The list of public holidays in Belarus (MoveYourWeb development offices are located here) will help our customers and partners to make the appropriate financial planning as well as resource management for the year of 2008. In this list we reflected the holidays which are celebrated during the working days. This might change slightly during the year (+1/2 days as additional holidays might get announced). Isn’t it short?

1st of January - New Year

7th of January - Orthodox Christmas

1st of May - International Labor Day

6th of May - Commemoration Day

9th of May - Victory Day

3rd of July - Independence Day

7th of November - October Revolution Day

25th of December - Catholic Christmas

Hint: when the holiday falls on Saturday or Sunday in Belarus - it’s celebrated the same day and doesn’t get shifted to next Monday or previous Friday. This generally makes the short list of holidays even shorter.

As 2007 draws to a close, everyone at MoveYourWeb would like to thank you for recognition and appreciation of our work. We enjoyed continuous rapid growth last year and are thankful for that! In a shortlist we remember the following about 2007:

- Full-circle Sales department setup;

- The list of technologies and project types was extended (facebook applications, social networking, media streaming, mobile games);

- A number of customers visited us in our offices in Belarus – which was productive and fun;

- Top professionals joined the company and the most talented been promoted;

- Huge number of projects was successfully accomplished;

- We celebrated our 6th year anniversary.

In 2008 we will continue to work day and night to exceed your expectations in MoveYourWeb as the outsourcing company of your choice. Our biggest goal for 2008 is to help you achieve your goals!

Thank you once again for your business! The entire MoveYourWeb team wishes you and your families and friends a happy, healthy, and prosperous 2008!

Being an offshore outsourcing company, MoveYourWeb doesn’t regularly have face-to-face meetings with the customers. The distance prevents daily personal communication between our managers and customers. However, if you are contracting an outsourcing offshoring company and have a long-term relationship, it might be nice to visit the country that they are from, to see the office they are working in, get to know the employees who are performing work for you. This helps you establish solid long-lasting relationships with your offshore partner and contributes to thorough and fruitful cooperation.

MoveYourWeb Offshoring Web Development Company is located in Belarus (Eastern Europe) with its headquarters in Minsk, the capital, and the branch office in Homel. Located conveniently in Eastern Europe, Belarus is easy to reach from any spot of the world. Minsk has a newly renovated National Airport Minsk just 50 km (30 miles) from the city center, ultra-modern Central Train Terminal with regular trains between Minsk and practically every major capital in Europe; and a developed net of highways.

Belarus is blessed with gorgeous landscape defined by splendid foliage - and coniferous forests, numerous crystal-clear lakes, spectacular rivers and immense green fields. Our climate is quite comfortable for all foreigners who come here. With warm and moist summers and mild, yet sometimes snowy, winters, Belarus sees about 175 sunny days a year. Belarus is known for its diverse culture, including visual arts, ceramics and music, unsurpassed Belarusian cuisine, and kind attitude to the foreigners.

MoveYourWeb will help our partners who wish to visit Belarus arrange a business trip. We’ll handle the official invitation for our partners to obtain a business visa to Belarus. The easiest and most popular way to get Belarussian visa is upon arrival (the belarussian officials will stamp it right in the Airport). The fee for visa upon arrival is $180 for US citizens. As soon as you arrive, we’ll pick you up at the airport and assist you in terms of accommodation and other things you might need. We’ll take special care of your visit so that you feel maximum of comfort on your business trip.

You will definitely like Minsk, which, yet big and busy, is kept surprisingly clean and pleasant to live and to stay, while numerous parks and green areas create an oasis of peace among the city’s hustle and bustle. Minsk offers a variety of accommodation options for your convenient stay, but, to be honest, our hotels are not our strong side – they provide an average level of comfort at a price of $60-160 per night for a single room, and $100-200 per night for a double. New grand 5-star hotels are being under construction at the moment, and very soon Minsk will offer its guests world-class accommodations in hotels. By now, if you are seeking luxury and maximum of comfort, we can arrange a super luxury apartment with all the modern amenities you can imagine - located in the city center, penthouse at a price of $250 per night.

