Web Development Live

It did not take long before they recognized limitations in their existing Website. Allianz’s original site had to service clients from all sectors. Every effort was made to make all services available in one place, but things were just not working. Many customers were not able to find what they were looking for. Unfortunately, later attempts to organize the information only made matters worse: Every section of the Web site ended up with its own unique ‘look and feel’, and with inconsistent branding.

The key challenges, therefore, were not just to re-design & develop the website, but also to mirror Bajaj Allianz’s strong offline brand imagery on the Web along with all the ingredients of a Web 2.0 online Insurance Web presence for customers & sales channels alike. So that customers could renew their policies online along with paying their premiums, prospects could search, compare & find the best policy/plan for their families & agents could drive account management all under one interactive roof. eDynamic immediately identified these problems, proposing, designing and implementing a comprehensive solution.

Subir Singh, VP, Sales, eDynamic, credits the success of eDynamic’s efforts to the company’s established expertise in the Insurance industry. “Our deep understanding in insurance..and strategic approach to business help us maintain a strong and comfortable relationship….” eDynamic brought to the table additional experience in financial services, such as lending and loans, credit cards, real estate, and financial services.

By creating a generic, easily customizable template to provide a framework for the design, the information architecture is kept simple, easy to understand and navigate. Simplicity is also key to its versatility –remaining consistent when customized for each service segment. The design has proven so adaptable that, as the online services of Bajaj Allianz have continued to expand, the same recognizable branding and navigational controls have remained.

Says Vishal Karki, Head of Marketing for Bajaj Allianz Insurance, India, “It has been a pleasure to do business with eDynamic. The team at eDynamic holds its customer’s satisfaction as highest priority. They understood our business requirements and have delivered high-quality results on time.”

About eDynamic: eDynamic is a Global IT services, Interactive Marketing Services, Website Design & Development and Consulting Firm focused on delivering integrated business solutions. eDynamic is a rapidly growing, privately held company that delivers on the technology, creativity & marketing needs of enterprises. Through its offices in New York, Portland, Toronto, London, Dubai, and New Delhi, eDynamic is serving customers such as Suncor Energy, UPS, PepsiCo, New York Life, General Electric, Advance America, Preferred Commerce, Intercontinental Hotels, Jet Airways, Samsung, Sony, among many others.

Their joint statue towers above the passers-by in
Swanston Street, but their story has been a cause of mockery since
as long ago as Joseph Furphy’s novel Such is Life (1903).
They are usually known as Burke and Wills, respectively the
Irish-born leader of the expedition aiming to cross the continent
from south to north (returning proved to be the problem) and his
young surveyor. The order was derisively reversed in the would-be
movie comedy Wills and Burke (1985) where the acting of the camels
was more expressive and certainly more doleful than the principals
- Garry McDonald as Burke, Kym Gyngell as Wills and Nicole Kidman
as the actress Julia Matthews. The tale of the doomed explorers was
recently revisited in Alan Attwood’s novel, Burke’s
Soldier (2005). Now their turn has come again, and strangely,
in the first novel by Kevin Rabalais, The Landscape of
Desire.
Born in Louisiana, Rabalais now lives in Melbourne, but his
American origins may have led to the jarring descriptions of
ranchers and rustlers with whom Burke deals while Police Inspector
at Beechworth in the 1850s. Its title a dreamy blend of concrete
and abstract, the novel is an extended imagining of sketchy periods
in Burke’s life.
Beechworth, for instance, was more secure employment than the
prospects of finding gold for the young man “who sailed to exhume
his fortune from the tainted land” - Australia. Nevertheless Burke
chafes, eager for glory, but infatuated as well with Matthews, who
teasingly signs her letters as C for Cupid, and whom Burke
obsessively watches on stage. He understands that “He has reached
the point in life where there is no return”.
Rabalais’ method is to approach this once-familiar episode in
the national drama from a number of oblique angles. He starts with
a brief, portentous passage: “Other items lie scattered, wreckage
across the primal earth.” This is all that is left of the baggage
of the venturers who reached as far as the wetlands around what is
now Normanton.
One of them survived, John King, “a white man, orphan of the
desert sea”. He tells the rescuers led by Alfred Howitt “I am all
that is left”. King has been succoured by Aborigines, who remain in
this book, as perhaps they were for King, apparitions, appearing
and disappearing in the landscape. Howitt dominates the early part
of The Landscape of Desire, before our attention is
shifted to the troubled life of Burke, the longings of Wills.
The boldest invention that Rabalais undertakes is to depict
Burke’s European life, as a lieutenant in the Austrian army. This
is one of those episodes that seems (not least for Burke) hard to
credit. For desertion on the eve of the invasion of Sardinia, and
for his gambling debts, Burke is dishonourably discharged. After
drifting back to Ireland, he heads for Australia.
Rabalais elides Burke’s later brief return to Britain in an
attempt to enlist for the Crimean War in which his brother was the
first British soldier to be killed. It is then with Burke in
Beechworth that Rabalais engages us. But before now we have been
inclined to wonder what is the larger import of the novel, vivid
and unexpected as are its vignettes?
Sometimes the prose is staccato, like the ominous voice-over in
a motion picture: “What will they find? Who will be alive? Who will
have been maddened by the desert silence?” At other moments
Rabalais searches characters’ preoccupations about how they will be
remembered. After the official photograph of the party as it
prepares to set off: “We are preserved for the record before we
fall outside of history.”
More intriguingly, King is made to ponder what legends the
Aborigines might make of these white men in their midst: “How long
would it take before they recited stories of the ghosts who came to
live behind them on the creek . . . We might become a tale they
could pass up to future generations like buckets raised from a
well.”
Or not. Rabalais leaves the Aborigines as silent, admonitory
figures. Tracing his own course, backwards and forwards in time,
rather than onward in space, his debut is carefully wrought, a work
of glimpses rather than dramatic revelations. Finally it chooses to
rest in enigma, leaving us no more sure of where we have been than
were the doomed explorers.
Peter Pierce is a former professor of Australian literature
at James Cook University.

