• Andy Volk‘s presentation about how his company, DownTempo use the margin generated from their consulting business to generate spin-off products and businesses. I was refreshed to learn about a company with so many similarities to ours, and learn about the ways that they have addressed many of the same challenges we face. I enjoyed his philosophy of preferring to “live in the land of “yes”" which means have a far more open relationship with other organizations with potential or real competitive overlap.
• This in-turn inspired some great conversations between some of us who own and operate “overlapping” businesses – conversations we have all agreed to continue with – in this regard, I had excellent conversations with Jarred Cinman, Guy Taylor and Wesley Lynch;
• Meeting and chatting to Sheraan Amod (Co-founder of Personera.com – check it out) about the “relentless focus” required to launch a web-based product and the journey he has been on;
• Sitting in on a discussion with seasoned Tech journos like Samantha Perry and Ivo Vegter along with a bunch of other great minds while they discussed telecoms advocacy and what the most important issue(s) to address are in 2010;
• Learning about the world of “Digital Agency” from Rob Stokes and Wesley Lynch and discovering how different that is to our world where we focus on heavy-lifting web app development consultancy – similar perhaps in terms of some of the “1′s and 0′s” churn out behind the scenes, but entirely different in terms of pre and post sales client engagements, the stakeholders we talk to and the types of conversations we have with customers and the industry at large;
• Spontaneous, hilarious live entertainment from Willem van Straaten on Saturday night – and the general craziness of the community;
• The international element and more tangible experience of “7 (or less)degrees of separation,” especially highlighted by Stefan Magdalinski, and also Stefan’s demonstration of how the internet can be used to liberate information (…and info wants to be free…)
• The discussion about the role (and validity) of the various “ICT Entrepreneurship Initiatives” in South Africa at the moment – with special focus on The Silicon Cape Initiative, GeekRetreat itself and NetProphet;
• A look into the excellent product Cognition and a conversation with Patrick Kayton about their journey so far;
• A conversation with Andrea Broom and others about the uses of PersonL in the education field (something we had not seen before);
• Seeing how many companies are running SCRUM in South Africa;
• Steve Vosloo‘s “proof of concept”  project called “Kontax” showing that kids will read books on a mobile web interface because “something is better than nothing”;
• And finally, the general quality of conversation (ok – maybe not all of it – the Birkenhead Black Snake and Tequila supplied by Elan Lohman did its work:) on Saturday night);
• And I’m pretty sure I have forgotten some things that I will only think of later…

A big up to all the sponsors as listed on the GeekRetreat site for funding the brilliant initiative.

Pic by Paul Furber, CC BY 3.0

In a nutshell, Twitsumé.com allows anyone with a Twitter account to connect and create an online résumé/CV (or “Twitsumé”) for all registered Twitsumé.com users to see. They can also see who of their friends and followers have Twitsumés and invite those who do not. Their are public/private settings enabling users to decide which aspects of their Twitsumé can be seen by all registered users and which are hidden.

We built the Twitsumé.com interface ontop of PersonL, our Recruitment Management Software Suite. The Twitsumé aspects took just over a month to build, but PersonL has been 2 years in the making.

See an interview with RSAWEB TV about the rationale of the product and a bit about the build process.

More about the Twitter API and some of our learnings to follow as well as news around the success of the launch.

Please use the product and tell us what you think.

See example Twitsumés:

• The Twitsume “Peacock”
• Pete Flynn (WWW MD)

Follow Twitsumé on Twitter, get news and give feedback: @twitsume

In order to address challenges facing companies in the human resource and recruitment management field, we have developed several online based information and personnel management systems that are both cost effective and will maximise ultimate business objectives.

One such example – PersonL (www.personlplace.com a web-based recruiter assignment management software suite), affords recruiters the ability to fully control the recruitment process from start to finish using purely web-based tools, saving both time and money.

PersonL incorporates the entire recruitment and placement management process from the creation of job specifications, advert management, registering of applicants in terms of CVs and personal profiles, intelligent matching algorithms, interview stages with automated regret, as well as final approval and pre-appointment reference checking correspondence.

Other online user-friendly interfaces implemented by White Wall Web to enhance business performance include Knowledge Management and Enterprise Wiki’s. In this day-and-age, with employee turnover figures on the increase due to the trend of job-hopping and the current job market situation in terms of job losses, information is easily lost. Using Knowledge Management and Enterprise Wiki’s, a virtual pool for all employees to dive into, deposit and source information, this precious commodity is literally at your finger tips. Tools such as these save companies not only time and money but also relieve some of the stress surrounding employee retirement, retrenchment and resignation.

We believe technology will continue to offer opportunities to increase efficiency and effectiveness for industries that work with high volumes of information and data storage. With the increase in candidate sourcing from foreign nations, this new technology will mean it is easier to recruit candidates from disparate geographical locations.

