A Marketplace for Tech Talents

Hired, earlier DeveloperAuction raised $15 M in Series A funding rounds led by Crosslink and Sierra Ventures with participation from SoftTech and Sherpa Ventures. The company founded in May 2012 has previously raised $2.7 million in seed funding from SoftTech, New Enterprise Associates, Google Ventures, Sierra Ventures, Crosslink Capital, and Haystack. CEO Matt Mickiewicz says the new funds will be used to build the Hired team and expand geographically, with launches set for Los Angeles, Boston, and Seattle this year.

hired in red textHired is basically a two-sided market place to meet the requirement of high-quality technology talent in business ventures and a multitude of work fields together with the best job opportunities. Out of 5000 participants, the site intakes an average of 230 new participants and connect them with 700+ leading companies, including mainstream companies such as OpenTable, Palantir, ClearSlide, Mixpanel, Klout, Lookout, and Twitter as well as leading early-stage startups. The company currently provides a platform to hire developers, UX/UI designers, product managers and data scientists in the Bay Area, NYC, Washington DC, Boston, Chicago, LA and Seattle.

Hired as a transparent and unbiased recruitment platform with offers appears sound for engineers, but with a future aim of broadening its span that welcomes professionals from all walks of life. As the team found that the name Developer Auction would shrink its span as it implies only engineers, the name was changed to Hired.

Hired is trying to reverse the way that in-house recruiters attract talented engineers. The top developers are listed for a period of time. During that time companies can bid on potential employees, letting them know upfront what they would be willing to pay a developer to join their team, including perks and signing bonuses, all before the two sit down for an interview.  If they’re interested, the engineers can follow up for interviews and go through the normal hiring process. If a professional followed Hired and secured a job with a company, the employer pays Hired 15 percent of their base salary. That fee ends up being a little bit less than what a standard recruiting agency might charge at 20 to 25 percent. Creating a profile in a site is free, but only the top 150 developers would be appeared in the auction list, hence more competitive and the high breeds get hired first. The platform assures the genuinity, as this controls by regular monitoring which candidates to prevent the awkward situation where a current employer sees one of their engineers. Furthermore, Hired help the professional’s support with personal advocacy from the sign-in day to offer signing day.

Lifeline Response – Protection at fingertips

Lifeline Response is a Chicago based mobile app development company that develops applications that intended to provide personal safety. It utilizes natural human reaction to respond to emergency situations by immediately alerting authorities if the user is in need of help. It incorporated GPS Location & Route Tracking technology and based on touch sensation, with Microsoft’s Bing Maps for GPS tracking. The app is currently available in AppStore and Google Play. The product has got attractive pricing since it cost only $21.99 for an annual subscription while $ 3.99 for monthly subscription. Since it was founded in 2012,  the app delivers outright service within the USA and have received a fair acceptance within the country. It has been received a seed round funding of $0.37M in March 2014. The company has partnered with U.S. Cellular and has enterprise agreements with universities, hospitals and corporations around the US.

The working of the app is briefly noted. The app is available on the gadget’s home screen. When selected and made it engaged, it senses the user’s thumb on the screen. The moment that thumb is removed, a countdown begins from 20 seconds during which time the user could enter a deactivation code for the app if it is activated accidentally. Instead, if you were attacked, your thumb would naturally come off the screen. Even if the phone was confiscated, once the app has been activated, there is no reversing the process without the proper code. After seven seconds without a code an alarm will begin to sound and when the countdown ends, app’s response verification center will be contacted. The center would call the user asking if they are in an emergency. Incase if the attacker finds something wrong with the situation and tries to turn off the app- by providing this code instead of the proper deactivation code, the app identifies the user is in an emergency. At that point, the app makes a call to the local 911 who would respond via GPS coordinates to the phone’s location. Likewise, if the phone isn’t answered, the same procedure would occur. The company provides 24/7 support and an option for 7 emergency contact numbers to be saved to which distress alerts will be sent, to make the service more promising.

