Global Data Case Stories
(actual type of work we do)

Bankruptcy News Service
(News Gathering on Specific Topics)

About a year ago, a D.C. lawyer and an accountant from Princeton walked into our offices here in Cebu. They had a stable business writing and selling newsletters about troubled companies in Asia and America and wanted to shift the news gathering work from the States to the Philippines to save money.

They hired GDS to set up news gathering teams to surf the net profiling countries and news sources on each continent. We would visit these sites daily, harvest the news and upstream the information to their USA editor.

This worked out so well that their bankruptcy news service was able to expand to include South America and Europe. In addition they were able to create other news letter projects that now employ about 20 people here in Cebu.

The reason for this success was that GDS was able to hire people highly skilled in the English language which enabled the client to try out new projects that they always wanted to do but were cost prohibitive to do in the US.

Another advantage was that their US staff was freed up to focus on marketing and project development while most of the labor intensive news gathering was done in Cebu.

The Wall Street Transcripts
(Transcription Work)

Quarterly reports, stockholders meetings and corporate conference calls for publicly held corporations are recorded for the internet.

This Company needed help in transcribing the Q and A sections of these reports so they could publish them on their web site in written form. GDS was hired to record and transcribe these reports from MP3 and real audio files found at specific URLs.

This was a very difficult task due to poor recordings of conference calls, (often done over phone lines) and the highly technical nature of some of the content.

GDS made a serious effort at a difficult task and was able to train a dedicated transcription team that learned the lingo and produced high quality work.

The result of this effort was that the client told GDS that they had tried numerous out sourcing companies from South Africa, Asia, Jamaica as well as the Philippines, but GDS had done the highest quality work.

At the end of the day in New York City (6 PM) TWST sends a list of files to be transcribed to GDS in Cebu where it is 6 AM and the new day has begun.

GDS records the files and give them to transcribers who encode in MS Word. The encoded files are then proofed and sent on to the American Cebu editor who does a final edit and another GDS employee enters the corrections.

At the end of the day in Cebu, about 8p.m the transcribed files are sent to New York City where it is 8 AM and a new day has started. The work has been completed while the client slept and the daily process repeats itself again and again.

WebClippings.com
(Data Harvesting Work)

GDS has various clients who just need to harvest large amounts of data from various URLs to populate database projects they are building.

The CEO of WebClippngs called GDS and told us about a project he was doing that required the collection of data on 16,000 web sites and putting it into an Excel spread sheet.

Since this was a labor-intensive task and our client is in Manhattan where labor and other related cost are high, he looked to us for help.

GDS was able to put together a team of 10 researchers that worked a night shift (internet speed is maximized at this time) and complete this work in less than two months at considerable savings to the client.

Each URL had various search options and information was compiled for eight fields. The completed spreadsheet was proofed for completion and send on the client.

GDS functioned just as a backroom in Manhattan at only a fraction of the cost. The client did not have to hire and train new staff or provide facilities with workstations. GDS was able to provide its client with unitized pricing and enable its worker to be paid on a unit basis.

1st Books, Beard Books, WrightsLaw
(Electronic Publishing )

The traditional way of publishing books is undergoing a revolution. With new print on demand technology that now allows the publication on one book at a time, new authors do not have to support the printing of a large number of books to get published.

Various web sites have been developed to sell and make readable entire electronic libraries of books and enable new authors the chance to get their work to the public.

GDS has been engaged by various companies of this sort to do the basic labor-intensive work. This involves employees skilled in encoding, and highly trained in book formatting and correct use of word processing software.

All manuscripts have to go through a process of encoding, formatting, editing and corrections, embedding graphics and building book covers. This work requires a high degree of training and skills with various word processors such as MS Word and Adobe PageMaker as well as PhotoShop and Quark. To date, GDS has encoded and formatted over 1,000 books in this process that are now published on the net.

This includes conversions to pdf format, tracking and problem solving, as well as author's corrections and book cover work.

Rough book manuscripts are placed at a FTP site where GDS downloads and proceeds with the work. Q and A involving problem books is handled by a systematic communication and tracking system that allows GDS to function as an extension of it client's USA staff.

After a few months of working together a smooth production flow is accomplished that results in high quality work at great savings to our client. The basic publishing work is broken down into compartments and unitized pricing is obtained through volume production.

The standardization of these processes involve intensive training and the experience that GDS has in this area make us a perfect offshore partner for any US based company or University library involved in this type of work.

GDS likes this work because the high degree of skill level and complete dovetailing of our staff into our clients procedures is a challenge that GDS thrives on. The steady and continuous nature of this work enables the development of sophisticated procedures that require the kind of commitment and dedication that GDS prides itself it.

Any company in the US that is in this type of work can build a partnership with GDS that will be mutually beneficial. GDS realizes that this type of work is important to its future development and has an experienced and well trained staff that is dedicated to excellence and seeking partnership with US based electronic publishers.