Home = Office
MOST
The Increasing Importance of Remote Working Culture
#Connected Things to Take Care of While Hiring in a Remote Work Se ng
INNOVATIVE
REMOTE
WORK SOFTWARE SOLUTION PROVIDERS
Kintone Dave Landa | CEO
Empowering Businesses to Improve Remote Teamwork 2021| Vol 07 | ISSUE 01
www.insightssuccess.com
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Home = Office
MOST
The Increasing Importance of Remote Working Culture
#Connected Things to Take Care of While Hiring in a Remote Work Se ng
INNOVATIVE
REMOTE
WORK SOFTWARE SOLUTION PROVIDERS
Kintone Dave Landa | CEO
Empowering Businesses to Improve Remote Teamwork 2021| Vol 07 | ISSUE 01
www.insightssuccess.com
Opening Ways for Productive Remote Working
othing could have proven Plato’s quote Necessity is the Mother of Invention (our need will be the real creator) more accurate than remote working. Although digital disruptions have been happening for a few decades, no one would have imagined the transparency and efficiency technology brought to remote working. The COVID-19 pandemic redefined the concept of normal working for many businesses. Work from home became the new normal, and despite many offices bouncing back to the old normalcy, a hybrid working model will persist. Though work from home is not a new concept, the ongoing pandemic forced many to practice it rather than opt for it. They were thrown off their inertia before one could blink an eye, and remote working became the new normal. After the teething problems and overcoming the resistance to change, businesses realized that remote working was the best way to work, and employees began enjoying their ‘new workplace.’ But managing work or office remotely has its challenges. During the initial days of remote working, businesses were worried about timely work and output while employees ended up working long hours. The
major hurdles were communication, interaction with teammates, visibility, etc. Here is where remote working software came to the rescue. Proper remote working software saves time and increases productivity while eliminating work-related fears of employers and managers. Automation, artificial intelligence, time tracking, team management software/Apps, Google drive, real-time communication tools, tracking to-dos, financial monitoring, cloud, collaboration hubs, video conferencing solutions, and many more tools are today used to manage businesses. The office-to-home transition saw a shift in comfort zones. Earlier, the areas were clearly demarcated – work in the office and personal life at home, which were our comfort zones for the respective activities. But as things started to get streamlined, people began to see the silver lining and enjoy the new work world. Though offices are being reopened, the hybrid model continues and will continue for a long period. As we oscillate between comfort zones, remote work software solution providers are busy with innovations to give the best tools to businesses and make remote working smoother. Adapting to the tsunami of changes was difficult. But now that the metamorphosis has happened and everyone is comfortable in the skin they had to wear, remote work software solution providers are the ones to hog the limelight, and rightly so.
In our latest edition of Insights Success, Most Innovative Remote Work Software Solution Providers, we have featured some innovative remote work software solution providers. Without their contributions, the new normal would have continued to be daunting. They have provided us with the best software for shared online workspaces. They made monumental business management and development tasks appear easier than one could imagine. Technological developments have always eased the functions of businesses and employees, but remote work software solution providers have shed away myths and fears of distance working. Even as these solution providers continue to prove Plato’s quote true, let us unearth their journey until now through this edition.
Have an enlightening read!
Sumita Sarkar
Cover Story
08
KIN ONE 28 HOME = OFFICE
The Increasing Importance of Remote Working Culture
ARTICLES
Empowering Businesses to Improve Remote Teamwork
18 #CONNECTED
Things to Take Care of While Hiring in a Remote Work Setting
Contents 14 FUNCTIONFOX
A Leading Software Choice for Creative Professionals
22 PROOFHUB
Progressive All-inclusive Software Solution Provider
26 ULATUS
Empowering Businesses to Go Beyond the Language Barrier
32 PROOFHUB
Crafting Fine Websites for Content Creators
Editor-in-Chief Sumita Sarkar Senior Editor Anish Miller Managing Editor Abhishaj Sajeev Assisting Editors Trishika, Vinayak Visualiser David King Art & Design Head Priyanka Rajage Art & Design Assistant Mrunalinee Deshmukh Co-designer Paul Belin Art & Picture Editor Rohil Shinganapurkar Business Development Manager Sherin Rodricks Marketing Manager Joseph D'souza Business Development Executives Kelly, David Sales Executives Mark, Alice Technical Head Jacob Smile Assistant Technical Head Amar Sawant Technical Consultants Pratiksha, Aditya, David Digital Marketing Manager Alina Sege Assistant Digital Marketing Manager Amol Wadekar SME-SMO Executives Gemson, Renuka Research Analyst Eric Smith Circulation Manager Tanaji sales@insightssuccess.com
July, 2021 Corporate Ofce Insights Success Media Tech LLC 555 Metro Place North, Suite 100, Dublin, OH 43017, United States Phone - (614)-859-2600 Email: info@insightssuccess.com For Subscription: www.insightssuccess.com
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Featuring
Brief
Jake Goldman Founder
10up makes the internet better with consultative creative and engineering services, innovative tools, and dependable products that take the pain out of content creation and management, in service of digital experiences that advance business and marketing objectives.
