Reputation Manangement Services

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Dear All,
Last year Miracle Studios worked on over 20 projects involving reputation management of companies.
Reputation Management has become an important factor for many companies big and small on the internet. One bad review or feedback on the internet and the companies future can loose a huge amount of business.  There have been many websites which claim to be associated with government agencies, and general population believes in them as well.

We would be writing a post explaining people about what they should and should not believe in when it comes to posting a review online.

Till then read more about our reputation management services at Reputation Management Services page

Miracle Studios is a premium reputation management company based in India

Coding for Dummies: It’s Like Learning How to Type on a French Keyboard

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The other day I was discussing computer programming with a fellow writer, and she said something along the lines of, “I don’t know, programming was just not something I took an interest in when I was a kid”. This struck me as interesting, because as I racked my brains for examples, I couldn’t think of anyone who had taken an interest in programming as a kid. Scratch that—I couldn’t think of anyone who had taken an interest in programming as a kid and wasn’t now a programmer.

I think most people will agree that as soon as programming becomes a hobby, it’s pretty unlikely that it will stay that way. Programming is one of those professions that lives in that impenetrable ivory tower in most laymen’s minds, gilded in those mysterious 0s and 1s that strike fear in the hearts of the braev.

Oops. Let me just CTRL+Z that, what I meant to write was ‘brave’.

This is a pretty routine shortcut, which many, many people frequently use to streamline their computer activities. Who has time to reach over to the mouse and go to File, Edit, Undo? But wait, isn’t learning a keyboard shortcut curiously similar to coding? You may not think so, but for those of you who have ever customized a keyboard shortcut, behold the ivory tower crumbling!

Computer coding, or programming, encompasses a range of activities that cumulatively result in the programs that help make everyone’s lives easier. Programmers are highly skilled technicians who not only design and write the source codes of computer programs, but also test, debug and maintain them. The process that programmers follow, however, can be distilled and compared to many of the shortcuts we use on our computers every day.

Just as a quick disclaimer—I’m told the Miracle programmers also frequent the company website—likening computer programming to my expert ability to edit my writing without using the mouse is pretty simplistic. Programming requires knowledge of a wide range of subjects, fluency in various coding languages and a solid understanding of the application domain, with some algorithmic knowledge and formal logic on the side. But again, distilling the entire process, programming involves many of the same processes as using a computer, albeit at a relatively savvy level.

Think about how you usually write an essay or otherwise use Word or Page. In addition to requiring knowledge of the subject matter, or application domain, you must also understand how to use the operating system and have some fluency in the ‘language’ of the program you’re using. This balance of skill and knowledge is exemplified in the classic example of a Microsoft user trying to work on a Mac: the linguistic fluency in the language of the Mac OS is missing. Switch him back to Microsoft, though, and his fingers will fly over the keyboard, reveling in their memorized shortcuts and completing tasks with expert speed.

The fluency required to masterfully use regular computer programs represents the tip of the coding iceberg. So, save for the resolutely computer-illiterate and Marc Prensky’s digital immigrants, it would seem that we are all coders at heart.

How to Build a Company | How Trust Factors Into Investment

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What do a two hundred-employee company and a two-man company have in common? Aside from a shoot-for-the-stars ethos and some form of caffeine dispenser, not much, it would seem. Now riddle me this: how does a two-man company get to become a two hundred-employee company? Simple: trust.

To swing right into the disclaimer, trust obviously forms the backbone of a much larger body comprising hard work, dedication, commitment and all the other stuff of success. Google had to earn the bicycles and fluffy chairs; it certainly didn’t get to where it is on pogo sticks. But I digress.

Trying to build up a company without trust is like trying to climb up one of those trick flip-over ladders. You try to do it, but you’re wobbling the entire time, perpetually unsure of whether your source of support will flip on you. And even if you do get pretty close to the top, you know that the chance of you failing is still as high as when you started.

