AskBINC Updates
New Feature Being Added to AskBINC.com
In a few weeks we are going to be adding a new feature to the AskBINC blog; a Questions and Answers section where we list the most common question we get from candidates and clients. Questions will include information about the job market, how BINC works and anything we deem important for candidates and clients to know. Please stop on in and get your fill of information. If there are any questions that you would like to be answered by the BINC, Inc. staff please leave a comment and we will be sure to add them. Here is a taste of some of the questions it will include:
Candidate
How’s the market right now?
As of June ‘09 the job market is best described as "spotty." The job market certainly hasn’t returned to its June ‘08 form, but it’s a lot better than Jan-March of this year.
Who’s getting hired right now?
Specifically in the software market, candidates with good coding skills are in demand. It seems like demand for non-coding manager, program managers, etc… is still pretty low. People need techies who bring lots of talents to the table and code skills are almost a must today.
How does an entry level candidate stand out?
Draw a direct correlation between past work and success for the company (i.e. I led an engineering effort that resulted in our systems going from 99.6 to 99.9999999% availability). As an entry level candidate, obviously you don’t have a lot of this to work with. Just stress your skills, passions, and what you bring to the table. Other than that – most companies are looking 1) education (it is what it is) and 2) you internship history.
Try to think about the area of software engineering that 1) you are most interested in and 2) are most likely to be able to going employment in. Then, look for opportunities to volunteer on open source software projects in that area, consider writing a program/project of your own to show your competency in the area, or think of other creative ways to start writing code in an area that you are interested in – these projects will show employers both your passion for the space and will showcase your engineering skills.
Click to continue reading “New Feature Being Added to AskBINC.com”
AskBINC Update
It has come to our attention that our website and blog have fallen victim to malicious software. Until we get everything straightened out we will not be posting any new articles. Follow the BINC team on Twitter to get the latest BINC updates
A Standing Ovation and Round of Applause
I would like to take this opportunity to thank everybody who participated in the First Annual askBINC WebMadness Competition. We had a great time planning the competition and are incredibly appreciative of everybody’s participation. We’ll definitely be planning more events like this later into the year. A big round of applause and thanks to:
- The initial 16 competitors for being such great sports as they faced off against one another rallying their employee base in hopes of voting them into the second round
- The 8 second round teams who battled head to head and after recognizing that voting alone wasn’t going to win the round, resorting to what they know best to propel them into the next round – building great software
- Sasha Strauss, CEO of Innovation Protocol for being the brilliant brand strategist and friend that he is and helping me refine the scope of this software development competition
- Alex Holderness and the team at Volunteermatch for taking interest in our competition and helping us come up with a real world and relevant problem for our competitor base to tackle
- The competition judges, Alex Holderness, Mamoon Hamid, David Weekly and Jerry Kirkheli for taking the time out of their schedule to help refine our competition criteria and for offering to serve on the judging panel
- The employee ranks of all 8 competition finalists for taking the time to review and consider taking a stab at our proposed problem
- The askBINC crew for helping to come up with the initial idea for this competition, working late into the evening and weekends to help refine the competition once it changed faces and pulling together in true Apprentice Style to make sure everything was in place for the competition be as successful as possible. You guys are the best!!
- And lastly I’d like to thank our winner Expedia.com for being a true class act and delivering a world-class solution that will hopefully be successful in improving the connectivity between volunteers and non-profits throughout the world.
BINC Web Madness Tournament Update!!
The BINC WebMadness competition is only 3 days away from completion and I can already feel the excitement beginning to brew amongst the competitors, the judges and the folks here at BINC as we are all waiting with great anticipation to finally see all of these great solutions being developed. I am sure all of the solutions will be amazing in their own right but hopefully one of them will be that killer app that really makes an impact and difference in the world of volunteer matching. I guess we’ll have to wait until Monday to find out what all these competitors have in store for us.
In the meantime, I thought it would be interesting to point out some observations I’ve noticed throughout the week from the competitor camp. In my opinion, these are very telling signs of a company culture and the mind set of the employees that work there. If any of the competitors are reading this and would like to chime in with more insight into the inner workings at their organization in response to this WebMadness competition, please do so. We’d be happy to publish any public responses that you send our way or keep them confidential if that’s what you prefer.