When it comes to eat, Minsk offers a number of choices to enjoy your meal varying from grand and expensive restaurants to small cafes and take-aways. You will be able to indulge in delicious Belarusian, Italian, French, American, Japanese, and Mediterranean cuisine at modern and immaculately decorated restaurants with excellent service: James, Saloon, Westfalia, Casa Agustin Lopez, 7 Tonn, and hundreds of others welcome you to try fantastic culinary masterpieces created by their talented cooks.

Now, as you arrived, unpacked your things, refreshed a bit, and had a lunch or dinner – it is high time for a business meeting. The typical itinerary for the day is as follows:

1-00 pm assistant of the CEO picks the customers and drives to the office

1-30 pm - introductions

2-00 pm - project meetings

3-00 pm - break

3-15 pm - project meetings

4-30 pm - lunch

5-30 pm - project meetings

6-00 pm - assistant drives the customer to the hotel/restaurant/any

place of interest

11-30 pm - chill out in a night club.

We also recommend not to plan any project meetings for the first and the last day of your stay so you can recover after the flight and have time to pack/unpack the suits.

Having a spare weekend is a nice opportunity to see the stunning places of interest such as Opera and Ballet Theatre, Victory Obelisk, Cathedral (catholic) of Simeon and Alyona, Minsk Botanical Garden, Trinity Suburb (where our office is located by the wayJ) in Minsk itself; or visit some nice Belarusian historic places in the Minsk District, including Mir Castle, Palace-and park ensemble in Nesvizh, Historic Museum in Dududki, Khatyn Memorial, Stalin Line; unique parks and preserves, like Belovezhskaya Pushcha, and Berezinski Preserve.

It seems like your business trip is going to be very saturated, and it is not only business but also discovery! Our company will give you assistance in all your matters while you are in Belarus. But before, please, read some of our practical tips

Practical Tips:

• Language

People in Belarus speak Russian. Even though most of people study English at school, language problems may arise sometimes (but not with MoveYourWeb employees), so don’t be surprised in case you can not communicate with regular people on the streets.

• Cash & ATMs

There are many ATM machines in all major cities. However, having some money in cash is necessary, because credit cards are not widely accepted. Money is Belarusian ruble and its current rate is here. You may get Belarusian money from currency exchanges, which can be found in abundance in all Belarusian towns. Euros and dollars are okay in many places. You will be able to get Belarusian rubles in any ATM located at in the nearest shop, there are some specific ATM’s allowing dollar/euro withdrawals.

• Hygiene & Health

Tap drinking water is typically safe - you don’t have to boil it or anything. Epidemiological situation is reasonable - close as in US or Western Europe. No malaria here

• Communications

There are Internet cafes in Minsk and other cities, which provide cheap, but usually slow Internet access. Also many postal offices offer have Internet services. Public phones use cards only, which can be bought from newsagents. You may always go to the Postal office in Minsk, which provides internet access 24-hours every day.

• Tips

Generally you should give tips only in the restraints - which is not obligatory as well. If you pay by credit card you will not be able to specify a tip amount. So just leave some cash (5% of the order) while leaving.

Belarus is located in Europe and there is no big cultural difference from other developed countries so generally all other popular rules apply here. All customers who visited our company or Belarus in general are welcome to comment and share their experience in regards their stay.

Our corporate blog has been populated by SEO topics recently. The posts are getting too long - so here we go with the small and easy one. (Sorry guys, no SEO science in this one).
I’m not really sure if you already seen a pretty girl Ms Dewey integrated with Live Search - if not it’s worth checking out!

The first thing I did as a marketer after playing with the web site - I checked it’s Alexa rankings (it’s now ranked as a 13k web site in terms of visitors) and yes - the traffic was exactly the same I had pictured in mind: the popularity of the web site skyrocketed in the first week when it was introduced (looks like it was in top 1k of the web sites) and then started decreasing gradually… I think the late posts like that and the users that haven’t seen it yet are keeping the web site on 13k position.