The importance of trust holds true at every level of a company, from doorman to managing director and everyone in between. Beyond the obvious necessity for trust—that your employer will pay you, that your employees won’t steal coffee beans from the break room—there are many other steps to growth that can only be taken if there is mutual trust between the members of a company.

As a company matures, it naturally begins to diversify its investments, deepen its expertise and broaden its product and/or service offerings. In order for the company to mature, however, it is necessary for its individual components to mature. These components are the employees. Consider the following scenario:

A company has decided to take on a substantial project—quite a big step for the business—and it will require specific skills of the existing employees. The most obvious solution is to invest in the existing employees, such that their skill set grows and they are equipped to tackle similar projects in the future.

Such an investment is mutually beneficial to both the company and the individual employees. You learn, we learn, and we all get paid a little bit more. Why not? The problems related to investing in a company and its components arise when there is a lack of trust.

It is normal that employees see their current jobs as stepping stones on their way to presumably bigger and better futures. However, this follows a natural progression. It certainly doesn’t mean using the present company to get your foot in the door of the next. (This is debatable, unfortunately. I guess it depends which kind of race you’re in—rat or other.)

The whole trust problem is compounded when the demand for a certain type of professional—designer, writer, what have you—is high. In some cases, the turnover of employees is so high, and so often unannounced, that the company simply cannot trust its employees enough to invest in them, and consequently stagnates in simple, skill-poor projects instead of growing into more demanding and rewarding projects.

The key to building up a vision is fostering a company culture that is based on trust. The way to do this is to encourage everyone to invest in the company, not just the owners or senior-level employees. Personal involvement in work is integral to dedication, which in turn helps to nurture that vital corporate culture of trust. Of course, the grand majority of this responsibility rests with said senior-level employees. As the managers and leaders of projects, they are charged with stimulating, motivating and engaging their team members. But there certainly must be some give from lower-level employees as well.

Think about it this way. If the choice was between climbing a flip-over ladder alone and climbing the ladder with a bunch of friends holding the sides up for you, which would you choose?

Happy new year 2011

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Black-Forest-Cake

Thanks for the Cake!!

Miracle Studios wishes everyone a very happy and a prosperous new year.

The New Year Office Party that happened at Penninsula was really something! Pics for that would be uploaded soon.!

We would also like to thank Nageshwari our absolutely wonderful client for sending us a lovely cake :)
We loved eating the cake Nageshwari, and before it was finished here is a picture.

Thanks again, and from all of us here a very very happy new year

Outsourcing goes wrong sometimes, but why?

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Summary:
After 1 year and $3000 spend on a project Mr. Rob today has nothing with him. The project is not completed and the individual he hired for his project cannot be traced.
So, what went wrong here? And why sometimes the decision to go for the cheaper price is sometimes wrong.

angry_customer

Outsourcing Disasters

A very strange conversation took place today as I went online on Skype, so strange, in fact, that it compelled me to write this post at 1 am.

So as I log in, I get a very racist message from a man—let’s call him Mr. Rob—about how Indians are not good service providers, and most of them leave projects unfinished or provide low quality work. It was very surprising, and I was definitely taken aback by this pop-up message from nowhere. Without jumping to any conclusions or retaliating to this not-so-nice message, I tried to search for previous communication between Mr. Rob and any member of Miracle Studios. As I found out, Mr. Rob had approached our company about a year back for a project, but did not end up giving it to us as—according to Mr. Rob—we were expensive.

This sudden pop-up message a year after the proposed project left me a bit confused, so I inquired further to see if Mr. Rob had a specific issue with our company and to re-confirm whether he was actually a client of ours. The answer was no.

