Yellowseed Web Design Services

It’s small but it’s beautiful. Thanks to Natalka for making this video.

In Canada sunny Sundays are when we head out for some climbing or lake swimming. Here in South India, sunny Sundays are about eating Birhyani and hiding in the shade. The 35 C+ afternoon heat is an energy drain. To stay cool on this blistering Sunday, we’ve taken our positions in front of our respective computers - Rik squashing bugs, Natalka getting Sugared and myself - bouncing between booking a room in Bangkok and learning more about the Golden Temple. The past three weeks have been rich. We’ve set up our office, hired 2 new programmers, taken 2 road-trips and joined in the full-moon walk (14km) around the mountain.

Initially, I set out to create a guide that other small businesses could follow to set up an offshore office. Instead I’ve discovered that establishing an office in India is not a linear process. We’ve faced various obstacles over the past few 3 weeks from power-outs, to hook-up delays, to crappy equipment and bowel troubles

Perhaps with some time and distance a step-by-step procedure may become more apparent. Up to now - our saving grace has been our relationship with Bala and his family. They have graciously welcomed us into their home and taken us under their wing. As I see it, if you’re thinking of setting up an office in India, the key is not “what” you do but “who” you know and their personal motivation to build a successful office and career.

Preserved Seed

A seed found in Jerusalem has sprouted and grown into a 3-foot tall Jerusalem palm. What’s so special about that? Carbon dating has found that the seed is 2000 years old, which makes it the oldest seed ever to germinate. Previously, a lotus seed from China held the title, at a measly 1300 years old, but grew with serious genetic abnormalities.

The oldest seed to ever germinate

It was one of four seeds of its kind found at the Masada fortress at the edge of the dead sea in Israel, and the only one to germinate.
It is nicknamed Methuselah after the oldest man in the bible, and is rumored to be a contemporary of Jesus. The extreme high temperatures and dryness of the region are the main factors contributing to it’s uniquely resilient preservation.

Scientists are hoping it’s a female, since the female of the variety are the ones to bear fruit. If it does provide us with dates, there is a possibility that it can be used for its medicinal properties. Scientists have already noticed that this palm is significantly different from the date palms of today, which hail from Israel; The dates of antiquity were thought to be good for fighting diseases like tuberculosis as well as for treating illnesses such as cancer.

Source: National Geographic

The Basics

• Wash your hands first, you will only be using your right one (your left is for your bum)
• Next, clean your leaf using a little bit of water (Large green leaves are used instead of plates)
• Having a handkerchief is handy - in case you need to blow your nose, or dry your washed hand

Eating Out

Do not expect ‘friendly’ service. The servers are there to do just that, unless you go to a restaurant that caters to tourists/westerners - where you can expect to be paying at least 3 times the price of regular restaurants.
Usually you don’t have too much selection, so just order the ‘meal’ - whatever it happens to be. In the morning it’s usually idly (rice patties) with different sauces, including sambar (a spicy tomatoey-onion broth), or curd (buttermilk/yoghurt - good for upset tummies). If you see these little doughnuts kickin’ around definitely try them (I think they’re called vadai).
Whenever possible order masala dosas. Dosas are the rice flour equivalent of a crepe (or of a really flat omelette, depending on the chef). Masala means mix, and refers to the stuffing inside which is usually some potatoey goodness. Always yummy!

*Before going to India I thought that I knew what Indian food was like because I ate at Indian restaurants in Canada quite often. What I was actually eating in the restaurants was Punjabi food. I was really looking forward to having palak panner (my favourite combo of spinach cooked with cheese cubes), but have not found it anywhere the last few weeks. It was a good reminder to leave my expectations at home, and to keep an open mind and palette.

Eating In People’s Homes

If you are blessed to be invited to someones home to eat - do not refuse. It will almost always be better than food served at a restaurant.
Remember that your eating strategy will not be the same as when you’re home, where you have some control.
My old pattern was to save the best thing on my plate till last. This is not a good strategy in this case. Every time you finish anything on your plate it will be replenished, even when you have not run out you will be served more. Protesting is useless. So if you like something - eat it up right away. You may be lucky enough to have 5 more servings!
The real key is - Eat Slowly. Gage how fast those are eating around you. If you finish first you will be served more - whether you want more or not. And, if you’re like me you hate leaving food on your plate.
So far - I think I’ve managed to pick up the Tamil word for ‘enough’ but I’m not sure - try ’podo-oom‘ with an inflection at the end. It may work. Good luck (you’ll need it)!. So far I have eaten the last six meals at home with an Indian family and I still find that I eat more than I should. It’s good food, and I know that it is a blessing in a place where others do not have enough.