- One competitor was able to rally their entire company behind this WebMadness effort. They dedicated a point person to communicate with BINC and assembled a development team to solve the problem. They asked great questions throughout the week and seem to be well on their way to a winning solution.
- One employee from a competitor heard about this competition and immediately rallied a team of colleagues to work on the problem. He said this is really cool project and hell ya his team was going to bring something cool to the table.
- One competitor said, sure we’ll participate but we’re going to let our people assemble and organize themselves and hopefully we’ll represent with something compelling.
- One competitor visited our blog every day this week and hasn’t said anything to BINC besides, “Our people are competitors and are excited about this. I’m sure we’ll come to the table with something good”
- Another competitor who has been visiting the blog everyday this week hasn’t said anything to BINC besides, “we’re looking forward to working on the problem”
- One employee from a competitor called us with interest in getting involved in our competition. He was interested in working on this problem, but when told that his organization has no point of contact and he would need to assemble with others to resolve the problem, he seemed to become incredibly confused and lost. As if without a point of contact, efforts cannot be made towards a common goal.
- Many employees from an organization contacted me with interest in participating, but after I let them know that they will need to assemble their own efforts they seemed to become discouraged and unable to muster up the initiative necessary to move forward.
BINC Web Madness Competition – Let the Games Begin
The BINC Web Madness Tournament which began as a fun little voting based competition to determine web/software marketplace’s top employment brand of 2009 literally turned into web madness when instead of voting and rallying others to vote for their employment brand it turned into an actual software development competition where the competing players were building software to out vote their competitors.
So we thought let’s give these 8 competitors what they obviously want; A software development competition to determine the employment brand in our web/software marketplace that employs the most driven innovative and passionate professionals in the marketplace. And to raise the stakes, we’ve decided to put forth an actual real world problem for them to work on so that when solved will actually make our community, society and country a better place to live. Talk about making a real impact.
So who is the top employment brand of 2009? Easy, the company that employs the most passionate, innovative and driven team of professionals. Let’s find out who amongst the amazing minds employed by Facebook, Zynga, EA, Activision, Expedia, Amazon, Slide and Apple will rise to the occasion and help their employer take the crown for top employment brand of 2009 as recognized by askbinc.com.
Quickly before we get started I’d like to thank all of the volunteer judges who have given up their time to review and grade all submitted solutions. Thank you Mamoon, Alex, David and Jerry. I’d also like to thank Volunteermatch.org for helping us come up with this real-world compelling problem and for agreeing to provide volunteer credit for all involved participants. And most importantly, I’d like to thank everybody employed at Facebook, Zynga, Slide, EA, Activision, Apple, Expedia and Amazon for taking time out of your schedules to participate and help tackle the real-world problem detailed below.
So without further ado let’s get ready for the madness. On your marks competitors, get set, CODE!!!!
Problem
90% of the people in the world volunteer only when asked. 90% of the people in the world would volunteer more if they had an easier way to identify relevant volunteering opportunities (or more importantly those volunteering opportunities had a better way to identify and connect with those most willing to volunteer).
Develop and launch a fully functional open sourced web application (website, social networking application, widget, etc) that makes it considerably easier for non-profit organizations and volunteers to connect thereby raising the volunteering activity and overall goodness done throughout the world.
San Francisco based nonprofit, VolunteerMatch, addresses this need as the industry leader with the most active market where nonprofits and volunteers interact. They connect almost 1 million people every year. Great, but there are so many more people and non-profits still out there that need connecting.
Deliverable
Upon completion of your solution, please send an email to webmadness@bincsearch.com with the following information. We will publish a link to your launched product on Monday, April 13.
-
Link to your launched fully functional and publicly accessible web application.
-
“About Us” statement somewhere in the web solution that mentions the name of your employer, the askbinc.com Web Madness Competition and your vision for your solution.
-
Technical design overview to include languages and technologies used.
Each company represented in this competition can launch as many solutions to this problem as they want as long as each one abides by the deliverable criteria mentioned above. Solutions can be submitted anytime up until deadline.
