Is anyone interested in working towards putting this into production post making suitable changes?

[saurabh bansal]

We are alumunus of Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur working towards making an affordable Point of Sales systems for retail stores in India. CoinBoxPOS is a suitable option. Will any of the existing contributors be interested in collaborating for the same?

This a totally new area we are working on and we need your inputs/suggestions/ideas to make this work. 

[Jad Kik]

Hello,

Your project seems interesting. How do you plan to go about it? Do you want to use Coinbox POS and make contributions to it or do you want to develop your own separate product based on Coinbox?

I didn't discuss this with the other collaborators (Ben and Miguel) but I think they'd also like your idea since this is what Coinbox POS aims for.

[Jonathan Aquilina]

I too am aiming to do the se thing but with some interesting twists. I am curious about the state of coin box feature wise is it ready for production use

Sent from my iPhone

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[saurabh bansal]

Hi Jad, 

Thanks for the revert. We are planning to use Coinbox POS core and make India specific changes to it. We have been actively involved in market surveys to gain some insights into business requirements. We will also be working toward translating the software to Hindi and major regional languages to attract a wider user base.

Let us decide on a time when we can have all interested people actively participating in the thread or a hangout call if possible. 

Also there are issues with installation on a 64-bit windows based system, the one click installer does not fix all dependencies and compiling from source isn't helpful either. I am facing problems similar to what others had faced earlier like front end not working post clock-in and due to lack of documentation it is really difficult to fix the issues. Let us work toward getting the software into a final shape. We are already in talks with numerous business owners who would like to give the POS a shot.  

[saurabh bansal]

Jonathan, I have gone through most of your posts in this group and I think we are aligned on a few ideas like having a cloud based version of the POS software but I think it is wise to NOT use the python core base for the cloud version as that would lead to a substandard final product. More importantly unifying the frontend has its own problems because of the different ways each environment works. I have been strictly advised against it. 

So we are planning to roll out a standalone software first and work on a cloud based solution in the background, to atleast have a customer base around the product. The cloud based version has to be built using HTML5, CSS and Javascript for better UI and increased functionality, another alternate is to use SaaS with a python based backend which uses Coinbox POS's python code base but again the web front end has to be on HTML5 for cross platform integration. It can also be used to create a chrome app.

Share your thoughts on the same.

[Jonathan Aquilina]

Take a look at the django frame work it's a python framework and won't involve massive rewrites 

Sent from my iPhone

[saurabh bansal]

I dont have any experience with django but this looks promising. I think we should more this conversation to a seperate thread and concentrate on the standalone software in this one to avoid any unnecessary clutter. 

[Jonathan Aquilina]

Ok. 

Sent from my iPhone

[Jad Kik]

It might be hard to find a time that will suit all of us, since we're all in different timezones. I'm in UTC +2 and Ben and Miguel are in +7 or +8 I think. Anyway if we want to agree on a time, let us not do it on this group since it's of no value to anybody else.

Regarding your response to Jonathan, I believe a cloud-based solution might not be appropriate for a low cost solution, since you will de facto need an internet connection. Before we started this project we had thought of a web based solution (even if the server could be local) and we had decided not to because it would limit how much we can interact with hardware (e.g. printers, led customer display, cash drawer). Some of these are not really big inconveniences and an HTML/JS frontend didn't offer much more benefits in our use case.

Regarding the installation issue, I managed to install it on a 64-bit machine. I'll try again now and try to see what the issue could be. If you can gather some more information, start a new thread for that. Also for the other bug. I'm sorry for the lack of documentation, we'll try to remedy the issue.

[Benjamin Burt]

Hey everyone! Looks like you all are having fun. Sorry I did not get back to you all earlier.

>>Will any of the existing contributors be interested in collaborating for the same?

Could I get some clarity on this statement? Are you talking about "Point of Sales systems for retail stores in India." or "working towards making an affordable Point of Sales systems" ?

>>We have been actively involved in market surveys to gain some insights into business requirements.

What type of market surveys?

>>This a totally new area we are working on and we need your inputs/suggestions/ideas to make this work. 

I am willing to work with you guys, as long as we can settle on a common goal. From what I have read so far it does sound like our goals are not far from each other.

>>We are planning to use Coinbox POS core and make India specific changes to it.

Just wondering if there is an example of something that would need to be "India specific". I am under the impression that a point of sale is a point of sale. The only things that would make them different would be the currency used...

>>So we are planning to roll out a standalone software first and work on a cloud based solution in the background, to atleast have a customer base around the product.

Which is a good plan. The one thing I can say from a business manager perspective is that standalone is more important to a single small business. Cloud becomes more important once you have more than one business to over see. I will not go into to much discussion about this at this time. :)

>>Let us decide on a time when we can have all interested people actively participating in the thread or a hangout call if possible.

That would be a good idea, if we can get everyone together. Video/voice conversation is a faster way to help each other understand our ideas. The only thing I do not like about video hangouts, is that you do not get written documentation. 

>>I think we should more this conversation to a seperate thread and concentrate on the standalone software in this one to avoid any unnecessary clutter. 

Yes, we can do that. I would ask for your reply to this email to stay in this thread.

I do have a question, about "We are alumunus of Indian Institute of Technology". What programming languages do you guys(or girls) use or like to use? I am assuming there is more then just you?

Final note...It is nice to hear from you, I am looking forward to sharing idea and hopefully working together. 

-Ben

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-Ben

[Jonathan Aquilina]

I would really like to spear head the cloud development side of things on this project. I am looking at eventually setting up my own cloud infrastructure that this could run off of.

I think though working with django we can easily get a web based version up and running.

Jonathan Aquilina

[saurabh bansal]

Yes. That would be excellent. When do you tentatively plan to start working on this? Also, can you please talk about the web based version on a seperate thread to keep everthing well documented. 

[saurabh bansal]

Hey Ben, 

Appreciate the detailed response. 

On Friday, February 13, 2015 at 7:54:03 PM UTC+5:30, bburt85 wrote:

Hey everyone! Looks like you all are having fun. Sorry I did not get back to you all earlier.

>>Will any of the existing contributors be interested in collaborating for the same?

Could I get some clarity on this statement? Are you talking about "Point of Sales systems for retail stores in India." or "working towards making an affordable Point of Sales systems" ?

We are working on developing point of sales software for retail stores in India. Though we also plan to provide an option of a bundeled hardware. 

>>We have been actively involved in market surveys to gain some insights into business requirements.

What type of market surveys?

We have been visiting local reatil stores on a weekly basis to find their exact requirements, openness to pay and willingness to shift to a new POS solution. We have also considered internet availability at the store in the surveys. 

>>This a totally new area we are working on and we need your inputs/suggestions/ideas to make this work. 

I am willing to work with you guys, as long as we can settle on a common goal. From what I have read so far it does sound like our goals are not far from each other.

Let us discuss more on this over a hangout.  

>>We are planning to use Coinbox POS core and make India specific changes to it.

Just wondering if there is an example of something that would need to be "India specific". I am under the impression that a point of sale is a point of sale. The only things that would make them different would be the currency used...

I agree to your point but there are different ways people utilize POS softwares. I can only comment more on this though when I get a chance to look at the features covered in CoinBox, which currently I am not able to install on my local machine. 

 

>>So we are planning to roll out a standalone software first and work on a cloud based solution in the background, to atleast have a customer base around the product.

Which is a good plan. The one thing I can say from a business manager perspective is that standalone is more important to a single small business. Cloud becomes more important once you have more than one business to over see. I will not go into to much discussion about this at this time. :)

I have mixed views about this.

For single store outlets, a cloud based version does not necessarily provide additional functionality but it is 'trendy' to use the cloud, that is the sentiment here. Also it is more convinient to set up a cloud based version and the updates are also hassle free.  

Anyway, let us not go into the detail at this time :D

>>Let us decide on a time when we can have all interested people actively participating in the thread or a hangout call if possible.

That would be a good idea, if we can get everyone together. Video/voice conversation is a faster way to help each other understand our ideas. The only thing I do not like about video hangouts, is that you do not get written documentation. 

>>I think we should more this conversation to a seperate thread and concentrate on the standalone software in this one to avoid any unnecessary clutter. 

Yes, we can do that. I would ask for your reply to this email to stay in this thread.

I do have a question, about "We are alumunus of Indian Institute of Technology". What programming languages do you guys(or girls) use or like to use? I am assuming there is more then just you?

There is one more friend involved in the project. He is an experienced python developer and has expertercise in hardware level programming. We have used Java/c++/python for programming, though recently we have mostly been working on Python.

 

Final note...It is nice to hear from you, I am looking forward to sharing idea and hopefully working together. 

I share the same feeling. Looking forward to hear more from you.  

[saurabh bansal]

http://doodle.com/uvfyhu7gfnzkvhrp

@Ben/Jad/ Jonathan / other interested people. Kindly fill this form so that we can arrive at a common time for a hangout call/text (whichever meets a concensus) 

[saurabh bansal]

Seems like we have a concensus for Friday, 20th Feb. Ben/Jad I have sent you event invites, feel free to invite more members. 

If anyone else is interested in attending the conversation reply on this thread and ill send you the invite.