Assured Labor Raises $5.5M To Find Jobs For Workers Across Latin America
Assured Labor, a New York, Mexico City and Sao Paulo-based startup that helps low- and middle-income workers across Latin America find jobs through their mobile phones, just closed $5.5 million in funding led by Mexican private equity firm Capital Indigo. Other existing investors include Great Oaks Venture Capital, Nexus Venture Partners, Kima Ventures, Enzyme Venture Capital, Fabrice Grinda and Jose Marin. The company, which came out of MIT’s Media Lab, runs two big job-hunting services called EmpleoListo in Mexico and TrabalhoJá in Brazil that now have 500,000 job seekers and 16,000 employers. They’re growing at a clip of about 1,000 employers per month. (They only just broke into the Brazilian market a year ago.) With Assured Labor, employers looking for potential hires can put job descriptions in through the company’s website. Assured Labor will find the most qualified candidates and text message or e-mail them. Workers register on computers either at home or through web cafes. ...
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Groupon Adds Global Search To iPhone, Android, Now Supports Android Tablets To Sharpen Up For Yelp, Foursquare Rivalry
Groupon’s VP of mobile, David Katz, says that it has been “business as usual” at the daily deals company since the dramatic departure of founder/CEO Andrew Mason. “We’re still just focused on shipping new stuff,” Katz told TechCrunch in an interview. Today, that includes news of updates to Groupon’s iPhone and Android apps: it is adding a universal search feature that will let consumers use the apps to search for Marketplace deals that are available nearby, covering not just local discounts that are time-sensitive but rolling offers that are not. The search feature lays the groundwork for a larger attack that publicly traded Groupon is making on mobile to stay competitive in location-based mobile services against the likes of Google, Yelp and Foursquare — with the latter just raising $41 million to position itself as a platform for local search, offering local deals as an added twist. On top of the new search updates, the Android app is now able to support tablets, the first ...
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Growing Your Design Business
So you’ve launched your own creative business, and you’re starting to grow. That’s great! But good growth won’t just happen. Just like a junior designer starts with small projects and slowly builds her skills, a new business needs time to mature, test new ideas, and prepare itself, too. How did you gain the design chops that got you where you are today? With study, practice, and testing, I imagine. Business owners learn their trade the same way: by taking general business wisdom, applying it to their specific niche, and working diligently until they get it right. If you want to grow in a sustainable, satisfying way, then you need to pay attention to how you’re growing, not just how much. After all, a bigger company isn’t necessarily a better one. Let’s look at four common pitfalls of growth in the design industry, and how to avoid them. The wrong clients As a business owner, you might assume you should serve everyone you can. Busy is good, right? In reality, taking on every ...
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Google's Director Of Privacy Alma Whitten Steps Down
As Forbes first reported this afternoon, Alma Whitten, Google’s director of privacy for product and engineering, has decided to step down from her current position. Google has now confirmed this. Whitten joined Google 10 years ago and oversaw the company’s privacy policies during a tumultuous time when its Street View cars were accused of spying on people’s Wi-Fi networks and Google decided to consolidate its over 70 privacy policies under a single document. Whitten has a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon, where her thesis looked into “Making Security Usable.” She spent seven years as an engineer at the company before she was promoted to director of privacy right after the Wi-Fi Street View story broke and Google had been severely criticized for the privacy controls of Buzz, its pre-Google+ attempt at launching a social network. At the time, Google described her as “an internationally recognized expert in the computer science field of privacy and security. She has been our engineering ...
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Toronto HR Startup ClearFit Raises $7M Series A To Grow Hiring Software For Small Business Offering
Toronto’s ClearFit, a company that uses automated software and algorithms to bubble up the top applicants for employers looking for quality hires, today announced the close of a $7 million Series A round. The financing, led by Boston’s GrandBanks Capital and including Relay Ventures, will help ClearFit grow to keep pace with demand, company co-founder and CEO Ben Baldwin told me in an interview. ClearFit offers for small businesses the kind of software-based candidate evaluation that has traditionally be out of reach for those who aren’t large enterprises. The system works by evaluating the fit of applicants based on a questionnaire and profile-building process that takes candidates around 12-15 minutes to complete, which is then measured against predetermined criteria to determine whether or not the candidate is a good fit. Baldwin says that its predictive analysis techniques are on average five times better at anticipating candidate job success than rival tools, according to ...
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