FunctionFox functionfox.com
Corina Ext President
FunctionFox is an online tool for tracking time and expenses, keeping to estimate, and managing clients and projects. FunctionFox streamlines the process with all the right tools, allowing your creative team to focus on the work and stay creative.
InVision invisionapp.com
Clark Valberg CEO, Co-founder
InVision is the visual collaboration platform powering the world’s smartest companies. The company exists to make every kind of work more collaborative, inclusive, and impactful.
Kintone kintone.com
Dave Landa, CEO
Kintone is a global leader in the no-code custom software revolution. Recognized in Forrester’s Wave and Gartner’s Magic Quadrant as a leader in the space, Kintone is making teamwork better with the best software and methods for improving teamwork.
ProofHub proofhub.com
Sandeep Kashyap Founder
ProofHub is a saas-based project management software that fits perfectly in every work culture. It solves the four major challenges that every team faces in their projects - Planning, Collaboration, Organization, and Delivering them on time.
Toggl Track toggl.com
Alari Aho CEO
Toggl Track is a leading online time tracking tool, which is extremely popular among freelancers, consultants, and small companies. It allows users to track the time spent on various projects and analyze productivity.
Taso Du Val CEO
Toptal is a network of the world's top talent in business, design, and technology that enables companies to scale their teams, on demand. With $200+ million in annual revenue and over 40% year-over-year growth, Toptal is the largest fully distributed workforce in the world.
Ulatus ulatus.com
Shilpa Mittal CEO
Ulatus, a Crimson Interactive Co., offers 'publish-ready' translation/localization quality and customizable solutions that use the very best advancements in the marketplace to solidify its clients’ continuous business growth through the conversion of their branded communications and distinguished by being Global in Spirit, Local at Heart®.
X-Team x-team.com
Ryan Chartrand CEO
X-Team has provided high-performing, on-demand teams of software developers for the world's leading brands since 2006.
Zyte zyte.com
Shane Evans CEO
Zyte is a game-changer in web data extraction, obsessed with removing barriers so that its customers can access valuable data. Quickly and easily, whenever and however they need it.
Company Name 10up 10up.com
Toptal toptal.com
Dave Landa | CEO
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Empowering Businesses to Improve Remote Teamwork
MOST INNOVATIVE REMOTE WORK SOFTWARE SOLUTION PROVIDERS
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or Kintone users, working remotely is suspiciously easy. The powerful workplace platform offers teams a 360-degree vision of everything they need to stay up-to-date at work: data, conversations, status reports. And they can see it from any internet connected device.
But what sets this platform apart isn’t just its features--it’s the culture infused around it. “Kintone is as much as a philosophy as it is a product,” says Dave Landa, CEO of Kintone Corporation. Kintone Corporation is the U.S. branch of Cybozu, a Japan-based groupware company that set records when it launched. Founded by three former-Panasonic software engineers in 1997, Cybozu went on to become the fastest company to go public on the Tokyo Stock Exchange – only three years after its debut. Kintone is now used by 19,000+ organizations worldwide, and the business grows an average of 50% a year. “Oftentimes, people want software to solve their problems. To make things like remote work easier,” says Dave. “They think, ‘if only I could see reports from my phone, or access that document that’s in someone else’s email.’ They hope new features or editions will fix the struggles they face around their job. But having access to reports on your phone isn’t a fix-all solution if you’ve got young children at home who need constant help logging into their Zoom classes. Being able to access that spreadsheet in someone else’s email won’t feel like much if you’ve just been told your company expects you back in the office after you’ve bought a house outside the commuting zone.”
