A new commercial for T-Mobile myTouch 3G features an Android application made by Sibers.
The app is called Face-IT and it turns your Android device into a mouth that moves according to what you pronounce.
Key-Soft Old Birthday
October 19, 2009When Sibers was small, it was called Key-Soft. Now, every October we gather all together: people who worked in Key-Soft and still work in Sibers, people who worked in Key-Soft, and people who are working in Sibers and never worked in Key-Soft. Namely: everyone.
Last Friday we did it again, and everyone said that was the warmest party ever.
We also introduced the Sibers Alumni program to keep in touch with those who changed their place of work but remain our good friends.
In the picture: Director of Development Alexey Shpack launches the Holy Cow in front of the cheering and a bit drunk co-workers holding an old banner of Key-Soft, which was hard to find this year. Click to view the full picture.
Review of Web Design in Russia
October 17, 2009
Smashingmagazine.com, which is an endless source of information and inspiration for Web people, has just published a sophisticated article about what Web design in Russia looks like. Smashing Magazine has chosen Russia to be the first in the series of “Global Web Design” and there really must be a reason for it!
The article is everything you ever wanted to learn about Russian Web design. It’s a bit of history and a lot about current state of things. It’s an interview with two Russian Web designers, describing life of Russian Web developer and telling you about differences between Russian and Western designs. It’s a showcase of creative agencies and freelancers (and I am sure they will get tons of work after this review!). And then, there is a huge list of Russian Web designs.
And… comments did impress me! Works of Russian Web designers got amazing feedback although some said they could not even think of Web design in Russia before!
9 Things We Don’t Like in Project Briefs
August 28, 20091. “etc.”
2. “CRM (or CMS or any other) capabilities” (without clear definitions)
3. “Clone of…”
4. “Here is code from my previous developers”
5. “My developer told me it will take you … hours”
6. “We need a quote for everything!”
7. “Home page like digg.com”
8. “I will provide all details when I select a provider”
9. “I need Flash developer with Java, PHP, and .Net skills”
German Online Marketplaces for IT Projects
August 11, 2009English-speaking marketplaces where you can find freelancers are well known and include such monsters as elance.com, odesk.com, and guru.com. German outsourcing platforms are much less popular and of course demand good German knowledge: just for bidding there and for communicating with your clients once you win a project.
Here, we’ll speak of two marketplaces. The first is www.mondayworks.de. Available in German and English, it lists lots of IT-related projects but only few of them are active. Bidding for others has already closed. That’s because of the fact that a new project appears on MondayWorks approximately once in a week or two, so there’s no hunt for projects (you get an email with notification) and you have time to prepare for a bid. Paid subscription is 5.70 Euro/month and you get 5 credits for bids, which is more than enough.
The other more or less active marketplace is www.freelancermap.de. Be very careful with them if you decide to purchase a subscription. Once your paid period is over, they keep “billing” you by sending invoices. After few months you will get an email from a debts collecting firm that will ask you to pay some Euros to cover your invoices from Freelancermap.de and services of the collectors. If you ask Freelancermap.de what’s going on, they will tell you that they have a new management and you can not in fact cancel your subscription by email. If you go ahead and pay the outstanding invoices, you will soon get a new email with new invoices and so on and so forth. We feel that we must warn everyone of these unhealthy and scam operations of Freelancermap.de. Those guys don’t care about their karma.
HireRussians Trademark Registered
July 16, 2009Thanks to our lawyers, we have registered HIRERUSSIANS trademark with USPTO. We look forward to receiving the official certificate shortly.
Sibers Takes on Wild West Adventures
July 4, 2009Sibers’ 11th anniversary was held on July 4, which is quite a remarkable date for us with our clients being mainly from the USA; moreover, it happened to be Saturday; and what is even more important, it happened to be the first really hot summer day in Siberia!
We chose to have a thematic celebration devoted to the Wild West and all the American attributes resembling the idea of American and European fancy dress festivals devoted to different historical events. The festival included team building, which turns out a very funny thing for a big company like ours. In order to grab the main prize teams had to go through quite a number of challenges, both intellectual and requiring active participation. Every step in this quest brought the team additional units turned money during the auction, when the teams purchased certain items for making a raft. The raft had to be floatable in order to bring a team representative to the prize floating about 50m off the shore of our lovely artificial sea. Needless to say, the game appeared real funny and caused a lot of improvisation, creativity and team work, which is a feature of Sibers.
The party following the game continued the topic of American celebrations with whisky, tequila, boiled corn, grilled meat, etc. Music and merry contests enlivened the celebration, which continued for about 12 hours in a row.
Thanks to the wonderful weather and enthusiastic colleagues, we are now more than happy to resume our work for years and years to follow.
5 Tips for Making Green Websites
June 30, 2009“Green” lifestyle is definitely a trend of 2009. Thanks to green incentives and environmentally-friendly strategies of major technological companies, “green” trend is very distinctly seen in IT. Check for yourself simply searching for #green on Twitter.
One of the main approaches in Green IT is, definitely, “green hosting”. Companies like Green Hosting.org, Go Green Hosting.com, Host Gator and many others offer servers powered by renewable energy power such as wind generators.
