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With smartphones ubiquitous,companies are adding camera functionality to their apps to take photos or scans of documents,people,checks, identification cards, real estate,and whatever else.The majority of apps simply utilize the camera to take a photo which is then uploaded.However, customers want a more sophisticated experience that includes features such as cropping,edge detection,editing,filtering,formatting,and sharing. Writing that functionality from scratch would take considerable development time, but like everything in IT,there are 3rd party vendors that sell Android and IOS SDKs.Recently we took a look at a few for a project. Here is a quick summary of our assessment and how we chose a solution.Initial research came up with the following options:&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; Commercial solutions:<ol><li style="list-style-type: none;" data-mce-style="list-style-type: none;"><ol><li>Scanbot SDK</li><li>Klippa SDK</li><li>Genius Scan SDK</li><li>PixelNetica Document Scanning SDK</li><li>Open source solutions:</li><li>WeScan SDK</li><li>OpenScan SDK </li></ol></li></ol>Interestingly most of the commercial offerings were from companies based in Europe.They all release new versions of their software as hardware and operating systems are updated. Also, they all still work when the device is offline; so they don’t offer a usage-only model. Scanbot SDK was our first choice after our technology assessment;it had all the features we needed. But after further digging, we found that pricing started at $23,000/year! They have four different packages and the version we wanted was actually $50,000 per year!This far exceeded the project’s budget.I spoke to Scanbot and they were very helpful but unwilling to offer any discounts. Their target market consists of large companies and enterprise clients.We looked at Klippa which starts at around $5,000 per year,Genius Scan which starts at $4,000/year, and Pixelnetica which starts at $3,600 a year.Going into the research, we thought we might be able to find a solution for perhaps $1,000 for a permanent license.We ruled out Pixelnetica because it would require us to write bridge components to get it to work in our app. We also didn’t feel comfortable going with the unsupported WeScan and OpenScan open-source solutions. We ended up choosing Genius Scan SDK over Klippa. It had all the features required and was easy to implement. You also don’t need to pay the yearly fee until the app goes live.Creating a demo app as a proof of concept took only a few hours.To evaluate functionality without any development, one can spend a few dollars and install and experiment with the single-user version that they all offer.Our client tested our POC, approved the functionality, and greenlit development.<table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 100%;" border="1" data-mce-style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 100%;"><tbody><tr><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td></tr></tbody></table>Based in Burbank, California since 2015, Vimware is dedicated to supporting small to midsize businesses and agencies with their behind-the-scenes IT needs. As a Managed Service Provider (MSP), we offer a range of services including cloud solutions, custom programming, mobile app development, marketing dashboards, and strategic IT consulting. Our goal is to ensure your technology infrastructure operates smoothly and efficiently, allowing you to focus on growing your business.<a data-mce-href="https://vimware.com/about/contact-us" href="https://vimware.com/about/contact-us">Contact us</a> to learn how we can assist in optimizing your IT operations.