Eating At A Wedding

My advice: Eat fast or Don’t eat (I may have gotten my case of diarrhea from wedding food - but can’t say for sure)

Within 3 days of being in India I was attending an Indian wedding reception (Did I mention that the people are amazing?! They are.)
Having to feed a thousand people is no small feat. Needless to say, you’re herded into the eating area, and are seated on benches at long tables, and the servers come around (only once) until you have about a dozen different food items on your leaf. Eat fast (watch others in your row) because they’ll be out of there as soon as they can be, and you will be shuffled along whether you’ve finished or not. I would say that eating dessert first is a good idea!

Drinking

If you’re having a hard time with your stomach, skip mango drinks. They produce heat, instead of cooling you down - try buttermilk instead.

You’ll find coffee just about everywhere, and I suspect much of the coffee is instant. You can’t really tell after they add heaps of steamed milk and sugar.
It will arrive piping hot and served in two pieces; a metal cup full to the rim sitting in a bowl/saucer below which contains the rest of your coffee. Typically you pour the coffee back and forth from cup to bowl to cool the liquid down, and then you drink. It’s yummy but doesn’t give you the same kick-start as coffee back home, so it may be a good place to drop your caffeine fix.

Many places have filtered water, but it’s better to bring along a UV water sterilizer (steripen). It decreases your chance of getting sick and cuts down on the waste of plastic bottles (which are not recycled).

I haven’t seen too many lassis (yoghurt drinks) - maybe they’re more common in the north?

I’ve really only been here for two weeks and am still just learning about this culture.  I’m here for 3 more, and so welcome any tips you want to share!

Namasté

Namaste, greetings from India!  This is the first installment in a series of blogs that follows the Yellowseed team as we set up a web-development office in South India. Over the next four weeks I’ll share info about traveling in India, hiring Indian programmers, setting up a office and nurturing an effective and happy team. More has happened here in the last three days than a month in our home-town of Nelson, BC. While I have a plan for this series - being in India has taught me that plans (like traffic rules) are arbitrary. Sometimes it’s best to go with the flow!

Personal Connections

We have been working remotely with Bala, our web programmer in India, for several months. All has been going well; so why the heck did Rik, Natalka and myself travel to the other side of the world to set up an office? I asked Rik this question over chapatis and sambar and this is what he said:

Making strong personal connections sometimes requires meeting in person. I want our team to feel like a team.  I want each person to feel strongly connected to each other even across so many times zones, and sometimes wildly different cultures. I also want the work that we do here in India to come from a place that resonates with our company and from a team that shares our values. The city of Thiruvannamalai is a holy place in South India, a home of many yogis and siddhars, and yet it is near Bangalore, the IT hub of Asia, creating a great synergy of spirit and technology.

To this Natalka added,"in an age where so much business is done through the internet - there’s a loss of personal connection. You can lose sight of why you’re doing something if money is your only goal. Our vision involves more then monetary goals, we want to help people. We have to know our own team on a personal level if we are going to work at our best helping others. We want to do business with our hearts - this involves making genuine connections with our employees, co-workers and clients.”

Group bonding at the beach

In a few hours we’re heading to Pondicherry, a French colonial town on the Bay of Bengal. The loose plan is to spend some downtime with Bala - to get to know each other and this area a little better. In the next installment I’ll share some vital travel tips that have (thus far) kept us sane and healthy. If you’re thinking about growing your small business through offshoring - stay tuned over the next 4 weeks for some tidbits on how to set up a sweet work space, hire programmers and create a solid team.

Inspired by the famous quote from Gandhi about being the change you want to see in the world, we've launched the BeChange Package. This is a bundle of services designed for individuals and small businesses creating positive change. Our current focus is to support coaches and teachers in the health and wellness industry but we'll soon be expanding it to include other social entrepreneurs. The BeChange services include managed marketing and logistics backed by an integrated website and CRM system.

Administration

Business Management

Yellowseed uses a business management system called SugarCRM. Designed to manage your contacts, registrations, courses, and documents, Sugar can also organize and track every phone call, support issue, and task. Since SugarCRM is web-based, your data is stored on a central secure server and can be accessed by assigned users, at the same time, from any location in the world. This means you will always have instant access to the latest course registrations, payments, contact details, phone calls and more.

Website Management

Yellowseed manages your website using a content management system (CMS) called ExpressionEngine. This CMS integrates with SugarCRM to display all your courses and workshops to website visitors while providing a seamless method for online registration and payment. ExpressionEngine also allows you to easily add or update any content on your website and comes with a blog, photo gallery, discussion forum, shopping cart and more.

Reception

Yellowseed uses Voice-Over-IP (VOIP) technology to make or take calls on your behalf. When you need us to answer your phone, simply forward your incoming line to our VOIP number. If you want to make the process even more seamless, we can set up the VOIP number as your primary contact number to be shared between you and our admin staff. The phone number can be forwarded to us at any time, wherever you are in the world.

