The Webchutney Blog

This is a heads up to all those nice people who love to waste their time on Facebook and Twitter and what-have-you. If you’ve ever aspired to work for this hallowed organization, here’s your chance.

We are looking for a bright young guy or girl, who can join us at Bombay as a Social Content Manager. Primary responsibilities will include in-house management of social communities for our digital marketing campaigns, an awful lot of which are likely to be social networks in their own right. Additional responsibilities will include working with the leadership within to hone our service offerings in the social space.

Notable character traits in the incumbent should include:

• Active on all major social platforms. Drop us a link to your Friendfeed Account so that we can see for ourselves.
• Ideally have six months of experience in a Social Media/PR Agency. If someone can vouch for you, nothing like it.
• Excellent writing skills. Show us your blogposts and things.
• A sound emotional quotient.
• An eye for usability. Must be able to think in terms of feature augmentation for the social web applications we create, and tell a good idea from a bad one.

Interested? Write to Meghana at meghana [dot] bhat [at] webchutney [dot] net with your resume and other stuff you want to show us, and you could find yourself with a gig at India’s number 1 digital agency.

Update
Subsequent to this blog entry, it was found that people were emailing all sorts of resumes to the above mentioned email address, which has made Meghana mighty pissed. Meghana is Associate Creative Director at Webchutney and is accepting resumes only for this position.

For everything else, the guy to spam is our Human Resources Manager, and he is available at samar [dot] abbas [at] webchutney [dot] net.

Webchutney just did it again – second frigging time in a row!  Oh yeah, Webchutney is the Leading (read No 1) Digital Agency in India as per Ad Agency Reckoner 2009 – a study released every year by Brand Equity & The Economic Times.

They put us under ‘techtonics’ and gave us nice monikers like ‘Lords of the Digital Space’. Thank you, it’s true we are kinda lordy! Credits go out to the work & our super cool clients who trusted us with their brands – Marico, Titan Group, Tata Tea, Airtel, HP, Microsoft, Virgin Mobile, P & G, Uninor and they just keep coming.  

So how did we do it?

The Official Brand Equity Version:  Best digital agency in terms of creative & strategic solutions, knowledge of and investment in most effective technologies, quality & talent of people to address brand problems using technology, give solutions across digital spectrum and provide higher return on digital media investment

Well we couldn’t agree more

No more talk. Let the accolades speak for themselves

When folks at Webchtney feel particularly bored in the afternoon, they decide to have fun with puppets.

Here’s introducing Maratha’s resident spooky puppet, who is yet to be named. Roughly appearing to be some sort of a cross between a swan and a serpent, there seriously is something eerie about the way it walks.

The little fella, under the able guidance of the Creative Director, managed to spook the shit out of our otherwise gung-ho receptionist. And yours truly was able to use it to satisfactorily freak out a female member of the Client Servicing department.

Women will get scared of anything. And its fun.

When you live in a billion-strong nation, that, sanitation is going to be a problem is a no-brainer. Quite possibly, we even have a Ministry for Health and Sanitation. Or, if we don’t I assure you that its in the making.

They say part symbolizes whole, and whole symbolizes part. This couldn’t be more true in the case of Webchutney, your friendly neighborhood Number 1 Digital Agency. For we too face the sanitation problem. Well, at least the male junta here (And if you are one of the sorts who needs to pee too often, you may bear that in mind in case you are thinking of joining us).

To elaborate, there are a grand total of 3 restrooms at the Webchutney offices in Mumbai:

1. 5th floor, Clean but women only (at least until 9 p.m.)
2. 2nd floor, Clean, unisex.
3. 4.5th floor, Dirty, stinky and reserved for male use.

Now, given that all the cool population on the 5th floor is over 90% male, the dirty, stinky restroom between the 4th and 5th floors is always in high demand. For example, I could wager that its occupied right now as you are reading this. We just love it too much.

So what happens when some brave lad from Technology or Creative wishes to opt for instant weight loss and finds that paradise is occupied? There are, of course, two choices:

1. Wait a while, and come back
2. Gun for the unisex loo on the 2nd floor, and hope that its empty

This, of course, is a moment of indecision. Urgency and nature of weight loss desired are both important factors. And you never know how much time the bloke who got there before you is going to take to evacuate. Knocking of course, is impolite. You don’t want to interrupt your colleague’s hard fought moment of nirvana.

This issue has already caused enough heart burn, not to mention reduced work efficiency.

Enter Nishi Kant, our Creative Messiah. Like the rest of us, Nishi too hates moments of indecision. And while nothing can still be done about the dirt and the stinkiness, (yes, we have one of those ‘maintenance chart’ thingies inside but its largely for decorative purposes) Nishi did come up with a creative solution for tackling indecision:

The Illuminated Restroom Occupancy Notifier

The IRON is a simple device which consists of three light bulbs, red, yellow and green on the outside of the john, with matching switches on the inside. The method of operation is simple: after you are in the can, switch on the red or yellow lights depending on the nature of your business; red for long ones, yellow for short. While exiting, always switch to the green light.