Judging Criteria
The judges will grade each of the submitted solutions against the following five criteria. Each solution can be awarded between 1-10 pts per judge per criteria allowing for a max total of 50 pts to be earned. We will then aggregate the scores, divide by the total number of judges and assign each solution a final score. Whereas everybody participating will receive an honorable mention, the team that submits the solution with the highest score total will be crowned the winner.
-
Impact/Reach
-
Functionality & usability
-
Creativity
-
Visual Appeal
-
Technical sophistication (modularity, extensibility)
TimeLine
April 6 – competition begins
April 13, 8am – final deadline for solution submittals
April 13 – all solutions are publicized on AskBINC.com blog and judging period begins
April 20 – winner announced on AskBINC.com blog
Communication Throughout Competition
Email – webmadness@bincsearch.com – send any questions, comments or updates and we will respond asap. Please also send the names and contact information of all participants so we make sure to update and communicate with them as the week progresses.
Twitter – #webmadess – please include this hashtag for any tweets related to this competition. Follow the BINC team who will be tweeting actively throughout the competition – @BINC, @TawnyLabrum, @gamingrecruiter, @Seattle_Hdhntr, @georginabinc, @melcondos
Askbinc.com blog – post any comments, updates, thoughts, ideas related to this competition.
Volunteer Hours
Thanks to volunteermatch.org all hours dedicated to this competition will be granted as volunteer credit. In order to receive credit, please send an email to webmadness@bincsearch.com with your name and number of hours volunteered. We will get you the proper documentation noting your earned volunteer credit.
Post Competition
The solutions developed for this competition are the property of the developers that built them or their employers (we’ll let you guys work that out). Because the solutions developed are meant to solve a real world problem and do some actual real world good in the world, we highly encourage that one of the following two paths be followed upon completion of this competition.
-
Continue to develop, maintain and support your solution so that it can make as great of an impact as possible.
-
Donate your solution to volunteermatch.org, a nationally recognized organization that employs a very capable technology organization and has the infrastructure in place to maintain and support your solution.
Judges
David Weekly Founder & Chairman – PBWiki.com and Co-Founder of SuperHappy[Fun|Dev]House
David has been programming since he was five and has coded for MIT, Harvard, Stanford, There.com, atWeb, and Legato. David 
wrote the first layman’s description of MP3 in early 1997 and graduated in 2000 with a BS in Computer Science from Stanford, where he was a President Scholar and a finalist in the ACM International Programming Competition. David started the company that became PBwiki in 2003. He likes to throw hacker parties, fly helicopters, ride his motorcycle, and make useful things.
Alex Holderness – Chief Financial Officer at VolunteerMatch.com
Alex Holderness brings to VolunteerMatch over 15 years of professional management experience. A lifelong entrepreneur, 
Alex founded his first startup, Eleven East Records, during college, to serve needs of startup companies around the world in such diverse industries as technology, ecommerce, financial services, entertainment and consumer marketing. Prior to joining VolunteerMatch, Alex helped build and launch several businesses for eBay Inc., including eBay Motors and eBay Travel. Before eBay, he held positions as a Derivative Securities Analyst with Lehman Brothers in New York City and was a member of a $1 billion portfolio management team with Kemper Mutual Funds in Chicago. Alex grew up in a culture of service. As a child, his family hosted a group of six political refugees from Vietnam, one of whom was adopted by the family and became their older brother, Pham. Alex earned his MBA from the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan and his B.A. in Political Theory from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is an avid surfer, skier and photographer, and plays music with his band in San Francisco.
Mamoon Hamid – Prinicpal at U.S. Venture Partners
Working at USVP combines Mamoon Hamid’s three passions: technology, people and building businesses. Mamoon joined USVP in 2005 and became a Principal in 2008. He has 11 years of experience building and investing in high growth technology businesses. His investment interests lie in IT and Cleantech areas. Mamoon led USVP’s investments in Box.net, and serves on 
the company’s Board of Directors. He is actively involved with USVP portfolio companies: Optichron, Supplyframe and Zannel. He is also an advisor to Yelp.