For Dave, having the right tools is just the first step. It’s the policies around them that make or break their ultimate value. “Last year, we had a sales member named Lisa reach out to us. She’s a mom with a young kid who needs a lot of help logging into classes and staying focused throughout the day. She felt she couldn’t be the mom her son needed and work within the normal nine-to-five timeframe. So, she came to us and had a conversation... She ended up switching her hours so she would work mornings—before her son started his classes—take the afternoon off to focus on him, and then jump back on in the evenings to finish up what was left. Lisa wrote an open note on Kintone explaining her decision and situation to the entire rest of the team. That note did two things: it helped her team understand her situation and support her, but it also helped establish an open line with other parents on our team who were struggling with the same thing.” Rather than turning a difficult situation into a point of shame or lack of commitment to the company, it became an opportunity to explore who else on the team was struggling and what adjustments could be made for them. Kintone’s culture laid the groundwork to speak up. Then the product came in to help others raise their voice. For Kintone users, the platform helps foster and encourage many of the company’s core philosophies, including transparency and accountability. “Kintone is a database. But it’s also a collaboration hub; rather than writing isolated emails back and forth to internal members of the team, you can push those conversations through Kintone itself,” says Dave.
The result is fascinating. Data records store conversations between team members right alongside the data being discussed – even after the conversation is over. Areas called Spaces allow teams to create department or teamcentric areas where they can chat and talk about the specifics of their work. Customer success has its own Space, as does marketing and sales. And within each of these spaces are threads
are conversation topics sorted by subject. That’s where Lisa’s message to the team was posted. At a typical business, her message might have never left the conference room. Or if it were announced, it might have been done through HR and accompanied by a politely worded email from Lisa to only her closest colleagues. But on Kintone it was visible to everyone in the company. “Just because it lives in the Sales Space doesn’t mean only sales can see it. Anyone can go over and look and read and benefit from it,” says Dave. “The Kintone platform gave her a voice, and in turn it gives others in the company a chance to speak for themselves as well.” For Dave, this is what Kintone is truly about: creating an ultra-transparent workplace where people feel truly comfortable to raise and discuss the issues facing them--both at home and in work. “If someone in sales wants to
learn about the marketing initiatives launching this month, or if the marketing team wants a better understanding of what current clients are saying to the customer success team, the information is there – accessible to all.” This all lends itself to this emerging semi-permanent remote work world businesses are dealing with. Right now, “many companies are struggling to figure out how to let people stay remote without risking company culture,” says Dave. What he feels they don’t realize is that they can build and grow a strong company culture even when no one is in the same room, if they’ve got the right setup. “Your team needs tools that allow them access to the information and conversations they used to be able to get by walking across to someone else’s desk.” No more conversations siloed away in email. No more spreadsheets trapped on someone’s desktop – and they’re not responding on Slack. Centralization and accessibility are critical.
But to Dave, the right tools don’t just help your team get their work done more effectively. They help foster the underlying values of your culture even when your culture committee or HR team isn’t around. “When the lockdowns occurred in March of last year, we like to say we went remote in 24 hours without a hitch,” he laughs. “That’s because we did. A team of 50 people in San Francisco and around the U.S. went completely remote in less than a day with no major hiccups, minus collecting the office mail. And while certain parts of our culture have changed, such as no more in-person happy hours – other parts have thrived. We haven’t lost anything.”
Most Innova ve Remote Work So ware Solu on Providers
A Leading Software Choice for Creative Professionals
Things like deadlines and due dates can be hard to keep a track of for these professionals and feel like a hassle oftentimes. To assist creative professionals and firms in keeping track of all of their timelines and project management concerns FunctionFox came into existence.
,
I
t is proven science that most creative professionals operate with a right-brained style of working. What they need to work efficiently is a creative space that will enable them to do what they do the best: create. Sometimes the factor that acts as a hurdle in their creative process is the management of their business.
,
Our vision is to be the leading time and project tracking software for creative teams in the world.
In an exclusive interview with Insights Success, Corina Ludwig, the President of FunctionFox talks in detail about the offerings of the company that helps firms streamline, optimize, and manage team resources in a central location.
specifically for In-House creative teams to assist with project intake and project management. We also offer a free product, ideal for a small team.
Following are the highlights of the interview:
What is the vision and mission of the company?
Enlighten us with the journey of your company so far.
Our vision is to be the leading time and project tracking software for creative teams in the world. Our mission is to help creative teams succeed and improve their business.
FunctionFox was created from a need to have a better tool to manage an advertising agency. There were no good tools available, so we created something that quickly proved to streamline our business, improve efficiencies, and contribute to increasing profitability. We decided our tool could be of value to all creative teams, so we built the software as a service business back in 2000.
What kind of challenges has the company and its team faced industry-wise?
Kindly talk about the exclusive products or services offered by your company.
In the Early days, we faced lots of hurdles – lack of highspeed internet, lack of understanding about how we could safely host mission-critical data. We were also challenged to develop a sales system that we could measure and track that was effective and efficient.
