Since the foundation of Bridge we follow the idea of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). As an Outsourcing company with offices in Ukraine, Moldova and India, Bridge feels socially responsible for the countries in which our offices are situated. To improve the balance of the world we want to make a contribution as well; we want to give a part of our profit back to the people of these countries.

Recently we got to know about a charity organization in India called Love and Serve that provides school accessories to children who cannot afford to buy them. As Bridge is especially interested in supporting education, we wanted to get to know more about this organization and their activities. After we met the founder of the organization we decided to support them yearly with a donation.

When Basheer Palliyalil started his charity in 1998, he was working as a teacher for mentally disabled children in Malappuram, situated in north of Kerala (South India). In this region there are many villages where people are poor and live below poverty level. Though his work he got to know many families where the parents are permanently ill and because of that not able to work, so he started to support their children that they can go to school and get the chance of a better life.

This organization has been doing this for the last 12 years, they started by supporting 10 children and now they are able to help around 520 children in continuing their education. Mostly families that need his help, got to know about him from other students of the neighborhood, so they write a letter to Love and Serve and Basheer goes to visit them and see their situation.

The children they support are studying in government schools, so tuition fee and text books are provided by the government, but for poor families that’s mostly not enough. School education in India is expensive and they cannot afford the equipment that is necessary. Due to the face that the government doesn’t give any help, they are dependent on the help of a charity.

Love and Serve provides them with 2 pairs of uniforms, notebooks, pens, pencils, instrument box and also basic food for the family like rice. It costs them 350 Indische Rupees (ca. 5€), to provide these accessories for each child for one year.

By now Basheer Palliyalil  is only part-time working as a teacher and most of his time he spends for Love and Serve to find more people that want to contribute. Till now around 100 people/companies support the organization. Mostly he finds donators by spreading the word as also Bridge got to know about him and his project.

In future he wants to continue to find more people that can support his charity by a donation. And also we want to spread the word that more people get aware of the necessity to act socially responsible.

On April 12th Adobe launched a new version of Adobe Software -  Adobe Creative Suite 5 (CS5).

To celebrate the launch of the new range of Adobe products and technologies, Bridge has sponsored an Adobe Launch Event that took place on April 10th in Kochi, India. It gave programmers and designers the chance to learn from the creators what’s new and to socialize and interact with other experts in the industry.

According to the variant the new software package CS5 contains all or some of the programs: Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Acrobate, Flash, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Premiere, After Effects, Soundbooth, OnLoccation and Encore. Most improvements will be for Photoshop that celebrates it’s 20th birthday this year and also for Illustrator and InDesign.

Photoshop gets more intelligent

CS5 has more improvements for Photoshop than ever a version before. Image contents will be recognized better what enables difficult manipulations and retouching. In particular Adobe is proud of the function “Content Aware Fill” that makes it possible to remove any content from an image. This function even works when there is a high variation of colors and lights in the background. The extended version will even have some new tools to create and work on 3D graphics and 3D animations.

Moreover the new version of Photoshop offers a bunch of small improvements that were made according to user suggestions. For instance provides the tool to drop images now a raster in the golden ratio (for the image-composition the image will be separated horizontally and vertically in three parts by auxiliary lines) and images will be straighten automatically.

Because of the economic crises last year a lot of companies had to announce their insolvency. According to ‘Creditreform’ (a German credit information) there was a total of 185.000 firms in Europe that were driven to illiquidity.

Also for the year 2010 many experts predict no improvement in trade. Despite the economic recovery, the number of firm-bankruptcies will still rise.

Even in Bridge we could feel the impact of the crises, but we were not that much affected by it. After a silly season in summer 2009,  the amount of requests were increasing rapidly. Bridge is able to look optimistically in the future and expects a high growth rate for 2010.

One indicator therefore is for example that we had to hire a bunch of new programmers in the last months because we reached our capacity limit and couldn’t deal with every order immediately. Moreover all Bridge offices are still searching for new staff. Of course that is something that we did and do with pleasure and we are happy about our new employees.

In Bridge India and Bridge Ukraine we started to move a bit closer together, till finally the office space were not sufficient anymore and we decided to move to bigger offices.

To find an office in India is not easy; searching for a well maintained building, in a quite area that has also the perfect size can be a challenge. Additional there are also some restrictions that limit the choice of properties. But every challenge can be won and so we found the perfect suitable office for Bridge India after only two weeks.

The movement was done by an external company during the weekend, so that everybody could work undisturbed till Friday and with a typical Indian tradition of lightening oil candles we inaugurated the new office on Monday, March 8th, and started with a good feeling to set up the systems and arrange the working space.