What had happened was that Mr. Rob, after getting in touch with us, decided to give the project to another firm/individual who had quoted a smaller amount for the project. As per normal human tendency, we all tend to jump the gun and think: “Ahh…discount…why should I pay more, when I can get the same thing for cheap?” Mr. Rob knew that the person he has awarded his project to was a freelancer. I believe his mindset was that if he approached the company that this freelancer actually worked for, the same project would certainly cost more. This would be true even if the same particular designer ended up doing it. A better option would seem to be just taking the company out of the picture and dealing directly with the end person—the freelancer. If you look at this from one perspective, it makes sense. Unfortunately, it is not as straightforward as it sounds.

After 1 year and $3000 spend on a project Mr. Rob today has nothing with him. The project is not completed and the individual he hired for his project cannot be traced.
So, what went wrong here? And why sometimes the decision to go for the cheaper price is sometimes wrong.

In India, it is often the case that freelancers are not actually work-from-home individuals who can spend the majority of their time on a particular service. In 95% of the cases—if not more—the same person has a full time job from 9-5, and only spends the remaining part of the day doing this additional freelance work for some extra cash. This is fair enough; who doesn’t need extra cash these days! Since there are no major overheads like employee salaries, welfare, office expenses, transportation charges, electricity, rents and the million other small things that a company has to take care of, freelancers can obviously charge 50-75% less than any company. Freelancers therefore charge far less, and most clients get blinded by this too-good-to-be-true offer and forget about the fact that the person they have just hired actually has no more than 2 hours a day to spend on their project.

Another consideration is the fact that when an individual does freelancing in the same line of work as his company, he becomes a direct competitor to his own employer. This itself is ethically wrong, if not illegal. If this person is dishonest towards their main source of income, where is the guarantee that they be honest towards their secondary source of income?

Now don’t get me wrong here. I am not against freelancers, and there are probably plenty of good freelancers who deliver their services with full honesty and dedication. However, in today’s cutthroat, competitive world, those gems are hard to find. The irony is that even when you do find them, they usually don’t get the projects, as their fees are higher than the part time freelancers.

Let me make one thing very clear. There are many times when companies are unable to satisfy each and every one of their clients. Heck, huge corporations like Google, Microsoft and Apple are frequently unable to make their customers happy. There is always someone talking about Google’s ad policies, and of course which of us haven’t cursed Microsoft whenever we see the blue screen of death on our computers without even the chance to press CTR+ALT+DEL? However, there is a very simple difference between companies and individuals: companies care! What’s more, in worst-case scenarios, such as bad feedback, they try to compensate.

Think about it yourself, if you are a customer of Microsoft and you call customer services, they spend hours on the phone assisting you and helping you to load Windows. Trust me, I have seen this happen. If one of their CDs doesn’t work, they usually send you a new CD along with a complementary anti-virus to show you that they care and to try to make up.

Ok, maybe I just went too far with the Microsoft thing there… But even in small-sized companies, the goal is always to make sure that when a client is not happy we try our level best to end everything on a good note, or better yet, retain him or her as our client.

Reputation is a company’s number one priority; this is what every company tries to achieve. And with one bad review, years of hard work can be destroyed in seconds. If for no other reason than this, companies must care about their customers. A freelancer, in comparison, books a domain for $9.99, sets up a template for $29, and there! With that much investment they are ready and equipped to take orders on the internet and sell their services by offering low prices.

Ironically, I am sure someone sitting in US thinks the same way about Indian companies. But to set up a company here or anywhere else in the world takes the same amount of effort. Things are not cheap for us anywhere, and at the end of the day everything boils down to the same money, be it in New York or New Delhi. In case you didn’t know prices, the prices of office space in the smallest places in Delhi are higher than those of a lavish office on Wall Street. Even in India, and especially in the IT industry, companies face the same issues with freelancers and lose a lot of work due to the price dilemma.

This post has gone more than a 1000 words and I’d better end it now.

To summarize: what happened with Mr. Rob was unfortunate. In an effort to save a few dollars Mr. Rob ended up losing a lot. From a service provider’s point of view, I would like to point out that as a buyer, looking at the bigger picture is very important. Even though it might be a little bit expensive, it can be worth the investment in more ways than you realize.

