JobeeHive.com founder Vishwas conferred Star Entrepreneur Award

JobeeHive.com founder, Vishwas Mudagal was conferred with STAR ENTREPRENEUR AWARD at the 4th Indira India Innovation Summit at Pune, India, in January 2011. The summit is annually sponsored by Indira Group of Institutes, Pune, and awards top entrepreneurs and innovators in India. Vishwas was appreciated for his contribution to Entrepreneurship & Innovation during the last decade as a serial entrepreneur and a CEO. He was recognized as a thinker and a believer in change. The Indira India Innovation Summit is governed by Advisory Council which guides the strategic intent of the congress to its logical success.

At the event, Vishwas spoke about his vision for the education industry and effectiveness of the education delivery through mobile/tablet based solutions. He stressed upon the need to end the era of costly text books through disruptive products and revenue models in education and publishing industry.

Pictures and more details on Vishwas Mudagal's blog.

JobeeHive Partners with Simplify360 for Social Media

Press Release: India's Biggest Employer Review Site, JobeeHive.com Partners with Simplify360 for Social Media

Bangalore, December 10, 2010 – JobeeHive.com, started three years back with the unique concept of providing company reviews, employer ratings and salary reports along with professional networking, has partnered with Simplify360 for their social media requirement.

JobeeHive.com was the first online portal from India, which let employees rate their employers and offered facts about companies, which could really be helpful to the prospective employees.

With most of the conversations happening through social media now, it’s not just enough to have a social media presence. Companies/ brands need to track what is being said about them, engage with their consumer and take appropriate actions.

“What is being said and written about a company is closely tracked by professionals today. Reviews on JobeeHive.com have been taken seriously while researching jobs and companies. Most of the companies want to ensure they manage their online reputation and are willing to engage our users and visitors. Together with Simplify360, we would be reaching the length and breadth of social media. We hope to make the reviews and salary data more valuable on JobeeHive and make it more accessible through social media with the help of Simplify360,” said Vishwas, founder and mentor of JobeeHive.com

About JobeeHive.com

JobeeHive.com enables users to rate/review companies (they have worked for), research on salaries or a prospective employer as well as get more info about a company - be it job offers, layoffs, announcements, business opportunities, etc. The site is one of the biggest employer review sites with 40,000+ reviews of over 20,000 companies around the world. The site provides rare salary information that helps professionals understand salaries, benefits and pay hikes in different companies across job grades and locations.

About Simplify360

Simplify360 is a web based complete social media engagement and analytics platform that lets you energize and engage with your customers, analyze and interpret the social mentions of your brand. It consolidates the conversations happening about your brand in all important social media communities and brings to you actionable insights to help you create your social media identity.

JobeeHive.com turns 3!

JobeeHive.com, India's biggest employer review site, turned three on 12th September 2010. We thank our users and visitors who supported us through the critical first three years. The site has 40,000+ employer reviews and salary reports across 20,000+ companies and growing - that helps job seekers and professionals research companies across industries and locations.

It's been a wonderful journey so far with lots of ups and downs. It's exciting time at JobeeHive currently with many new great individuals joining our team. Many others have departed during the last couple of years and we thank them for their contributions.

We are back and we are here to stay. We had taken down Jobeehive for a little while to set few things in order. We had to clean up our code base and fix few architectural issues that had bogged down our system, particularly the database. We lost some data, but user login data is intact. You can login and start researching your favorite companies and industries.

We have new partners who will now support us to increase our reach in India and US. Stay tuned for further updates.

Team JobeeHive.

JobeeHive in India's hottest startups by JAM Magazine

JAM Magazine saluted the kindred spirit of entrepreneurship and covered India's hottest startups in their September 2009 edition. And ofcourse JobeeHive.com was listed as one of the hottest startups and touted as "the company that provides what everyone is looking for."

Here is what they said about us - "The website provides a unique platform for people to interact with other professionals by sharing career information on companies they have worked for. Basically, if you joined a company and loved it (or didn't), you can write a review on the website. It is the only website in India currently providing information of this kind. When you want to switch jobs and don't know who to ask about a company, Jobeehive.com provides all the answers."

The magazine also ran the interview of JobeeHive.com's founder Vishwas Mudagal. Read the entire story here.

We thank our users and visitors who have made us HOT!

Stay tuned to JobeeHive.com!