FunctionFox offers time and project management software designed for creative teams. We offer Classic, which is focused on time and expense tracking and reporting; Premier, which adds in Project Management functionality and features; and In-House, which was designed
More recently, our challenges have been to remain focused on our niche when we see other opportunities for things we could do. Currently, the industry has many, many players, and our challenge is visibility in a sea of competitors that have raised hundreds of millions and spent it on marketing.
14|July 2021|www.insightssuccess.com
Corina Ludwig President
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About the Leaders Corina Ludwig - Corina Ludwig is an accomplished Senior Executive, Advisor, and Board Member with more than 30 years of success in Business Tech and advertising. For the past 21 years, she’s led FunctionFox –a global leader in time-tracking and project management. She also sits on the board for Women in Science and Tech and the Innovation, Advanced Technology, and Entrepreneurship Council. Mary-Lynn Bellamy - FunctionFox founder Mary-Lynn Bellamy-Willms had started her advertising agency with her husband from their home back in 1988, so working from home was a simple concept to embrace. Through the growth of their agency, they built a building and moved in, and ‘gave birth’ to FunctionFox. Even from 2001, FunctionFox had a key management team member working from home, while the rest of the team worked from a centralized office. Through the years up to ‘COVID’ time, FunctionFox had many team members (25%) working from home full-time and/or part-time from home. In March 2020, we were quickly able to shift, and the company has been operating 100% remotely since
How have technological advancements and innovation in the industry impacted/enhanced the business of the company? Continuous improvement in speed and technology increases the value we bring to our clients. Data on demand helps our customers see their business on both a macro and micro level and enables them to fine-tune and become more effective and profitable. What are your strategically driven plans to be implemented in order to scale the business in the upcoming year? We are completing a full back-end upgrade, looking at some exciting integration opportunities, and refreshing our brand and marketing programs. What does the future look like for the company in terms of growth and expansion? FunctionFox has a spectacular future. More companies working from home, more companies needing to better manage their work all add up to opportunity for FunctionFox, and our deep expertise in the creative community put us at an advantage for any creative business wanting to up their game.
16|July 2021|www.insightssuccess.com
THINGS to
TAKE CARE of While HIRING in
a REMOTE WORK
Setting
B
efore the COVID-19 pandemic, people had a dystopian POV about their desired job conditions– how the office should be near their homes, how there should be no longer traveling in boring traffic, no boss hovering around the table, and the freedom from timebounded life; simply sit at home, complete your work, and get paid accordingly. But who would have thought that this dream would become a reality? The epidemic changed all the traditional ways of working and forced the world to look after new ways of working. Due to the imposed lockdowns and later applied norms of social distancing, the traditional approach of offline working shifted towards online working, which gave rise to the new normal – work from home. Various studies show that remote workers are more productive than office workers, which provides an advantage of increased working efficiency. However, despite all the advantages, it is challenging for management and hiring authorities to hire new employees
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#Connected
19|July 2021|www.insightssuccess.com
for remote work. In some instances, employees who are very efficient with working in the office find it difficult to manage the remote working module and lower their graph. This proves that everyone is not molded for remote working. So, before hiring an employee, it is essential to consider some key points to avoid failures. What are they? Let's see: The Outreach of the Company The first and foremost thing is the company's outreach and its brand. Many people will think it is quite unrelated to hiring remote workers, but it is important to have a better reach because in many cases, it has been seen that companies miss out on hiring better people than they can get with the extra reach. For companies, recruiting people for remote teams is often more difficult than they anticipate. It can be difficult to get the word out about the company and the positions if a company doesn't have worldwide connections or is a small brand, and local ties can be difficult to come by. Hence, making use of every available channel to spread the news and keep track of where the best prospects come from is essential for companies. There are many things that help spread a firm's reach for recruitment, such as advertisement, social media posts, business platforms such as LinkedIn, and many more. Making effective use of reach can provide great assistance. Value-added Recruitment Process The term 'value-added recruitment process' refers to a strategy that strives to guarantee that recruiters hire the right people with the correct skills and beliefs. It is a strategy that prioritizes certain beliefs and values in order to recruit skilled workers. Companies develop some essential ideas to form a competent team with the correct people and talent.
employee's thought process is similar to that of a company, it becomes easy to work for him. Selection of Strongest Candidates Possibly in each round of the selection criteria, weaker candidates almost get eliminated in the process. But it doesn't mean that the selected candidates are appropriate for the job. Especially in remote interviews, it is tough to predict if the candidate is speaking the truth or not. In many cases, candidates show false experience, which is hard to cross-check. Hence, companies get fooled by such candidates and end up with a loss of money as well as precious time. Some candidates who get shortlisted are not really experienced, but they are still selected for further procedures. This happens only if they are really talented or if the company believes that they are talented. The former case is good for the company, while the latter causes a loss of time and money. This happens because some people don't have core knowledge of the work, but they may have practiced the interviews, and accordingly, they portray their candidatures as having a core knowledge about the work. Hence, these nuances must be considered while selecting a candidate. Final Thoughts Hiring the right candidate is the key for any successful company, and it is a challenging task considering the consequences of remote working. Managing a remote working team requires a high level of trust and worthy team members to get the work done. Remote working brings many advantages, but it also puts some barriers in coordination. Countering these barriers needs a great team that can solve these problems, and hiring the right people is the foundation of any successful virtual team.