The important lesson that can be learned: the web site is amazing and fan, however it brings no real value or importance (why should someone wait for this girl smiling and thinking while when he needs). That’s the reason for super popularity which lasted a week (the number of visitors was really huge, however few of those returned).

At MoveYourWeb we pay a lot of attention to the communication process. A number of customers switched to us after using offshore development resources due to the communication problems they experienced in those relationships.

One of the important aspects of effective communication is stable and reliable internet connection (currently we have 8mb down and 1mb up stream). The sad fact is that even the biggest internet provider in the country has some downtime happening. So the last week we signed agreement with another alternative providing another back-end up and down links to our office. The administrators already performed the necessary updates of the routing server to handle the change of one ISP to another during the downtime. Stay tuned!

While reading some stuff on outsourcing, I came across a peculiar new title of a Chief Globalization Officer. This position was new to me, and I thought that it might be new to somebody else, too. So, I got down to my next article for the blog, which, as I decided, would be dedicated to this new C position.

The necessity of creating this new position was conditioned by the fact that many companies that work on an international level are very often puzzled when it comes to the real issues of targeted or online marketing with a local flavor. In fact, “website globalization puts this issue front and center as firms market their brand and wares through their corporate URLs”. Companies often lack a high profile specialist to control the messaging, budget, technology infrastructure, and other key elements for the channel of global communication and commerce.

It happens that this is exactly a CGO who should take upon all these duties. The CGO is often compared to that second steady hand: the catalyst for global thinking, and responsiveness.

The CGO’s main functions include:

1) to form a corporate global mindset to help the organization enter new markets, and maintain competitiveness in those markets for many years to come;

2) to pursue the best global leadership talent to be able to respond to local conditions;

3) to continuously improve organizational structures to meet local conditions;

4) to conduct the management of knowledge and information, and utilize it through the best use of technology.

The first company to appoint a Chief Globalization Officer outside the US is American Cisco Systems, Inc. With that, one more C level position has been created in corporate America. Wim Elfink, the first professional Cisco’s Chief Globalization Officer will go to Bangalore and work from there, thus creating the first CGO job in Corporate America outside its borders; i.e offshore.

According to Mr Elfink, as a Chief Globalization Officer, he will be in charge of “executing the growth strategy for the company globally, including collaborating with Cisco’s worldwide functional leaders to innovatively globalize and scale all functions by leveraging their work in India as a platform”.

Besides, he will take up elaborating disruptive business models for Cisco to create new markets, go-to-market channels, and technologies. Additionally, he is planning to carry out an analysis of possible implementation of Cisco’s $1.1billion investment in India. He emphasizes that developing and strengthening existing partnerships with Indian IT partners on a global scale is of vital importance to Cisco. The reason is not only that India’s market is growing for Cisco products and services. In fact, India was chosen due to many other factors. First, India is an open culture, unlike, say, China. It is well known for its strong sense of partnership, which is beneficial for implementing Cisco’s globalization strategy. Secondly, it has educated workforce, innovative customers, and skilled partners that have global capabilities. Finally, India’s government pays much attention to economic development across all levels of society.

Overall, time will show if the position of a Chief Globalization Officer justifies itself. However, already now it is clear that with the development of the modern global economy, and growing availability of the offshoring services, this new C position can become irreplaceable for implementing modern globalization strategy.

At recent IT English classes that are organized in our company (personally I attend upper-intermediary level as a lot of other management do, we also have intermediary level classes) we discussed the evolution of advertisement on the internet. Everybody could remember the crappy ad banners that were flooding the web sites 4-6 years ago. Those were simply untargeted and spent a big deal of advertising budgets of .com companies. Nowadays the advertisement is getting more context and relevant with ad programs starting from AddWords and Overture and finishing with Amazon  having ‘customers  who  bought that  book also  bought‘ feature, which provides the results based on the sales history. The advertising and marketing are getting less offensive and are getting more and more focused on target audience.

