Construction Apps — 10 Ways to Build Your Contracting Business From Your Phone

 

Want to grow your construction business? There’s an app for that. Thanks to modern technology, it’s possible to update blueprints, create and sign contracts, and care for your construction workers from your smartphone. To help take your company to the next level, check out these top construction apps.  

Whether you’re building your business from the ground up or fine-tuning your workflow, one thing’s for sure: You’re just a few taps and swipes away from making your mark in the construction industry. 

 

SMARTBID

Ready to build your company's portfolio and work on some impressive projects? Well, a lot needs to happen before your team steps foot on a construction site. As one of the top bidding apps for general contractors, SmartBid helps streamline the entire preconstruction process. This app offers a secure platform to track your bid status with subcontractors and other companies. Not only does SmartBid help you get the job, but it also keeps your project organized from the very start.

‍Download SmartBid on the App Store and Google Play.

 

PLANGRID

As the old adage goes, Rome wasn't built in a day—and neither was your latest construction project. PlanGrid uses Autodesk BIM (or building information modeling) to monitor your project as it changes. From punch lists, to blueprints, to progress photos,  this app is designed to keep your team in sync throughout the entire construction process. 

Download PlanGrid on the App Store and Google Play.

 

HOURLY

There’s more to running a successful construction company than updating floor plans and calculating roof pitches; it’s important to track and compensate your employees for the time they spend working. Fortunately, Hourly is here to help make time tracking and administering payroll easy. The app uses GPS and geofencing to ensure your employees are at the correct construction site—and only lets them clock in once they’ve arrived. Keep your contractors on schedule by creating custom rules such as enforcing an eight-hour workday, granting a 30-minute lunch break, and setting a mandatory start time. Have a few team members who are burning the midnight oil? Hourly will automatically calculate overtime pay based on your company’s local labor laws, and add it to your employees' timesheets. 

Download Hourly on the App Store and Google Play.

 

GASBUDDY

From driving to the job site each day to schlepping around construction materials, general contractors are always on the go. Since they're often on the road, construction businesses wind up spending a lot of money on gas. That's exactly why every contracting company should download GasBuddy. This platform uses a smartphone's location services to find the closest and most affordable gas station. According to the app, GasBuddy can help you save up to 25 cents per gallon.

Download GasBuddy on the App Store and Google Play.

 

DEWALT MOBILE PRO

How many slate shingles do you need to build a gable and valley roof? Or how many studs for a 3,200 square-foot home? That's where DEWALT Mobile Pro comes in. The tool company has created a construction calculator to determine the materials your general contractors will need for their next project. Simply enter your dimensions and DEWALT Mobile Pro will do the math for you.  

‍Download DEWALT Mobile Pro on the App Store and Google Play.

 

GOCANVAS

With so little time and so many construction projects, the very last thing you need to do is to spend a superfluous amount of time sifting through old paperwork. If you want to be as efficient as possible, download GoCanvas. Instead of turning your filing cabinet upside down, GoCanvas will let you store, organize, and share important data and documents from its mobile app.  

Download GoCanvas on the App Store and Google Play.

 

PROCORE

Consider Procore your one-stop construction management app. From sharing accurate BIM data with your team, to receiving real-time productivity updates, to staying in the loop about potential safety hazards, Procore empowers project managers to stay connected with their mobile devices. You can also use this app to keep tabs on RFIs, inspections, daily reports, and more. Unlike many construction apps, which require an Internet connection, Procore lets construction managers access and save their work in offline mode. In other words, this app is a great match for managers who either travel often or work on a job site with a poor signal. 

Download Procore on the App Store and Google Play. 

 

RED CROSS FIRST AID

Accidents are bound to happen, regardless of your construction team's skillset. Unfortunately, falls and fatalities are more common in smaller businesses. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, nearly half of the deaths that occur on construction sites are from companies with ten or fewer employees. While downloading Red Cross' First Aid app won't guarantee your project will be accident-proof, it will help construction professionals know what to do if an emergency strikes. 