Payment Processing

Based on 4 years of experience in this sector, Yellowseed recommends PayPal for payment processing. PayPal is a secure, affordable and widely embraced method for online payments. Yellowseed can integrate PayPal into your website payment process for fast and easy payments.

Logistics - Event Management

Dedicated Staff

Yellowseed provides dedicated logistics staff to organize and manage your workshops, courses, or retreats. Trained at one of Canada’s largest and most successful yoga teacher training organization, our staff know how to organize and market courses so that they run effectively and smoothly.

Marketing

Event Marketing

Yellowseed offers comprehensive marketing services for promoting your retreats, courses and workshops. Marketing may include postering, newspaper advertising, online advertising, PR, word-of-mouth and referral campaigns.

Brand and Website Marketing

Yellowseed offers extensive brand and web marketing services. We offer search-engine optimization, Newsletter management, podcasting, blogging, newsletters and Web PR services.

How we’re different:

There are a number of reasons why we can offer such an affordable service:

1. We use web-based open-source technology, like SugarCRM, ExpressionEngine, CodeIgniter, PHP and MySQL.
2. We use VOIP technology (Internet telephony) which allows us to make and receive calls at a low cost from any location in the world. This helps us reduce the overhead of central offices and expensive communications infrastructure.
3. We share development costs and management staff between many clients and we maximize the cost/benefit ratio by working with clients in a similar field. This allows us to deliver a highly personalized service at a low cost.
4. We have 4 years of experience working with one of Canada’s largest and most successful yoga teacher training organizations.

Nelson radio station CJLY, 93.5FM in Nelson BC launched a new website today. The new site a sweeping upgrade for the station with sections for each show, a member forum, downloaded files, news, comments and more. In addition to creating the site, Yellowseed created a podcasting system for the station that currently delivers weekly shows through iTunes to the world.

We're pleased to introduce Yellowseed's lead programmer (and newest staff member) Balakrishnan Somasundaram.

Bala is an experienced web developer with extensive programming skills. He is passionate about creating elegant and useful web 2.0 sites that unite and engage humans in their digital experience. Bala studied engineering and received his B.Tech from Madras University in Chennai.

Bala’s objectives (as written on his resume) are: to obtain a challenging career in web 2.0; become associated with a progressive organization with committed & dedicated people - which will help me to explore myself fully; willing to work as a key player in a challenging & creative environment.

Looks like we both scored. Welcome aboard Bala - it’s shaping up to be an adventurous ride!

Stay tuned as we will be traveling to India in June to meet Bala and set-up our development office.

Simple question: if you had 2-hours a day to devote to no-cost, off-blog (even off-line) marketing for your blog, what would you do� The author posed this question to a collection of some of the world's top bloggers and social network marketers and here's what they revealed. Click here for the article.

Centennial Canoe Outfitters Inc. take viewers on a scenic ride down the wild rivers of Colorado in a new video released today on You Tube.

Marty Generaux and Julia Gumper, owners, shot the video over a whole summer and sent it to Yellowseed for compilation and upload.  The canoeing video will also be displayed at http://www.centennialcanoe.com.

Proposed model for the future of e-commerce exploits a novel peer-to-peer video sharing application

Computer scientists are using a novel peer-to-peer video sharing application to explore a next-generation model for safe and legal electronic commerce that uses Internet bandwidth as a global currency. The application (available for free download) is an enhanced version of a program called Tribler. Click here to read more...

We launched NCES.ca today, a website for a local non-profit group (NCES = Nelson Citizen Empowerment Society).

It’s cool to be able to offer functional donations to groups such as NCES. We wove community building features into the NCES site including: mailing list sign-up, events calendar; issues bulletin and a blog. Communication is the heart of groups such as this, and so we included the ability to post content and add comments directly to the website.

Building an interactive website is but one ingredient in a social networking recipe. The true flavour comes from the voices of its members. The saying “if you build it, they will come” does not hold true for the Internet. A vibrant, active site requires the regular human touch - the dialogue between members.

We wish NCES all the best - and hope that this site opens the doors for deeper discussion.

Facebook has just released an API that gives company the ability to develop software (called "Widgets") that can be used within Facebook - think of Facebook like an operating system, say Windows, and widgets like software that runs on the OS, say Adobe Photoshop.

Facebook’s timing is perfect. They just released an API that gives third party developers deep access to Facebook functionality and it’s 20 million users. Not only can these third party startups get a widget placed on people’s Facebook profiles, but they can also get viral distribution through users’ news feeds and access core Facebook features. Using the tools that Facebook made available, developers could build new versions of some of Facebook’s own applications, like Facebook Photos. Users can then remove those default applications and add the new ones. Like Microsoft with Windows, Facebook is now competing with application developers on its own platform.

