All posts by astalabs

ADMINISTRATION, PRODUCTS

Making the City Asta Smart

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Asta Smart City is a mobile cloud computing system that supports implementing the idea of e-administration. It enables inhabitants of municipal and rural communities to report problems concerning the functioning of the community infrastructure and services using a mobile app. The reported information can be immediately managed at community offices and the status and progress of resolving the problem can be monitored on-line by the reporting individual. The information can also be made available to local inhabitants, investors and infrastracture operators; combined with territorial and demographic data it can be visualised on street and satellite maps, e.g., using large-size television panels. Asta Smart City is offered as a service, hosted in the Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud, with the applications available for smartphones, tablets and desktops.

Read more (in Polish).

COMPANY, EVENTS

Asta Labs at Microsoft Partner Strategy Conference

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On October 15-16th Asta Labs took part in the Microsoft Partner Strategy Conference 2014, held in Serock near Warsaw. An annual event, this year the conference promoted Microsoft’s motto ‘mobile first, cloud first’, concentrating on the issues of cloud computing, mobility, social media, security, and Big Data. The conference gathered more than 130 prominant Microsoft Partner companies from the Polish IT sector.

Regarded by Microsoft in Poland as one of the most promising partners in the area of advanced software solutions, Asta Labs has been among just several software vendors directly invited by the organizers. Using such an excellent opportunity, Asta Labs demonstrated the entire portfolio of its innovative mobile cloud solutions for both corporate and private users, presenting an exact answer to the challenge that results from the conference’s motto.

SURVEYS, TECHNOLOGY

Asta Surveys Released

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The Asta Surveys technology enables conducting arbitrary business-related and technical surveys using smartphones and tablets. The gathered information can be further analysed exploiting the business intelligence capabilities provided by Asta Architecture.

Thus, service providers can organise an on-line process of collecting data about their current and potential customers, the perception of their offer, their competitors, etc., directly at customer premises, while infrastructure providers, in particular communications and utility network providers and operators, can gather information on the technical infrastructure available at their customers’ premises, conduct technical interviews on their own infrastructural sites and connections, and on the equipment that is placed at those locations.

The Asta Survey Wizard application allows for freely defining surveys — one can add a new survey, define a number of open and closed queries, edit questions and answers, specify the single- or multiple-choice mode for closed-answer queries, link queries by specifying which answers unlock which queries, require attaching multimedia (pictures, videos, documents, etc.) while answering a query.

And the Asta Interview Master application enables conducting interviews using defined surveys. It features a simple and intuitive interface — answers are selected from drop-down or check-box lists, out-of-context queries are automatically skipped, multimedia can be attached by recording voice or taking a photo with an embedded camera, etc. Completed questionnaires with attached geo-position-related information are sent on-line to the central repository and can be viewed immediately, or business intelligence can be used to process the data from the questionnaires off-line. Both applications are available on Windows smartphones as well as on Windows tablets.

All components of Asta Surveys are implemented on Asta Platform and the Asta Surveys technology is integrated into the majority of (if not all) Asta Labs solutions, in particular into Asta Sales and Asta Operations — it is used, e.g., in the Marketing subsystem for organising market surveys and marketing campaigns, in the Customers subsystem for contacting customers in the call-centre and self-care mode, and in the Resources subsystem for running resource provisioning, maintenance and service activities.

PLATFORM, PROJECTS

Lab Resources Reservation on Asta Platform

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Using the newest release of the Asta Platform, the flagship product of Asta Labs, the Department of Switching and Computer Networks of the Warsaw University of Technology (WUT) has just implemented the first production version of its Lab Resources Reservation system. The system allows the students that attend the courses provided by the Institute of Telecommunications (IT; the parent unit of the Department) to reserve the time and the resources required for their laboratory assignments.

As a rule the resources are accessed remotely and are provisioned at runtime using the virtualisation capabilities of the Department’s IT infrastructure. Already supporting a considerable number of courses provided by the Institute, the system is used by almost 400 students of the Faculty of Electronics and Information Technologies. While primarily allowing the students to reserve the lab resources it also provides the lecturers with the capabilities of monitoring the reservation process.

The system has been implemented by the students who are active in the scientific circle of the Mobile Applications and Systems, supervised by staff members of the Department. The entire phase of system design, coding, testing and deployment has been completed within 6 weeks.

COMPANY, COOPERATION

Cooperation with the Warsaw University of Technology

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Asta Labs has signed a cooperation agreement with the Institute of Telecommunications (IT) of the Warsaw University of Technology (WUT), the major and most prominent technical university in Poland. The Institute of Telecommunications and Asta Labs are eager to establish a collaboration relationship that will involve innovative research and development projects pertaining, in particular, to the Telco 2.0, IMS, LTE, and FTTx technologies. According to the agreement, Asta Labs will provide the Institute of Telecommunications with the most current version of its software Asta Platform and the corresponding know-how. The platform includes Asta Services and Asta API allowing for the mobile application- and cloud computing-based system development and deployment.