Sourcefit, Philippine BPO Companies Step In To Supplement Gov’t Flood Relief Efforts

Manila, Philippines October 9, 2009 – The floods came without warning. City residents are used to the storms and they try not to let them upset their daily routines but tropical storm Ondoy (known internationally as Ketsana) was different. “I knew there was a tropical storm warning but I thought it would just amount to some inconvenience trying to stay dry walking from my ride to the office,” said Kai Desamparado a Customer Service Representative working for leading Philippine BPO provider Sourcefit. “I was in the middle of my shift when I received a call from my family that our house was filling with water. Soon half a dozen of my colleagues had received similar calls. There was no
warning and my family said that within minutes the water was waist deep in our house and even higher in some other houses.”

Ondoy dumped more than a month’s worth of rain in a 24-hour period, overwhelming the city’s drainage system and sending flood waters raging through several city neighborhoods, causing the worst flooding in the capital in more than 40 years. “Everything happened so fast and the affected area was so wide that many of us couldn’t even get home, and the ones that did had to wade for hours through flooded streets,” Kate Fruto said.

Stretched thin by the scale of the flooding, government relief efforts were focused on protecting human lives, leaving displaced residents to fend for themselves or rely on extended family for support. With over 30% of its staff severely affected by the flooding of neighborhoods nearby its offices, Sourcefit management knew it had to step in and fill the gap in relief and services. The first step was to rent temporary housing for the employees who had lost their homes. Next, the company put together two relief funds; one distributing a variety of basic necessities including food and clothing and the other offering no-interest loans to help employees begin rebuilding their lives. "We canvassed our clients to help us build these funds and found them to be tremendously generous" said Sourcefit President Andy Schachtel. "I think that not only are they touched by the tragedy that has struck these people who they work closely with every day, but they are also moved by the dedication of the employees who have been making extraordinary efforts to continue their work despite their hardships."

More than two weeks after the storms, many neighborhoods remain under water and the rebuilding process is slow. With no government assistance, a lack of widespread insurance coverage and limited personal savings, companies such as Sourcefit will continue to play a primary role in helping their employees recover and rebuild their lives.

To donate to general Philippine flood relief efforts please visit The Philippine National Red Cross website.

Source: www.pressabout.com

Making Directory Submission Easier

Directories Benefits

• Provide back links.
• Categorize websites.
• Increase you link popularity.
• Increase your Google Page Rank
• Help you rank for keywords.
• Provide limited traffic.

Types of Directories

• Paid Directories. You pay for a review or inclusion.
• Bidding Directories. You bid on position and may have to raise your bid to keep on top.
• Reciprocal Directories. These require you to place a link back to the directory before you are approved. Must keep up link to be listed.
• Free Directories. These provide you a listing without asking you for money or a reciprocal link. These are the best.
• General Directories. These cover a broad range of topics.
• Topical Directories. Cover a topic broadly. You will find these on topics like lw or medicine.
• Niche Directories. These cover a very limited topic. They might focus on such things as dating or astrology or internet marketing.

Submitting to Directories
You will need to have these before you start to submit to directories

• An email just for submitting.
• URL in http://www format or http:// format. You want a consistent URL to increase your PR. Pick one and use it for all your submissions.
• Ten different titles for your website.
• Different descriptions ranging from 35 characters to 1000 characters.
• InFormEnter for Firefox.
• A spreadsheet to keep track of where you submitted to.
• 5 to 10 deep link titles and urls for directories that accept dep links..

SOURCE: http://www.directoryphoria.com/

Mobile Media Entertainment

Technology re-identified is the attempt to coalesce tools into one mini gadget. We can say that technology is an evolution in a hurry. I wouldn't agree that laziness fathered invention. Humans are just a convenience-hungry creature.

It's really tricky to tell which among the latest gadgets is the newest, as new gadgets swarm the markets in an almost daily basis. We can say that the entertainment value of each concept-created gadget dominates pragmatic reasons. Or, that the primary rationale of most gadgets that is communication has been redefined to make communication more fun.

It is amazing to trace how man has improved his means of communication. He started scribbling in cave walls, has learned to use figures and icons to convey a message and he has later learned to send those messages using trained pigeons. And because man is ever hungry to leave a more expedient life, he never ceased to advance. And man has worked arduously to develop his communication equipment. But besides man's ingenuity and being convenience-hungry is man's love for fun. And man's love for pleasure dates back from the prehistoric era when people go to coliseums to watch feisty gladiators, to these days when south and North Pole can easily converge. Maybe because enjoyment is tantamount to convenience.

And we are man!

We seek entertainment ubiquitously. We enjoy a cab ride and a coffee break when a good song is played on the background, we enjoy a bus ride if it has a television that makes us oblivious of the congested traffic, and on our rest days we would never miss movie marathons or the never ending political ruckus featured in news and current affairs programs. And of course, we would never fail to send text messages to friends, chat with them or talk with them on webcam. It's always fun to exchange greetings with friends after a week-long killer work, don't you agree?

It is staggering that technology has become both a necessity and a source of entertainment.

We are now living the touch screen age, a fast-paced lifestyle. We have become busier people and time has become priceless times three. The things in our must-do list can no longer be accommodated by the 24 hours in one day, and stress has become the most common malady. But as always, technology has provided an answer.

Technology has boosted the doodads that most of us are already accustomed to. Let's take the cell phone as an example. The cell phone that was once a plain SMS and call gizmo has improved to become a multi-media capable device. Such enhancements are much appreciated by company executives and other white collar personnel, but let's not care about what they do with Bluetooth, infrared, video files and WI-FI. Not many of us understand the stock market and banking and finance. But we all know how to pose in front of camera. And we are all addicted to uploading our pictures in friend-finding sites. And we can't stop downloading the latest music video of our favorite boy band or the song of that sexy sultry singer whose face you first saw in the JPEG file that an acquaintance has sent you in MMS.

It will be time-consuming if we need to be seated in one place to do our technical stuffs. Thus, it is only proper to commend technology for coming up with mobile services, special mention to mobile entertainment. Now, we may not be seated in front of a webcam because 3G allows us to make video calls, we can already chat on our cell phones and even surf the internet. We don't have to be at home, in front of our TVs to watch a much-talked boxing match [because the same thing can also be done on our cell phones]. We can forget about our bulky Walkmans or Discmans and just stuck in our ears our mp4's earpiece. Wouldn't you want you be encouraged to lose weight if your jogging shoes have a built-in mp4? And hey, the last time I checked on a tech's must-buy list is a digital camera with mp4 . If there is anything more chic than it, I wouldn't wonder.

We are all technology aficionados, or if not just practical people relying on technology to make our jobs easier. But I remember a line in a Rudyard Kipling poem: Machines are no more than children of our brains... But wow! What amazing children our brains have!