Download Red Cross First Aid on the App Store and Google Play. 

 

DRONEDEPLOY

Thanks to DroneDeploy, your project team can get a lay of the land before arriving at the construction site. Compatible with both iPhones and Androids, this app uses drones to survey a job site on your behalf. Once the drone collects and interprets the data, the app sends over real-time drone maps and 3D models. Since launching in 2013, DroneDeploy has served 5,000 companies nationwide and surveyed 100 million acres of land. Not only can DroneDeploy save time and money, but it can also help you streamline your construction project. 

Download DroneDeploy on the App Store and Google Play.

 

FORMS BY LEGALSHIELD

Want to add a new client to your growing roster? It’s important to agree on all the fine print before you step foot on the job site. That’s where Forms by LegalShield—formerly Shake—comes in. Once you and your client have set the terms for the project, simply enter a few basic facts into one of the app’s legal templates. From there, Forms by LegalShield will whip up a contract (complete with legal jargon, of course) for both parties to sign. While the app does offer legal counsel for an additional fee, you can skip the trip to a fancy law office and make a deal from your iPad. 

Download Forms by LegalShield on the App Store and Google Play. 

 This article was contributed by Kelsey Mulvey and originally posted on Hourly.io

Adopting Blockchain Shouldn’t Be Painful for Your Users

 

According to Deloitte, over 50% of worldwide organizations see blockchain adoption as their strategic priority, with 86% of executives expecting it to go mainstream, and 77% recognize that not adopting blockchain could cause them  to lose their competitive edge. 

However, blockchain integration into an existing infrastructure is not the same as building your product or service using blockchain architecture from the ground up. 

To ensure a successful migration process, a great deal of attention must be paid to the existing customer base, and finding the proper way to facilitate the experience for them as well. 

For instance, companies that are looking to secure their users’ identities are increasingly looking towards adopting blockchain. However, as the technology is still a big unknown for an average consumer, product makers and service providers are seeking out the services of companies that can make the process seamless for their users.

While the average cryptocurrency user may very well be familiar with private key access and signing from their wallets, using these same access points to authorize applications, for example, can be a confusing and uncomfortable experience for non-cryptocurrency users. 

Companies like AIKON have found a way to formulate a smooth migration process onto another platform and provide the ultimate identity security solution, as well as a powerful protocol for easy digital asset access, control and management. 

Therefore, careful consideration of their needs, user habits, familiarity with the architecture (and assessing how much they need to know about the impending adoption of blockchain) needs to recognize ways to facilitate the transition process for them and eventually ease of use down the line. 

Here is how to make it painless for your customers. 

1. Raise Awareness

While company executives and government officials are getting rapidly familiar with the benefits of moving their backend infrastructure to the blockchain, their end-users might not. 

And why should they? It’s not important to consumers to tell their brand how to do things faster and cheaper. They’re not necessarily concerned with transparency, security, and data immutability without knowing how it affects or benefits them.

So the question to answer for the end user is: “What’s in it for me?”. Identify how your customers benefit significantly from blockchain transition and communicate it to them.

For example, a customer might feel safer if they knew that the solution protects their personal data from being unknowingly accessed by unauthorized entities. They might also appreciate knowing that blockchain keeps them in complete and sole control of their assets.

Bear in mind that the technology is still mostly unfamiliar to the broad masses, or it may be reduced to Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in their minds, so stick to the simplest of explanations concerning the why and the how.

For more interested customers with advanced knowledge of the concept, it would be wise to concentrate on addressing specific concerns they might have raised in a clear and transparent way. 

For example, to demonstrate how blockchain-enabled authorization works, you could use illustrative or visual “How-to” guides outlining the flow of the process, rather than the precise technical details.

This will help you prepare your customer base for any changes they will experience first-hand and might contribute to its expansion as well. 

2. Make It User-Friendly

When switching to a new platform of any kind, it must alleviate the overall user experience, especially if it affects the system they come into direct contact with. 