Thus, your colleagues can know from afar what to expect, without the effort of actually having to climb down the stairs and push against the door. The IRON is a beacon of hope and the information it transmits is very valuable when it comes to making the choice.

As a matter of fact, information is valuable when making any choice. Heck, this is an information economy. And Nishi is at the forefront.

All hail the messiah!

On 17th of June, we got blighted. Apparently, a worm on one of our office machines managed to append an iframe calling a malicious site to the index page of webchutney.com. These buggers lie in wait for an outbound FTP connection and make their move the moment they get their chance. Damn those virus writers!

Google classified us as a ’site which may harm your computer’, which had us notice the issue and fix it the very same day. The offending iframe was removed from the page, there was an anti-virus marathon, FTP passwords were changed and all Windows machines were denied outbound FTP access for good measure. As of now developers are required to use a VNC connection to a Linux machines for all uploading needs.

Since then, webchutney.com has been very much malware free. Out of paranoia, we’ve been verifying it everyday, and there’s no sign of any fresh infection. A simple view-source on our pages should quickly demonstrate that.

What’s perplexing though is that Google still continues to classify our site as malware. Any number of ‘reviews’ have been requested from both Google’s Webmaster Tools and StopBadware (the company originally supplying the knowhow for this) but to no avail, till now. As irrational it might seem, we even took the extreme step of taking old the website down, in favor of a fresh spanking one which is currently being built. One hopes that the site content changing radically should have some effect. If not, I guess the only solution is to change our website URI.

Google’s dominance over the search engine business means that you get completely screwed over if you get into their bad books. And its quite exasperating to be wrongfully reported by them as a malware facilitator, for ten days and counting. Given that the SafeBrowsing API is now built into modern browsers like Safari and Firefox, this not only screws Seach Engine traffic, even direct visitors get the wrong ideas.

Heck, even the diagnostic page for webchutney.com mentions that malware was found the last time on the 17th, while Google seems to have visited the site many times after that. One expects the search engine overlords to act faster and behave more logically, given the fact that false positives can ruin reputations.

For our part, we can assure you that there’s no malware on any of our websites, and we shall continue to take actions to ensure that it remains so. Search Engine Experts, do chime in with comments with how this problem can be dealt with.

After wishing the problem away for many days, a post simply had to be made. All in all, this is one lesson well learnt. Meanwhile, do look forward to the new webchutney.com. Its gonna be a lot nicer.

Update (June 30, 2009):

• The malware warning has gone (Finally!). Thank you, Google for having mercy.
• The new webchutney.com website has been up since a couple of days. Do check it out if you haven’t already.

May I have your attention please? This is Webchutney Mumbai News Bulletin, reporting on the happenings in these parts of our hallowed organization, not necessarily live, but exclusive nevertheless.

Ever since King Iqbal left his dominion to pursue higher things at Delhi, many people here have had a reason to rejoice. First and foremost, the highly restrictive no smoking edict was revoked by means of a spirited uprising. Smokers at the Chutneyplex, tired with being ill-treated all this while, ferociously staked their claim to a room which, since then, has been designated as the official smoking zone. This meant an end to furtively smoking cigarettes on the stairs or huddling in the Kitchen like pre-independence Harijans (those are the words of the CEO himself). Cigarettes can now be smoked in a relaxed manner in the aforementioned area, in between intermittent bouts of what masquerades as “work” at the Chutneyplex.

Creation of the smoking zone, of course, involved the movement of the non-smoking populace of the room in question to another one exclusively meant for their kind. Since all of the smokers here are male and most of the non-smokers otherwise, the great smoker vs non-smoker divide has become a synonym for the eternal one: Mars vs Venus. It didn’t take much time for two rival camps on the basis of gender to emerge, and since then they have been constantly in a state of a cold war of sorts. Of course, there is a third camp as well: people who are largely indifferent about this whole business, but they don’t really count (If you don’t feel strongly about anything, nobody is going to take you seriously anyway).

Tempers flared up this Tuesday, when the cold war ceased to be cold, and blossomed into a full blown conflict. The sequence of events goes something like this: Members of the mild mannered male faction were minding their own business, and doing what they usually do at 11:00 am – smoke cigarettes – when a messenger from the neutral zone entered and drew their attention to the salvo which had been fired from the female camp. The offending object was a highly provocative message which had been furtively stuck onto the door of their fortress, attempting to imply, quite needlessly and much to the male faction’s chagrin, that there was something distinctly porcine about them.

