At vteams, we’re all about innovation.
Traditionally, offshore companies are consumed with turning a profit; cheap work for cheap product. Our international team, however, is comprised of industry professionals with goals that reach far and beyond the kind of projects we complete at a daily rate.
As you know, the majority of our developers are located in Lahore, Pakistan; here, we’re in the process of rolling out one of the most exciting advances the city has ever seen: its first robotics firm.
We see the potential. Robotics sales have been steadily increasing since the dawn of the industry’s commercialization, hitting a peak in 2013 when the largest number of robots to date were sold. While China remains the country with the largest level of robot production, the automotive industry’s growing interest in the technology has sales breaking records worldwide. The following year, demand hit a high point in North America with orders culminating to the tune of $1.2 billion.
This year, CES (Consumer Electronics Show) 2015 unveiled several exciting new robotics projects, yet another indication that the trend is strong. These initiatives were released to the public eye for the first time, and as Engadget writer Christopher Trout reports,
“You could hardly turn your head without smacking into a 4K display, but finding a robot companion takes a bit of legwork.”
Though this year’s most stunning advances in unmanned technology were few and far between, they were undoubtedly the stars of the show; from “employees of the future” to customer service bots capable of fulfilling a patron’s every need, the field of robotics is changing the world as we know it.
Enter vteams: for the past few years our own robotics division has been focused on the development of prototypes that would contribute to the world.
As Jeff Burnstein, President of the Robotic Industries Association shares,
“Innovative companies focused on robotics, as well as cutting-edge research from universities all over the world, will lead to new products that expand the opportunities for people and robots to interact on a daily basis at work, home, and in all aspects of our daily lives.”
In our eyes, the keywords here are “daily lives.” Thus, our priority lies in the massive possibility that exists in robots serving out humanistic, day-to-day functions. One such project? An autonomous litter removal agent.
How often do you take what you hope to be a pleasant stroll in the park, only to place one unfortunate step in the wrong spot, courtesy of the canine variety? The same goes for beaches, public streets and playgrounds. With this technology, this nuisance would be eradicated.
As reported by World Robotics, “average robot technology investments in the automotive sector increased by 22% p.a. globally from 2010 – 2013.” Industry professionals have calculated such a massive leap in the sales of household robots by 2016 that vteams has maximized focus in this vertical; the coming year will be our biggest yet, with development occurring daily in countries spanning the globe.
Why these projects in particular? Both their everyday, life-altering application and their immense potential.
As the World Robotics Organization states, “One significant driver is the new generation of lightweight robots that enable man and machine to work closely together – with no safety guard between.”
While these are just small examples of the kind of initiatives we’ve got under wraps, they are fantastic representations of the caliber of developer you’re hiring: goal-oriented, innovative and focused on the future.
Below is a list of the technologies we work in.
PHP
Ruby on Rails
When it comes to the rails framework, we not only absolutely adore ROR, we put our money where our mouth is.
If you spend some time on our site, you’ll be pleasantly surprised that we’re not just a programming services company. In reality, we’re a product development company who happens to sell programming services.
For our internal and external products, we have repeatedly chosen the ROR framework over other technologies and learned a lot from that experience.
In 2007, when we started developing our internal CRM, we chose ROR over any other framework. We ended up with Atlantis, our inhouse CRM solution.
In 2009, we started developing a landing page solution. We developed the whole solution in ROR and brought it to market in January 2012. It’s called Hyperconversion. In fact, if you’re ever in the market for software that creates and hosts landing pages, you should check it out.
In 2012, when we started working on our second commercial product called OSB (Open Source Billing) we–again–selected the Rails framework. As you read this, our open source product is in development, and we’re planning on releasing it to the general public in June 2013 as the ultimate replacement to Freshbooks and Quickbooks online.
By now, you probably realize that when it comes to Ruby on Rails, we not only talk the talk–we walk the walk.
Python Django
Python is the second most beautiful programming language that was ever invented. And Django is the most prevalent framework for Python. It may not be as beautiful as Python, but it’s powerful, and we have some damn good engineers who know it inside-out.
Python is our all-in-one toolkit for solving unusual problems in software engineering. We use it as a glue code and also as the main toolkit.
We don’t just use python for web development. We use it as the main scripting language in almost all of our embedded projects and hardware development projects.
.NET Development (Including Dot Net Nuke)
The .NET framework and our teams go way back. In fact, we developed our first ASP solution (the precursor to .NET) in 1997 for a famous lottery system. We developed the ASP code when the official spec for ASP was not even published by Microsoft.
Hardware Development
This may come as a surprise to you, but you can use a vteam to develop hardware. This includes electronics and mechanical design.
As you know by now, we are our own customer. And here is a list of products we’ve developed for ourselves:
An iPad controlled snowblower: This machine was conceived by me [Mark Mian], and I used vteams engineers to help me design and build it. The iPad and Android code for this machine was written by vteams engineers.
An iPad controlled lawn mower robot: This is our second machine which is going to be released in Spring of 2013. The hardware has been developed already, and the machine has been tested. Currently, we’re working on the software to see if we can make this machine autonomous
A 3D printer: Our mechanical design team is working on developing a 3D printer kit for the third-world market. You will be able to find out more about this later this year.