Monday, December 19, 2005

First Advantage Acquires TruStar Solutions

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. (AP) -- First Advantage Corp., a provider of risk management services, said on Monday that it agreed to acquire online recruitment firm TruStar Solutions Inc. for an undisclosed sum.
TruStar, a Fishers, Ind.-based firm owns a variety of Web recruitment technologies, including a job posting tool that distributes listings to several job boards, as well as an interactive advertising tool.

Separately Monday, brokerage firm Morgan Keegan downgraded the stock to "Market perform" from "Outperform," on valuation concerns.

Shares of First Advantage, which have traded between $18.48 and $31.07 over the last year, slid $1.76, or 5.8 percent, to $28.80 in afternoon trading on the Nasdaq.

TruStar Solutions

Thursday, December 08, 2005

New Tool for HR Evaluation by Beeliner HR and Training

December 5, 2005 — Cambridge, MA — Spinfish/ROG, Inc. today introduced Beeliner HR & Training, a customized version of its flagship online survey software product, enabling human resources professionals to better manage employee communications and evaluate training and hiring practices without the cost, effort and learning curve typical of many HRIS software products.

The Beeliner HR & Training Surveys software package enhances Spinfish's original Beeliner Surveys by offering more of the services that a typical HR department needs, including:

Customized training workshops by industry experts Professionally developed survey templates Dedicated support specialists

"A primary focus for Beeliner was to produce an easy-to-use solution for HR professionals," said Amanda Trombley, CEO for Spinfish/ROG, Inc. "HR professionals spend a lot of timing in meetings and working one on one with people. They need an efficient way to collect and manage information from employees, but they do not have the time to use a software product that has a big learning curve."

In countless occasions, HR professionals avoided complicated and costly HRIS software in favor of products that are simple to use, but might not have the needed functionality. Beeliner offers the best of both worlds; a high tech software product with the ease and familiarity of a spreadsheet.

"Many large companies that we've talked to are using Excel spreadsheets to keep track of paper surveys," said Trombley. "It can be manual and time-consuming, but from an HR perspective it's easier than researching, buying, and integrating HRIS software."

Beeliner's easy to use interface is web-based, so HR professionals do not need to install software or involve their IT departments. The software can be accessed from any location, not just within the office.

Beeliner's web-based interface walks HR professionals through every step of developing, customizing, and sending the following types of surveys and more: - Team member self-assessments


  • Employee performance appraisal forms

  • Post-training impact surveys

  • Training session evaluation forms

  • New hire surveys

  • Benefits surveys

  • Organizational climate surveys

  • Employee satisfaction surveys

  • Exit surveys

  • Applicant surveys



Beeliner's reporting function allows HR professionals to decide how they want to view and share the data -- they can pinpoint it by individual response or get the big picture by viewing data in a general summary format. It also creates customized reports and presentations for effectively communicating the information as needed.

More information is available on the Beeliner web site at http://www.beelinersurveys.com/

About Spinfish/ROG, Inc. Beeliner Surveys (http://www.beelinersurveys.com/) is a leading survey software tool that helps people and businesses around the globe conduct professional email and web surveys. Large and small businesses, universities, non-profits, and governmental agencies use Beeliner to create surveys for a variety of purposes, including market research, human resources, customer satisfaction and retainment, and more. Beeliner is developed by Spinfish/ROG, Inc., a privately-owned software development company in Cambridge, MA in the USA. Spinfish was founded in 1997.

Monday, December 05, 2005

Correction: Google is not trying to be a job board, or even get in the job board business.

Google Base is not trying to be a job board or even a classifeds system. They are not trying to sell houses or advertise jobs or sell cars. Google Base is a product that allows people to build websites and applications while uses Google as a database. The more content Google can analyze the more accuratly they can deliver more targeted ads on their other sites, where the real money is for them. In addition to letting developers use Google Base as a public or prive database, they are also allowing developers to build applications / websites that use the public content put into google base. Yes you can search base.google.com and find a pseudo job lists, but it will take a developer/company to build a true job board using all of that data. Basically you can build a job board and get tons of jobs automatically, without having to do any wrapping or indexing. The same goes for real-estate, cars and any other popular categories of data.

So in closing. Google is not getting in the job board business, Google is trying to be the literal hub of data / data transactional API on the internet. For example Flickr, who is very liberal with their data, could use google base to store all of their data - then any other company could use the Google Base API to create a Flickr browser plug-in. "All" Google really wants to be, is the database for all the information floating around the web.