Posts Tagged ‘Dayak’

Job sites using Innovation but fight issues

Thursday, May 28th, 2009

Launching a new job site in this economy could be deemed as not profitable.  Two new job sites aren’t looking for profit (as of yet) but using innovation and technology.  Splits.org and Hash#Jobs are two such sites.  These are experimental job sites that leverage data aggregation of certain tags on Twitter.  They will battle spam and “freshness” as stated by this Cheezhead article.  The user experience in such cases will be the battle these two sites have to win though Hash#Jobs seems to have more of an uphill battle due to the use of a more general tag.  Even though Hash#Jobs users are pre-approved, it doesn’t guarantee “freshness” but it may reduce spam.  Splits.org shares the same battle.

 

I use the word “freshness” in relations to a job posting to define how up to date the job information is and active the job poster is too.  This is a term that Dayak defined over a year ago to make the lives of its recruiters easier.  We would send email notifications to a job poster when a job has not had any “activity” for a pre-defined duration.  If a job goes through the reminder process with no new activity or no action from the job poster to confirm that the job is still active, Dayak closes the job posting.  This keeps jobs “fresh”.  The project was fondly called “Bad Job Filter”.  As time evolved, the project has gone through fine tuning but still remains a key part of ensuring job “freshness”, though we do throttle it now and again.

 

Combining this “freshness” concept with the aggregation concepts above, could provide to be powerful, but would have challenges on its own.  I hope ideas such as these do well and new ones keep popping up.  Its Re-“Freshing” to come across such concepts.

A peak inside Dayak’s use of Google Apps

Wednesday, October 29th, 2008

Who doesn’t know about Google Apps? Steve Ballmer recently dismissed Google Apps. I do agree with him to a certain degree that Google Apps can’t fight Microsoft alone BUT the combination of OpenOffice and Google Apps must have Steve Ballmer sweating.

Its hard to deny that Google Apps and OpenOffice isn’t a compelling option. Steve Ballmer’s response shows a bit of arrogance that Microsoft could perhaps have afforded 10 years ago but not anymore. At Dayak we have people that use Microsoft Office and some that use OpenOffice. Why don’t we have it standardized? The reasons range from Operating Systems (Mac, Linux and Windows), costs and comfort level of the user them self. We are ok with that due to what Google Apps provides.

Where Google Apps comes into play is the ability to share, collaborate and view files without installing converters. So not only does it save us money on Microsoft licenses and Microsoft Sharepoint but also on administration costs of the same.

We also get 7GB email accounts and calendaring that don’t require us to have an Admin for an in house Microsoft Exchange or equivalent system. Our employees get a great web interface or the comfort of using Outlook Express or Outlook or Thunderbird. I know there are great options like Zimbra or Spicebird but those do incur administration costs. For Dayak we have no in house server for any of this and Google Apps takes care of all of our needs including Email backup for a nominal per user fee. We used to run our own email server using Postfix but the features we get bundled with Google Apps and with no Administration overhead, I couldn’t be happier.

Got Intranet? Yes, we do with Google Sites. Another benefit of Google apps that allows us to have an wiki style intranet with no cost of a in house hardware or administration.

So Dayak like probably many startups are following a recent trend. A trend that will save us a lot of money in the long run. Just notch us up as a Google Apps fan and avid user. I hope Steve Ballmer opens his eyes to what is really going on and acknowledge that this compelling option of Google Apps and OpenOffice is something Microsoft will have to compete with.

So… Do you “Google Apps”?

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