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Startup growth and the new recruiting ecosystem

Mike Dover — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 18:28:05 +0000

The recruiting ecosystem is changing, led by professional social networks like LinkedIn and Viadeo and companies like Jobvite and BranchOut, which are building Facebook apps for hiring and career development. This report examines that new ecosystem and how the above and more companies are changing the way businesses find and retain their employees. Small- and medium-sized businesses can benefit from innovative technology that will help their recruiting efforts, and the cost for doing so is reasonable (and decreasing). The bottom line is that technology enables the recruiting process to be more streamlined, scientific and democratic. This report provides examples and recommendations for employers.

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Scrubly Wants to Help Clean Up Your Address Book

Simon Mackie — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 21:02:59 +0000

If you’re anything like me, you probably have several email address books, each with a daunting number of duplicate, conflicting and junk entries. Scrubly is a web app that can help to clean them up. It’s compatible with Gmail and Google Apps, Outlook and Apple Mail address books, and can scan contact folders and groups for duplicate contact entries, flagging them for review. You can remove duplicates with a click, or choose to selectively review and delete flagged entries individually.

Scrubly provides similar “de-duping” functionality to the Personal Assistant tool provided by unified online address book service Plaxo that I wrote about earlier this year, but it’s considerably cheaper and provides a few features the Plaxo tool doesn’t:

Address books are automatically backed up before cleaning them, so original files can be retrieved and restored at any time (reassuring if you’re concerned the de-duplication process may accidentally remove some entries you don’t intend it to).
It can automatically update Outlook, Gmail and Apple Mail address books after cleaning them up (Plaxo can also do this, but only if you pay for its Premium Sync service)
Scrubly groups compatible duplicate contacts together, merging them into one complete entry.

It’s easy to use: Just sign up, then either authorize the Scrubly app to connect to your Gmail/Google Apps accounts and/or download the clients for Outlook or Apple Mail. You can set up multiple address books in your Scrubly account; each one is scrubbed and backed up separately. When you hit the “scrub” button on an address book, Scrubly scans it, looking for duplicates, junk entries (those that contain very limited information, such as only a name) and “loose match” duplicates (entries that Scrubly thinks are probably duplicates but they aren’t exact matches; you need to review these individually). Once you’re happy with the results, you can re-import the scrubbed address book (or books) back into your email app (or apps).

If you have fewer than 250 contacts to clean up, Scrubly is free. More than that, and you can either opt for a one-time cleaning of address books with an unlimited number of contacts for $9.95 or buy an annual subscription, which costs $24.95. It worked pretty well in my testing, successfully de-duping both Gmail and Outlook address books. However, note that Scrubly only has de-duping tools; it doesn’t attempt to automatically keep your address books up-to-date like Plaxo’s Personal Assistant does, and it can’t connect with the variety of services Plaxo can, either. If you have a mass of contacts spread across various different email and social media accounts, and want to de-duplicate entries across all of them, Plaxo’s pricier service (which costs $79.95 per year) may be more useful. But if you’re simply looking for a way to clean duplicates from a particularly messy address book, Scrubly offers a simple and cost-effective solution, particularly as you can opt to pay for a one-time cleaning.

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Plaxo’s Personal Assistant Keeps Your Address Book Up-to-Date

Simon Mackie — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 16:00:11 +0000

Plaxo was one of the first companies to offer a unified online address book that connected to and synchronized with all the different address books people use to store contact info: email clients, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. More recently, however, many innovative “social CRM” competitors have moved into the address book space, like Gist, Connected and Soocial, while Plaxo tinkered with a social networking product called Pulse. The company has announced that it’s refocusing on its address book product, and has released the Plaxo Personal Assistant, a new service that intelligently makes automatic updates to the Plaxo address book to keep contact information relevant and current.

The Personal Assistant is an add-on service that can:

Intelligently update inaccurate info. It recognizes outdated contact info, intelligently sources updates, and recommends changes.
Complete missing details. It can assist in identifying partial entries and proactively locating current information to fill any gaps.
Cleans duplicate entries. It merges contact info between corresponding entries and removes duplicates to help organize your address book.

The product also includes access to change tracking and 24/7 support.

