Company Name

uBoast

20-Word Description

Create video resumes, build long-lasting relationships, and utilize a streamlined recruiting process increasing the ease of communication.

CEO’s Pitch

uBoast is a professional networking site that specializes in enhanced virtual resumes, video profiles, real-time video interviewing, contains a job board pooling openings from throughout the entire Web, and hosts numerous cutting-edge recruiting tools to optimize the hiring process. We also have coached, edited, and filmed thousands of video resumes at several east coast college career centers and recruiting offices for job candidates. A private link is provided for students/job candidates that is easy, yet impressive for employers to review when hiring new talent.

Mashable’s Take

At first glance, uBoast looks like a window into the employee recruitment world. And it is, at least in part. It’s something of a three-party actor. On one hand, it is a job posting service/search engine. Pretty basic, pretty simple. It also promises to help develop resumes. And connect with recruiters to simplify and potentially expedite the employment process. And generally offer business networking, a la LinkedIn or Facebook.

It is multifaceted and multipurpose, then, and for a number of users on all sides of the workforce roundtable, that is to considerable benefit, as it brings more elements to the table. If you want to search for jobs manually, you may. If you want help and guidance, the folks at uBoast are there to provide it. Even as an in-person coaching and video recording service. For the time being, uBoast is largely based in Washington D.C., so it can’t quite blanket the country’s job seekers in one fell swoop. But it has told of investment made in its efforts, which has helped spur plans of expansion beyond the nation’s capital. In its own words: “Within the next six months, uBoast’s potential and mass use will be taken through the nation in order to utilize its features that allow for global recruitment.”

The video resume samples displayed on uBoast are not the most inventive I myself have seen in recent years. The YouTube era has been in full force for some time, and plenty of profiles have been recorded with interesting, and sometimes very peculiar takes on professional hopefuls. Still, they are simple and straightforward, and match relatively well with individual resume pages. The corporate theme runs throughout.

Other aspects of uBoast’s portfolio share some of these traits, though each has its variance in design to comply with the needs of their respective user base. Recruiters, for instance, receive ample search and account management utilities to execute their responsibilities both on the candidate and client fronts. In all, uBoast’s value is in the people it is able to connect. As for its job board specifically, its focus on the Washington, D.C. area shines strong. Among the tax agency and telecom gigs pulled from sources around the Web are titles to do with the US Air Force, lobbying groups and a missile defense agency or two.

Editor’s Note: This post is part of an ongoing series at Mashable - The Startup Review, Sponsored by Sun Microsystems Startup Essentials. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Sponsored By: Sun Startup Essentials

Source:Mashable!

There appears to be a new trend in micro-blogging where services are focusing on letting members share how they feel versus just what they are doing. Services such as Twitter and Plurk have messages about things their users are doing and places they’re going, but these new services reveal the inner-most emotions of their users. One could say it’s like a modern day version of the mood ring. Here are some of these “networks for feelings.”

Feelings, nothing more than feelings

http://moonri.se is like twitter but it lets you insert Flickr photos, YouTube videos and even your favorite famous quotations from their sister-site, QuotationsBook. One of its neat features is the ability to send a feeling, which is really a greeting card with attached elements such as a photo, video or quote. Every member gets their own RSS feed called My Feelings, which tracks all of their moods. You can even add this feed to your FriendFeed account if you really want to share with your friends.

MoodMill calls itself a social mood management website. It was one of the first services to try to tap into the hearts of its users. The Mood Makers Chart groups members according to their latest moods, which is handy because you’ll know which friends to stay far away from that day and which ones are in good spirits. There’s also a mood graph which lets you analyze your feelings, as well as an RSS feed for your moods.

I Rate My Day doesn’t have a plethora of features, but lets you rate your day and displays graphs and charts.