Values are the guiding principles that significantly impact a person's conduct, judgments, and, most importantly, ability to make decisions. In simple words, concentrating on core values during the recruitment process is quite beneficial when it comes to selecting the appropriate individual. If an
20|July 2021|www.insightssuccess.com
-Vinayak Ghorpade
Most Innovative Remote Work Software Solution Providers
ProofHub A Progressive All-inclusive Software Solution Provider
E
very business owner wishes to boost their productivity. Profits rise and waste falls when a business runs efficiently, resulting in a healthy bottom line. When it comes to managing multiple tasks all at once, it often consumes a lot of time and energy. Business organizations have a lot of activities to manage, like projects, files, and teams, which can seem like an arduous task sometimes. Every entity must manage all the activities successfully for a seamless performance. With advanced technology and management services, there are certain softwares that can perform timeconsuming tasks in a matter of seconds. One such company that is providing these cutting-edge software solutions is ProofHub, based out of Walnut, California; it is an all-in-one simplified project planning software for managing activities carried out in an organization. In an exclusive interview with Insights Success, Sandeep Kashyap, the Founder of ProofHub, elaborates more on the distinct software services that the company provides to its clients. Below are the highlights of the interview.
Enlighten us with the journey of ProofHub so far. The story of our company has been a simple one. I built a software platform from scratch, and since then, all we’ve done is improve the product and market it to the best of our abilities. The journey started when I created ProofHub to end the mismanagement of files, projects, and, most importantly, teams. And, I know it had potential since early on, we got a flush of notable customers who wanted to use our platform to simplify their tasks and streamline the work processes. After that, I aimed to find a group of like-minded people who shared this bigger vision with me and were ready to create something that would aid people with project management and
team collaboration as a whole. As a close-knit team, we work hard to understand the highly competitive nature of the market, and of course, the needs of our customers. We believe that the customer is the boss of us, and what they need, we provide. So, all in all, we have four things going on for us- (1) extensive customer service, (2) improving the look and feel of the product, (3) adding more and more bells and whistles to the feature-set of ProofHub, (4) making it easier for our potential customers to find us and sign up for our product through successful marketing as well as branding efforts. Kindly talk about the exclusive products or services offered by ProofHub.
In the new normal, that is the era of remote work; we believe tools like ProofHub have become and continue to become the basic necessity for teams to effectively collaborate, track work assignments, communicate, and more.
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Sandeep Kashyap Founder
About the Leader Sandeep Kashyap, Founder of ProofHub Project management tools have always been a sort of a helping hand to teams of all sizes and of any industry. However, when the era of remote work took over, tools like ProofHub went from being a helpful suggestion to an absolute necessity. Teams needed a place where they could come together to collaborate and work together more efficiently and effectively, and with tools like ours, they can have exactly that. ProofHub helps teams centralize all project-related information (with Kanban boards, notes, and Gantt charts) and coordinate with each other (using discussions and chats). As a remote work software solution, ProofHub is providing the world with a secure platform where distributed teams can come together to plan, schedule, store, and execute projects without any hassle.
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ProofHub is an all-in-one tool that helps teams replace 6-7 tools they would be using before this one. Some things that make ProofHub one of a kind within its kind are: In-house features: Even though ProofHub comes with a plethora of integrations that sit seamlessly inside the application, it comes with several in-built features that eliminate the need for other software programs. Ease of use: ProofHub is an easily scalable tool, it is easy to use, and overall, it just makes everything every information, task, and teammate more accessible. Not only does it allow ease of use to the users, but it also gives them a platform where it is easy for the team to onboard new members and keep information on the front and center. Flat Pricing: Another thing that sets us apart in the market is that we offer a flat-pricing model to our customers where there is no in-app pricing and also no per-user charge. What is the vision and mission of ProofHub? Both our vision and our mission are and always have been to help people achieve the highest rates of efficiency with all the innovative features that we can provide to them. Our organization has the vision to improve the quality of work and the productivity of the workforce by providing a solution that can help them carry the workload for them. Therefore, we work on the customer satisfaction part of the job effectively. What kind of challenges has ProofHub, and its team faced industry-wise?