That all sounds pretty useful, but the new service is not particularly cheap: it costs an additional $79.95 per year (the basic Plaxo service itself is free). You should also note that in order for the Personal Assistant to work its magic, it will need process your contact data, which may make some folks uncomfortable; you can view Plaxo’s data usage policy here.

Photo courtesy Flickr user HeyRocker

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5 Alternatives to Social CRM Service Etacts

Simon Mackie — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 15:00:19 +0000

Yesterday, Om reported that Etacts is to be shut down. While that’s bad news for users of the social CRM service, fortunately, there are plenty of alternatives available. While none of them provides an exact like-for-like replacement for Etacts, here is a selection of the more useful social CRM tools that have been reviewed by the WWD team:

Gist is an online service that “connects your inbox to the web,” automatically building a profile for each of your contacts from the data that’s available in your inbox and via their social networking profiles. Like Etacts, it will also remind users if they haven’t been in touch with an important contact for a while. It’s available as a Chrome extension, Firefox add-on, and also as iPhone and Android apps, and can work with Gmail, Outlook and Lotus Notes. The service is currently free. See Scott’s review of Gist here.
Rapportive uses social data (pulled from the controversial Rapleaf service) to provide additional information about your contacts. It replaces the adverts in Gmail’s sidebar with useful information about your contacts: a photo, bio and links to social media accounts (Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, etc) and works via a Firefox add-on or Chrome extension. As the information is taken from the Rapleaf database, the results are sometimes hit-and-miss, depending on how well Rapleaf has managed to tie a particular contact’s email address to various social media accounts. Rapportive is free. See my review of Rapportive here.
Plaxo is an online address book that can store contacts from Gmail, Outlook, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, Facebook, LinkedIn and more. Like Etacts, it’s “socially aware,” tracking social feeds from Twitter and Facebook to keep users up-to-date on their contacts. The basic Plaxo service is free; Plaxo Premium adds sync with Outlook Contacts, Google Contacts and Windows Mobile and some additional features and costs $36.95 per year. See Judi’s review of Plaxo v.3 here.
MailBrowser. Webyog’s MailBrowser is another CRM app that works with Gmail to provide additional data about your contacts, and can automatically keep contact information up-to-date by pulling data from emails. However, it doesn’t provide easy access to social network profiles or updates. Unlike some of the other services here, MailBrowser is a locally installed app, so it may be a better choice for users with privacy concerns. MailBrowser is free, and is available as an IE plugin, Firefox add-on and Chrome extension. See my review of MailBrowser here.
Xobni is a popular productivity add-on for Outlook that provides a sidebar offering additional information about your contacts culled from their social network profiles and emails. It can automatically extract information like phone numbers from email messages, and also provides a threaded conversation view and easier ways to find attachments. The basic Xobni product is free, while Xobni Plus costs $30 and adds advanced search features, auto suggest, support for more than one PST file and more. See Scott’s hands-on review of Xobni here.

What are your favorite social CRM tools?

Photo courtesy stock.xchng user GretheB

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Ribbit Mobile: Not Yet Ready for Daily Use

Charles Hamilton — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 14:00:46 +0000

The folks at Ribbit Mobile have taken Google Voice‘s “one number for life” concept and expanded upon it. The service is still in beta, but it already offers many sophisticated features that allow users to:

Use their existing cellphone or landline number, or get new numbers.
Route phone calls to smartphones and other locations. One can set up Ribbit to ring multiple landline and cell numbers, as well as Skype. It can also be set to send SMS alerts with notifications of missed calls and transcribed messages.
Make and receive calls through Ribbit’s web interface.
When an incoming call arrives, be presented with what Ribbit calls “Caller ID 2.0,” showing the Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Flickr statuses of the caller.
Transfer calls.
Receive recorded and/or transcribed messages. Ribbit Mobile offers a choice of vendors, so one can select computer-generated or human-produced transcriptions.
Archive and search messages.
Take notes during conversations and attach them to the record of the call.
Dictate memos.
Specify what caller ID will be displayed with outgoing calls.

Ribbit Mobile offers several ways to interact with its service, including an iPhone app, plus web-based and AIR widgets for messages, conferencing, dialing and SMS.