That’s the warning from Ian Fogg, research director at JupiterResearch Europe, who was speaking during a Westminster eForum debate on the future of broadband in Britain.

Without investment to improve broadband infrastructure ?such as fibre to the home (FTTH) and fibre to the cabinet (FTTC) ?Fogg said the danger is “the next big thing on the internet may not work in the UK”.

But, even so, Fogg admitted that the business case for fibre is “incredibly hard” as the market has seen a slide in the average price for broadband over the last few years and consumers don’t see why they should pay more for fat-pipe access.

All-IP next-generation networks (NGNs) are being rolled out in the UK ?such as BT’s 21CN ?but NGNs do not solve the problem of legacy copper wiring at street level, from exchanges to cabinets and homes ?an issue known as “next-generation access” (NGA). NGA is the fly in the ointment of faster broadband in the UK.

Antony Walker, chief executive of the Broadband Stakeholder Group (BSG), told delegates the prospects for early investment in NGA are not good. But he said this is an issue that is likely to trouble small businesses before it annoys consumers, as SMEs might feel they are losing a competitive edge for accessing and competing in global markets where fibre deployments have ?or may ?outstrip the UK.

Consumer demand for upgrading the UK’s broadband infrastructure is less clear cut, Walker said. This point was echoed by Ofcom executive Peter Phillips, partner for strategy and markets development, who said there is still “a lot of uncertainty” about how long current broadband networks will deliver what consumers need.

The speakers at the eForum touched on various applications ?from videoconferencing to greater opportunities for home working to the rise of social networking and even the BBC’s iPlayer ?that might benefit from improved broadband infrastructure. But the general consensus was no “killer app” for NGNs has yet emerged.

JupiterResearch’s Fogg said: “No-one has yet identified that unique application that can only be delivered over next-generation broadband.”

Ofcom’s Phillips added that there may even be some advantage to the UK holding back on broadband development ?to see how things pan out in other countries and learn from their experience. The regulator is currently consulting on NGA.

The stance of the network operators was summed up by Andrew Lazarus, head of regulatory policy and strategy at BT, who said the company “does believe we can get a lot more out of copper”.

Lazarus cited ADSL+ ?coming next year, with top speeds of up to 24Mbps ?and said speeds would still “satisfy a lot of apps”. Issues such as broadband “not spots” ?areas not currently served by fat pipes ?and headline speeds are “not necessarily part of the fibre debate”, according to Lazarus.

That’s the warning from Ian Fogg, research director at JupiterResearch Europe, who was speaking during a Westminster eForum debate on the future of broadband in Britain.

Without investment to improve broadband infrastructure ?such as fibre to the home (FTTH) and fibre to the cabinet (FTTC) ?Fogg said the danger is “the next big thing on the internet may not work in the UK”.

But, even so, Fogg admitted that the business case for fibre is “incredibly hard” as the market has seen a slide in the average price for broadband over the last few years and consumers don’t see why they should pay more for fat-pipe access.

All-IP next-generation networks (NGNs) are being rolled out in the UK ?such as BT’s 21CN ?but NGNs do not solve the problem of legacy copper wiring at street level, from exchanges to cabinets and homes ?an issue known as “next-generation access” (NGA). NGA is the fly in the ointment of faster broadband in the UK.