The app is directly focusing on female population especially the university students. As a part of this, the company has two versions available for purchase viz  Personal edition and Campus edition. Thus, the company has made enterprise agreements with major universities and colleges(30+) within the state with a reasonable cost of  $2 to $7. As the alternative solutions are costly and include either personnel or infrastructure or both service, the company could directly make an entrance into the standard population.

An innovation in Digital Advertising

Elevate digital, founded in March 2011 as smartDIGITAL is a leading developer and advertising company. The Chicago company provides a platform for interactive digital advertising. Presently, Elevate Digital products, interactive touch screen displays are employed in high traffic area in Chicago. The company utilize the funds raised for product development and to spread out the span across the US and internationally as the company aims for deployments in the top 30 markets by the end of 2014.This venture is obviously an shortest way that public get access free of cost to a wide range of information and services. Besides, the products design is indubitably appreciable as the display units could be placed indoor and outdoor with multiple sized displays cached with information that best fit the customer needs.

Since its founding in 2011, Elevate DIGITAL has deployed more than 70 screens across several cities. The company has also established partnerships with organizations such as Groupon, The Tribune Company and the American Red Cross, among others. The company received about $7.2 M in Series A funding from many investors during past two years. The investors includes SFX Entertainment, Partners Path Investments, Advantage Capital Partners and Metropolitan Capital Bank.

The elevate digital display units incorporates still and video camera, rotating top screen videos, Interactive displays that features video spots, interactive applications, interactive photo and video sharing. Moreover, it makes possible the interactive shopping and so a bar-code scanner, credit card reader. The display unit is manufactured with data collection and reporting feature together with 24/7 system monitoring and reporting, hence advertisers to easily measure campaign performance. If a customer require a well later reference to the information perceived, one can record  as a soft-copy in the form of  email or a printed report. This implies the consumers are more engaged and hence the ads could directly shot at the clients.

10 Points To Take Care While Creating Your Online Barter Network

Bartering goods online is one of those online trends that saw a wide spread trading interest. Though initially not much recognized, barter networks did make a transforming change in the online market places. As in any type of trade and exchange there are certain things to be taken care of while bartering your goods online. Creating the online barter network is a challenging task. Span of such a type of business depends on the requirements, provisions and priorities of the parties involved in trade and therefore it’s necessary to have fine features involved in the website.

You should be able to manage all activities linked with the website in a centralized manner. The powerful admin area should be able to operate different functionalities of the website as well. The interface should be designed in such a way that it can support any number of product categories and their sub categories. If the barter network created is capable of supporting any number of users and products it would certainly lead to huge expansion of your market place. Barter network building scripts are available in the market. If the scripts used are open source, it would enable you to customize the website anytime according to your requirements. Such scripts would usually involve SEO enhanced HTML codes which can generate a good enough traffic for the website which can ultimately lead to increased sales.

Feedback mechanism forms an essential part of any service and plays a key role in determining the quality of work. Also, the customer satisfaction rate goes high if the barter software seems to be user friendly. User guides and other manuals will make it easier for a new user.

Since these networks are not created in a geographic location specific manner, it would be best if it can support the most common payment gateways that include PayPal, Google Checkout and so on. Also these gateways wouldn’t require you to host a secure server to enable safe transactions thus avoiding another expense and risk. As part of business strategies, it’s recommended that the network can support both e-scrow and non-escrow methods.A The network created should be safe enough for online transactions. It should be created in a secure manner, so that it’s safe from internet threats like phishing, identity theft and other online scams. Users should be authenticated automatically, by email or by admin, eliminating time to manually approve. But all these activities should be tracked.A The network should include trading with points. This is to accommodate the forex values for different countries.

Attractive themes and graphics to choose from and support features like banners and tags would make the website appear more exciting and entertaining. . The system is well set to run a successful online business if the website is able to remain compatible with different platforms, ensuring safe and reliable transactions and runs a quality feedback mechanism.