Regards,
Raj

Miracle Studios is a premium web design and development company based in India.

Outsourcing 101: The Scoop on India (In Case You Haven’t Already Heard)

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I know it isn’t news, but humor me.

When I say outsourcing, you say… Well, India, of course. This emerging, or emerged, global leader is paving the way for outsourcing companies around the world, leading by example especially in the IT industry. Since pioneering offshore outsourcing, the country has flexed its muscles considerably. And the rest of the world has noticed how good it looks in its cut-off shirt.

Outsourcing-to-India

Outsourcing to India

Indeed, it is hardly a secret that when you call customer services, you’re probably not talking to Betty down the block, but more likely to Babita over in Chandigarh. India’s outsourcing capacity is more or less unparalleled. It owes this primarily to its gargantuan population size and the fact that it was the first in the industry. These two factors have contributed to the often incomprehensibly low cost of services in India. This is arguably the largest pull factor, giving India a wild competitive advantage in the outsourcing industry. But where exactly do these cost savings come from?

The most significant cost savings come from employee compensation. Compared to, say, the US, India’s wage rate is lower across the board, with skilled technicians and developers earning about 11% of what their American counterparts do. A senior software engineer or web developer with substantial experience will earn somewhere within the range of $17,000 to $40,000 per year. While this obviously increases with experience and seniority, even senior-level managers make only around 21-27% of what they would if they were working in the US.

Another area from which significant cost savings are made is real estate. A typical Indian outsourcing firm will spend less on occupancy than an American firm. However, there are vast differences in real estate prices. A well located office space in Mumbai will cost approximately $121 per square foot per year—over double what it would cost in downtown New York. On the other hand, the same would cost only $34 in Bangalore’s central business district.

Now for a fun fact: did you know that a lot of what you pay for outsourced services is related to Indian taxes? Although Indirect taxes, such as VAT, are only about 12.5%, there are a host of other taxes that weigh quite heavily on small business. In fact, with an effective tax rate of almost 65%, Indian companies pay more back to the government than those in all other outsourcing locations (World Bank, 2010).

What this all boils down to is a rigorously competitive outsourcing environment. The growth of outsourcing, and no doubt the cost of real estate, has pushed the industry into further corners of the country (my writing this in Chandigarh is a testament to that fact), with more and more people benefiting from the $47 billion sector.

While there are emerging areas of competition around the world—notably the Philippines, Indonesia, Pakistan and Egypt—cost differences are not always significant. In addition, Indian outsourcing companies have years of experience—not to mention reputation—on most of these other countries. So what does this all mean? It means that you, sitting at your computer in the US or wherever else, have opted to check out outsourcing rather than get things done in-house or locally. Good decision, my friend; you won’t get a better deal than the Indians can give you.

Clients versus Designers: A Petition for the Return of the Sketchpad

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Clients Vs Web Designers

ahAAA!

Take away Flash, Photoshop, HTML, CSS and all the other paraphernalia, and web design is essentially a sketchbook and a sharp pencil. The beauty in it lies in the freedom to play, express, grow, shrink and create…well, anything. Now, take that sketchbook, wrap it up, tape the pencil onto the package and mail it to India. What do you have now? Outsourced design. How does freedom factor into this picture?

This is the crux of the problem that many web designers face. Don’t get me wrong, many clients are uncomplicated. Hell, most clients are happiest when they can dump their ideas onto us and give us free reign. Incidentally, this makes us pretty happy too. But once in a while you come across a designer-client relationship that really throws this freedom tension into high relief.

Sometimes, you’ll get a client, and he or she will give you a clear outline of their web design concept. We’ll discuss it, throw it around, and after some back and forth we’ll eventually settle on an approach. At this stage, the assumption is generally that the client relinquishes some control and gives us the space to do our job. There have been times, though, when we’ve sent a more or less completed project back to a client, and the sheer magnitude of the changes he or she made to the project basically negated our involvement to begin with.