Antony Walker, chief executive of the Broadband Stakeholder Group (BSG), told delegates the prospects for early investment in NGA are not good. But he said this is an issue that is likely to trouble small businesses before it annoys consumers, as SMEs might feel they are losing a competitive edge for accessing and competing in global markets where fibre deployments have ?or may ?outstrip the UK.

Consumer demand for upgrading the UK’s broadband infrastructure is less clear cut, Walker said. This point was echoed by Ofcom executive Peter Phillips, partner for strategy and markets development, who said there is still “a lot of uncertainty” about how long current broadband networks will deliver what consumers need.

The speakers at the eForum touched on various applications ?from videoconferencing to greater opportunities for home working to the rise of social networking and even the BBC’s iPlayer ?that might benefit from improved broadband infrastructure. But the general consensus was no “killer app” for NGNs has yet emerged.

JupiterResearch’s Fogg said: “No-one has yet identified that unique application that can only be delivered over next-generation broadband.”

Ofcom’s Phillips added that there may even be some advantage to the UK holding back on broadband development ?to see how things pan out in other countries and learn from their experience. The regulator is currently consulting on NGA.

The stance of the network operators was summed up by Andrew Lazarus, head of regulatory policy and strategy at BT, who said the company “does believe we can get a lot more out of copper”.

Lazarus cited ADSL+ ?coming next year, with top speeds of up to 24Mbps ?and said speeds would still “satisfy a lot of apps”. Issues such as broadband “not spots” ?areas not currently served by fat pipes ?and headline speeds are “not necessarily part of the fibre debate”, according to Lazarus.

That’s the warning from Ian Fogg, research director at JupiterResearch Europe, who was speaking during a Westminster eForum debate on the future of broadband in Britain.

Without investment to improve broadband infrastructure ?such as fibre to the home (FTTH) and fibre to the cabinet (FTTC) ?Fogg said the danger is “the next big thing on the internet may not work in the UK”.

But, even so, Fogg admitted that the business case for fibre is “incredibly hard” as the market has seen a slide in the average price for broadband over the last few years and consumers don’t see why they should pay more for fat-pipe access.

All-IP next-generation networks (NGNs) are being rolled out in the UK ?such as BT’s 21CN ?but NGNs do not solve the problem of legacy copper wiring at street level, from exchanges to cabinets and homes ?an issue known as “next-generation access” (NGA). NGA is the fly in the ointment of faster broadband in the UK.

Antony Walker, chief executive of the Broadband Stakeholder Group (BSG), told delegates the prospects for early investment in NGA are not good. But he said this is an issue that is likely to trouble small businesses before it annoys consumers, as SMEs might feel they are losing a competitive edge for accessing and competing in global markets where fibre deployments have ?or may ?outstrip the UK.

Consumer demand for upgrading the UK’s broadband infrastructure is less clear cut, Walker said. This point was echoed by Ofcom executive Peter Phillips, partner for strategy and markets development, who said there is still “a lot of uncertainty” about how long current broadband networks will deliver what consumers need.

The speakers at the eForum touched on various applications ?from videoconferencing to greater opportunities for home working to the rise of social networking and even the BBC’s iPlayer ?that might benefit from improved broadband infrastructure. But the general consensus was no “killer app” for NGNs has yet emerged.

JupiterResearch’s Fogg said: “No-one has yet identified that unique application that can only be delivered over next-generation broadband.”

Ofcom’s Phillips added that there may even be some advantage to the UK holding back on broadband development ?to see how things pan out in other countries and learn from their experience. The regulator is currently consulting on NGA.

The stance of the network operators was summed up by Andrew Lazarus, head of regulatory policy and strategy at BT, who said the company “does believe we can get a lot more out of copper”.

Lazarus cited ADSL+ ?coming next year, with top speeds of up to 24Mbps ?and said speeds would still “satisfy a lot of apps”. Issues such as broadband “not spots” ?areas not currently served by fat pipes ?and headline speeds are “not necessarily part of the fibre debate”, according to Lazarus.

SAP, the worlds biggest maker of business management software, will include the program as part of new sales-force automation software that it is launching this month.
The iPhone has become such a popular thing, said Bob Stutz, a SAP senior vice president who is responsible for developing the companys customer relationship management software. Everybody wants the ease of use of the iPhone.
The first generation of the iPhone software will load business contacts, information on sales prospects and account data onto the device, Stutz said.
SAP is breaking with precedent by introducing versions of the new software that are compatible with the iPhone ahead of ones for mobile devices that businesses traditionally use. These include Research in Motions Blackberry, Palms Treo and devices that run on software from Microsoft.
Stutz said that SAP had decided to introduce the iPhone software ahead of programs for those devices at the request of its salespeople, saying they prefer using iPhones to the other devices.
The iPhone software, part of a new sales-force automation suite from SAP, uses a Web-based interface with drag-and-drop tools similar to ones available on Google.