Recruiting Disrupted: What’s Your Online Score?

Finding the needle in a haystack in search for the right talent is getting harder as the traditional recruitment models are being disrupted by social networks and increasing number of online services for professional resumes. True story: While professional social network LinkedIn just passed 100M members, growing at a rate of 1M new members per week, an executive recruiting agency just had a seminar on topics ”What is LinkedIn?” and “The difference between Twitter and a chat?”. They better hurry. The landscape is rapidly moving towards social recruiting services in verticals, good example being the newly launched Careers 2.0 by Stack Overflow, offering programmers create free online resume that weighs in their forum activity.

“No longer will your resume be your own version of your work history; it will also include a data-driven third party’s assessment. You will also be judged by your network, online activity, level of contribution, all adding up to your online score. The next time you look for a job, don’t be surprised if someone asks you for your score.”

“How much are you worth and would you opt-out from social scoring systems?”

Student Competitions Harnessing World’s Top Students

Flickr CC: Daniel Greene

When Foursquare, the coolest lbs kid in town, favourite of approx. 3 million users with 200 million check-ins, was down earlier this week, the social web reacted with frustration, sad tweets, and hunt for alternative check-in services.

Apparently, the most dedicated Foursquare users hooked on rewards and badges even chose to stay at home , until they were able to collect rewards of their check-ins.

“We are hearing from many users (they want to remain anonymous) that they are staying at home until the service is restored. One user called us on our tips hotline noting that it just “isn’t worth going out if you can’t get a badge”.”

The concept of check-in also continues to heat up among businesses, especially fashion industry going gaga over the new ways location based services allow brands to interact with, as monetize their customers. Good example of how hot it is, Swedish retailer giant H&M just launched their first Foursquare campaign in Sweden, regardless the fact, that use of location based services is still fairly moderate in Sweden. Gowalla holds the pole position with 35 000 users against Foursquare’s 9 000 users. The buzz and eyeballs around the campaign evidently are worth as much.

Sharing location was seemingly hot concept already back in 2007, when Facebook filed for a patent on general sharing location mechanisms. The patent was granted this week, adding an extra twist on the already competitive space.

Map.pr Finds You Interesting Places With Help Of Groups

The one not afraid of patents and competition is Swedish Map.pr. Map.pr is all about location around groups and interests, based on the idea that your friends make the best maps. Map.pr uses places from Foursquare, building enhanced search on top to let you find cool places nearby recommended by your group members. No need to trust the “Giraffe sign”  I’ve been one of the beta testers, and since its release in July, the app has already had thousands of downloads.

When you check in with Map.pr, you still check-in with Foursquare, so you don’t miss out on any badges or mayorships. But what’s unique to Map.pr, with any check-in, one can also check-in with a group one belongs to. To give a sense of a venue’s popularity, unlike Foursquare, Map.pr iPhone app also shows how many individual and team check-ins a venue has. Anyone can create its own group, and the possibility to create and add venues via Map.pr is being added in the next coming update. Until now, it’s only been possible to check-in to already existing venues.

There’s no native Android app on the roadmap, instead an updated mobile web version with check-in functionality is round the corner. Check-ins with Facebook Places, which hasn’t reached Nordics yet, aren’t yet allowed by Facebook API, but instead Map.pr is about to integrate with new Facebook Groups, released earlier this week with both privacy blunders as upsides, to let you share check-ins within a group, private or open. As before, one can share check-ins to both Facebook and Twitter. Gowalla users have, for now, been left out of the service.

Map.pr White Label To Boost Businesses’ Customer Engagement

Cartomapic, the startup behind Map.pr, was founded early 2010 by a team with backgrounds in Google Maps and Spotify, surely qualifing regarding domain competence within location and app design. But, as all social check-in services, they’re about understanding and triggering human behaviour. Since grouping and categorizing venues as function isn’t considered a long term competitive advantage, Map.pr needs to do something else differently. One way is to monetize by competing with a more attractive price model on partnerships than its established competitors. It also plans to offer its solution as a white label, letting businesses create their own branded check-in services around events, releases etc. I find the idea of focusing on aggregating check-ins and information from several location based services, e.g. like Buzzd does with hottest venues nearby right now, compelling. By also aggregating check-in info into a comprehensive recommendation system for groups, I could see how Map.pr just might find its way to the end of the rainbow.