The world of marketing is definitely getting smarter with the marketing masseges hitting very small targets. The successful marketers of the future and successful business ventures are those who will be able prepare X versions of the same basic ad delivered to X different users based on both data that is mined behind the scenes, and data that they directly input.

Web 2.0 is in power now and the most valuable companies are those focused of competitive differentiation based on data. Those services succeded because they effectivelly gather and use the data - there is no much sense listing all of YouTubes, MySpace, Facebook and others here. They are known not for the security, reliability or security. In fact many have experience outage that would have killed any other traditional web company. Data is the most important component of internet success nowadays. Think about the way you utilize and use the data while starting your next business venture or rethinking the functionality of the current solution.

 p.s. I’m a big fan of our English classes not just because we polish our English speaking skills here but because this is a great opportunity to discuss ideas, trends and innovations happening in the IT industry.

1. Every moment of your work in the company you should support the idea of creating or maintaining easy-going, creative, and respectful of the company aim/goals atmosphere. That will allow the company to function as a whole successful mechanism and effectively develop a number of successful products/solutions.

2. The A-management team of the company has created the business, established working process, methodology and culture. The employees of the company added their knowledge and skills to make that successful company happen. We have a huge list of satisfied customers that keep doing business with us and refer a bunch of new customers. B-list of management should be respectful to the established business structure and must follow it and make the company doing the same way. This is the way to success; since the model created by A-list guys is enjoying the popularity. The business model of the company should be discussed with the Executives in case B-list guys see the ways to improve the model; A-list team welcomes new suggestions and adopt them as soon as it’s possible if those can bring real value to the company and the customers. The role of B-list executives is to support and improve the existing culture, values and methodology!

3. The B-list executives should be real back and support to A-list managers since that’s the one and the only way we can move the company in the successful direction. In case someone is not supportive and accepts the chosen strategy he automatically stops bringing additional value to the company and moreover turns the overall performance down and must be immediately dismissed since he is more then a destroyer rather then a creator.
4. A-list managers created fast-growing company with the unlimited growth potential supported by great product ideas, prosperous business models, powerful connections and numerous partners. B-list of managers should be creative and interested in bringing additional value to the company (creating stable working environment, creative culture - HR manager, and improving the effective methodology, successful project management and consultation of key IT projects, employing new powerful ways of developing products, ensure the high quality of the code in produced applications – CTO, making the department really powerful by using the latest technologies and by planned management of every single action/operation done within the dpt – Heads of Departments, managing the projects effectively and making the communication with the customers as easy as possible, as well as the employees working productively in the managed environment – Project Managers).

Agenda:

A-list executives at MoveYourWeb: CEO, COO, CFO

B-list executives at MoveYourWeb: CTO, HR, Heads of Departments, Project Managers

Recently we had a fun in our company, a corporate party devoted to the continuous grows and success of the company. The idea of having a party was brought to my mind from the first days of working here and what was difficult for me is to decide what kind of party to organize. The only thing I knew for sure – we should make it fun for everybody.
So, how did that go!? After hot working Friday all employees set off to the cottage with neon lights and cool sound, where our party was to be held. I was responsible for the entertaining program - that was a kind of fun to think out or to find some cute games. I laughed to tears when imagined my colleagues playing these games. No wonder that they were amazed by what I asked them to do, for example: 3 guys and 3 girls took part in this game; they guys with their eyes closed were to find a small thing (clothes-peg) fixed on girl’s body. Imagine the COO doing that!! We also had all night dance and I even did not expect from our bosses to be so active and to dance with such great enthusiasm. I ’ve never seen them so childish and so much laughing. And, by the way, we left our party place only in the morning!
In closing, I would say, we know how to make great job, but we also know how to rest.
P.S. the most favorite music theme of the party: Voodoo People (Pendulum rmx)