Prior to joining USVP, Mamoon spent seven years at Xilinx (XLNX) in various marketing management and engineering roles. He was responsible for defining and implementing sales and marketing strategies that grew the company’s consumer electronics and automotive market segment revenues five-fold to $100 million in a span of three years. As a System Architect at Xilinx, Mamoon was responsible for evangelizing the role of Xilinx technology in emerging markets and prior to that, as an applications engineer, he designed performance and cost optimized FPGAs which led to key design wins for the company. Previously, Mamoon has also worked for Deutsche Bank.
Mamoon holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University (graduated at age 19), an MS in Management Science & Engineering from Stanford University and an MBA from the Harvard Business School.
Jerry Kirkheli – Senior Software Engineer/Manager at Google
Jerry Krikheli is currently a senior software engineer and engineering manager in charge of AdSense quality at Google. He started his engineering career during his last two years of college while working part time at Applied Semantics. At AS, Jerry participated
in the development and launch of core text processing technology for the flagship products at the Enterprise Solutions division. He developed software used in word-sense disambiguation, meaning extraction, and 
content summarization. In 2003, following the acquisition of AS by Google, Jerry got involved with AdSense engineering and developed the first non text-ad format for Google called “Link Units”. Link units were an alternative to text ads and offered a list of topics relevant to the content page which when clicked, took a user to a page of related advertisements. While at Google, Jerry also participated in the development of Google’s next generation contextual targeting system and was involved in the development of AdSense for Domains, and third party ad serving. Prior to serving as the manager of teams focused on developing software and algorithms aimed at improving AdSense quality, Jerry was responsible for managing products worth nearly one billion dollars of AdSense revenue. He holds a BS with honors and an MS in Computer Networking from UCLA.
Participants
Slide is the world’s largest publisher of social entertainment applications. They offer people the ability to engage and have fun with one another using the relationships they’ve already developed on social networks like Facebook and MySpace. The social networks benefit from increased activity, advertisers benefit from an exuberant audience, and their users can share favorite videos, send virtual lattes or even throw sheep at each other.
Amazon.com, Inc. operates as an online retailer in North America and internationally. Amazon serves its consumer customers through its retail Websites and focuses on selection, price, and convenience. It also offers programs that enable seller customers to sell their products on its Websites and their own branded Websites. In addition, the company serves developer customers through Amazon Web Services, which provides access to technology infrastructure that developers can use to enable virtually any type of business. Further, it offers co-branded credit card programs, fulfillment, and other marketing and promotional services, such as online advertising. Amazon.com, Inc. was founded in 1994 and is headquartered in Seattle, Washington.
Electronic Arts Inc. is the world’s leading interactive entertainment software company. EA develops, publishes, and distributes interactive software worldwide for video game systems, personal computers, cellular handsets and the Internet.
Founded in February 2004, Facebook is a social utility that helps people communicate more efficiently with their friends, family and coworkers. The company develops technologies that facilitate the sharing of information through the social graph, the digital mapping of people’s real-world social connections. Anyone can sign up for Facebook and interact with the people they know in a trusted environment.
Expedia, Inc., together with its subsidiaries, operates as an online travel company in the United States and internationally. It provides travel products and services to leisure and corporate travelers, offline retail travel agents, and travel service providers through a portfolio of brands. The company’s travel offerings consist of airline flights, hotel stays, car rentals, destination services, cruises, and package travel provided by various airlines, lodging properties, car rental companies, destination service providers, cruise lines, and other travel product and service companies on a stand-alone and package basis. It also facilitates the booking of hotel rooms, airline seats, car rentals, and destination services from its travel suppliers; and acts as an agent in the transaction, passing reservations booked by its travelers to the relevant airline, hotel, car rental company, or cruise line. The company is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington.
Zynga is the #1 social gaming company on the web. Zynga was founded specifically to add a social element to casual online games because they love games, and they love them most when they’re playing with friends! Social games provide a more fun, competitive and contagious experience. Zynga delivers on the promise of social networks, making it easy to connect with old friends and make new ones (no download required!). Zynga has something for everyone: casino games, word games, board games, role playing games and party games which can be found on Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Friendster, and Hi5.
