HireRussians Trademark Registered

Thanks to our lawyers, we have registered HIRERUSSIANS trademark with USPTO. We look forward to receiving the official certificate shortly.

Sibers is a registered trademark

With a new update of Sibers.com, you can notice a ® sign next to the Sibers logo. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has registered Sibers name and logo as a trademark, which makes us feel a bit more important. :) The registered trademark provides additional protection for our customers: if you see the word “Sibers” anywhere, you can be sure that it’s us. This doesn’t include GAZ Siber, though, a new vehicle of GAZ and Chrysler.

The new update also includes some minor fixes and additions, like Portfolio link was moved to the left to indicate preferences of site visitors.

Upcoming Holidays

Due to national holidays, Sibers software development offices in Russia will be closed on February, 25 and March, 10. We’ll tell you how we celebrated the holidays later in the blog.

New Office in Downtown

We are pleased to announce opening of our first office in Novosibirsk city. Located in downtown, the new office is able to accommodate about 30 Sibersers who live in the city. Close connections to main bus, tram, trolley and subway lines make it possible to avoid traffic jams.

Eye-Fi Selects Sibers To Develop Wireless Photo Sharing Service

November 19, 2007 – Novosibirsk, Russia, – Sibers Group LTD, a Russia-based software outsourcing company, announces that its development center in Novosibirsk has been chosen by Eye-Fi, Inc. to develop the Eye-Fi Service, the first photo sharing service based on Wi-Fi technology. The service works with the Eye-Fi Card, a standard-sized SD memory card that is designed to universalize and simplify the process of uploading pictures from users’ digital cameras to the PC or Internet. With just an active Wi-Fi access point and no wires, the Eye-Fi card automatically transfers all photos on the card to one of many popular photo sharing and printing services, blogs and social networking sites. First beta-testers and customers have already confirmed that this new gadget will certainly overthrow the whole concept of digital freedom and mobility.

“Working on such innovation in digital world as Eye-Fi, you should be ready to take up a challenge,” said Serge Markov, Sibers CEO. “Our startup-optimized technological and business processes were tested to support time-dependent know-how development. Of course, as any IT geeks, our developers were excited about realization of a project that will make our lives easier. Moreover, working on innovative projects, we become even more flexible and open-minded.”

Eye-Fi first contacted Sibers through Elance, a popular online marketplace for offshore developers. Initially, the collaboration began with investigating possible ways to handle Wi-Fi in Microsoft Windows. Once the concept was proved, Eye-Fi and Sibers started working on a service enabling the SD card to upload to Flickr and Wal-Mart.com. Lately, the list of photo sharing, printing, blogging and social networking websites was supplemented with Phanfare, Shutterfly, Picasa Web Albums, Fotki, SmugMug, Facebook, dotPhoto, Gallery2, Kodak Gallery, Photobucket, Vox, and TypePad.

“It was a difficult decision to go offshore for the development of the Eye-Fi Service,” said Kim Gustafson, Web Services and Applications Lead at Eye-Fi. “We were afraid of misunderstandings, missed deadlines, and out-of-sync development environments. Now we can say with certainty that we made the right decision. Sibers helped turn our vision into reality. While there are always stumbling blocks working with offshore companies, the advantages far outweighed the disadvantages, especially having a 24 hour workday cycle with daily turnarounds.”

Eye-Fi Card first announced by Eye-Fi, Inc. at the end of October, 2007. For further information see www.eye.fi.

More information about Sibers offshore development centers is available at www.sibers.com.

About Sibers
Sibers is an offshore software development center founded in 1998 in Russia. As a leader in this industry Sibers provides safe outsourcing services, secure processes, and top quality results for business. Sibers’ specialists have great experience of working with almost all major platforms, programming languages and technologies and can develop almost any types of solutions. For additional information please visit www.sibers.com.

About Eye-Fi
Founded in 2005, the company is dedicated to building products and services that help consumers navigate, nurture and share their visual memories. Eye-Fi’s patent-pending technology works with Wi-Fi networks to automatically send photos from a digital camera to online, in-home and retail destinations. Headquartered in Mountain View, California, the company’s investors include Opus Capital and Shasta Ventures. More information is available at www.eye.fi.

We Clear The Bar

HireRussians became number 1 in the total Elance rating of software outsourcing service providers.

Click for a full size screenshot:

List of Elance providers

Voix. VoIP Call Manager Release

We are glad to inform the community of a Beta 1 release of Voix Manager. It is a switchboard application with an integrated Iax phone, able to manage and display information about the user’s Asterisk PBX activity in real time. The project took almost three months to design, and now you can download the most powerful and flexible communication system on the market from Voix official site www.voix.it (beta version is free, but its term will expire on 01/07/2007 ) .

Voix Manager Screenshot. Click to enlarge

Sergey Parfenenok, Sibers VoIP Lead Developer

February 23: National Holiday

Due to the national Russian holiday, our offices will be closed on Friday, February 23. We’ll be back on Monday.

Internet down? We have backup!

For us as an offshore IT company it’s vital to get in constant touch with our customers. The Internet is one of our main tools as our chats, mail, sites, IP phones work through it. Unfortunately, even good Internet providers can’t avoid some malfunctions. That’s why we decided to have an alternative channel in case of emergencies. It proved to be quite handy yesterday, when the main provider failed to support the net for some time. The alternative channel had already been active, so the local doomsday was cancelled.

Our system administrators managed to quickly switch the outgoing traffic to the alternative channel, so we could send our reports and other correspondence. We are sorry for some inconveniences such as the temporal loss of external connection to our dev server and possible delays of receiving incoming mails, but the good news is that the access to the server is allowed through the new domain as well as there are alternative addresses available. We have succeeded to minimize the losses and are going to work on switching the channels in case of emergency automatically.

Sharepoint Portal Services 3 for New Portal

We have migrated to a new version, Sharepoint Portal Services 3. As a result:

• Our Portal has a new address with a https certificate;
• Now it has a mobile version for those working with modems and GPRS;
• It works much better with Firefox 2.0, which is handy for our Linux team;
• Portal has a RSS subscription, although it doesn’t work with all the Feedreaders;
• Posts for the Portal can be typed in Office 2007 (through Blog API), and messages can be edited remotely;
• Each message has a place for the avatar, which can add some implicit information about the author;
• Discussions accompanying some news and interesting information have much better usability;
• Portal is Wiki-compatible.
• Outlook is connected with SPS, and we can enjoy the search and other offline advantages.

As for the subscriptions, RSS might well be better.