With all of these features, I really wanted to like Ribbit Mobile. Unfortunately, at this point, it has some major shortcomings:

Slow interface speed. The web interface is Flash-based, and seems to be very slow to load. I counted the load time (on my Mac, using Firefox 3.5) at over 90 seconds!
Poor contact management. Existing contacts can be imported through Plaxo. Plaxo has its own problems, which I won’t go into here, but Plaxo imports are extremely slow (20 minutes for about 1,400 contacts), and the imported contact file does not include the social network information that’s central to the “Caller ID 2.0″ idea. You can go through each contact in Ribbit and add the social network info, but Ribbit deletes all of your current contacts if you re-import from Plaxo, which means that any social network links you add will disappear next time you import an updated Plaxo file. Also, since Ribbit offers no way to export its contact list, you’ll be forced to maintain two separate address lists if you don’t want to be tied to Ribbit.
Inconsistent linking to social networks. The connections to Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter seem to require frequent re-linking.
Limited community interaction. Surprisingly, one must get approval to even view the forums. Not surprisingly, there aren’t many forum posts, which doesn’t strike me as a good sign.

During the beta period, Ribbit Mobile is free, and U.S. and UK residents can request beta invitations. After the beta period ends, Ribbit anticipates that the service will be sold for $10-$30 per month.

Ribbit Mobile has potential, but right now, its slowness and limited contact management mean that it’s not yet ready for daily use. Ribbit was acquired by telecoms firm BT in 2008, so let’s hope that it gets its act together.

Share your thoughts on Ribbit Mobile in the comments.

Plaxo Releases Improved Social Address Book

Doriano "Paisano" Carta — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 19:00:55 +0000

Plaxo, the contact synchronization service that we’ve covered previously, has released a much-improved version of its address book, the bread and butter of the app. The first thing you’ll notice is the speed. It’s now so much faster when searching your contacts. It actually starts displaying results as you’re typing the names in the search box in real-time, which is cool. Opening the contact record is also faster, without no delay after double-clicking on a contact.

The other new feature involves categorizing your contacts into groups. Yes, it’s really just another way of creating distribution lists which comes in handy when corresponding with large groups of people at once. You can add your contacts to more than one group and send emails to the group.

Also new is the ability to mark your favorite contacts with a star, which makes them appear on the front page of your address book. All of your top contacts from Gmail automatically get the gold star but you can easily unselect it.

Plaxo has also renamed its social streaming “Pulse” service to “Stream.” All of the same functionality remains, it’s just a new name.

These changes point to a good future for one of the elder statesmen of the Web 2.0 era. Plaxo has listened to its users, improved performance and added some useful features. It’s still the best when it comes to importing contacts from other address books such as Gmail, Yahoo and Outlook. By the way, you might have missed this feature but you can also import all of your LinkedIn contacts. Just perform a LinkedIn address book export and upload it to Plaxo here.

It’s going to be interesting to see what other socially-aware address book services like Gist and Soocial will do in this space. I think it’s surprising to see that Google still hasn’t done much with Gmail’s address book; I want contact information synchronization and other social networking features to get added, but nothing much has changed. Not yet anyway.

Do you use Plaxo? What do you think of the new address book?

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HipChat Launches Corporate Chat Room Client

Liz Gannes — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 22:05:28 +0000

HipChat, a new self-funded startup from the folks who sold web calendar HipCal to Plaxo right out of college in 2006, is launching today an Adobe AIR corporate group chat client.

With a look very similar to 37signals‘ web chat product Campfire, but with some added features such as one-to-one messaging, notification noises and file-sharing support, HipChat is targeting startups as customers — its largest plan maxes out at 100 people.

There are already lots of products filling this need for casual and convenient corporate communications — for instance, Socialcast (which, like us, is funded by True Ventures, where Om Malik is a venture partner) and Yammer, or an IRC client. However, in just a 30-day private beta period, HipChat reports it had 500 companies sign up and more than 100,000 messages sent. And some of these users are already paying. So that’s a pretty good sign it’s not superfluous!