Apple Inc. and its wholly owned subsidiaries design, manufacture, and market personal computers, portable digital music players, and mobile communication devices, and sell various related software, services, peripherals, and networking solutions. The company sells its products worldwide through its online stores, its retail stores, its direct sales force, and third-party wholesalers, resellers, and value-added resellers. The company sells its products to consumer, small and mid-sized business, education, enterprise, government, and creative customers. Apple Inc. was founded in 1976. The company is headquartered in Cupertino, California.
Activision Blizzard, Inc., publishes online, personal computer (PC), console, and hand-held games worldwide. The company develops and publishes video games, as well as maintains its proprietary online-game related service, Battle.net. It also publishes interactive software products and peripherals internationally. The company’s products cover various game categories, including action/adventure, action sports, racing, role-playing, simulation, first-person action, music, and strategy. Its products include Guitar Hero, Call of Duty, Tony Hawk, Spider-Man, X-Men, James Bond, and Transformers, as well as Diablo, StarCraft, Warcraft, and World of Warcraft. The company is based in Santa Monica, California. Activision Blizzard, Inc. is a subsidiary of Vivendi S.A.
Web Madness Competition begins Monday – Participants to be Given Volunteer Credit
UPDATE - All hours contributed to this competition will be credited as volunteer hours by volunteermatch.org
Very exciting day yesterday. This competition is turning out to be bigger than we imagined. So in the interest of getting it right and making it a positive experience for all competitors involved we’ve decided to push off the start until Monday morning. At that time, we’ll announce the societal impacting problem (it’s a good one benefiting a very worthwhile cause), the criteria for the solution, the time line for development/judging and the remaining judges who will be reviewing all entrants. In the meantime, I am happy to announce the names of two of the judges who have been kind, gracious and interested enough to volunteer their time to review and grade all delivered solutions – Alex Holderness CFO at Volunteermatch.org and Mamoon Hamid Principal at USVP – each bringing their own unique insight to this competition.
On the competition front, we’ve connected with representatives from the participating companies and everybody is approaching this is their own unique way. Some are dedicating a few key resources to the task with the intent to bang out a solution in a scrum session or two. Some are pushing it out to their entire development team and letting this serve as a mini internal software development competition where only the best solutions will be submitted for consideration. Another has simply said “bring it on” while offering no insight as to how they intend to approach this, but with that eagerness in their voice, we can tell they have their game plan ready.
With all of the companies representing such different development styles and employing such diverse talent, I am very excited to see what sort of solutions will be brought to the table next week. So will it be gaming giants EA or Activision, Seattle powerhouses Amazon or Expedia, nimble startups Slide or Zynga or staple consumer brands Apple or Facebook?
We’re interested in hearing your thoughts throughout today and the weekend!
Alex Holderness – Chief Financial Officer
Alex Holderness brings to VolunteerMatch over 15 years of professional management experience. A lifelong entrepreneur, Alex founded his first startup, Eleven East Records, during college, to serve needs of startup companies around the world in such diverse industries as technology, ecommerce, financial services, entertainment and consumer marketing. Prior to joining VolunteerMatch, Alex helped build and launch several businesses for eBay Inc., including eBay Motors and eBay Travel. Before eBay, he held positions as a Derivative Securities Analyst with Lehman Brothers in New York City and was a member of a $1 billion portfolio management team with Kemper Mutual Funds in Chicago. Alex grew up in a culture of service. As a child, his family hosted a group of six political refugees from Vietnam, one of whom was adopted by the family and became their older brother, Pham. Alex earned his MBA from the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan and his B.A. in Political Theory from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is an avid surfer, skier and photographer, and plays music with his band in San Francisco.
Mamoon Hamid – Prinicpal
Working at USVP combines Mamoon Hamid’s three passions: technology, people and building businesses.
Mamoon joined USVP in 2005 and became a Principal in 2008. He has 11 years of experience building and investing in high growth technology businesses. His investment interests lie in IT and Cleantech areas. Mamoon led USVP’s investments in Box.net, and serves on the company’s Board of Directors. He is actively involved with USVP portfolio companies: Optichron, Supplyframe and Zannel. He is also an advisor to Yelp.