The market for project management, collaboration, and communication tools is a relatively tough one to breach. It is undoubtedly a highly competitive market that is hard to navigate at times. There are two ongoing challenges that I would like to talk about. The first one is the competition. We always had competition, but the era of remote work has pushed some tools to jump this bandwagon of facilitating efficiency with remote work. Now even though these software platforms have not taken us out of the race, they have muddied the water for the big players like us who are trying to make a stance in the market. Another challenge that has been coming in our way is one where we are trying to keep up with the innovation steps being taken up by our competitors and balancing all of that with all the requirements that our users and potential customers have. While our competitors find ways to add more bells and whistles to their products, users are simply searching for a solution to help them manage their workload and collaborate with their teams in real-time in this particularly taxing era of remote work. How have technological advancements and innovation in the industry impacted/enhanced the business of ProofHub? As we steadily moved to an era of remote work, our needs changed, our requirements, habits, and activities changed, there was a need for a robust solution that could help hold things together. Since our product and our team, in general, have always offered the best, most useful collaborative features to our customers over the
years, time and technology have only enhanced and improved our sales and market prospects. As time moves on, people expect to see clarity with the UX, faster functioning, and heightened levels of software performance. All of this impact us in the way that we have to keep working on the demands of the masses and cater to the needs and requirements of the public. Therefore, over the years, we have worked on updating our tech, enhancing the user experience, and increasing the security measures so that people can find our product as reliable as it is useful. What are your strategically driven plans to be implemented to scale the business in the upcoming year? In the upcoming year, we are looking to improve our product performance. We are looking to add feature sets that help us cater to enterprise teams in particular. We are coming up with a cleaner interface and a holistic range of features for distributed teams with distributed needs. What does the future look like for ProofHub in terms of growth and expansion? In the new normal, that is the era of remote work; we believe tools like ProofHub have become and continue to become the basic necessity for teams to effectively collaborate, track work assignments, communicate, and more. Hence, in terms of growth and expansion, we are looking to penetrate across more and more industries and take advantage of all the open space of opportunities this pandemic has left in the market.
24|July 2021|www.insightssuccess.com
Most Innovative Remote Work Software Solution Providers 2021
L
“
anguage shapes the way we think and determines what we can think about.” American Linguistic and Fire Prevention Engineer Benjamin Lee Whorf correctly highlighted the importance of language learning in education.
And it stands true for businesses as well. Today, the digital revolution and social media have blurred geographical boundaries. However, lack of quality and trusted translation services in the market have been limiting companies to communicate with their audience limiting their success in the global market. Ulatus was founded to provide quality translation services considering this market gap. Since its inception, the company has been working on a mission to lessening language barriers for academic and corporate purposes by hiring expert translators in several countries. “We firmly believe that language should not be a barrier for businesses aiming to capture local markets to expand their geographical presence,” says Shilpa Sanghai Mittal, the CEO of Ulatus. With this guiding philosophy and visionary leadership, Ulatus has been empowering companies to communicate with their audiences in global markets in their native language. And now working on its motto ‘Localize to Globalize’ Ulatus strives to go beyond language translation to support brands to build a strong local presence.
Read the following interview to know how Ulatus was established, how the company’s services are making difference for its clients, and its technological approach to thrive in the future. Enlighten us with the journey of Ulatus so far. I started Ulatus when I was 27 years old after I noticed that there was a lack of translation services for academic purposes. We started by hiring translators from Japan and bridging the gap between clients and translators. After this model proved to be a success, we expanded into several other countries and diversified our offerings in the translation industry. Today, Ulatus is present in over 125 countries and provides translations to most of these countries. We have a team of around 100 people in Mumbai, 15 people in the Japan office, 4 in the US office, 6 in the Korea office, and 6 in China. Apart from this, we have over 2,000 translators who work for us remotely from across the globe. Share with the exclusive products or services Ulatus offers. Ulatus primarily offers 50+ language translation solutions to academic researchers and authors to get their research published in international peer-reviewed journals. We also help corporate firms appeal to different global audiences in the languages they understand. The company offers Chinese, Indic, Korean, Japanese, Spanish, and Portuguese language services amongst other languages. Additionally, we also deliver solutions
like interpretation, book translation, pharmaceutical and medical localization, website, game, app, and finance localization amongst others. Under our life science localization offerings, we offer services such as regulatory submission translation, linguistic validation for pharmaceutical companies, medical device translation, and work with well-known biotech companies as well as CROs for their requirements. What kind of challenges the company and its team faced when entering the niche industry? The translation industry is huge and to even be recognized as a brand here requires immense effort. With a $47 billion+ industry, there is loads of competition here. So, entering and surviving this competition requires one to be different and specialized, and hence our start was to be experts at providing language solutions in Asian languages specifically. Another challenge is that this industry is continuously evolving from one language and service to another (translation, localization, technological solutions, etc.). Technology is getting better day by day. Thus, we also need to keep evolving in what we offer to clients. This requires constant market intelligence and innovation. Building a team competent to handle varied and unique client requests is a challenge we accepted and successfully achieved early in the business. The success of Ulatus today should be attributed to its hardworking and intelligent team.