For instance, adopting blockchain for enterprise asset management may not be directly visible to your customers, as they don’t have access to your operations’ back office. But it will probably affect their perception of the service they have gotten from you or the quality of the product made by your company. 

But when it comes to a banking app’s user interface, for example, things change drastically. If it changes, it needs to be for the better. 

Therefore, if you are keen on integrating blockchain technology, make it easy for customers to use it, guide them through the process, and train your support to provide the necessary information in case of issues. 

Companies adopting blockchain have the responsibility to make the concept approachable to their users and remove any concerns that might arise. AIKON’s ORE Enterprise, for instance, is one such identity management solution that found a way to do this quite well — a backend business blockchain integration that happens completely behind the scenes that results in a net neutral change for the end user experience on the front end.

3. Control the Costs

One of the advantages of blockchain is the potential for exerting more control over the way you pay for your operations and business processes. Today, businesses can switch from paying for centralized servers and services like AWS and Google Cloud, to a model that pays for public blockchain transactions.

In this way, instead of paying flat enterprise fees on a subscription model, costs scale along with business volume (and in many cases, depending on the public blockchain, can end up being far cheaper when transactions are batched or conducted off-chain via a second layer).

For businesses worried about the additional steps and possible complexities for their users switching over to blockchain, they can simply opt for solutions like AIKON’s ORE ID, which helps companies facilitate transactions on behalf of their users. At any stage, should users elect to independently control their transactions with their own private key, ORE ID also allows for that flexibility.

4. Communicate Safety

As a relatively new and unknown concept, blockchain technology is to an average person indistinguishable from its products, such as many types of cryptocurrency. That also means that any scandal with Bitcoin, for example, will be automatically associated with blockchain. 

Companies adopting blockchain technology can guarantee the next generation of data security to their customers, but they must also be able to communicate that clearly. 

All companies operating on the blockchain must do what they can to enter the regulated framework — such as it is at this stage — to be able to officially say to their customers that their information and funds are safe with them and that they needn’t have any asset security concerns. 

Not only will that facilitate customer acclimatization to the changes, but it will also draw other stakeholders and end-users to the company. 

Final Thoughts

As the number of industries adopting blockchain rises, so does the number of people being in direct contact with the concept. It’s up to the companies leading the charge to make sure they transition their customer base safely and painlessly to the other side by being transparent about the effects it will have on user experience, data security, and overall product or service quality.

Original Post: http://blog.aikon.com/2020/11/adopting-blockchain-shouldnt-be-painful-for-your-users/

Tokenized securities on blockchain are here. And they’ve been around for a while.

Remember tokenized securities or securitization with tokens on blockchain?

 

With the entire year in crypto defined by a maelstrom of projects embarking on decentralized finance (DeFi) aspects to their products, it can be easy to forget that previous advancements in blockchain-based technologies have continued to make great headway in terms of adoption and application.

 

Security tokens and tokenized securities 

In 2019 especially, with greater regulatory scrutiny on blockchain-based crowdfunding in the shape of initial coin offerings (ICOs), many projects sought to reconcile crypto’s much-maligned aspect of democratic fundraising with increasingly unforgiving regulatory compliance. Hence the proliferation of Security Token Offerings (STOs) that meant to replace ICOs as legitimate, law-abiding instruments to raise funds and issue securities through blockchain-based tokens.

 

It’s important here to distinguish between security tokens and tokenized securities -- often used interchangeably, but hardly the same thing. In the former, blockchain technology is used to create new tokens that is a representation of real-world “securities”, ie. crypto assets that share some qualities as securities in the traditional sense. In the latter, we are talking about existing assets (securities) in the real world, that are expressed digitally… wrapped, if you will, in a token technology.

 

An overlooked breakthrough

Put in another way, security tokens create a token and create securities, but tokenized securities simply digitalize existing securities. That really is something that solves a major problem with traditional securities, which makes it somewhat surprising that it hasn’t been picked up more.

 

Tokenizing securities immediately helps with widening the market and improving their liquidity. In addition, it’s not a new product so it isn’t so much something for regulators to look at, it simply is a new, digital channel for distribution, which actually makes tokenized securities simpler to approve.