Prior to joining USVP, Mamoon spent seven years at Xilinx (XLNX) in various marketing management and engineering roles. He was responsible for defining and implementing sales and marketing strategies that grew the company’s consumer electronics and automotive market segment revenues five-fold to $100 million in a span of three years. As a System Architect at Xilinx, Mamoon was responsible for evangelizing the role of Xilinx technology in emerging markets and prior to that, as an applications engineer, he designed performance and cost optimized FPGAs which led to key design wins for the company. Previously, Mamoon has also worked for Deutsche Bank.
Mamoon holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University (graduated at age 19), an MS in Management Science & Engineering from Stanford University and an MBA from the Harvard Business School.
A native of Pakistan, Mamoon grew up in Frankfurt, Germany, where he developed his love for playing, watching and coaching soccer. One day he hopes his team Eintracht Frankfurt will win the Champion’s League. Mamoon is multi-lingual in German, Urdu and Hindi.
Web Madness Tournament Gets a New Twist
The BINC Web Madness tournament which started out as a simple competition to determine the top employment brand within the web/software marketplace just evolved into something much bigger. Instead of it being about who can gather the most votes or who can tell the most people to vote for them, it became about something that not only drives the entire marketplace, but something that’s at the absolute core of any good software organization. It became about innovation, passion and drive -- the 3 components that it takes to build and succeed as any great software organization.
Round 2 began with 8 fiercely competitive brands going head to head with each other -- Amazon, Slide, EA, Expedia, Apple, Activision, Zynga and Facebook -- and just like competition amongst these brands is heated in the real marketplace, the same fire burned in this tournament. We don’t know how it started or who started it, but at some point in this round an engineer employed by one of these brands became so adamant that they work for the top employment brand that they created a piece of software to push their own employment brand to a win. But what that did was start a chain reaction that compelled the other brands in the tournament to develop their own piece of slightly improved software to push their brand to the top. So what initially started out as a voting-based competition eventually became a competition driven by passion and engineering talent that is much more reflective of the real world marketplace.
So somebody may look at this and say rules were broken and systems were rigged; therefore brands should be eliminated or rounds should be replayed. But it’s too late for that. The can of worms has been opened. The competitors themselves insisted that the winner shouldn’t be determined by who can gather the most votes. They insisted that the winner should be based on who employs the most passionate, driven and innovative professionals and who can build the best piece of software.
So if that’s what the people want, that’s exactly what we are going to give them. What we’ve decided to do is raise the stakes of this tournament and make this abut something bigger. So we know that all these companies can build a piece of software to influence a voting system. But can these companies use those same skills and attributes to build a piece of software that can make the world a better place to live. Let’s find out.
So here’s the new plan. All 8 teams that made it to the second round are still in the game. In exactly 24 hours at 8am on Friday morning we will pose a societal or charitable problem solvable by building a piece of software and give each of the entrants a specified amount of time to deliver their solution. It will be the company that comes up with the best solution that will be crowned the winner -- the employer of the most innovative, passionate and driven software professionals in our marketplace.
In 24 hours we will announce the problem and the criteria and allow these 8 competitors to get to work.
OMG – Round 2 just finished and we’re shooting our roundup
What an insane Round this one turned out to be. Each matchup collected near 150k votes and literally went down to the wire. Slide and Amazon were literally neck and neck until the final seconds with Amazon winning by a nose. Expedia pulled away last minute from EA and Zynga and Activision made huge runs to beat out Facebook and Apple. So the Final 4 bracket is set with Amazon taking on Expedia and Zynga taking on Activision. Get ready to begin voting on Thursday morning at 8am. Let’s get it ooonnnnn!!!
Web Madness Tournament Update Round 2
Round 2 of our Web Madness Tournament has been an exciting one. We are seeing thousands of voters coming to our site to support their employer. Right now the leaders are Slide, EA, Facebook and Apple – with their competitors Amazon, Expedia, Activision and Zynga fresh on their trail. Voting for this round ends today at 5pm.
If you work for the competing companies leave a comment below telling us why you love working for your current employer.
Find Us On: