July 12th, 2008 was a joyous occasion for everyone at CueBlocks. Our beloved baby had turned 3! That, of course, called for a celebration. As grand as last year was (the much talked about pool party at Chimney Heights), we wanted to do something different this time.

On the way to Sadhupul

After a lot of planning and contemplating, a day trip to Sadhupul was finalized.

All was set, a list of things required was made, responsibilities were handed out and on Friday, July 11, we all went home knowing that tomorrow, we would be embarking upon a journey which none of us would forget, ever. So keeping in tune with the plans laid, we all met outside the office and headed to our destination. But of course we didn’t go there straight away! A stop at Dharampur is never to be missed, especially if we know that we will be feasting on paranthas, curd, pickle and tea. No point counting the calories! Let’s just say the food was really, really delicious.

After approximately 3 and a half hours, we reached the Sadhupul resort, which I might add was beautiful, but in a spooky way. Huge mirror adorned rooms and quiet, lush green surroundings. I know, sounds beautiful, but believe me for those of us picturing the place at night (everyone!) it was kinda scary.

Enjoying the Weather!

After a little refreshing ourselves, we set out to explore the place a bit and reached the bank of Sadhupul’s sole river. And this is when the adventure and fun really started. An overcast sky, knee deep water and the company of some of your closest friends – this is the recipe for a perfect celebration and that’s what we had. Actually, we did get a little wary when it was time to cross the river, but once that was out of the way, things pretty much were perfect. And so we went on, laughing, clicking pictures, splashing in the water and making the most of life.
Just as we were marveling at the weather and its perfection, we felt the first few drops of rain. ‘Ha!’, I thought, ‘A little rain never hurt anyone’. And I was right, a ‘little’ rain does not hurt, but within a matter of minutes, the light drizzle has turned into a heavy pore which threatened to soak us to the bone. Oh wait, it did soak us to the bone. Are you thinking that our spirits were then as damp as our clothes? Oh please! In fact, we were more enthusiastic and charged!

After a lot of walking, actually climbing, up a small path way, we took shelter in a small enclosure. It was only a little later that we realized that it was a temple! Of all the divine coincidences. Our explorers Nosheen and Ketaky, ventured into surrounding areas and came back with a pine cone (where is it now, by the way?).

Agreed, we were all cold, starving and tired, but the excitement just wasn’t letting us acknowledge it! That was, till we came across Hotel Rainbow. The food was fit for a King! We had everything – tea, paneer, dal, chicken, rice, rotis, salad….(now I’m hungry!). Oh, I almost forgot, we ran into Sweety at the Rainbow. A cute little puppy, Sweety was the hotel owner’s pet but looked very love and attention deprived to me. Sadly, I couldn’t take her home and when we left, she was peacefully sleeping next to two other dogs, who looked like they could have been her parents.

More of walking and we were back at the resort. We dried ourselves and rested a little. No one wanted to head back, but we had to. So with heavy hearts and promising ourselves that next time, we would stay for a day or two, we started back. The journey back was also as much fun. Despite the exhaustion, we kept talking, cracking jokes and clicking pictures. After a stop over at Dharampur, complete with tea and pakodas, and a 15 minutes jam at Kalaka, we were outside the office, all set to head back home. Did I mention that we really didn’t want to come back?

Once back home, I suddenly realized how tired I was, but going straight to bed wasn’t an option! I still had to do two very important things – describe the wonderful trip to my folks and show them the pictures. I kept doing these over and over again, till it was 1 A.M., my parents were tired and bored and my mother threatened to take away my phone if I didn’t stop. That immediately put me to sleep, but not before I relived the trip. I seriously dozed off smiling. It had been an awesome day, the memories of which will make us smile all throughout our lives!

CueTeam - All smiles

Special thanks to Nosheen, without whose professional photography we would not have been able to freeze the moments of fun, to Aseem, who kept our spirits high (even when we were drenched and tired) with his rib tickling jokes, and to the driver of the bus, who played songs which we had never heard before and were thus too funny (all in favor of buying Miss. Pooja’s hardcore Punjabi CDs, please say ‘Aye’!).

Can’t wait for next year! Let’s aim for Switzerland then :-D.

Recently, we received a worried email from one of our clients. It said he was being sued for copyright infringement for using a photo on his website - a website we designed.

The news was obviously very alarming. We were completely taken aback because we have ensured that our team follows ethical practices. We obviously didn’t want our client to suffer and offered to bear the costs associated in case we are responsible for putting the said photo on his website.

Our challenge now was to locate 2 year old project data and communication files. Once we located it, we found out that we had not added that image on the client’s website. When we logged into the client’s server, we also found that the image had been uploaded on the server a year before we actually started to communicate with the client. Our team had just transfered the page contents (including this photo) to the new design. We also found the old page in the backup folder.

Although we are extremely happy that we lived up to our word, we are very concerned about our client. The picture was obviously used by the previous design company. And our client might now have to live with the consequences.

This brought us to the whole issue of copyright laws and the Internet.

Image Banks are using image tracking softwares like PicScout (http://www.picscout.com) and are now going after websites displaying their images without license.

And it’s the website owners who are receiving the legal notices.

So what can you do now as the website owner?

1. Hire an attorney, now.
2. Dig out the contract if you signed one with the web designer/ independent contractor
4. Contact the web designer and ask him if he has a valid license for the image.
5. Respond to the legal notice immediately
6. Take down the image immediately if you or the web designer don’t have the license.

But as Ivan Hoffman puts it, “Help me is almost always cheaper than fix me”.

Precautions you can take:

1. Have a written agreement/contract with the web designer which leaves nothing to imagination.
2. Confirm if the web designer has the license to use the images that he has used on your website before you even make the site live. Preferably, get the license copy sent to you.

This is just ones of the many issues related to copyright and Internet. Strangely though, I couldn’t find much data online about this specific issue at all. Apart from a brief mention on Ivan Hoffman’s website, Ecademy and a couple of news items, forum, there wasn’t much out there.

This is the kind of information that should be readily available to all. There are so many individuals running their own small websites. How many of them are aware of this? So many people are now going to freelancers outside of their country to get their websites designed. Not being fully aware of the copyright laws can get very expensive.

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!