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EXCLUSIVE: HiringBounty.com disrupts recruitment industry with social power

by Herman Manson (@marklives) I often receive emails from friends with links to job posts and a note that says “this will be perfect for you” (just in case your business goes belly-up or you actually want to afford that new car – though that part goes unsaid). Greg Schneider, a rising star at digital agency Quirk, has launched a start-up that taps into networks of friends to bypass recruitment agents and crowd-source candidates for positions in the marketing and technology industries.

Schneider’s new recruitment platform, Hiringbounty.com, allows businesses to place recruitment positions on the site alongside a bounty. The bounty, should a position be successfully filled, is paid out in thirds – 1/3 to HiringBounty, 1/3 to the person recommending the successful candidate and 1/3 to the person finally appointed.

So if the bounty next to the position says R5000 the cost to client is R5000 x 3. It pays HiringBounty and HiringBounty pays the other two parties. If you applied for the job without a recommendation from friend you are set to pocket the bounty x 2 (as referrer and successful candidate).

Brand reinvention: Nintendo is about to lurch out of the tomb once more with Wii U GamePad

Nintendo is doing its own zombie act: coming back from the dead with the new Wii U, writes Arthur Goldstuck (@art2gee)

Are you prepared for the Zombie apocalypse? It’s a concept that has long been viral on the Internet, inspiring numerous guidebooks on how to prepare for both the day and night of the living dead. You can even explore a version of Google Maps adapted to show the level of likely zombie infestation across the globe, and highlighting resources like pharmacies, hardware stores and police stations, where you would find handy resources to help survive the undead onslaught. Medicine, guns, axes and baseball bats will be high on your shopping list.

Sadly, preparing for the apocalypse only by reading a map is like learning to drive using a mapbook. You also need on-the-job training.

Enter an unlikely ally: Nintendo. It is the old-timer of the gaming console industry, and rapidly falling behind Sony and Microsoft. These global giants have brought the industry back to life, respectively, with a new version of the PlayStation Portable, called the Vita, and an add-on to the Xbox, the Kinect.

Smartphones surge by 40,9% at Vodacom

Vodacom issued a trading statement yesterday morning that shows smartphones active on the network surging by 40,9% in South Africa in the last quarter, even as local revenue growth remains flat, writes Arthur Goldstuck (@art2gee)..

Smartphones active on the Vodacom network in South Africa surged by 40,9% in the quarter ended 30 June 2012, according to a trading vodacom pontestatement issued by the Group yesterday morning.

Highlights of the Vodacom Group Limited trading statement for the quarter ended 30 June 2012 included:

– Group service revenue growth up 8.7% (5.7%*)

Brand reinvention: Kodak gets its next moment

Kodak may be dead as a camera and film company, but it is coming back to life in the “post-capture” world of printing, writes Arthur Goldstuck (@art2gee).

The Kodak moment is back. When the company that invented popular photography filed for bankruptcy protection five months ago, it provoked a tut-tut that was heard around the world. The company had been undone by the advent of digital photography – a technology it pioneered, but never managed to turn to its own advantage.

The “portable all-electronic still camera”, invented by Steve Sasson in 1975, was awarded US patent number 4,131,919, but that wasn’t enough to convince Kodak executives. As Sasson would write many years later, they could not understand why people would ever want to view their pictures on a TV.

Brand Journeys: MWeb – not quite ‘just like that’

For many people MWEB is still the big black box, which it launched in 1997, the same year the business was established by MIH Limited (a Naspers company). The big black box, in case you don’t get it, was a box, and black, and offered wary South Africans everything they needed to connect to the Internet via dial-up modem, with the payoff line “Just like that” (I still hear the finger snap in the background).

The commercial Internet was new, exciting, and big business was getting in on the act. The first dot com bubble had yet to burst and MWEB was spending large swathes of money buying up rival ISPs before its 1998 listing on the JSE.

Today it is a friendly consumer brand wholly owned by Naspers. Its pay-off line has changed to Connect & You Can to reflect the growing acceptance and integration of the Internet into daily lives. It serves a user base of over 300 000 subscribers (which is not that much higher than figures available for 2005 – although it has had success in converting many of those to ADSL) of whom more than 200 000 sits on ADSL. They consume 4.5 petabytes (4,500,000,000,000,000 bytes) of bandwidth per month.

TechCentral readership climbs to 133 000

TechCentral, launched in September 2009 by IT journalist Duncan McLeod, has shown steady growth, averaging between 250 000 and 300 000 impressions a month. It has also been profitable from day one thanks to a lean structure put in place by McLeod, who manages the site with one other full time journalist, Craig Wilson, and with Lance Harris in charge of lighter content over the weekends.

A string of freelancers make up the rest of the team. McLeod handles sales himself.

McLeod had been at the Financial Mail for twelve years before he jumped ship, and served as technology editor at the time that he left the publication, to which he still contributes a weekly column. Having seen the decline of print in the US, especially on the newspaper front, and seeing the rise in connectivity in South Africa and the relatively low barriers of entry into online publishing, he made the leap and launched TechCentral.

Brand reinvention: What Windows 8 means for Microsoft (and computing)

Debate swirling around Microsoft’s proposed Surface tablet misses the point about the significance of Windows 8, writes Arthur Goldstuck (@art2gee).

It’s almost a mantra in the computer business that you write off Microsoft at your peril. The company’s Windows operating system runs most of the world’s computers, it has tens of billions of dollars in the bank, and its Office software sets the standard for productivity tools in the working world.

Yet, it remains fashionable to predict its demise or declare it is unable to innovate and is about to be supplanted by Google or Apple.

That summed up the response to Microsoft’s announcement last month that it would release its own tablet computer, to be called the Surface. (see http://www.microsoft.com/surface/en/us/about.aspx ). Its most striking feature is a thin, touch-sensitive cover that folds out into a keyboard, with a built-in trackpad. It will run the new Windows 8 operating system, in two configurations: a lower-end version called Windows RT, and the business-oriented Windows Pro.

EXCLUSIVE: Hellocomputer – “we’ll continue to fight the fight from the inside”

Draftfcb acquired independent digital agency Hellocomputer earlier today. MarkLives talks to David Moffat, Managing Director at Hellocomputer, about the future of his agency within the Draftfcb South Africa Group (also see our interview with Draftfcb CEO John Dixon).

MarkLives: Why did you choose Draftfcb as a new corporate parent?
Moffat: Hellocomputer has been approached by most of the leading advertising networks. This possibility resonated with for a number of reasons: it’s an esteemed group with an impressive track record creatively and in terms of business performance, a culture and value structure we subscribe to, enviable clients and a management team we admire. Draftfcb has also demonstrated its belief in digital by investing in its own digital agency Mesh Interactive. We look forward to being part of a group that has built many of South Africa’s most loved brands.

EXCLUSIVE: Draftfcb acquires Hellocomputer

by Herman Manson. Draftfcb has acquired independent digital agency Hellocomputer. The move follows widespread industry speculation that the two parties were about to announce a deal.

Why iMaverick is changing frequency

iMaverick, the ambitious daily tablet newspaper from the publishers of the popular website The Daily Maverick, is scaling back its frequency from daily to weekly. The news was announced to subscribers in an email earlier today.