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How have technological advancements and innovation in the industry impacted/enhanced the business of the company? Like most other industries, technology plays a large part in translation as well. As automated translation slowly comes to the forefront, we have had to also adapt to ensure that clients get what they are looking for. In recent times, automated translation has become popular and is being used for many reasons which have made it more important. We have used our years of experience and superefficient linguists to make our own proprietary AI-based machine translation with the highest quality and value available in the market today. We have also used technology to speed up our processes, shorten turnaround times, and improve the accuracy of human translation.
Our focus, however, has always been client satisfaction and top-notch quality of service. We have always treated retaining our current business as the best foundation for growth and will continue to do so in the future as well. What does the future look like for the company in terms of growth and expansion? We aim to be one of the most recognized and trusted language solutions company for many language pairs. Globally we want Ulatus (www.ulatus.jp) to be the first choice for clients seeking translation service across industries. Achieving this will take a lot of work and patience but we are currently focused on quality and our dedication to client satisfaction. We’ve been growing steadily over the last couple of years, and we expect to do even better in the years to come. Blending technology with quality has worked for us so far and we will continue to do that more efficiently, in times to come.
Shilpa Sanghai Mittal | CEO
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We aim to be one of the most recognized and trusted language solutions company for many language pairs.
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What are your strategically driven plans to be implemented to scale the business in the upcoming year? This year we want to focus on upcoming markets related to cybersecurity, interpretation, game localization, and e-learning. Considering how the world has evolved to be more online, we feel that these markets have improved in potential and can be an opportunity for growth.
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Home = Office
The
Increasing
Importance of Remote Working Culture I
f anyone asks, what is the most drastic outcome of the COVID-19 pandemic, the obvious answer is an unprecedented social and economic disruption. However, in addition to this, it bisected the timeline of human history. This timeline was previously divided based on the birth of Jesus Christ (AD and BC) and then after the second world war. But the global disruption caused by the pandemic simply added a new spot on the axis of time. From now on, whenever the history books will be written in the future, the references will be divided into pre-pandemic and post-pandemic. Such is the impact it caused on a global level. Though the pandemic has changed global dynamics, it also led to some technological revolutions. Worldwide lockdowns led to a sudden shift in traditional working and gave birth to a new normal – 'Work-from-home.' Believed to be a blessing in disguise, the work-from-home or simply remote working process has become popular in
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the working culture of many companies. It is one of the positives that emerged from the negative effects of the pandemic. When millions of enterprises faced an existential threat during unprecedented times, remote working was the only option that saved them. Early Influences of Remote Working Culture Remote working was not initiated by the pandemic. It was already in practice even before the emergence of the internet. Jack Nilles, A NASA engineer, coined the term 'telecommuting' in 1973 and laid the foundation of modern remote working culture. Further, with the arrival of garage start-ups, a new generation was born that was associated with entrepreneurs and their ideas. These entrepreneurs worked from their homes, small office rooms, or even from sheds to run their businesses. On the other hand, employees started to prefer companies that were flexible, allowing them to continue working from their preferred locations or as suitable to their premises. The technological revolution provided essential flexibility in the working module and ensured the smooth running of a business. The journey that started from heavy computers reached the portable laptops and further to smartphones and tablets. Machines that used to take up entire rooms are now small enough to fit in the bags or even in your pockets. These portable devices eliminated the necessity of working at a particular location. The invention of Wireless Fidelity (WiFi) was the icing on the cake, which provided wireless access to the internet. The amalgamation of these advanced gadgets allowed companies and their employees to work according to their preferred locations. The Pandemic Boost
The change in the policy pushed many companies to implement a techno-savvy approach to survive in the market. Previously there was a traditional mindset of people that employees can't work efficiently when they are not in the office, and hence, they must be working under the same roof. But the pandemic overturned this approach, and due to the many advantages, that remote working provided, it just shifted the winds towards new horizons. What Next? Technological advancement is on its verge leading to the digitization of everything. The new age is a digital age, and remote working is the most obvious thing to implement. To date, 'Cloud-based Computing' has become a buzzword, and it is hastening the use of the remote working module. Companies who had seen this module as just a passing fad previously are now realizing its importance. As work-from-home is becoming a new norm, companies need to be equipped with upgraded gadgets and tools to survive in the future market race. It is likely that companies will choose a hybrid and flexible working policy for employees. The hybrid approach provides employees the autonomy of choosing the work location that increases their efficiency and suits them best. On the flip side, allowing teams to work remotely helps companies increase employee retention. They no longer have to be concerned about the inconvenient, costly, and disruptive consequences of team members leaving for brighter pastures. With the advantages greatly outnumbering the downsides, it's time to think about the future of work and how remote working will fit into it. After all, change has been the constant, and those who accepted it aced the race.