The members of the male faction then decided to get their act together after finishing their cigarettes and launch a blitzkrieg campaign. A twelve point execution plan was formulated after referring to the requisite Sun Tzu manuals, and the responsibility its execution was delegated to three sub-teams:

Red Team : Creative

Blue Team : Espionage

Black Team : Logistics (Includes refreshments, cigarettes, etc)

The Red Team, with its trusty Google^TM Image Search and witty copy made the war hammer which would strike deep into the heart of the enemy. Likewise, the Blue team’s job was to distract the enemy and engage them at a different location, reminiscent of allied invasion of Normandy. Most importantly, the Black Team was basically running back and forth with supplies like paper, scissors, adhesive tape and cigarettes.

Twenty minutes of intense effort by the male faction led to the eventual achievement of the objective, and what they hoped was the annihilation of the enemy spirit. In retaliation to being compared with pigs, they had succeeded in posting a message at the enemy’s doorstep which suggested an absence of intelligence on the female faction’s part.

The latter of course, did not take this lying down, and an open confrontation broke out subsequently. Reliable witnesses aver that there was lot of shouting and hullabaloo, the collective productivity of the Chutneyplex being seriously hampered for a while. Eventually, a truce was brokered. Both sides were allowed to savagely destroy the messages posted onto the entry-points of their respective fortresses, and peace was restored.

The atmosphere is still tense at the Chutneyplex, and the current state of things can’t be exactly described as normal. Both sides are in a state of readiness, each constantly having an eye out for what the other might be up to.

The cauldron still simmers: for now, a wait and watch policy has been adopted. Fear not, dear reader, for the Webchutney Mumbai News Bulletein shall keep you updated on latest, as it happens.

– With inputs from Mustafa Syed, Saket Vaidya for the Webchutney News Bulletein

I’m not quite sure if this is something to write home about, but here goes nevertheless. Julia Roberts can claim credit to sleeping with the enemy, but only in Webchutney can you sleep with the boss. That too, when you are at work.

Greetings, Earthlings. You are being addressed by the Vulturo, Prince Of Darkness, an unimaginably evil being, who is known to masquerade as Saket Vaidya, the Social Media Analyst at Webchutney. And today, he shall share with you, an excellent game which you can play to sharpen your grey cells, and among other things, waste your time.

Webchutney has always been a company full of smokers, and of that, we are quite proud. The Mumbai Office, until very recently, was a free-smoking zone. The healthy cigarette consumption ensured that at least a 100 odd ITC employees were assured of their daily bread and butter through the fauj’s benevolence, alone.

There is an unwritten law which states that the availability of matches is inversely proportional to the quantum of cigarettes being smoked, and at times, it leads to chronic matchstick shortages. Often, when one fauji asked another for a light, he got a response “Yaar light ki fight hai” (Fight hai, is standard chutney lingo, by the way).

And then the inevitable happened. Like all good things, happy times for smokers at Chutneyplex Mumbai came to an end, when the powers that be declared “Thou shalt not smoke anywhere, but in the Kitchen”. Cigarette consumption reduced, and due to the aforementioned law, the fauj was forced to deal with a matchstick surplus.

Then came along Anirban Biswas, the SEM superstar at Chutney, who invented an extremely invigorating game called Webchutney Light Fight™ which achieved the twin objectives of productively utilising the matchstick surplus, and sharpening one’s intellect.

The game, which is meant to be played against each other by two people, goes thusly: You take fifteen matchsticks. You arrange them in three rows: The first, second and third rows containing three, five, and seven matchsticks respectively.

Subsequent to which, your opponent is invited to pick up one or more matchsticks, with the condition that all the matchsticks which are picked up must belong to one row (e.g. one may choose to pick four matchsticks from row three, or just one match stick from row one, or even all the matchsticks from row two. Or anything else for that matter, you get the drift)

After your opponent is done and it is your turn, you pick any number of matchsticks provided they are all from the same row. That done, your opponent is again invited to play his turn and and the game continues indefinitely in this fashion, the person who picks up the last remaining matchstick being the loser.

In order to win the game, you must pick up your matchsticks in such a way that you leave the last matchstick on the board for your opponent (e.g. The game has proceeded to a stage where there is a single matchstick on row one, and three matchsticks on row two. You pick up all the three matches on row two and leave your opponent stranded with the solitary matchstick on row one)

Anirban Biswas and Vikram Gahlot have devoted considerable research to this game and have developed a secret algorithm which helps them apply superior strategies to ensure that they never lose against lesser opponents, no matter if they play first or second. If you feel that you have it in you to beat them, please feel free to throw in the gauntlet.

The team at Mumbai is, in fact, contemplating requesting the powers that be, to make sure that all future faujis have to prove their skills at WCLF as a mandatory part of the interview process.

So, if you plan to seek a job at Webchutney anytime soon, start practising. Here’s to happy playing!

The Webchutney Blog is set to move from its old home to this spanking new website, in what we expect to be a very short while.

Keep watching this space – the transition will happen soon, we promise.