Easily add scanning functionality to your app

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We are developing an app that requires scanning documents and extracting key information; the extraction is then used to update the relevant user data. We looked at several technologies including AWS Textract, Azure Computer Vision, Google Lens and the open-source technology, Tesseract. All were feature-rich and have certain strengths, but in our case, the documents to be scanned are multipage and heavy on tabular &amp; form data. Due to the amount of structured data, we decided to go with Textract.Textract uses OCR to auto-detect printed text, handwriting, and numbers. All extracted data is returned in a polygon frame with bounding box coordinates. You can detect key-value pairs and context making it easy to import extracted data. Textract also preserves the composition of data stored in tables. This is helpful for documents that are composed of structured data, such as financial reports and medical records. You then load the extracted data using a predefined database schema. Textract can extract data with high confidence scores, whether the text is free-form or embedded in tables. Amazon Textract uses ML to understand the context of invoices and receipts and automatically extracts relevant data such as vendor, invoice #, price, total amount, and payment terms. Textract also uses ML to understand the context of identity documents such as passports and drivers’ licenses without the need for templates or configuration. When extracting information from documents, Amazon Textract returns a confidence score so you can make informed decisions about how to use the results. Amazon Textract is directly integrated with Amazon Augmented AI (A2I) so you can implement a human review process when the confidence score is low.&nbsp; The UI/UX flow requires that documents are scanned using the camera. The document is uploaded to an S3 bucket. A Lambda function is invoked to call the AWS Textract API. Behind the scenes, AWS Textract processes the document and spits out a very long JSON that describes the contents, location in the document, and metadata. Along with the JSON, Textract also creates a CSV file containing all structured data. Upon completion, Textract notifies our callback function that stores the extracted structured data. We then invoke another service to run that data against our matching model,extract the data needed, and update the database.&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; Textract supports both synchronous and asynchronous calls.The synchronous design is to support small mostly single-page documents and we can get near real-time responses. However, we had to go with the asynchronous call since most of our documents are multiple pages. The main drawback of asynchronous processing is that it can take several minutes, negatively affecting the user experience. Breaking the document into single pages and scanning them via synchronous calls is a possibility, but there is a lot of overhead going that route.<a data-mce-href="https://vimware.com/about/contact-us" href="https://vimware.com/about/contact-us" target="_blank">Contact us</a> if you need help adding OCR to your application<table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 100%;" border="1" data-mce-style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 100%;"><tbody><tr><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td></tr></tbody></table>Based in Burbank, California since 2015, Vimware is dedicated to supporting small to midsize businesses and agencies with their behind-the-scenes IT needs. As a Managed Service Provider (MSP), we offer a range of services including cloud solutions, custom programming, mobile app development, marketing dashboards, and strategic IT consulting. Our goal is to ensure your technology infrastructure operates smoothly and efficiently, allowing you to focus on growing your business.<a data-mce-href="https://vimware.com/about/contact-us" href="https://vimware.com/about/contact-us" data-mce-selected="inline-boundary">Contact us</a> to learn how we can assist in optimizing your IT operations.

OCR and extracting text using AWS Textract

We are currently developing an IOS app for a client using React Native.We are using the AWS technology stack as the backend with Amplify,Aurora Serverless,Code Commit,and various other AWS services.Our DevOps team attempted to automate a continuous integration (CI) continuous delivery (CD) process and faced some challenges.I will note what we tried and the issues we faced, both financial and technical,and see if anyone has other suggestions.&nbsp; The software development and DevOps teams are working remotely and distributed across multiple countries.In order to create the iOS app build,we needed a virtual Mac server to install Xcode and the required dependencies to create the build file. We looked at an AWS EC2 Instance with MacOS but the costs at $2,000/month were too high for our client. So we started looking for third-party solutions that provided IOS app build service as well as CI/CD pipelines. We looked at CodeMagic, CircleCI, and Semaphore CI and concluded that CodeMagic was the only choice because the others did not support AWS CodeCommit. Codemagic also provided both build functionality as well as pipelines to Apple Connect.Additionally,CodeMagic is free for a single user with 500 minutes of build time with Xcode running on a Mac Mini,which works fine for our initial setup and development. Since we are below that threshold,it’s free for now.&nbsp; &nbsp; DevOps easily integrated CodeMagic with AWS Code Commit with a very simple process.But then tried to configure a webhook for automated builds but was unable to connect.CodeMagic tech support said that at the moment they do not support continuous integration when connected to AWS CodeCommit. However,our team is already working on adding the webhook support and it will be featured shortly!!&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; The idea was to fully automate the process but we ran into two problems<ol><li style="list-style-type: none;" data-mce-style="list-style-type: none;"><ol><li style="list-style-type: none;" data-mce-style="list-style-type: none;"><ol><li style="">Code Magic does not fully support AWS. We have to fetch the code manually.</li><li style="">&nbsp;AWS does not support IOS builds and pipelines.So at this point, our DevOps team is manually triggering the builds.Update 11/28: CodeMagic is now supporting webhooks for AWS Code Commit.I will report back if this allows us to automate the build process.</li></ol></li></ol></li></ol><a data-mce-href="https://vimware.com/about/contact-us" href="https://vimware.com/about/contact-us" target="_blank" data-mce-selected="inline-boundary">Contact us </a>if you need help automating your virtual IOS pipeline.<table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 100%;" border="1" data-mce-style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 100%;"><tbody><tr><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td></tr></tbody></table>Based in Burbank,California since 2015,Vimware is dedicated to supporting small to midsize businesses and agencies with their behind-the-scenes IT needs.As a Managed Service Provider (MSP),we offer a range of services including cloud solutions,custom programming,mobile app development, marketing dashboards,and strategic IT consulting.Our goal is to ensure your technology infrastructure operates smoothly and efficiently,allowing you to focus on growing your business.<a data-mce-href="https://vimware.com/about/contact-us" href="https://vimware.com/about/contact-us">Contact us</a> to learn how we can assist in optimizing your IT operations.