This week we released the last of the vital/core features and the team is now focussing on the “wishlist/enhancement” items (some of which can be seen here). Immediately we will be building:

• The PersonL Instance API (used by our clients to create customised job searches on their web sites if they choose)
• The PersonL Instance Job Search (accessed directly via a link)
• The White-Labeled PersonL Instance Job Search (which can be embedded into our client’s sites via iframe)
• PersonL Joomla Plugin (this will be released open source to the Joomla community as an easy-to-use job search for any Joomla based site using the PersonL API)

PersonL also released new/refined packaging & pricing today which can be seen here: www.personlplace.com/Sign-Up/

Please send us your comments & suggestions as per normal…

“We have just officially entered PersonL (last minute) into this years TechCrunch50 Contest

We had half applied, decided it was too late, and then they mailed me yesterday and asked me to complete the entry by tomorrow…

So we got cracking and churned out a much upgraded web site and content in just two days (planning, writing content and everything).

Well done to the team who did this: Martin (design and input), Pascal (most of the dev and styling), Tim (Powerpoint, Flash and graphics) and Ferdi (making sure it all came together).

Check it out and let us know what you think.

Rob helped out a bit on testing from a usability perspective. I wrote the content.”

The amazing thing is, i think it is the best website we have ever built on such short notice.

So this is how it rolled out… I (Peter) had half completed a very late (only heard about it very late) entry for PersonL on the TechCrunch50 website when the general consensus in the team was “it’s too late.” So I stopped and we focussed again on our 23rd August *internal* deadline to get PersonL out of beta and into commercial-release-still-in-beta-phase .

On of the “background tasks that we just haven’t gotten to yet” list, getting our promotional site up and ready has been sitting semi-permanantly at about number 5. But an email from TechCrunch on the 30 July changed all of that…

So why did we manage to get such a great result in such a short space of time. Some thoughts:

• All the team members involved know our product and business intimately
• We had all the tools at hand (all required technologies)
• We had very fluid and regular correspondence between the business people, the technical people and the marketing people
• We were not too focussed on cost estimates and “big spec upfront” but rather business results best met – basically this was very Agile
• We had a Project Manager on the project with a singular focus on delivering a swift result
• We were all having fun

And was fun! (Note to self, I must work hard to convince more clients to engage with us in this way. It is simply so much better for everyone concerned…)

Now just holding thumbs for TechCrunch50.

In practical terms, CareerPlanet has a mobile network of computers and trainers who setup in shopping malls for a week at a time and assist kids to understand the “world of work,” profile themselves and have their minds opened to opportunities that they may never have considered before.

CareerPlanet needed a way to manage all the profiles of the kids attending their mobile kiosks, and PersonL was a perfect fit.
We really liked the project and worked with Karin and her team to integrate PersonL seamlessly into the CareerPlanet website.

I (Peter) attended the CareerPlanet launch (held at Century City) along with Allan Pike of PersonL. It was amazing to see the vision coming together. Cameron Dugmore (MEC for Education in the Western Cape) spoke at the event and also expressed his strong support for the project.

I was very heartened to see the first bus load of kids arrive and begin using PersonL to profile themselves. In just the first day of luanch, CareerPlanet already had over 30 CV’s captured into their instance of PersonL.

This is what Karin had to say about the product: “”PersonL is the solution we have been looking for to enable Career Planet to accurately profile our members based on skills and interests. PersonL enables us to link our members with relevant career-related opportunities. By accurately identifying our members’ needs we are able to send targeted information relating to skills development and employment.”

It is all coming together…

see http://www.personlplace.com

“This has been over a year in the making with the dedicated focus of a specialist team,” says Martin Gouws, project manager in the PersonL product development team. “We are excited about the power of the application that we have been able to produce and we feel that it will be an extremely useful tool for both job seekers and recruiters.”

“When we started out with creating PersonL, our hearts desire was to produce a software product that would aid the process of people being placed correctly in a new job,” says Peter Flynn, MD of White Wall Web, the PersonL product developers. “We used  the expertise of our partners to compile over 25 years experience in accessing people for placements and wrote clever business logic into the system which will match people not just according to their skills match, but also their aptitude and personality match.”

The software is built in Ruby on Rails and has powerful AJAX functionality to enhance the usability. Amongst the impressive feature set, the system also boasts CRM capabilities and keeps and audit trail of all correspondence and activity per candidate and per assignment.

The system is currently launched for “private beta” for intensive feedback and testing. Once the beta testing phase is completed, the system will be launched for a period of time for free beta. “Interested people can opt-in by going to http://www.personlplace.com/ and following the opt-in email instructions,” says Flynn.

“The system framework is also poised for the easy implimentation of social networking features - a number of which are on the development wish list.”