However, I think the issue with these tools is that it often isn’t enough to do one thing well in the corporate environment. When your paying customers are asking for more and more features it’ll be hard to avoid being a general collaboration tool.

http://www.youtube.com/v/u6Qs73Torio&hl=en_US&fs=1&

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New Xobni Update Now Supports Salesforce and Twitter

Doriano "Paisano" Carta — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 19:00:39 +0000

Xobni, a very useful Microsoft Oulook plug-in that we’ve covered with praise previously, has just released a new update that now reveals more information about your contacts, including acquiring valuable data from their Salesforce account. This has been a much-demanded feature that is available for all Xobni users for free at this time. Ultimately, there will be a small fee for this feature but the return on investment for those organizations that use Outlook and Salesforce will make the decision a no-brainer.

The other new feature that most people might have missed in a previous update (I know I did) is the ability to access each contact’s Twitter account information. This was also a very popular request from Xobni’s userbase who’ve previously been able to access their contacts’ Facebook and LinkedIn accounts. Adding Twitter and SalesForce connectivity to your address book makes a great deal of sense.

Here’s an example of what the Xobni panel displays next to your email message. Not only will you see the usual information such as phone numbers, email addresses and threaded email conversations, but now you can actually view that contact’s Twitter stream (once you connect the right Twitter account, based on the email address used). Notice how you can actually send a tweet right from Xobni as well as unfollow the contact and view their Twitter profile for even more information.

Personally, I love this hot trend of infusing intelligence into our otherwise under-utilized address books. Services such as Xobni, Gist and the one that started it all, Plaxo, are providing tremendous value by allowing us to get more from our contacts. It’s baffling to me that Google has not done much with contacts in Gmail. Things will become even more interesting when (not if) Google finally adds social networking power to its address book.

Do you use Xobni?

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Ribbit Mobile Enters Beta; Invitations Available for WWD Readers

Charles Hamilton — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 19:00:20 +0000

The folks at Ribbit Mobile are offering 100 invitations to WebWorkerDaily readers for the beta of their new communication service. Just sign up on the reservations page, and enter the invite code “wwd09″ in the appropriate box.

Ribbit Mobile has more features than Google Voice, and reminds me a bit of VoxOx, which I wrote about a few days ago. This service looks very promising, but, like VoxOx, it isn’t finished yet. I’ve been unable to test it fully, because it doesn’t yet support Sprint cellphones. I also can’t get my contact list to import, either from a CSV file or through Plaxo (the only options Ribbit Mobile supports). I hope to post a fuller review soon.

Try it out, and let us know how Ribbit Mobile works for you.

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Bring Your Contacts Together and Keep Them Safe

Meryl K Evans — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 18:00:48 +0000

Gmail. LinkedIn. Facebook. Your phone’s address book. Your contacts may live in many places online, yet there’s always the possibility one of these places will disappear or crash, taking your information with it for good. Or perhaps you simply decide to close your account with the network.

You should consider importing the contacts from these networks into your main address book app. We use these services to connect with people, update our statuses and play with whatever features they contain, but we don’t always remember that these resources have contacts that belong in our primary address book.

Another consideration is having a secondary resource for backing up your primary address book. With most services able to import and export files as a CSV or vCard file, it has turned into a fairly easy process. For the least tedious approach, try to find a secondary resource that you can keep in sync with your primary resource — for example, Plaxo can sync your address book with Mac OS X, Yahoo!, Google and several other apps. Otherwise, you’ll have to import and export your contacts on a regular basis.

After selecting the apps for your primary and secondary sources, here are the steps to take to make sure that you have all your contacts in primary resource and backing it up to the secondary resource.

Determine what kind of files your address books can import and export.
Export address books from your social networks into a comma-separated (.cvs) or vCard (.vcf) file based on Step 1. Remember where you save the files.
Import the addresses books from Step 2 into your primary resource. Repeat until you’ve put all of your contacts into your primary address resource.
Sync your primary and secondary resources. If they don’t have a sync wizard, go to Step 5. If they have a sync wizard, make sure you synchronize them on a scheduled basis if it’s not automated. You’re done.
Export the address book from your primary resource into a comma-separated (.cvs) or vCard (.vcf) file.
Import the primary resource file into your secondary address book as your backup. Repeat on a scheduled basis, unless you find a way to automate it.

You might want to consider a solution that can sync with your phone — if that’s not already your primary source. That’s what I like about Google Contacts and Calendar — they sync with my favorite PC app, I can access them anywhere and they also sync with my phone. Read our contact management and application articles for ideas and apps to consider.

How do you manage all of your contacts?

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