Are you new to iPhone development, or in the process of submitting your newly created iPhone Application to the apple store? Sure, you’re excited, but you’re probably anxious too, about the right method for a smooth and successful iPhone App submission. To help the process, we present here some important steps to keep in mind during the submission – along with some important do’s and don’ts.

The elementary

For a new iPhone Application to be submitted successfully, you must first make sure you have the iPhone Application Developer account ID and password in place. Also, the “app” should be tested before you submit it to Apple store. It is important to make sure the application will run on all the most recent operating system versions.

Now for the keyword field

This is where you will be asked to put in keywords as search criteria for your iPhone application. Following are some tips to avoid rejection of your application just because of inappropriate keywords -

● Put in keywords related to your application only; Keywords which refer to other applications will most probably lead to the rejection of the App by the reviewer.

● Don’t use offensive language.

Mind the kind

There are many reasons why applications get rejected by reviewers. Applications that have special characters in their names are not welcome in the Apple store. It would be good to keep in mind that the application should have some useful functionality; if it is created merely to create a “brand presence” in the Apple Store, it will almost certainly be rejected. Also, applications that mention celebrities, public figures, or even Apple or Steve Jobs should be avoided.

Submission

There are various categories of the iPhone applications and it is important to understand their definition and then choose appropriate category (web – Website optimized for iPhone or native- application installed on the phone) and subcategory (example – Game, Entertainment, Productivity, and Business etc).

The native application should be submitted to https://itunesconnect.apple.com, while the web application should be submitted to https://adcweb.apple.com/iphone/index.php. These links are available only after you login to your developer account.

A new native application can be added through the ‘Manage Your Applications’ menu. Fill in details under respective headings. The Copyright field should contain the name of the person or entity that holds the rights to the application. Filling up the correct version number is of utmost importance. The Application field needs to be populated with the binary of your application.

When submitting the web application, all fields should be filled carefully. Pay particular attention when filling out the title and description. You will also be asked to submit an image of your application, along with its icon. Screenshots of your applications are required to be a resolution of 320×356.

Tip: If your application requires some specific settings for the review process, directions for the reviewer can be added in the ‘Demo Account – Full Access’ field. The contents of this field would not be available to the general public, but only to the reviewer.

Some more tips

● If your application uses internet connection, then in case of internet connection failures, user should be informed.

● You must make sure the users are notified if any of their personal information is being used or sent to the servers, and given the option to select out of sending any of this information.

● While submitting your iPhone application, ensure that the small application icon and the large App store icon are same, or at least similar-looking.

● Reviews might take 2-3 weeks.

● You will need a webpage that hosts the information about your application as well as screen-shots of your application when you submit the application.

● Submissions of updates to existing applications you have in the store are considered to be new applications, and are treated the same as any new submission.

Stay tuned for more information about iPhone Application development.

Smartsourcing Global is thrilled to announce a special collaboration with Stylo Creative Communication, combining the unique skills and experience of each firm to launch the Stylo Small Business Toolkit.

While we continue to remain focused on the state-of-the-art custom technical solutions for businesses from medium to enterprise size, small businesses hold a special place in the hearts of the Smartsourcing Global team. We have long believed that small businesses are the backbone of our economy. Julien Sharp, Founder of Stylo Creative Communications, has been a vocal advocate of the small business model since 1993.

We understand how difficult and overwhelming it is for entrepreneurs and small business to keep up with the trends in marketing, technology, and how they have merged to create “social media,” and to succeed while wearing different hats. The Small Biz Toolkit brings a set of affordable solutions to the small businesses. It allows business owners to focus on the core of their businesses…and let us help with the marketing and branding through our affordable toolkit solution.

We have combined the expert copywriting and content management skills of Stylo Creative with our strong the technical experience to develop a full array of services aimed at helping small businesses thrive in any economy.

The Small Business Toolkit includes:

● Build a Brand – Logo, website, content, and marketing collateral

● Promote and Build Recognition of that Brand – Newsletters, email marketing, SEO, Ads

● Grow that Brand Online via Social Media

● Optimize Business Workflow/Productivity – Integrated email solutions, Google Analytics, Webmaster tools, and Quickbooks integration

… and much more.

Please visit http://www.stylocreative.com/toolkit/ to learn more about the tools we offer that can help your small business make a big-business impact.

We developed a social community product on Ruby on Rails platform. We used WordpressMU to manage many article pages on the website. Initially, we used Apache HTTP webserver. During the effort of optimizing performance of the product, we realized that Ngnix (http://nginx.net/) server performed better in comparison with Apache.
Nginx is a free, open-source, high-performance HTTP server and reverse proxy, as well as an IMAP/POP3 proxy server. Nginx is known for its high performance, stability, rich feature set, simple configuration, and low resource consumption. Nginx doesn’t rely on threads to handle requests. Instead it uses a much more scalable event-driven (asynchronous) architecture. This architecture uses small, but most importantly, predictable amounts of memory under load.

Nginx powers several high-visibility sites, such as WordPress, Hulu, Github, Ohloh, SourceForge and TorrentReactor. The main advantage of the asynchronous approach on Ngnix is scalability. In a process-based server like Apache, each simultaneous connection requires a thread which incurs significant overhead. Nginx is faster at serving static files. So for all the good reasons, we decided to migrate our site to Nginx.

There were quite a few things needed to integrate WordpressMu with Nginx server. Here are the steps
1. Install Nginx: [root@localhost]# yum install nginx
2. create the system sartup links for Nginx:
[root@localhost]# /sbin/chkconfig –level 35 nginx on
3. shut down the apache web service:
[root@localhost]# /sbin/service httpd stop
4. start the Nginx web service:
[root@localhost]# /sbin/service nginx start
5. Make PHP5 work in Nginx through FastCGI.
Install all these packages:
[root@localhost]# yum install lighttpd-fastcgi php-cli php-mysql php-gd php-imap php-ldap php-odbc php-pear php-xml php-xmlrpc php-eaccelerator php-magickwand php-magpierss php-mapserver php-mbstring php-mcrypt php-mhash php-mssql php-shout php-snmp php-soap php-tidy
6. Open /etc/php.ini and add the line cgi.fix_pathinfo = 1 right at the end of the file:
7. Start a PHP FastCGI daemon listening on port 9000, run it as the user ngnix and group nginx
root@localhost]# /usr/bin/spawn-fcgi -a 127.0.0.1 -p 9000 -u nginx -g nginx -f /usr/bin/php-cgi -P /var/run/fastcgi-php.pid
8. Restart PHP FastCGI daemon
root@localhost]# ps -ef|grep php-cgi
root@localhost]# kill PROCESS_ID
9. To have the system execute the command automatically at boot time, open /etc/rc.local…
root@localhost]# vi /etc/rc.local
and Add the command at the end of the file:
/usr/bin/spawn-fcgi -a 127.0.0.1 -p 9000 -u nginx -g nginx -f /usr/bin/php-cgi -P /var/run/fastcgi-php.pid
10. Stop the Apache server
root@localhost]# /sbin/init.d/httpd stop
To disable apache on startup:
root@localhost]# /sbin/chkconfig –level 35 httpd off

It is advisable to keep a backup of your Nginx configuration file:
root@localhost]# cp /etc/nginx/nginx.conf nginx.conf_cp
Add following code to the Ngnix.conf
server {
listen 80;
server_name localhost.localdomain;
#charset koi8-r;
location / {
root /usr/share/nginx/html;
index index.php index.html index.htm;
}
error_page 404 /404.html;
location = /404.html {
root /usr/share/nginx/html;
}

# redirect server error pages to the static page /50x.html
#
error_page 500 502 503 504 /50x.html;
location = /50x.html {
root /usr/share/nginx/html;
}

location ~ ^/(wordpress)/(.*)$ {
root /usr/share/nginx/html;
index index.php;
fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
fastcgi_index index.php;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME /usr/share/nginx/html$fastcgi_script_name;
include fastcgi_params;
}
location / {
}