Five 5-min savers

Pic Source: Microsoft Clipart

If you are perpetually wondering why your office laptop/desktop functions slower than Charles Babbage’s prototype, you are certainly not alone. The 5 tools listed below should help you speed up some of the most uninteresting tasks - and still allow you to keep all the wallpapers, games and movies intact! ;)

1. Xobni: For all those who live out of the inbox, Xobni (reverse of inbox) is a welcome relief. Once installed, it takes stock of all your mails and personal folders. It creates a social network of colleagues right in your inbox and you can now easily search for people, conversations and attachments. Other features include integration with LinkedIn, Facebook and Hoovers along with some inbox specific stats for the super-organized folks. Xobni is great time saver when you are looking for a long-forgotten mail chain with hardly any strings to enter in the search fields that are otherwise enabled in MS Outlook. Flip side: slows down the loading of Outlook on first boot.

2. Launchy: Alright, you put as many shortcuts on your desktop as possible, but where does the next one go? Launchy helps you in accessing all your files with minimal hassle and keeps your desktop clutter-free. After installation and initial catalog building, press Alt+Space (customizable) to invoke Launchy. Type in the first few letters of the file, application, folder or URL and hit enter for instant access. Launchy is mouseless, very light, has a compact interface and helps you locate files you didn’t even know resided on your hard disk! Flip side: There is no auto catalog rebuilding and this has to be done manually on a periodic basis.

3. Clear Temp: For most of us, clearing Temporary files is like exercising – we know it is good but we never do it. And on the rare occasions when we do get on to it, the irksome prompt saying some files are currently being used in the session dampens all further enthusiasm. Clear Temp is a small .exe file that cleans all your temp folders in one swipe and closes itself once done. Put it in your startup list of executables and you can forget about clearing temp folders for the rest of your life. Flip side: Doesn’t clean up Recent Docs, Recycle Bin and Registry.

4. Caffeine: You are in the thick of a presentation or on a phone call and lo! Your laptop locks itself as per your organization’s security protocol. To avoid the inconvenience of re-entering your login details/biometrics during such occasions, use Caffeine which is a minuscule .exe that simulates a Shift key press every 59 seconds thereby preventing your system from getting into the lock, screensaver or sleep mode. Flip side: Can’t be customized to run along with specific applications or on a scheduled time.

5. Tweak UI: This is a well-known Microsoft add-on that enables you to customize most features of your PC. Perhaps the one that saves some minutes is the Autologon feature which allows you to do just that into your office network on system startup after you have stored the right username, domain and password. This might not be a great idea if you are using a desktop or a shared laptop but if you are the sole user of your system, this tweak does save a few keystrokes and minimizes instances of failed logins and the more extreme system lockouts depending on how slipshod you can get ;) Flip side: Doesn’t auto-update password when changed.

Not that these tools will give your office PC an edge over the latest Cray XMP build but they’ll certainly make it quicker, this side of a defrag.

Office Jargon Demystified

Like every other tribe under the sun, officedom too comes with a cant unique unto itself. Office lingo is filled with words that sound like a clap of heavenly thunder and almost makes you worship the guy who used it on your uninitiated ears. Seasoned office-goers would find it highly dissatisfying if they don’t get to use some of it a few dozen times everyday.

Unless you are the type who’d like to learn things the hard way, here’s a brief primer of some popular office jargon and their probable undertones: ;)

PFA: An email acronym that stands for ‘Please find attached’. The sender doesn’t want to explain things to you and expects you to learn from the attachment, which is usually a very large document that might take you a decade to wade through.

TIA: An email sign-off that expands to ‘Thanks in Advance’. You are being thanked for an act you are yet to commit, implying that you have no way out but to achieve the expected results. Usually comes with a deadline that is surprisingly within the next 30 min and is ALWAYS accompanied with the PFA as interpreted above.

“Let’s take it offline”: Mostly used in telephonic or video conferences indicating that the thread currently being discussed concerns only a select few attendees. But by the time this great truth is realized, all the rest in the call would have blinked away gallons of yawn-induced tears and dug their nails deep into the underside of the table in a desperate attempt to avoid the embarrassment of falling asleep.

Spare Bandwidth: This is a cunning way of asking if you have ‘additional time’ to complete some extra tasks that no one else wants to do. If you declare that you don’t, it has the uncanny ability of coming back to you with increased load and without an option to reject, this time around.