We would be lying if we or any other web designer in the world  hadn’t wondered once or twice, “Well, why didn’t you just do it yourself?”

You might be thinking that this sounds strange, that we’re being nitpicky and defensive, that’s we’re being a little bit nuts since we’re going to get paid regardless of how much our clients toy with our creations.

We are quite mad about web design around here, so when someone messes too much with our work, it tends to irk us.

Handing over the job of web design to a stranger is a bit scary, sure. But as a client, once you’ve agreed to it, you really do have to cede some of that control to us. Without the freedom of the allegorical sketchpad and pencil, it is impossible to let our creativity loose. And without creativity, what makes us any different from the next Photoshop Joe looking for a quick buck and a virtual byline? If you give us back our sketchpads, we can give you our expert best.

Miracle Studios is a Creative Design Agency based in India.

New Website New Content New Start

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Miracle Studios New Website

Miracle Studios New Avatar

The first conversation I had as an intern at Miracle Studios began with: “Ok, tell me what you can do, and what you want to do.” I knew immediately that I had chosen the right place to work.

Because what I wanted to do was write, Raj threw me right into creating the text for the company’s new website. I had hardly expected to get an assignment so quickly, let alone one that was so prominent. Truth be told, I was a little overwhelmed. Raj and the team explained that there hadn’t been time to work on in-house projects in the last three years, because of the overwhelming number of clients’ projects that the studio had committed to. But now a window had just opened; I was really walking into a major overhaul.

As I would soon learn, taking on a project at Miracle doesn’t just mean making something new. Everyone—and I mean each person, down to the very last inhabitant of the most distant corner of the office—had ideas that would be incorporated. The general aim was to create something user-friendly, which also showcased what the company was capable of. So I jumped on board and took on my own role in the massive pulling together of ideas and effort.

At this point I had only been writing for Miracle Studios for a very short time. Most people would think that that’s really not enough time to understand a company, and normally I would agree. The thing with Miracle is that you become immediately enveloped in the awesome work culture that makes this place work. I worried that I wouldn’t have any idea what to write about Miracle’s mission, the work they do here and the motivation that drives them. How wrong I was!

Writing for Miracle Studios’ website was easy—inspiring, even—because I got to know the company culture right off the bat. It wasn’t just that Raj sat me down and explained the very personal journey of setting up this company. It was also that designers would come up to me offering candid information and suggestions. The head designer, once came over and told me to relax my writing style a little. “It should be fresh, something you can relate to.” People don’t hesitate to contribute to your work because it’s expected that you will do the same for them. A couple of days later I was at his desk giving my suggestions about the layout and color scheme of the website he was designing. How about that?

I started to understand that this is just how things go here. The people you work with put a lot of faith in your ability to perform, and as a result you don’t just want to commit, you want to give them the best results you can. In the end, I think that the way we all built the new Miracle Studios website is a perfect reflection of that little winged lion that follows you around the website. Just like the company emblem, the site is majestic.

There’s one more thing I think needs to be said. I’ve worked at a lot of places, and I can say with absolute certainty that the one thing every successful company has in common is a boss that vests responsibility and trust in his or her employees. When Raj needs to finalize something, you can be sure that his office will be filled with designers, a couple of administrators, an HR rep and even his week-old content writer. And because this makes us feel involved, we take on every project like it’s belongs specifically to us.

I’m definitely not trying to pay the company lip service—if you look through the website you can see for yourself how much Miracle talk I’ve been engaged in over the last couple of weeks! I’m just writing out my own experience with the company. If it sounds too good to be true, well, what can I say? Sometimes a company really is as good as it says it is.

Gabriela van der Linden

Content writer extraordinaire
miracle studios is a premium web design and development company based in India