Automating an IOS CI/CD pipeline

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Anyone evaluating AWS Aurora Serverless v2 beta? We’ve been using v1 the last few months and had the following concerns.<ol><li style="">Does not support RDS proxy leading to a high number of connections from lambda and other services</li><li style="">Lack of redundancy/failover</li><li style="">Only Supports MySQL version 5.6, which is very old</li><li style="">Event_scheduler is not supported</li><li style="">Number of connections utilize more ACU</li><li style="">Occasional timeouts during scaling</li><li style="">Instance warmup takes time</li></ol>UPDATE: AWS will be releasing v2 in 2022 that will hopefully address some of these issues.&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; <a data-mce-href="https://vimware.com/about/contact-us" href="https://vimware.com/about/contact-us" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Contact us</a> if you need help implementing Aurora Serverless.<table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 100%;" border="1" data-mce-style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 100%;"><tbody><tr><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td></tr></tbody></table>Based in Burbank, California since 2015, Vimware is dedicated to supporting small to midsize businesses and agencies with their behind-the-scenes IT needs. As a Managed Service Provider (MSP), we offer a range of services including cloud solutions, custom programming, mobile app development, marketing dashboards, and strategic IT consulting. Our goal is to ensure your technology infrastructure operates smoothly and efficiently, allowing you to focus on growing your business. <a data-mce-href="https://vimware.com/about/contact-us" href="https://vimware.com/about/contact-us">Contact us </a>to learn how we can assist in optimizing your IT operations.

Review of AWS Aurora Serverless v1

A new buzzword, “Data Science”, is becoming increasingly popular. With the advent of user-generated content from social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, there is a huge amount of data passing through the internet. Each time you share, like, dislike, comment or post, the action is captured. But how beneficial is that data, and why is it important for them to manage it?Data Science vs. Big Data Your data provides business with information about your particular preferences which fee into models that can use this information to present you with options you are more likely to choose. Have you ever thought about why Facebook replaced its “Like” button with several emojis? Well, that’s thanks to the user’s behavior and data science. Data science is not about making complex models or visualizations, nor is it about writing long lines of code. In fact, data science is about using data to create the greatest impact for your company. It can be in the form of insights into data, or data products, or using data in a visualization tool. Companies need more and more space to store huge amounts of online data calling it Big Data. &nbsp;The ability to extract actionable insights into that information is what we call Data Science.Most companies are more focused on a data-driven approach for their product instead of a knowledge-driven approach. And this approach is used for many products include web sites, apps, information services and physical products. IOT devices lead by Amazon Alexa and Google Home are changing our lives completely along with the way we interact with machines and devices.<h3>Data Science vs. Machine learning </h3>Data Science and Machine Learning (ML) are growing at an astronomical rate and many professionals are now shifting their focus in this field. But both are not the same and the work performed also depends on the scale of the organization. Data Science heavily influences and impacts the AI and machine learning algorithms. Machine learning is the study of statistical data and algorithm models that a computer system uses to enhance learning models and experience.Machine learning is heavily based on data science which in turn relies on big data. The more big data you have the better product you can come up with. Each interaction you have is recorded. Data Science varies greatly by type and size of company. A small company may only have one employee in the role of data science, statistics, reporting and analytics. A medium-sized corporation may have software developers working alongside data scientists. Large corporations have even more specialized teams and individuals working on every part of the stack.The amount of data being collected is continually increasing whether by social media, devices, apps or IOT. Making sense of all this data and learning about customer behavior and preferences means that Data Science is here to stay.<table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 100%;" border="1" data-mce-style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 100%;"><tbody><tr><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td></tr></tbody></table>Based in Burbank, California since 2015, Vimware is dedicated to supporting small to midsize businesses and agencies with their behind-the-scenes IT needs. As a Managed Service Provider (MSP), we offer a range of services including cloud solutions, custom programming, mobile app development, marketing dashboards, and strategic IT consulting. Our goal is to ensure your technology infrastructure operates smoothly and efficiently, allowing you to focus on growing your business. <a data-mce-href="https://vimware.com/about/contact-us" href="https://vimware.com/about/contact-us" data-mce-selected="inline-boundary">Contact us</a> to learn how we can assist in optimizing your IT operations.

Data Science, Big Data and Machine Learning – A Brief Overview

AWS Services Offered By Vimware For the last two years Vimware is an AWS Amazon Select Partner . To date, our team has significant experience with 30 out of almost 200 services offered by AWS, which we deploy, manage, and optimize for our clients. Here are some of the AWS services we have worked on over the past few years.Vimware-Personnel-AWS-Experience-as-of-April 2020 Service Description Auto Scaling &amp; Load Balancing Automatically scale up or down resources as traffic changesAWS VPN Enables Virtual Private Network (VPN) for AWS and on-premise networks.Backup Fully managed backup service for snapshots and centralized storage Certificate Manager Provision, manage &amp; deploy SSL/TLS certificates Cloudfront Global content delivery network (CDN) that minimizes page load time Cloud Trail Enables governance, compliance and auditing of AWS accounts Cloud Watch AWS service monitoring and alerting Cost ExplorerAWS billing and cost management services and tools including File System and Budget Directory Service Managed domain directory service built on Microsoft Active Directory EC2Spin up virtual servers in the cloud for enterprise applications and robust production websites EFS Fast and expandable file storage for EC2 instances ELB Elastic load balancing services that distributes traffic across your AWS instances and functions GlacierLow-cost and secure archive storage for long-term backups IAMUser access, permissions &amp; encryption key management Lights ail Quickly and cheaply spin up simple applications, WordPress sites, and development and test environments Management ConsoleWeb-based user interface to manage your AWS infrastructureRDSManaged database services for Aurora, SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle and PostgreSQLRedisReal-time very fast, highly availability, easily deployable, scalable and secure database Route 53DNS service to map web sites to serversS3Cheap, reliable, scalable and secure cloud storageSESHighly scalable email service to send up to millions of email SNS Notification service for users and device using mobile push, SMS and email VPCVirtual Private Cloud featuring multiple layers of security enabling quick creation of secure private networksWAF and ShieldApplication and firewall to limit hacking by common attack schemes such as DDOS, injection and cross-scripting.Vimware provides IT strategy and software development consulting services in the Greater Los Angeles Area. We specialize in helping organizations transition and reinvent themselves into the tech world. Our clients are across many industries including academia, consumer goods, entertainment, and healthcare. Expertise covers iOS, Android, Windows, LAMP and MEAN technology stacks. Vimware is a Select Partner within Amazon’s AWS partner network.<table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 100%;" border="1" data-mce-style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 100%;" data-mce-selected="1"><tbody><tr><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td></tr></tbody></table>Based in Burbank, California since 2015, Vimware is dedicated to supporting small to midsize businesses and agencies with their behind-the-scenes IT needs. As a Managed Service Provider (MSP), we offer a range of services including cloud solutions, custom programming, mobile app development, marketing dashboards, and strategic IT consulting. Our goal is to ensure your technology infrastructure operates smoothly and efficiently, allowing you to focus on growing your business. <a data-mce-href="https://vimware.com/about/contact-us" href="https://vimware.com/about/contact-us" data-mce-selected="inline-boundary">Contact us </a>to learn how we can assist in optimizing your IT operations.

Blog

Easily add scanning functionality to your app

OCR and extracting text using AWS Textract

Automating an IOS CI/CD pipeline

Review of AWS Aurora Serverless v1

Data Science, Big Data and Machine Learning – A Brief Ove...

AWS Services offered by Vimware