Emotionr has a unique slider bar that you use to share how you feel at the moment on a scale from 1 to 10. There are badges and widgets that you can add to your website that will share how you feel whenever you update your status. There’s an ambitious World Happiness section that tracks how you, the USA and the world itself feels. I don’t know what you’re supposed to do with that information, but there you go.

The objects of my affection

There are a ton of sites that let users rate and rank things such as movies, books, restaurants, hotels, etc. They allow us to share how we feel about our favorite things. Perhaps these services will be blending and merging with these new emotional micro-blogging services. Here are some of the sites that let people show the world what they love most:

- WeHeartPlaces lets you share which places you love the most in the world. Check out Mashable’s full review of We Heart Places Here.

- I Heart Movies lets you show which movies you dig the most. You can read a full review of I Heart Movies here on Mashable.

- Blippr goes a bit further and lets you share your favorite books, movies, music and more!

Mixing business with pleasure

This whole touchy-feely mess has even spread into the business community and corporate America. As I discussed in a recent post, many sites and businesses have set up shop with feedback services whose sole reason for being is to discover exactly how you feel about those sites and businesses. Are you happy with their new product or service? What don’t you like about it or even us? It’s become one big ole Dr. Phil-fest.

Final thoughts and feelings

Will we see a flood of these types of services that focus on our emotions? I don’t think so really. At the end of the day, most of us don’t want separate services that just do one thing like sharing how we feel or where we are going or what we’re doing. Instead, we want less sites that do more. For example, why not have one service that aggregates all of our feelings and emotions, not just our moods, but also how we feel about people, places and things? Not having to log in to so many sites sure would make me feel better.

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In a move that could have a major impact on the way you surf the Web, the Mozilla Foundation today announced Snowl, an experimental solution designed to bring messaging and Web surfing together in the browser.

According to the company, Snowl is designed to answer the question of whether or not a browser can “help you follow and participate in online discussions.”  Mozilla believes that browsers are specially designed to address issues most users have in handling messages – weeding out the less important messages and navigating through the messages – and with Snowl, it aims to bring messaging platforms into one central location to let you surf the Web and handle messages at the same time.

Mozilla is still unsure of whether or not people will actually want to use the service and is opening up Snowl for us to figure that out.  But if it does become a desired application, Mozilla expects to offer “support for additional message sources like Facebook, AIM, and Google Talk; create an interface for writing and sending messages to enable true two-way conversations; and develop an API to make it easier for developers to build new experimental interfaces, e.g. an instant message view.”

There’s no way to tell if Snowl will be a success or if most users will even want to use the program.  But at first glance, it looks like a winner.

Let’s face it – it’s utterly annoying to switch back and forth between tasks to answer some messages and address other issues in AIM or Google Talk.  But if messaging was built into the browser, productivity would certainly increase and the overall usefulness of a standard Mozilla browser would skyrocket.

I don’t know about you, but I’m behind Snowl.

You can download Snowl here.

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Source:Mashable!

Rejaw is not YATC (Yet another Twitter Clone). Sure, it has some similarities but it’s really more of a hybrid of twitter, Plurk, and Meebo. It’s a micro-blogging service with a hint of chat. Here’s the quick and dirty rundown of its best features.

The first thing you will notice is the different terminology they use. For example, a public message on Twitter is called a Shout and a private direct message is called a Whisper.

The other difference is the size limit of messages. Rejaw allows messages up to 1,000 characters instead of the 140 characters that Twitter allows.

One of the most refreshing (pun intended) things about this service is that it isn’t as static as twitter because the messages automatically appear on your screen in real-time. This adds a much needed instant messenger feel to the microblogging experience. The most unusual thing about Rejaw is that it has a Mac client called Rejaw Radar for the desktop, but not a windows version yet! That is in the works though.

The un-twitter-like ability to add audio, video and images within a message post via links is very nice. This means no files to upload as on services like Pownce and Utterz. Simply paste the URL in your message and the picture, song or video will be instantly embedded within your post.