What makes this interesting is that not only is Facebook insanely popular and growing by 100,000 users a day, it provides an almost complete platform for relating to other people. Imagine, for example, a future where you can not only check out what music your friends are listening to, but you can instantly purchase the song from iTunes and give your friend a commission for the recommendation. 

DoubleClick, an online advertising company founded in 1996, provides display ads on Web sites like MySpace, The Wall Street Journal and America Online as well as software to help those sites maximize ad revenue. The company also helps ad buyers — advertisers and ad agencies — manage and measure the effectiveness of their rich media, search and other online ads.

Google reached an agreement today to acquire DoubleClick, from two private equity firms for $3.1 billion in cash, the companies announced, an amount that was almost double the $1.65 billion in stock that Google paid for YouTube late last year. Click here for the full story.

Here's a good glossary of SEO terms used by search engine marketing professionals.

Social Media Optimization (SMO), a new term recently coined by Rohit Bhargava, has since been taking on life of its own. In his introduction to SMO, Rohit draws similar comparisons to SEO...

… SMO tactics can drive huge amounts of people to a website and can also determine whether a startup, website or idea will make it or not. It involves driving traffic to a website through new channels because search engines aren’t the only sites that drive big traffic anymore. While it’s not taking over SEO yet, it has the potential to someday soon.

Click here for the full article

The choice quotes:

Google controls more network fiber than any other organization. This is not to say that Google OWNS all that fiber, just that they control it through agreements with network operators.

Why? One thought is that it kept down the price since people didn’t really know it was Google snatching up this stuff (they’ve done it under a number of different corporate names). But if price was the issue, then why hasn’t Google just bought the companies that own the fiber? It made no sense until I scratched my head and thought a bit further, at which point it became obvious that Google wants to—in its own way—control the Internet. In fact, they probably control it already and we just haven’t noticed.

Google intends to take over most of the functions of existing fixed networks in our lives, notably telephone and cable television.

The Internet as we know it is a shell game, with ISPs building their profits primarily on how many users they can have practically share the same Internet connection. Based on the idea that most users aren’t on the net at the same time and even when they are online they are mainly between keystrokes and doing little or nothing when viewed on a per-millisecond basis, ISPs typically leverage the Internet bandwidth they have purchased by a factor of at least 20X and sometimes as much as 100X, which means that DSL line or cable modem that you think is delivering multi-megabits per second is really only guaranteeing you as much bandwidth as you could get with most dial-up accounts.

It is becoming very obvious what will happen over the next two to three years. More and more of us will be downloading movies and television shows over the net and with that our usage patterns will change. Instead of using 1-3 gigabytes per month, as most broadband Internet users have in recent years, we’ll go to 1-3 gigabytes per DAY—a 30X increase that will place a huge backbone burden on ISPs. Those ISPs will be faced with the option of increasing their backbone connections by 30X, which would kill all profits, OR they could accept a peering arrangement with the local Google data center.

Seeing Google as their only alternative to bankruptcy, the ISPs will all sign on, and in doing so will transfer most of their subscriber value to Google, which will act as a huge proxy server for the Internet. We won’t know if we’re accessing the Internet or Google and for all practical purposes it won’t matter. Google will become our phone company, our cable company, our stereo system and our digital video recorder. Soon we won’t be able to live without Google, which will have marginalized the ISPs and assumed most of the market capitalization of all the service providers it has undermined—about $1 trillion in all—which places today’s $500 Google share price about eight times too low.

Here’s the full story

RSS is a funny old thing - once it takes hold in a person's daily routine it becomes as essential as checking ones email or reading the morning newspaper - but as far as mainstream usage goes, it's a long way from attaining widespread approval.

The technology behind RSS is not the issue - it’s just the underlying transport, like the ink and paper of traditional media. If RSS is to break into the mainstream, it’s the means of delivery that will make it or break it. Here’s the rest of the article on RSS feed readers.

There won't be much mistletoing or hearts a-glowing among e-commerce sites if they aren't ready for what's supposed to be their most wonderful time of the year.

Most retailers generate 20-40 percent of their annual eCommerce revenues and profits during the holiday season, according to Web research firm CoreMetrics. And contrary to popular belief, the Monday after Thanksgiving isn’t the biggest holiday sales day of the year.

Sure, that Monday, often dubbed ”Cyber Monday,” will see the highest traffic this season. But CoreMetrics predicts that sales on the following Monday, December 4th, will be 19 percent higher than “Cyber Monday.”

So you weren't born on MySpace and you didn't cut your teeth chatting on MSN Messenger. So what do you do when some kid throws an STFU or ROTFL at you? A good place to start is with a translation from the Acronym Finder, a searchable database of tens of thousands of acronyms - an essential tool for translating chat into english.