Still, it is important to remember that a website hosted on “green” hosting must be optimized for environment, if a website owner wants to contribute to a better way of life. We have created a list of 5 checkpoints you should be aware of while making “green” websites.
1. Make sure the website loads as fast as possible.
The faster your site loads, the less energy is consumed by servers of a hosting company and by your computer. Complex scripts, not optimized queries, large graphics contribute to the excessive machine loads and irritate users. Making your website load fast is a number one criterion to be checked for green websites. You can evaluate performance of your web pages with free utilities like Page Speed or YSlow.
2. Green websites must follow Internet standards.
The logic is simple: browsers are made to follow the standards, therefore the best use of browsers’ resources is possible when they open standard-made websites. Of course, it does not mean that all green or optimized websites look the same. They just follow a number of guidelines documented in HTML and CSS specifications. It is very easy to check if code of your website follows them: enter your URL in validators: CSS and HTML
3. Use of Flash is justified and fair.
While British Energy creates a Flash game to raise awareness of sustainability challenges in the energy sector, Adobe Flash is known to consume too much memory and CPU, especially in Linux. Due to its inefficiency, it makes your computer consume more electrical power than usual. It is easy to check by unplugging your laptop and running it from a battery: it will die much faster with a Flash application running.
4. Check content of your website.
Greenness of your website is contained not only inside, in the backend or source code. It can also be clearly seen from outside, just looking at the content. Promoting green practices just by placing a small button, logo, or statement in the footer will keep the public aware and distribute the green ideas throughout the world.
5. How about far-reaching consequences?
If you stop and think how people may be using your website, you will inevitably come to an idea that people may be printing your website. Printing means using paper. Without being paranoic, you can optimize what gets printed by using special CSS print stylesheets. A giude to print stylesheets can be found here. For example, you can remove headers, make fonts smaller and send to printer only the valuable content, reducing the amount of paper needed to print a web page.
For those of you who are ready to check their websites for “greenness”, we have developed a special tool called GreenOrMachine. This tool examines your website against 10 criteria (i.e. 5 more than described in this article) and provides a report how your site performs on the green scale.
Log off the web: save the planet
June 29, 2009A new fun project is live. Check how you destroy the Earth by browsing the internet:
Simple 50 Google AdWords management rules, Part 1.
June 24, 2009Yesterday I was happy to attend the web seminar by ROIRevolution, the Google AdWords qualified and Google Analytics authorized company. The webinar was named as “50 Ways to Make Your AdWords Advertising Drive More Response and More Profit”.
The knowledge I recieved was very direct and clear for understanding. And, due to it great sense, I thought to share this information with the world, ’cause everyone should be involved.
I decided to share this information in two parts, today I’ll tell the first half. Let’s begin.
1. Use Negative keywords to avoid irrelevant traffic
2. Logically organize your campaign structure for freely swimming through your AdWords acct
3. Separate campaigns with Search advertizing and Content Network advertising
4. Keep in mind that bids differ for various match types of keyword
5. Position 1-3 won’t surely lead to incredible conversions
6. Evently revise positions that your ads occupy on Content Network
7. Also it is not the best way to make changes to account from dusk till dawn, some time is required for system to collect statistics
8. Promote benefits, not features in Ad text
9. Test at least two Ads in every AdWords group: when you found the better ad text, then try to find a better one
10. Examine CTR and Cost per Conversion of each Ad
11. It is a good practice to include keywords and key phrases in the headline of Ads
12. Use Call2Action in the bottom line of Ads
13. Using “&” instead “and” will help you to save place for Ad text
14. Attract attention in Ads that you place in Content Network
15. Try to provide a “unique selling proposition” in your Ads
16. “Words That Sell” by Richard Bayan
17. DON’T USE ALL IN CAPS, there are much more ways to impress your point
18. Ads that are straight to the point work better.
19. In order to get rid of unwanted customers, include price in Ad text
20. Want to increase QS, than you have to improve CTR
21. Use several landing pages, don’t sent all traffic on single page – your customers need space for choice
22. Keep out of money wars for Ads positions
23. According to your market include “free”, “no charge”, “open” and so on in your negatives
24. Do not neglect matching types when you create keywords
25. It may be profitable to create campaign based on your competitors terms, but be careful and smart with this advice
26. Maybe special “branded” campaign with different versions of your company name or site title will bring you additional traffic. Look at example: HireRussians, www.hirerussians.com – is right name, Hirerussians, hire russians, hire russian, hirerussian – variations of our brand name, which may be, and according to Google Analytics it is, used as search query to find our company in the Internet
Don’t you agree that this is pretty useful for advertisers who interested in successful AdWords account management? I think you do, and if so, come back soon for the second part.
In addition, today I was involved in very interesting game provided by collaboration of Google and Virgin America, Day in the cloud. It was some kind of intellectual game, duiring one hour every participants answers questions from various part of life and solves puzzles. The most amaizing was the fact, that here, in Novosibisk, was rain after which beautiful clouds appeared on sky of wonderfully blue colour. You can see it on image below, view from our office window.
Adios!
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