Feed

Job hunting just got a bit easier with VisualCV

Posted on February 9th, 2008 in Internet Startups, Business Software by admin

If you are looking for a new job, and want to impress the prospective employers, a new tool is here that could be just the thing to help you. CV stands for curriculum vitae, and is basically another word, or words, for resume – now, I hope you don’t need me to explain what that is. Anyway, resumes, or CV’s, have always tended to be rather dull old things, one or two typed sheets of A4, which of course you can send as an attachment by email, or mail the hard copy, to those top companies.

But now it’s time to think again. VisualCV takes the traditional resume, and makes it come alive with video, pictures, a portfolio of your best work samples, and any other supporting documents that you care to include. Informational pop-ups provide background data on the companies you’ve worked at, and the universities and colleges you have attended. Add to this the fact that you can securely share different versions of your resume with your own network of employers, colleagues and friends, and control who sees what.

VisualCV certainly takes the whole concept of the CV up a level, and the result is a lively, vibrant and informative online document, that is pretty well guaranteed to impress.

One quibble might be that you might just as well do your own website, but VisualCV offers you the chance to put your resume online in a somewhat easier manner, and in a standardised format that makes a professional looking online resume easy to produce.

VisualCV is still at the beta stage, so if you are job hunting, it could be worth giving it a go. The proof of the pudding will be the job offers.

Social Ads - the next move from Facebook

Posted on November 4th, 2007 in Advertising, Social networking sites, Business Software, E-Commerce by admin

social_ads.jpg
While we wonder if Facebook will join OpenSocial, it seems that Facebook has other things on its plate. Next week Facebook will be launching its Social Ads advertising service, which takes the Facebook ads outside the social network, and allows third party sites to run them. Interesting. It’s Facebook’s very own version of Google Adsense, and will take Facebook and Google into an even more competitive position vis-a-vis one another.

The whole thing will not actually be unveiled until November 6th, but it looks like it will work in a similar way to AdSense, but the ads will be targeted to Facebook members profile data, and interests. This will be done, surprise, surprise, via cookies which will identify the members later when they visit other sites hosting Social Ads.

Facebook has already had a go at targeting ads on its own site, by means of its Facebook Flyers program, using demographic and psychographic data gleaned from members’ profiles. With Social Ads, that targeting will be extended right across the web.

The only glitch in all of this is that the targeting will only work for Facebook members, who are still not a major proportion of all web users, despite the fact that Facebook has grown so dramatically in membership.

There is also some talk that Facebook will be targeting ads according to who networks with who on the site, but this remains to be seen. Meanwhile industry pundits are waiting for November 6th to see what lies in store on the Facebook scene.

Open Social - the new API in town

Posted on November 1st, 2007 in Social networking sites, Business Software by admin

opensocial.jpg
OpenSocial seems to be the word, (or is it words?), on everyone’s lips at the moment. And in case you don’t know what that is, it’s a set of common application programming interfaces (API’s) for web-based social network applications, that has been developed by Google, and was released today, November 1, 2007. So what does this mean? Applications implementing the OpenSocial API’s will be interoperable with any social network system that supports them, including features on sites such as MySpace and Friendster.

OpenSocial provides as a more open cross-platform alternative to the Facebook Platform, and was initially seen as a potential challenge to the big social networks, such as MySpace and Facebook. However it now seems that MySpace has joined OpenSocial as a partner. Chris De Wolfe, CEO and co-founder of MySpace, says, “this is about helping the start-up spend more time building a great product rather than rebuilding it for every social network.” Now everyone is waiting for the reaction of Facebook, whose platform has received some criticism for not being open enough.

The whole project will tie together Google, MySpace and numerous other social networking platforms in a common environment that application publishers can publish widgets to with one set of code.

Since the release of OpenSocial, it has apparently already been hacked. Somebody going under the handle of theharmonyguy, and claiming to be a mere amateur, has already compromised the RockYou OpenSocial application on Plaxo called emote, having added a number of emoticons to Plaxo VP Marketing John McCrea’s profile within 45 minutes of it launching.