I'm heading down to the Stirr mixer shortly, where, before Sun's Scott McNealy talks with the audience about entrepreneurship, I'll be moderating pitches from four start-ups. Three of them I've covered previously:
Attendio makes a system that automatically feeds your calendar with events it thinks you'll find interesting (let's hope it gets the times right).
Confabb is a conference directory. Rumor has it the site is soon to be acquired. Maybe we'll find out tonight.
JobCoin is a hosted job board service that I think is really clever.
The fourth company is Collaborative Drug Discovery. In a nutshell: Open-source development concepts applied to drug creation. I can't begin to explain it better, let alone critique it. But if you've ever felt that you needed a more efficient way to upload your high-throughput enzyme inhibition and high-content cell assays, check it out.
On the consumer side, see also Mepath[blog post], an initiative to create public drug trials, or at least make it possible for clinical drug users to compare their experiences (efficacy and side effects) with other people.
I'll also be looking for other interesting Web 2.0 companies at the event. I often find the most intriguing start-ups by talking with event attendees, not by hanging out with presenters. Come find me at the event if you've got a good pitch.
When TechCrunch launched its Web 2.0 job board last year, it was joining--and was soon joined by--several other similar job boards. And now, anyone can get in on the action. Using JobCoin, you can create a job board on your own site with practically no effort. The service is a job board host. You tell it how much you want to charge for a posting, upload your logo, and bam, you've got a board. Here's ours: webware.jobcoin.com. (Our current fee for posting a job: $0. Go wild, but keep it clean.)
The new Webware job board
(Credit: CNET Networks)It's a great idea for people running popular blogs or sites. A lot of blogs have very focused and dedicated audiences, and this tool makes it possible to make money from one of the best advertising forms out there: help wanted notices. We're not talking chump change here, either: a good job board can charge $200 a posting. Get a few of those a month and you're talking real money. JobCoin is free to use, but the company keeps 30 percent of all revenues collected.
JobCoin could become an excellent resource for people who post jobs, too. In the future it will be possible for recruiters to post a job to one site and have it appear on other relevant sites. The exact mechanism for determining which jobs go where isn't complete yet, but if JobCoin CEO Keith Schacht can figure it out, he'll really have something. Especially if he can also figure out how to reward the owners of sites where posts are first entered.
Nearly every business on the planet needs to hire people. Successful blogs have highly specific audiences that people in particular industries gravitate toward. So JobCoin could make a lot of money for everybody involved: the bloggers, the people who get neat new jobs, and JobCoin itself.
Schacht will be presenting tonight at the Stirr event in Palo Alto, which I will be moderating (tonight's event is full, I'm afraid). If you're looking to catch the Web 2.0 buzz in person, the Stirr events are great, and there's one every month. Hit the site to apply for an invitation.
See also: Relationship management for job seekers: JibberJobber
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