An ongoing theme throughout our start-up process has been the struggle to clearly articulate what we’re trying to do. We’re big believers in clarity, but Jobyssey has a lot of unique features that make it a challenge to spit out a phrase or two that leads to a lightbulb moment for the listener. Worse, people continually misunderstand and believe we’re a job board, or worse, a recruitment agency (this probably shouldn’t be a surprise since recruiters do spend quite a bit of time dissembling to get past gatekeepers). So, we try to explain that we’re a job and CV database, but that it’s our searching system that’s really unique, but also our attention to soft skills characteristics (especially for software jobs…), and that we have really high confidentiality standards, and no headhunters, and….suddenly everyone is nodding and smiling they way they do when Great Uncle Rufus starts in with the war stories again.
I feel like this is the critical challenge for us on the non-technical side of things, but unfortunately I haven’t had a lightbulb moment myself yet. Hopefully one day we’ll start explaining and see someone’s eyes light up right away, and we’ll know we’ve hit the nail on the head at last.
“Cloud computing” seems to be that new phrase you suddenly start hearing everywhere. First, we heard Ray Ozzie talk about it as part of Microsoft’s new business model in the Mix08 keynote address. Now we’re hearing about the new cloud computing center IBM will be opening in Ireland (via Silicon Republic and IBM).
To be honest, at first I was kind of confused as to exactly what cloud computing was all about, but luckily HowStuffWorks shed some light on that (as an aside, the power requirements of the main Google facility are pretty awesome in the Biblical sense). Read the entire post…
Well, we have all heard the “market gurus” - the job market is slowing down, multinationals are moving their service centres out of Ireland, doom and gloom for the Irish economy, yada yada yada.
I have not doubt that some of this is based on factual information and there is an element of truth to it all - however does this apply to all sectors? Read the entire post…
Eirepreneur says that Garmin Satnav will be creating its’ own system of Irish postcodes for ROI from the end of March on. You’ll be able to visit www.irishpostcodes.ie to get a code, and you can see more detail here. There are some sample codes up there- they will be 7 character (letter and number) geographically based codes.
Hopefully Google support will be added soon- we’d love for Jobyssey to have a location search feature (always important in Dublin), but without postcodes it was pretty much impossible to get a good result.
Old news by now, but everyone’s buzzing about the Google/ DoubleClick deal. Further information/discussion here at Slashdot and here at Silicon Republic. Of course it’s likely there will be job cutbacks, but it’s hard to say what the impact will end up being here in Ireland- both DoubleClick and Google have offices in Dublin (Clontarf and Grand Canal Dock, respectively) handling ad sales.