Paula is online strategist and startup evangelist. She blogs at paulamarttila.com and here at Bub.blicio.us.
Connect with her on Twitter, LinkedIn,
Drop her email at paula.marttila[at]gmail[dot]com

By Julie Blaustein

Evan Williams, CEO of Twitter

The Girls in Tech event, TWITTER NATION Fireside Chat with Evan Williams, CEO of Twitter was held at the incubator Kicklabs in San Francisco with over 100 attendees. It was moderated by Claire Cain Miller, reporter for the New York Times. The chat was full of new and interesting information about Twitter and, surprisingly Evans was quite entertaining.

Evan Williams is known for inventing the term blogger and in fact one of his previous companies, Blogger, was acquired by Google. His success is a result of his need to be driven by his passion within. He is a big fan of Napolean Dynamite who he sees as one of the biggest geeks that there is, but so geeky, that he is cool.

Twitter had over 90 million tweets the day of the event and has now more than 145 million users. Evans feels  there has been no real need for PR and Promotion until recently, and that is because they were “lucky” enough not to need it. Twitter shares a great deal of information not surprisingly, on their own Company Blog .

Eric Brown, Sarah Brown, Lisa Phillips and Dana Contreras of Twitter

Did you know that Twitter is hiring! They have grown to over 300 people and are continuing to grow. Williams feels its important to continue having meals together to get to know one another. Perks include not only working in SF but having your gym membership covered, yoga, pilates and of course most of your meals taken care of.

What is it like working at Twitter? The Twitter folks present at the event were more than enthusiastic about being a part of this fast-moving train that the entire world has either joined or is quickly jumping on board.

Flickr cc: Tramidepain

Robert Polet, CEO Gucci, has famously said:

“We are not selling handbags or shoes. We are selling dreams. That market will always be there.”

While the statement still holds the truth, what’s hot and what’s not in the world of fashion is no longer decided by the few and privileged ones. The social web is changing the rules, by giving independent fashionistas the voice and the tools to get recognized for their own individual taste. As the web and commerce gets more social, so does every step of a decision making process.

Brands are starting to recognize the need of being part of the various stages of decision making process taking place in social networks. Facebook Like button has become the first step to connect with potential customers, and it was only last week Starbucks as the first brand reached more than 10 Million Facebook Likes, and became one of the top ten largest Facebook pages. When it comes to fashion brands, though, one needs to scroll down the list, finding only two fashion brands to make the top 100 list: Victoria’s Secret on place 44 with 5 Million Facebook fans, followed by Converse All Star on place 83 with 3.8 Million fans.

ModCloth, Bloglovin’ and Fashiolista harnessing Likes beyond Facebook

But, not all “liking” happens or is being harnessed on Facebook. ModCloth, San Francisco based indie fashion site featuring vintage-inspired clothing just recently raised $19.8 Million in funding to meet the growing demand of hot fashion items frequently being sold out. ModCloth was early on to recognize and create a marketplace for independent, up and coming designers, reporting $19 Million in sales last year. Influence ranks high among fashionistas, thus by engaging fashion bloggers and fashionistas to become virtual fashion buyers to help ModCloth choose which designs get created, it’s also able to predict the demand much earlier. Watch Eric and Susan Koger, the husband and wife founders of ModCloth, interviewed by Jason Kincaid on TechCrunch TV.

To further interact with fashionistas, ModCloth ran a fashion campaign earlier this year together with Bloglovin’, Swedish blog aggregator startup with 96% female users and 5.5 Million monthly visits. Influential fashion bloggers were chosen by Bloglovin’ to promote fashion items in a transparent and trustworthy way, resulting 5 out 14 items to have been sold out within 24 hours.