Though the pandemic has not invented remote working, it really accelerated the use of this module. The sudden shift in the working culture toppled the operations of companies and forced them to provide their workers the access to work remotely. Soon, the awareness about remote working widespread throughout the world, and companies adapted to work from home looking at the need of an hour. Once considered a fad, remote working has now become a trend in every sector.
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-Vinayak Ghorpade
Crafting Distinctive Websites for Content Creators
I
n a world where the internet reigns supreme, content creation has gained a strong foothold. For a business to prosper in this hyperspace, it should have a robust online presence. Websites act as a cover of the book that describes the features of the company. Impressive content and a user-friendly interface are certain hallmarks that attract audiences and present the possibility of transforming them into future customers. Web services play a vital role in making websites look attractive, impressive, and interactive. Therefore, a web
development partner is an essential investment so that a business can drive the respective market with excellence. 10up, based in Roseville, California, is one such company, which makes cyberspace better with consultative innovative and engineering services, creative tools, and reliable products that take the hassle out of content creation and management in service of digital experiences that further business and marketing objectives. In the following interview, Jake Goldman, the Founder of
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10UP, whose dedication and contribution to the WordPress community has made him achieve his dreams, shares with us the success story of his company. Enlighten us with the journey of 10up so far. 10up was founded by Jake Goldman in 2011. Jake initially embraced WordPress in his prior role around 2008 and contributed heavily to the WordPress community over the years that followed. In 2011, Jake saw an opportunity to start an agency that could position itself as the leading design and engineering expert specializing in WordPress. Taking a cue from the distributed nature of the WordPress community itself and not wanting to tether himself – or his talent search – to a singular location, 10up was 100% distributed from the start. In the decade since, 10up has grown from 1 employee to over 250 – spanning dozens of states and countries around the globe – and has worked with clients ranging from ESPN and The New York Times to Heap.io and Credit Karma to Microsoft and Salesforce. Kindly talk about the exclusive products or services offered by 10up. We make finely crafted websites and digital tools for clients ranging from Microsoft and Salesforce to ESPN and Politico. We offer a full suite of digital expertise, spanning web strategy, experience design, engineering, audience, and revenue optimization, and more. We also contribute extensively to the open-source projects behind our success, like WordPress, and share our solutions with the community, like DistributorPlugin.com and ElasticPress.io. What is the vision and mission of 10up? We believe building finely crafted digital experiences should transcend singular industries or trends and strive to ensure that our team is ready and able to solve any sort of digital challenge: whether a complicated revenue challenge for a traditional publisher or a novel technical idea from a rapidly growing start-up. What kind of challenges has 10up and its team faced industry-wise? Perhaps unsurprisingly, the technology landscape – within the WordPress community and at large – has changed significantly in our decade-long history. What were once simple websites have grown up into complicated platforms built from multiple technologies?
Building and maintaining the flexibility that these shifts necessitate has required careful effort on our part, though our remote working model has made it considerably easier. How have technological advancements and innovation in the industry impacted/enhanced the business of 10up? A remote company’s success comes down to one thing: communication. Over the last decade, several new tools – Slack, Zoom – have re-invented the way we communicate online. They’re as good, and sometimes better, as traditional face-to-face, in-office communication. What are your strategically driven plans to be implemented to scale the business in the upcoming year? We’re continuing to take advantage of the hiring flexibility that our remote working model empowers, bringing the best talent onto the team no matter where they live. What does the future look like for the company in terms of growth and expansion? We plan to continue growing our team.
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Home = Office
MOST
The increasing importance of remote working culture
#Connected Things to Take Care of While Hiring in a Remote Work Se ng
INNOVATIVE
REMOTE
WORK SOFTWARE SOLUTION PROVIDERS
Kintone Dave Landa | CEO
Empowering Businesses to Improve Remote Teamwork 2021| Vol 07 | ISSUE 01
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