Monotony of daily work, mundane professional and organizational lifestyle and clockwork routine does take a toll on the passions, enthusiasm and creativity of employees working in any company. This exhaustion is to such an extent that weekends seem to be like a farfetched oasis that can only be reached after crossing a vast arid stretch of a region called ‘work’. The journey to this region is undertaken by the fatigued traveler (who rejuvenates only to droop again as the week starts) on the most dreaded day of the week, ‘The Melancholic Monday’, when the distressing journey begins.

The responses to the beginning of a week, i.e Monday are universal and identical irrespective of culture, creed or race. These include sullen, discouraged and grumpy behavior and in extreme cases may also lead to diurnal depression commonly known as ‘Monday Blues’. To ward off this gloomy strain and influence that Monday drags along with it, we have come up with a cure to combat the Monday Blue Syndrome. This effective cure is the after work ‘Monday Movie’. Note that the cure works best when accompanied by pizzas, burgers, popcorns and delicacies of other kinds. Yes, it is a great way to terminate the germs of stress and vapidity which gradually kill the motivation, zest and energy in an individual during the course of the week. Therefore, at our company, CueBlocks, we decided to give this innovative cure a chance and to our delight, it has not only worked exceedingly well but also made all of us look forward to Mondays, which have now ceased to be mundane and monstrous.

The movie is screened at 5:30 pm, half an hour before the office gets over, and goes on till 7:30 or 8:00 and is selected unanimously. One can imagine the success of this small indulgence, when it can make all of us stay longer happily at the office, without being irate!

Till now three comedy movies have been screened Khosla ka Ghosla, Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro and Bheja Fry, and the result, well, the dispirited symptoms have now given way to increased laughter, interactions, discussions (about subjects apart from the movies also) and a general sense of commonality. We also watched, ‘The Secret’ a highly inspiring film that motivates to lead life in a bigger, better and a more beautiful way. The movie really touched the chords of everyone’s heart and encouraged us to realize our dreams and achieve our goals. The movie turned out to be a life lesson rather than just an inspiration. It helped us to actually incorporate ‘The Secret’ of living life to the fullest into our attitude.

It is very significant that a workplace gives you more than just work. It is important that it teaches, influences and shapes your way of life. You know that a company is evolving when its employees also share moments apart from work!

Hence, the cure does work and eventually we aim at completely eradicating the disease of melancholy Monday and maintain an active consistency through out the week. As our credo is ‘All can only end well if it begins well’.

Amit Singhal recently shared (or did he?) on Google’s Official Blog how Google’s ranking system works.

New information in the article:

1. The 3 philosophies behind Google ranking:

1) Best locally relevant results served globally. (according to Amit, it’s their “no query left behind” principle)
2) Keep it simple.
3) No manual intervention.

2. …

Reminder in the post:

From Google’s Official Blog:

The second reason we have a principle against manually adjusting our results is that often a broken query is just a symptom of a potential improvement to be made to our ranking algorithm. Improving the underlying algorithm not only improves that one query, it improves an entire class of queries, and often for all languages. I should add, however, that there are clear written policies for websites recommended by Google, and we do take action on sites that are in violation of our policies or for a small number of other reasons (e.g. legal requirements, child porn, viruses/malware, etc).

Looking forward to the “followup post!”

This is an excellent 1 minute video by Kevin Kelly. The video talks about “THE business challenge for 2008!”. A must watch!

Described as the “Coach behind Ireland’s Celtic Tiger” - Kevin Kelly is one of Europe’s and Asia’s leading authorities on motivation, entrepreneurship, leadership, communication, and personal excellence. Kevin Kelly is Europe and Asia’s leading authority on entrepreneurial thinking, leadership and motivation.You can read more about Kevin Kelly at - www.KevinKellyUnlimited.com

Finally we have a feature which was much awaited by the Indian businesses and freelancers - especially from the IT community. A few days back, Ebay owned ‘Paypal‘ announced that Indian paypal account holders can now withdraw their funds from their paypal accounts, directly to their India banks. Earlier the options were to either get a physical check via snail mail (which took a long time) or to wire the funds to a US bank account. Also, there were limitation on the amount you could withdraw in a month’s time. This too has been increased substantially.

Paypal Fee: For withdrawal amounts of more than 7,000 Rupees are free. For withdrawal amounts of less then 7,000 Rupees, Paypal charges a fee of 50 Rupees.

Paypal has partnered with almost all the major bank in India, so this immensely increases the reach and utility of this new option. These banks include: State Bank of India , Bank of India, Canara Bank, Union Bank of India, HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, ING VYSYA Bank, UTI Bank, Standard Chartered Bank, HSBC and Citibank.

Some days back, Paypal had announced another exciting facility - allowing users to withdraw funds from their Paypal accounts to their Visa credit cards as well.

You can read more about these features by visiting the following links:

• Paypal - Indian Bank Account Withdrawal
• Paypal - Transfer to Visa Credit Card

A perfect Diwali Gift from Paypal to Indian companies, freelancers and entrepreneurs!

A Content Management System (CMS) has traditionally been regarded as bad when it comes to Search Engines. In many cases, its still true.

Content Management systems were not designed for Search Engines. The objective was to allows the site owner to edit his website easily (usually just the content and images). The content is stored in a database and the webpage is generated on the fly when a user requests for one.

Why CMS became search engine un-friendly?

The restrictive approach caused a lot of problems. From dynamic urls that contained special characters and no keywords to common meta tags for all pages, the content management systems became more of a roadblock than a help.

Search Engine Friendly CMS

Today, most Content Management Systems have improved drastically. They are user AND Search Engine friendly. The open source CMSs had much more support and came through faster. However, many implementors still have trouble setting up the CMS is a search engine friendly way. Its very important to ensure that your CMS has all the required plugins/contributions installed to make it search engine friendly. There are lots of content management systems available today. But you need to look for one that:

1. has valid and clean HTML
2. maximum flexibility
3. allows you to customize it
4. can be integrated with other applications
5. is modular
6. gives you freedom over the pagenames
7. is tested for all browsers

This will be a good start.

Search Engine Optimized is More Than Just Search Engine Friendly

Don’t confuse search engine optimized with search engine friendly. While a Search Engine friendly CMS may help you get indexed, it may not help you get ranked well. In order to rank well, you need to ensure that you are catering to the needs of your end user first.

And it all starts with a keyword search.

India was destined to be the 3rd largest mobile market by 2007, according to AdMob Metrics, we are ranked second, right after US.

With the world catching up, is your website mobile friendly? Its time to make your moves fast!