Compared to the old one the new office has several advantages, not only that there is now enough space to house all our employees, we even have enough space to hire a lot of more people, the office could accommodate the double amount of staff. Other advantages are that the office is situated in a calm and peaceful area that has even a better grit connection and that the house is more friendly and bright; so power cuts will be less and the working atmosphere improved.

Even in Ukraine the previous office became too small for the programmer team. There we had only two rooms, that all our programmers shared. Maybe that would have been enough if we did not plan to grow .

But like Bridge India also Bridge Ukraine is planning to grow. We are going to hire some more programmers since we got a lot of requests from our clients and also we expect that we will have more clients and more contracts in future.

Our new Bridge Ukraine office is still situated in Odessa, in the same area where the previous one was. Now we have four rooms, an entrance hall and also a small kitchen. One of these rooms we plan to use as a meeting room. Later we could use it for new employees too. Summing up, we can say we have definitively big reserves of space for team growing.

When we first time entered the office we noticed that we will have a lot of space there, so the first step was to think how we could make it more cozy and comfortable. Also we are now thinking of having an animal–talisman in the new office. Actually we have some kind of a Bridge symbol –  an animated penguin that we call Bridgy and that we use on our websites and for marketing actions, but of course we can’t be so cruel and take a real  penguin to our office. At the moment there are a lot of discussions going on: parrot or hamster,  rabbit or fishes… Till now we do not have a final decision.

Also if the question of what animal would be most suitable for living in our Bridge Ukraine office is still open, we are convinced that this talisman will bring us good luck and that we can further follow the positive trend and carry on growing.

“Imagine it more as a big open lounge where people come and go, talk to others in their industry, showcase demo’s of what they are working on, save the world, and ultimately maybe get some work done and run a few small meetings.”

Following up the great success that our Dutch colleagues from Bridge Holland have achieved when they started their first OPEN COFFEE in Hoorn, The Netherlands, Bridge India is now organizing the first OPEN COFFEE KOCHI.

The Indian subsidiary of Bridge is situated in this big and busy but also beautiful city in the south of India. Here and all around India IT is one of the biggest industries. Due to the fact that we consider knowledge sharing and networking to be important, we want to follow the concept of Open Coffee that was started in London and is organized worldwide on more than 100 locations.

Open Coffee was started to encourage entrepreneurs and investors to organize real-world informal meet-ups to chat, network and grow a better ecosystem. Spread out all over the world it became a famous networking event that is arranged in many cities. The time and content differs per city, but everywhere you meet nice and interesting people. The underlying meaning is of course to see if you can add value to each other. but the atmosphere also invites to simply chitchat and show interest in your colleague-entrepreneurs.

The first OPEN COFFEE KOCHI will take place on April 21st in the Avenue Regent on MG Road in Kochi.

Bridge India wants to organize these Open Coffee meetings every month to give entrepreneurs, investors, developers and creative genius of the IT but also of other industries the chance to share knowledge and build a network.

There is no fixed agenda, the participation is free and the number of participants is unlimited.

If you would like to know more about OPEN COFFEE KOCHI and the first event, join one of our groups in linked-in or facebook.

http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=2849457&trk=myg_ugrp_ovr

“Let’s not treat it just another social networking event - if you don’t make it along, it’s not the end of the world – there’s one every month. You don’t have to go round speaking to everyone – sometimes it’s good to meet a few good people and a few in-depth discussions – the other people will probably be there next month!”

…You join the Bridge Club!?

That’s the question we want you to wonder about.

Even we, the marketing team of Bridge, just started with a question: How can we attract customers and how can we keep them with us?

Approximately one year ago we were thinking about these questions and therefore we did a lot of research, brainstorming and marketing meetings. Pretty fast we were sure
about our core goals and that we want to create a loyalty program to reach these goals.

- Get a closer relationship to our clients,

- Show our clients that and how they can benefit form a cooperation with us,

- Show our clients that we are a friendly and open company

- Make our clients satisfied and

- Make our clients returning to us.

With these core goals we start to work on our ideas. We wanted to create not only a benefit program but also a new face for our company that look warm, friendly, open and helpful. A face that customers can always associate with our company.

At the beginning we developed a concept to clarify what our benefit program shall include, how it should work and how we can get our customers to know about it.

In this phase we also started to search for the perfect name, a name that combines all our goals, that is catchy and that makes our clients feel like a part of something important. As we also wanted to involve all our employees in this marketing development process we requested them to send us their proposals. The decision wasn’t easy but at the end we decided for the “Bridge Club” and from that day on all our work and efforts got a name.