Aiming to become the start page for fashion blogging, Bloglovin’ recently also launched a new start page, described as a visual Digg for fashion blogging. By introducing a voting system called “Like”, the most popular blog posts in fashion can now be featured. Bloglovin’ has been picking up steam among fashionistas world wide, overtaking both Style.com and Teenvogue.com with its 1.1 Million monthly unique visitors. Brands like DKNY and Roberto Cavalli have discovered Bloglovin’ to reach out to fashionistas, and H&M has been a frequent advertiser on the site. US fashion bloggers like Fashionchalet and fashiontoast have already created a larger following on Bloglovin’ than for example on Twitter, counting over tens of thousands of followers.

Fashiolista is another European fashion startup from Netherlands, where Likes and “Loves” are everything. It’s a fashion community with a handy bookmarklet tool that lets you collect, save and share all the fashion finds with the rest of the world. One can easily follow other Fashiolistas to get inspired of their fashion sense, as add items from nearly any online fashion shops, such as ModCloth, who has implemented Fashiolista’s bookmarklet. When it will be possible to start subscribing specific tags on Fashiolista, I can see the site getting seriously compelling. Henriette Weber, Danish social media avantgardista and fashionista herself, recently interviewed the founders of Fashiolista.

With help of services like Bloglovin’ and Fashiolista, the life of fashionistas gets easier, when being able to spot the fashion blogs that don’t suck, as to track down the perfect summer season items in the nude.

As for “safe” fashion discovery, I recommend first to head over to Mint Goals to set up your saving plan for all the fashion Likes and Loves. Happy Liking!

More Bub.blicio.us reading on Fashion

Paula is online strategist and startup evangelist. She blogs at paulamarttila.com and here at Bub.blicio.us.
Connect with her on Twitter: @paulamarttila
Drop her email at paula.marttila[at]gmail[dot]com

I rarely splurge on shopping since I thrive off of bargain finds. I get such satisfaction of getting a $450 dress for $25 that I scan sale racks and sift through clearance outlets most of the time. However, sometimes I catch myself gushing over a Chloe handbag or some Miu Miu killer pumps. I bite my tongue to hold back the tears as I put the item back and walk away knowing I can’t afford them.

Alas, there is hope for those extreme shopping splurges from Mint.com and I plan on trying it out asap! With the newly launched Mint Goals, I can now plan a smart and financially responsible way to purchase that splurge without having to feel guilty or rack up more credit card bills.

A simple action plan is created for me showing the best and fastest way to get those shoes or that handbag. I enter how much the item is and how much I can set aside a month and when I would ideally like to get that item. Then Mint Goals will let me know when I’ll be more likely to actually save enough for that item. You can also customize the goal by naming it and uploading a picture, so you can stare at a picture of that coveted item and know that soon, it will be yours!

Guess I’ll have to go find something to splurge on so I can start to set my goals!!!

Photo Credit: Sean Percival

This week is the National Women’s Health Week empowering women to make their health a top priority. And it’s not only women’s health that we should be concerned about. Childhood obesity in United States has more than tripled in the past 30 years, and there are more than 1 billion overweight adults globally, of which at least 300 million are obese. Food industry is vowing to make processed food healthier, meanwhile studies showing how addictive fatty foods are, also suggesting that processed carbohydrates may increase the risk of obesity, diabetes and heart disease more than fat does.

Jamie Oliver’s new TV show Foodrevolution has a mission to fight childhood obesity and change the way America eat. His combined Facebook and Twitter community has passed 700 000 followers and the petition to improve school food has so far been signed by half a million people. It’s a great example of how to create awareness by engaging directly with the community, both online and offline. Watch this clip with Stephen Colbert (4min in) and the magnitude of the challenge the nation in whole is facing becomes evident.

So, what if you could bring a personal trainer, dietician and motivator with you all the time? In your pocket? Now you can. DailyBurn and Swedish ShapeUp Club are two easy to use online weight loss and fitness services, both with free iPhone apps. Yes, you can get started with your new life with zero cost (ShapeUp Club is soon to have an application available for Nokia). DailyBurn’s freemium model also offers a basic functionality free online, whereas with ShapeUp Club one can sign up starting at $3 per month to get added functionality, such as advanced nutrition tracking with charts, back-up and online community.