When the CEO one of the most followed companies on the Web goes on stage for two hours, you can bet that the press will be listening to every word, looking to break a major piece of news for their respective organization. But yesterday, with Mark Zuckerberg on stage at F8, why did we all (including us) feel so compelled to “live blog” the event, given it was being broadcast live on video – quite publicly - via Facebook’s own web site? In retrospect, it seems rather ridiculous.

While plenty of big news came out of the event – the launch of Facebook Connect, Facebook Translations for Developers, and the Great Apps program, just to name a few things – it seems like those who cared enough to get these announcements “live” were most likely either in attendance or watching the video stream. Beyond that, if people wanted to discuss the announcements, Twitter or Friendfeed offered a perfect medium. This is all besides the fact that the press release itemizing Facebook’s major product launches was distributed to the media moments after Zuckerberg took the stage, leading us (and a number of other tech blogs) to publish stories detailing the news before Facebook even got to that part of their presentation.

Liveblogging certainly has its place, especially for events where not everyone has access. But what are we gaining by liveblogging something that everyone else can see? And it’s not just keynote speeches at conferences either – blogs now routinely liveblog conference calls, press conferences, and other events that anyone can tune into, usually by going to a company’s investor relations or press page. While news does often break during these events, the people who really care are already tuned in, while the few people reading the liveblog have to sort through paragraph upon paragraph of unimportant notes to find the one piece of potentially breaking news.

Beyond the overkill of liveblogging public events, I also don’t see what good it does from a business perspective as a publisher either. Versus listening to an event or a conference call and making a post detailing the news when it’s over, a liveblog usually offers a boring headline (“Live: F8 Keynote with Mark Zuckerberg”), is very difficult to read, and has minimal long-term value. Compared to a post where you cover and analyze the news, write a headline that articulates what the story is about, and create long-term value in terms of content that is indexable and can be backlinked, liveblogging just doesn’t make sense.

Proponents of liveblogging such events would likely argue that it offers not only breaking news, but instant insight into the event from the perspective of someone in attendance. While that is true to some extent, there is a ton more insight taking place elsewhere, via discussions on services like Twitter and Friendfeed.

I’m sure we’ll continue to liveblog events here on Mashable, and I’m sure others will continue to do so as well. I’m just not sure why.

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Source:Mashable!

In the past few weeks Plurk has released a number of updates in preparation for its upcoming API launch. Improvements include, a new customizable sidebar widget, new starter verbs such as “wonders” and “needs,” a cleaner “All Plurks,” and “My Plurks” navigation, along with a custom search feature. Plurk has even enhanced their competitive ranking system, also known as “Karma” to make the algorithm more fair and balanced.

Another feature that Plurk recently implemented that reminds me of the unofficial Twitter extended backgrounds is the ability to customize everything on your profile via CSS if your Karma is over 25. Customizing your profile background is something that some Twitter users, myself included, have wanted to see, but after seeing a few backgrounds and profiles in Plurk, I’m not so sure. Take a look below:

Plurk fail whale:

Animated gator background:

I’m not saying they’re bad - I’ll let you be the judge of that. But customizing backgrounds should be an enhancement and not a distraction to users, especially since many Plurk users are waiting for desktop integration such as Plurker, a Windows WPF desktop application or twhirl.

For those of us who Plurk on a regular basis I would say that we’re satisfied with the service’s development and features — and just this week Plurk was added to the list of supported sites on FriendFeed. However, Plurk’s community and conversations still remain a question. Currently from the twitter/tech/blog community, Darren Rowse of Problogger and Majo of Live Crunch are making headway up the interesting plurkers karma list. But still, without an API, no desktop application, and some of the most popular topics on Plurk being “good morning,” “good night,” “hi,” “sex” and “coffee,” it will be interesting to see what audience Plurk continues to build.

Is Plurk the MySpace or Facebook of micro-blogging? Only time will tell.

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