11. Now, to deal with the pretty URLs, add the following code for fixing the WordpressMU’s Pretty URLs. In location parenthesis above you can paste following code:
rewrite ^.*/.*/files/(.*) /wordpress/wp-content/blogs.php?file=$1;
if (!-e $request_filename) {
rewrite ^.+?(/wp-.*) /wordpress$1 last;
rewrite ^.+?(/.*\.php)$ /wordpress$1 last;
rewrite ^(.+)$ /wordpress/index.php?q=$1 last;
break;
}
12. For fixing the images issue with Nginx server use following code, paste it before location parenthesis,
#images for WordPress site
location ~* ^.+\.(html|jpg|jpeg|gif|png|ico|css|zip|tgz|gz|rar|bz2|doc|xls|exe|pdf|ppt|txt|tar|mid|midi|wav|bmp|rtf|js)$
{
root /usr/share/nginx/html/wordpress;
rewrite ^/.*(/wp-admin/.*\.(html|jpg|jpeg|gif|png|ico|css|zip|tgz|gz|rar|bz2|doc|xls|exe|pdf|ppt|txt|tar|mid|midi|wav|bmp|rtf|js))$ $1 last;
rewrite ^/.*(/wp-includes/.*\.(html|jpg|jpeg|gif|png|ico|css|zip|tgz|gz|rar|bz2|doc|xls|exe|pdf|ppt|txt|tar|mid|midi|wav|bmp|rtf|js))$ $1 last;
rewrite ^/.*(/wp-content/themes/.*\.(html|jpg|jpeg|gif|png|ico|css|zip|tgz|gz|rar|bz2|doc|xls|exe|pdf|ppt|txt|tar|mid|midi|wav|bmp|rtf|js))$ $1 last;
rewrite ^/.*(/wp-content/.*\.(html|jpg|jpeg|gif|png|ico|css|zip|tgz|gz|rar|bz2|doc|xls|exe|pdf|ppt|txt|tar|mid|midi|wav|bmp|rtf|js))$ $1 last;
rewrite ^.*/files/(.*(html|jpg|jpeg|gif|png|ico|css|zip|tgz|gz|rar|bz2|doc|xls|exe|pdf|ppt|txt|tar|mid|midi|wav|bmp|rtf|js))$ /wordpress/wp-content/blogs.php?file=$1 last;
expires 10d;
break;
}
Following articles we found helpful with making the changes.
URL : http://www.wikivs.com/wiki/Lighttpd_vs_nginx
URL : http://www.wikivs.com/wiki/Apache_vs_nginx

Contributors – Rohit Jain, Amol Nirmala Waman

We built a high-traffic social community, which offered a niche product to provide information about maintaining a healthy lifestyle, including articles on various health topics. This application is developed using Ruby on Rails, and there were many advanced requirements for the article pages of the site. Since the article pages (analogous to blogs) were not the “meat” of the product, we decided to implement the WordPress MU tool, which provides an excellent platform for multi-user blogging and can be utilized to fulfill custom requirements that WordPress alone can’t do.

You can learn more about how to integrate the Rails application with Multi-user WordPress, you can refer to this white paper at WordPress MU.pdf

All of us have heard the question about “What is the ROI on social networking”. There is no more the question, “do we need social media” or “does it work?”, so in essence we all have accepted that social media is important for marketing and should be taken seriously by businesses. Also, it is not for free, it requires investment and efforts.

Now, like any other marketing strategy, Social media brings you results if approached correctly. There are no dollar conversion metrics that anyone has come up with, except I have seen http://www.frogloop.com/social-network-calculator claiming that they have a formula to calculate ROI on social network campaigns.
Measuring the ROI for social networking is difficult because the returns you’ll get out of networking via social media are not direct and immediate. Chatting with another person on Twitter or linking with other professionals on linkedin does not always convert into business. However, this process is about building relationships and communities which you can leverage in the future.

Viral nature of social networking helps in many ways with very minimal investment. The power to reach out to target audience through social media is tremendous and does help in building your brand as well as reputation; only if you can deliver effective and interesting content.

Online success is by and large measured by page views and unique visitors. So if you can’t get social traffic visitors to your website/content/campaigns, you have to get them through other websites and that’s where social sites like twitter, facebook, myspace and many others play a great role.

Social media is powerful in lot of ways and good candidate to measure return on branding and customer relationship. It is a long term strategy and not a short term objective.

“If your company does not have a social media presence online, you are missing out on the 93% of Americans who believe you should, and the 85% of Americans who are expecting to interact with your company through social media, according to a new research study from Cone. ” – Source (http://www.corpsocialnetworking.com/bsn-blog/study-reveals-93-of-consumers-expect-companies-to-have-social-media-presence/) Social media is the new way of doing some of the business workflows. It supports transparent relationship with the customers, improves the customer experience and opens up doors for collective intelligence.