Setting up ones individual health program is quickly done in both services, whether one is looking for losing, keeping or gaining weigth. The iPhone apps make it really easy to record daily food and exercise, with metric system of ones choice, allowing one to create, add and favourite food items and meals. Both services sync all data with the online account. DailyBurn is a bit more fitness orientated with lots of various workout program and challenges, where one can find like minded people for support to achieve fitness goals.

I spent previously four years on developing the largest online weight loss service in Sweden (Viktklubb.se) in collaboration with an obesity unit, that also conducts research studies on weight loss online with help of the service. These are my learnigs and thoughts on why I think the two services have figured out the key success factors of weight loss, thereby already enjoying over 100 000 users in respective service.

1. The social aspects of weight control. Gaining and retaining motivation with the help of the community, day or night, is very important. To find and interact with other people in the same situation has shown to be crucial to many. Besides from the inbuilt communities, this is where social networks like Facebook and Twitter come to help to increase the interactivity, thus strengthening the core service. ShapeUp Club has been more focused on blogging than social networking so far, where I’m especially happy to see DailyBurn engaging with its users.

2. Easy registering of daily calories and activities. iPhone apps do just that! The most annoying thing users know is spending a lot of time to fill in the diary of daily calories and activities. It brings down the motivation and once one skips registering, it gets harder to stay on track. I think both services have done a great job even if I find it a bit easier with ShapeUp Club. On the other hand, DailyBurn offers a FoodScanner app for $0.99 to easier find foods by scanning UPC barcodes or typing in food names.

3. Visualization of the progress. This is the number one motivational factor. To see charts and diagrams over ones weight, waistline, body fat, to name a few, does wonders. DailyBurn is also connected to Withings, a WiFi scale linked to the Internet that automatically tracks weight and body fat directly to DailyBurn. Trust me, men like this one. Men has shown to be more competitive, also when it comes to fitness and weight loss, thus making the information publicly available a good motivator.

4. Watercheck/Water tracker. Grown ups should drink at least 2 liter (0,5 gallon) water per day. Registering and visualizing the daily water consumption is a great way to get a hang of how much water one actually drinks during one day. I’ve learned how easy it is to be mistaken of ones daily water consumption. I particularly like the neat implementation of watercheck in ShapeUp Club’s iPhone app.

As Andy Smith, CEO and Co-Founder of DailyBurn, said: “You manage what you measure”. (quote by Mark Suster). I couldn’t agree more.

Ps. Not to worry! For the occasional social drinks, stick with gin & tonic and wine. They’re the kindest when it comes to calories.

Paula is online strategist and startup evangelist. She blogs at paulamarttila.com and here at Bub.blicio.us.
Follow her on Twitter: @paulamarttila
Drop her email at paula.marttila[at]gmail[dot]com

by Julie Blaustein

What is a start up company to do that is on a limited marketing budget or perhaps even overseas planning to launch? Why not enter to win the Web 2.0 Expo’s Launch Pad where they will receive instant and incredible amounts of exposure of their products or services to the Web 2.0 market. That is exactly what over 80 companies did but only 6 finalists were chosen to present before a panel of judges and were voted by the audience to be the winner. On Wednesday, May 5th. at the Web 2.0 Expo, the six finalist had just five minutes to present their company and if they went over that time they were gonged. Three judges included Ellen Park, VP of Marketing at Elance, Brian Singerman is a Principal at Founders Fund and Marshall Kirkpatrick is the lead writer at ReadWriteWeb.com and previously with Tech Crunch provided instant feedback and questions on the spot. Brady Forrest, Web 2.0 Expo Co-Chair, hosted the program.

Based on the people’s choice as determined by the audience’s clapping volume, the winner was Rhomobile. They create cross-platform native applications for all major smartphones with Rhodes, the open-source smartphone app framework. Along with RhoHub, the first hosted development as a service for mobile and RhoSync, a standalone server that keeps enterprise application data current and available on users’ smartphones, Rhomobile’s suite of products provide a complete mobility solution for businesses of all sizes.

