your Website is Taking Too Much Time to Load

Website speed is one of the strongest ranking signals today. If your website takes too much time to load on browsers and mobile devices, then that will not only create problems in rankings but will leave very poor user experience as well.

As a website owner, you must check a few things to make your website faster on browsers and all devices.

Check if GZip compression is enabled or not. This compresses all web-files and makes the website loads faster.

Confirm if browser caching is enabled on or not. You may use WordPress plugins to enable the browser caching for your WP website. Otherwise use the browser caching code directly on sites' htaccess file.

Optimize image dimensions and file sizes before uploading those to the website. Images eat maximum space and take long times to be fully downloaded. Therefore, optimizing image width, height and file sizes make lots of differences to the website’s loading time.

Consider making minimum HTTP calls by consolidating multiple .css files into a single large.css file, and multiple .js files into minimum .js files.

Additionally, you may also ask the SEO agency to use minified .css and.js files and CSS-sprite for small images and icons.

If you have a decent budget, you can also try paid CDN technology to make your website faster.

Your Website isn’t Mobile Friendly

In today’s mobile world where everyone is searching things on their mobile devices, a mobile responsive website is a very normal thing. But still, there are many business websites which are not yet designed keeping their mobile customers in mind. If your website is one of those non-mobile-responsive sites, then you are bearing huge losses month after month. Therefore, this is the right time to focus on mobile SEO and redesign your website to make it mobile friendly.

Besides, Google has already stated that they take websites’ mobile responsiveness as a serious ranking signal. And those sites which are not yet mobile friendly will lose their organic rankings over time. This means that you cannot ignore this anymore if you want your website to rank organically on Google and other big search engines.

Consult your website designer and developer to revamp your website in accordance with modern responsive web design concepts and techniques. This will not only lift your website’s search engine rankings but will also get you more loyal customers.

Remember, while remaking the website mobile-customer friendly, try not to change the site’s internal URL structure.

You are Not Tracking Your Visitors Behavior and Experience

Failing to measure site visitors’ behaviors can cost a lot. User-experience is one of the strongest ranking signals today. If a majority of your site visitors are exiting your website without staying on it or visiting other pages that can be fatal for your website.

The worst case is that when a big percentage of your website’s organic visitors leave your site and come back on the search engine, and then visit one of your competitor sites. This is called Pogo-Sticking. Google takes it very seriously and ultimately this can cause a low search engine ranking.

There are several things you can do to keep your visitors engaged with your website and its contents.

First, analyze the site’s design and loading speed. Your website’s design must be user-friendly. Make sure that the menu links are easily accessible on a variety of devices and screen sizes.

Develop human-readable contents. Over-optimized contents are not going to satisfy both the readers and search bots. Besides, your content must answer all possible questions on its topic. Invest in crafting brilliant contents without grammar, spelling, and punctuation errors.

Use attractive images, GIFs, and videos to retain your visitors on your site. Additionally, you may also use other visual media like infographics and podcasts to increase the audience dwell time.

Allow users to interact with you, your content and other fellow users. Encouraging visitors to leave their comments and answer others questions can be a good strategy to build up strong relationships and positive user experience.

You Are Not Using Google Search Console (AKA Google Webmaster Tool)

Google Search Console formerly known as the Google Webmaster tool is one of the essential SEO tools. If you as a site owner are not using this tool for your website or blog, then you are bound to miss many important data about your website. All these data should be analyzed in detail to augment the overall SEO of one website.

First, you need to add your website and verify it on Google Search Console tool.

Next, you should add your website’s sitemap file to Google Search Console and resubmit that whenever you come up with a new page or post on your website.

Regularly check if the tool is listing any crawl errors related to the DNS, server, robots.txt, and your site’s broken URLs. If you see any of these take the necessary steps as soon as possible.

Use the ‘Fetch as Google’ function to inform Google about the changes you have recently made on your site and its pages. This helps in getting a quicker crawling and indexing of the ‘fetched’ URL.

Check if Google is consistently indexing your pages at ‘Index Status’ section. If you see a deep fall in the number of indexed pages, then you should execute a complete site analysis, including onpage, content, and backlink audit.

If you see any errors in the ‘mobile usability’ section of Google Search Console tool, you should try to fix those as early as possible.

Double-check the ‘Manual Action’ section to confirm if your website is free from any kind of manual actions taken by Google.

Analyze your acquired backlinks using Search Console to verify their relevancy, authority, and toxicity. In case you see a relatively poor domain linking to your website irrelevantly you may disavow that using Google Search Console tool. As a result, from next time onward Google will start counting it as a nofollow link, as long as you keep that link on your disavow file.

Make a daily habit of checking the keyword data using the Search Console tool. This section lists the impressions, clicks, CTR (Click Through Rate) and average positions of your website and its pages for different keyword searches.

In addition to Google Search Console, also integrate your website with Google Analytics tool to measure all traffic-related data in detail.

Conclusion

Starting from picking up the right keywords, optimizing the metadata, developing great contents, attracting high authority backlinks, structuring the technical optimization, fixing the website’s speed and building a mobile-friendly website are must for getting the best search engine rankings. Organic ranking is not the result of one particular thing, but search engine ranking is the collective result of around 200 different SEO factors. Therefore, start correcting and perfecting every aspect of the website to enjoy huge organic traffic from Google and other search engines. Additionally, you may invest a little of your daily time learning digital marketing skills.

SEO is online marketing and marketing must be diversified in various marketing channels. Therefore, don’t just focus on Search Engine Optimization. Instead, channelize your online marketing budget in various internet marketing outlets, including SEO, search engine marketing, social media marketing, content marketing etc. This will bulletproof your marketing results and will improve your company’s bottom-line.