 

They’re not just an idea, they’re already here.

Because tokenizing securities are comparatively simple to do, there actually have been quite a number of them entering the market. Last year, we saw traditional funds like 22X Fund put together a tokenized fund (with money raised through an ICO in fact in 2018) to invest in 22 startups. But SPiCE will argue it was even earlier, as the VC fund set up in 2017 and lays claim to being the first tokenized VC fund able to offer immediate liquidity for venture capital -- which otherwise takes years to liquidate!

 

This year, AllianceBlock, which is building the “world’s first globally compliant decentralized capital market” partnered with another blockchain firm AIKON for secure blockchain-based identity management service -- making decentralized finance services accessible to all, and securing that access with the blockchain.

 

The data already shows that the coming years will see securities very soon fully digitized and empowered by blockchain. From owning a small share in your favorite soccer club, to fractional ownership of pizza restaurants in a country halfway around the world from you, blockchain and tokenized securities are spelling out a way for $256 trillion worth of real-world assets, mostly illiquid as physical representations, to go digital.

 

As they say in blockchain, tokenized securities are a matter of when, not if.

 

This article originally appeared on aikon.com

Blockchain mass adoption isn’t a bandwagon, it’s the sailing ship

And here’s why companies are choosing blockchain technology and its various applications.

After the long “blockchain winter”, 2019 finally saw the rise of companies interested in adopting blockchain. According to recruitment portal Hired, global demand for blockchain engineers grew 517% in 2019, four times more than for any other types of engineers. 

Another interesting fact is that 83% of large companies see strong cases for blockchain, as reported on Deloitte's 2019 Global Blockchain Survey. 

The same study shows that these companies plan to invest US$5 million or more in blockchain initiatives in the next 12 months. This is a clear sign that blockchain adoption in corporate companies is becoming mainstream.

These investments are spread across various types of industries. Technology, media and telecom are the top industries, followed by Energy & Resources and Manufacturing.

This is definitely the first and most important step for blockchain mass adoption. But why has blockchain become an almost unanimous choice across various industries and different sectors? 

There has been a shift in tech belief: many industry leaders, even those wary of technological innovations have now a shared belief that blockchain is a straightforward and secure solution —and that it can serve as a pragmatic solution to business problems and use cases across different industry sectors.

In reality, blockchain is not a “one-size fits all” solution. Industries differ in any number of ways, the difference for a successful transition to blockchain, is how the technology can advance companies’ respective strategic priorities.

Blockchain can work beyond its original purpose - most of us first heard about it through cryptocurrencies - and now, we are discovering more and more different applications of the technology. 

Other well known blockchain applications are data validation, ID protection, payments, supply chain management, land registry and much more. 

A Blockchain use case in action

One of the most important of blockchain applications, and yet often overlooked, is user onboarding and validation. While there are several blockchain solutions for this, many like IBM and Hyperledger are geared for enterprise and multinationals, thereby making it cost prohibitive to startups. Others are coming up too, like Aikon’s flagship product ORE ID, which promotes a simple and efficient user onboarding and blockchain identity management service. ORE ID handles account creation, multisig accounts, password resets, signing transactions and resource management – and it’s offered through a REST API and Javascript libraries that make it easy enough for any developer to use.

The number of partners onboarding like Algorand and the WAX (Worldwide Asset eXchange) blockchain suggests that seamless onboarding that allows a truly friction-free experience that the user may not even need to know or understand that they are on the blockchain -- is the way to go. 

DApps and enterprise adoption of blockchain solutions will find such user-friendly solutions attractive because not everyone is going to be able to, nor even want to, manage their RAM, gas or respective account resources that are necessary to interact with the blockchain.

This is a win-win solution for companies and developers. Companies like Aikon will do all the heavy lifting on businesses that don’t want to create a special role just to manage the backend chain infrastructure for their business just to use the blockchain.

And users won’t even know they’re on the blockchain. Early adopters? That ship’s sailed.

This article originally appeared on aikon.com.