Urgent and Important: Seen in the subject lines of emails that are just that….for the sender, not you. S/he has now made it your mandate and if you are not careful, you will be doing all of it in your ‘spare bandwidth’.

Gentle Reminder: Again, sent as subject lines of emails to invoke actions to the Urgent and Important activities explained above. The ‘Gentle’ part is mostly restricted to the subject line and as days go by, the content gets ‘gentler and gentler’.

There are a gazillion others, what’s your favorite?

Time to A-C-T Stress

STRESS, perhaps is one of the most oft used words of modern world. ‘I am stressed’ is one phrase that I have been uttering more than my name ever since my post education days. Work stresses me, family stresses me, friends stress me, relationship stresses me. And it’s all real I can actually feel the weight.

I got married recently and marriage as you know is a package. New people, new ways of thinking, new ways of everyday living, along with expectations from your existing relationships and demands of your existing job. Till about a fortnight ago I was heading very clumsily attending to both personal and professional life. So busy did I get with this ‘attending’ business that I almost forgot about a life I had once aspired to enjoy. I went around asking friends on how to tackle the situation. But while on surface it might sound similar, actually all of our situations are so different that it is difficult to derive what worked for others into your life.

I realized stress is something extremely internal to me and it is I who can do something about it. After a bout of real hard thinking I embarked upon a method which I would call A-C-T: Ask-Contemplate-Tackle. Many might feel it is a clone of SWOT – well may be.

What I did here is: I first Asked/Analyzed the situation looking at all the whats, whys, whens and hows. Next I Contemplated on the character that I am (good, bad, ugly), people I have around, environment I am in, my financial and social standing. Finally, based on all my derivatives above I charted out on how I tackle the situation.

One bit of caution before we go about the A-C-T exercise is to be as unbiased as possible. Though all questions are extremely subjective we need to keep an independent view of all the entities in question here – ourselves, people around us and our environment.


ASK

What is the situation?
Why have I fallen into it?
When are the times when I fall prey to stressful situations?
How has my external environment played a role in it?

CONTEMPLATE: (A combination of both strengths and weaknesses)

Look at self

What am I like?
How do I react to a situation?
How do I take feedbacks?
How do I react to the unexpected or unknown? …..etc

Look at people around you:

What kinds of behavior make me feel good?
What kinds of behavior intimidate me?
Who all can I open up with and how much?
Role people around me have played in such situations in the past?
Role they could play now?
Do I need to bank upon anyone or is it self handle(able)?

Look at the environment around you

Environment am I comfortable in (could be anything crowded place, not so crowded place, intellectual talks, light talks etc)
Environment I am not comfortable in
What all have I landed myself into, in the past, because of my like or dislike of any environment?
Role, my liking or disliking of my current environment, is playing now

Look at your financial and social standing (independent of stress to asses whether the stress is real or artificial)

Are you fine enough financially?
Are you secure – house, security policies, safe job etc?
Relationship – are you doing fine with all your everyday contacts like spouse, parents, siblings, close friends, boy/girl friend?

Our minds enjoy intense thinking. Stress I would say is another form intense thinking. So sometimes when all is well (finance, security, relationships) we still feel stressed for reasons unknown to us (what many of us call as BLUES). That's because our minds would have created some artificial intense thinking cloud just so that it is occupied. That is why assessing whether the stress is real or artificial is necessary.

TACKLE

Now I have some clarity about:
The situation
How I react and think about something
Impact that people and environment around me have on me
Whether or not I have essential materialistic want

Based on the above make an outline of the following:

ACCEPT: I am stressed because am in real trouble and I want to do something about it.

OR My stress is artificial all that looks wrong to me are actually minor issues

If the stress is real, answer these:

What are those (part of character, people, environment) that I shouldn’t and can’t do away with?
What are those that I should avoid and to what extent?
How much should I get involved intensely (conversation, a situation, a feedback etc)
When should I keep it to surface level?
What are the things that I can let go without hurting myself?
When should I send the ‘I don’t like it’ message?
Which emotions/reactions of mine should I take seriously (based on my experience or real or artificial stress)?
How do I deal with set of people (ones I can/should get closed to, one I should keep it at formal level)?.....etc

There can be many more ways of dealing with a situation. Crux of everything is: The Answer lies within us, all we need is to look for it!


Cheers
Jhinuk