The Finalists:
AskYourTargetMarket.com is the web’s first self-service online survey tool that includes a built-in consumer panel to fulfill all your market research studies on demand. No phone calls no delays, this pay-as-you-go service starts at only $29.95 and takes just a few hours to get delivered. This is an an offer that will save you or your company major money and will gather you serious market research.

Pearltrees came all the way from France to compete, is a social curation and discovery tool and that gives users a social way to organize, discover and share stuff they like on the Web.

Strings is an online service that empowers users to effortlessly discover interesting and relevant content. Users of strings.com automatically track their interests, share their tastes with friends, and discover new content based on their expressed personality. The Strings platform enables a new generation of discovery applications that can leverage the power of Strings to help users discover content both on and off the web.

Stupeflix is an automated video creation web service. It is unique in its ability to create highly produced video in real-time, at high volumes, with a highly programmable R/W API. With the Play Platform, Stupeflix makes it easy for any website to instantly transform its content into broadcast quality videos.

EnglEasy is the winner of StartUp Weekend which impressively only came into existence a few days before the contest. This is an Online Game solution that helps teach children English. Through advanced analytics and Fun games, they hope to Improve Learning through Play. With a little bit more time to develop their strategy they may have gone further in the contest.

More Pictures of Launch Pad here!

The Winner of Launch Pad: Adam Blum of Rhomobile

Mike Courtney of AskYourTargetMarket.com

Francois Rocaboy of Pearltrees

Edward Balassanian of Strings

Jeff Boudier of Stupeflix

Ahmed Siddiqui of Engleasy

By Julie Blaustein

Speaker Aliza Sherman

Web 2.0 Expo has arrived! It is the annual event that brings together the people, ideas, products, and companies that shape the next-generation web and mobile apps at the Moscone West in San Francisco held this year from May 3-6. If you are able to attend in person, there is a schedule full of engaging content to choose from with over 75 sessions, workshops and intensives with well represented speakers from the industry.

Part of the excitement of being at the Expo in person is you can participate in silly but fun networking games. You will need to download the Microsoft Tag to your smartphone for The Scavenger Hunt. Clues are provided for you to locate  and tag throughout the conference. Great prizes are awarded too such as Xbox games and HD Zunes! Another game to play is the Paparazzi Photo 2.0 contest where starting on Tuesday May 4 -6 the Web 2.0 Expo Team will tweet 5 photo-related tasks from @w2e each day. The tasks involve you taking pictures with other attendees and you MUST be in each photo. Cash Cards up to $50 each will be awarded each day.

If you are not able to attend you can feel as if you are there by following the vibe of the conference through its Twitter tag #w2e or follow the Web 2.0 Team @w2e. There will be a Live Stream of the Keynotes. Also most speakers will provide their slides as found here from 2009.

Aliza Sherman’s workshop Create a Successful Social Media Plan: The Seven-Step Program provided a great overview of how to get started with the right objectives and tools to reach your target audience. Most importantly she stressed that social media is not about sales but rather about the conversation to make conversions to make the sales. Her numerous presentations on Social Media are available, not surprisingly, online. Once you get your community up and running you will want to to track it and you will need analytics to provide that data. Applied Communilytics provided great data including leading vendors of analytics – BitCurrent, ForSeeResults, HootSuite, CrazyEgg/KISSmetrics, comScore, Omniture and others.

Applied Communilytics Panel

There are tons of events happening at the Expo.  Monday night Ignite was held at Mezzzanine where speakers have five minutes on stage to present 20 slides that are rotated automatically after 15 seconds. Check out this past Ignite presentation by Justin.TV.

The Expo Hall opens on Tuesday at 10:30 am and closes at 3:30 pm. Wednesday the hours are from 10:30 pm to 6:00 pm. Don’t miss the booth crawl on Wednesday from 4:30 pm to 6:00 pm. There is lots of free stuff at the Expo including a free Expo Pass by using the discount code EXPOPASS.