The ROI on social networking depends on and is driven by goals of the company. There are many success stories of high revenue through advertising, a good example is facebook. There are many other applications built using facebook APIs (http://www.bestfacebookapplications.com/) which are performing well. If you can create stickiness, you are successful.

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch started as a lawyer then became a blogger and now makes $2.5 million per year, has a $100 million valuation, classifieds and job boards, $12,000 per month display advertising, Crunchgear (merchandising) and blogger staff.

There are multiple resources which can help you measure success of your social networking media/efforts, some of them are – AideRSS allows you to enter a feed URL and returns statistics about its posts, including which are the most popular based on how many times they are shared on a variety of social networking sites (Google, Digg, Del.icio.us)., Google Analytics and Feedburner are free tools to help analyze your company’s blog traffic, subscriber count, keyword optimization and additional trends.

Xinu is a website where you can type in a URL and receive a load of useful statistics ranging from search engine optimization (SEO) to social bookmarking and more. So in my opinion, if you have social networking sites that derive Ad revenue, there is direct way to calculate ROI. But if you are using social media for advertising, marketing and as a support tool for business processes, there are lot of benefits but no direct $ conversion formula.

The era of Web 2.0 has completely changed how we deal with information. Web 2.0 is an elegant, collaborative solution which facilitates two-way communication. Participation and collaboration no longer have boundaries. Consumers of the internet look for relevant information, with less concern as to which unknown person has produced the data, content, media, or tools.

Harvard business review ranks outsourcing as one of the top business ideas of the past 100 years. Outsourcing is a proven concept and as Thomas Koulopoulos explains in his book “Smartsourcing : Driving Innovation and Growth Through Outsourcing”, each business needs to identify their core and shed rest of the non-core responsibilities to reliable partners. This is Outsourcing 2.0.

Traditionally, outsourcing was mainly considered for cost-cutting purposes. The shifting marketplace has different requirements. You need to innovate faster and also lower the cost. By partnering with the right resources, along with operational cost benefits, you get access to bigger talent pool, achieve follow-the-sun concept, liquidate internal resources, gain speed, agility and flexibility and above all innovate faster.

Outsourcing 2.0 is the new way of doing your business by partnership and not by ownership. Lower cost is important but maximizing innovation per dollar is even important. So instead of finding the cheapest service, you should look for best value proposition, partner with the company that give you maximum ROI.

Outsourcing 2.0 is about involving your partners in business process and invest in building the relationship strategically. It is no more about getting a small piece of work done, it is about sharing, supporting two-way communication. As web 2.0 has created platform in the internet world to participate, collaborate and share, Smartsourcing creates an approach to participate, collaborate and share in the outsourcing world.

Smartsourcing, we call it Outsourcing 2.0, enforces accountability, innovation and builds strategic partnerships. It supports globalization and empowers businesses to grow, deal with uncertainty, improve processes and the most important – ‘focus on the core competency’. The businesses who have embraced Smartsourcing and Globalization have been the most successful businesses.

Whether onshore outsourcing or offshoring, all successful businesses have reaped benefits of partnering with experts. A lot of outsourcing is focused solely on cost savings. But research shows that companies who outsource IT development are looking for more than cost savings. They’re looking to augment internal capabilities and expertise. They want to speed time-to-market.

95% of the firms considered to be Fortune 1000 firms, are using an offshore strategy. The success and savings through offshore outsourcing depend on your approach and thorough work on offshore strategy.

The economic benefits of outsourcing are real and significant. While cost reduction is the primary strategic focus of most companies that are offshoring, though it is not the only strategic advantage to offshoring.

In some industries, IT offshoring is beginning to be viewed as a strategic necessity. Some call it “offshore or die.” When one company’s cost efficiencies allow it to lower prices or expand its competitive options, then other companies must match their competitor’s strategy, or fail. Offshoring is becoming part of the larger context of hyper-competition: companies are swept into faster and faster cycles of competitive responses and reactions in order to remain financially viable and cost competitive.

The strategy most companies miss out on is the ‘focus’. Each organization needs to identify its niche and core competency. They need to let go other functions by partnering with other services. This enables them to concentrate resources on growing the business and being ahead of the game. This is just not for big fortune 1000 companies; this very well applies to start up companies.