A lot of creating and development work followed. We started to create a website, announcements, information, gifts, membership cards, postcards, etc.

Also we decided that we want to make Bridge more involved in social projects in the countries we are settled. Therefore we started to support and work with a charity in Kochi (India) which also developed some of the gifts we want to send to our Bridge Club partners. In future we want to increase our social work, both in India and Europe.

After a long time of setting up every element of the Bridge Club we are proud to release it on this March 1st. From this day on all our clients will be a part of the Bridge Club and will profit by certain benefits.

Now there is only one question I am still wondering about: When do YOU join the Bridge Club?

Read more: http://bridge-india.in/club-ancmnt/you-common.html

Bridge offers its customers a cooperation model which gives European companies the chance to hire one programmer, or a team of programmers from us. So these companies can increase their capacity with the insurance to have a professional and trustful IT company in the background of these programmers. And in the same time they can not only avoid the exhausting recruiting process, but also save money.

Maybe you wonder how this process of hiring a dedicated programmer or team looks like. I want to explain this with an example of a customer from Germany who wanted to increase the capacity of his own programmer team and started working together with our Indian PHP developers, Lekha and Anish.

As in all recruiting processes, the first thing we did to find these two team members was to define the profile and skills that the wished candidates should have to fulfill the job role perfectly. But different to the normal process of recruiting, all following steps were done by Bridge. We selected several CVs of candidates who would match perfectly to the customers’ expectations and would fit in the job role.

These candidates either already work for Bridge, or we will search with the help of our long-term-partner recruiting agencies for more good people.

After we agreed on two profiles, we arranged an interview, or better said a meeting, in Skype. Involved in this meeting were not only he and the developers but also his project manager, the director of Bridge India and me, an Account Manager. Thanks to all modern communication tools, we had an interview with six people at the same time. It was more a friendly talk to get to know each other better than a normal interview. This way it brought all involved people already closer to each other and the customer got a better idea if these persons really match his expectations. And he got a better feeling if they’ll fit in his team before he made the last decision.  At the end of this talk all contract details were fixed and the contract was signed after a few days.  It took the client by surprise how fast and easy it went; it was a good start for a friendly partnership.

In the last centuries the issue of social responsibility of companies (Corporate Social Responsibility or short CSR) has been given a lot of attention by our society. As the ecological load limit became more and more noticeable, CSR is more and more considered as a necessity, especially in the time of an industrial change and growing globalization.

Customer’s and investor’s expectations about the social responsibility of their suppliers are nowadays higher then ever before and even investment decisions became dependent on social factors; especially, if it is a company with business relations in a developing country, since these are more confronted with CSR issues.

http://www.indianet.nl/CSRIndia_CREMfinal.pdf, http://www.bkk.de/bkk/psfile/downloaddatei/74/soziale_ve414826ee42067.pdf

As an Outsourcing company, Bridge feels socially responsible for the countries in which our offices are situated. To improve the balance of the world we want to make a contribution as well; we want to give a part of our profit back to the people of these countries.

Therefore we support several social organizations.

One of these organizations, called Dorcas Aid International, is situated in Holland. It was founded of a small group of people following the Christian religion in 1980 that committed their selves to act to take care of poor and oppressed people independent of their race, religion, gender or political conviction.

Now, more then twenty years later, Dorcas Aid International is operating worldwide providing social, development and relief aid through over 100 projects in more than 20 countries in Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, Middle East, Eastern and Southern Africa.

In collaboration with Dorcas Aid Bridge supports two grannies that are not able to emerge their own livelihood and a young IT student that could not study without any support in Ukraine.

To read more about this organization you can use the following link: www.dorcas.net/

Another organization that we support is Befriend. This initiative was founded with the aim to support small-scale projects for the benefit of people in deprived and vulnerable situations. Due to the fact that Bridge has an office in Kochi (Kerala, South India), we take an active part in a project, which supports a community in South India with the development of an IT educational centre for children to give them the chance for a better future.

If you would like to know more about Befriend visit their website: www.befriend.nl/

Located directly in Kochi, we also support the Raksha Society, an organization for children with special needs. This association provides various kinds of services for children with disabilities.

The school has a handicraft section where they make different products that they sell later on like toys out of wood, sheets, candles and bags. Here they also produce some gifts for Bridge that we give to our Bridge Club partners. These gifts will be revealed soon when our Bridge Club is launched. Thereby even every one of our clients supports indirectly this Society.

We are proud that many of our clients notice our social engagement with contentment and that they take stock in our activities. We, as a company are not able to change the world, but we try to see the world through the eyes of the people around us and to take a responsibility for our society.

Video: http://www.befriend.nl/video_soorya.html