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Online Book Rental, the P2P Way »

Online book rental is now becoming popular on the internet. We recently had the opportunity to work on Silibi whose business model is focussed on peer-to-peer rental. For us, the concept of exchanging books over the internet, using the APIs from ISBNDB, Amazon, USPS and Paypal was very interesting.
We initially used ISBNDB to access the books database and it worked great for us. However, we needed the book image and its weight, so we switched over to Amazon. USPS is seamlessly integrated with the check-out process and shipment labels automatically get generated.  Check it out yourself at Silibi and you will see that the application is very fast, even when it tries to retrieve lot of information from many 3rd party sources.

Video resumes in India »

In the last 3-4 decades, if there is one thing that has not been significantly influenced by technology, it must be resumes. Of course, they have moved from paper based to electronic format, but the content, format etc are pretty much the same. Except for few tech-savvy companies, HR personnel have not yet started experiencing the power of Video resumes.

With internet connection speeds pretty decent nowadays, video resumes are not that painful to download and view. In fact, with advances in the video encoding and streaming technologies, viewing videos online is now a seamless experience. One cannot deny the fact that video resumes offer more insight into the candidates. I have heard ridiculous comments like “Candidates are all staged” in video resumes. Well…so are paper based resumes. In paper based resumes, candidates try to use more prominent keywords, so that job portals can pull them up over other resumes. So, more than the resume content, keywords play a more important role in paper based resumes. In video based resumes, HR personnel get to SEE and HEAR the candidates, without even picking up the phone.

Communication skills are as important  as technical skills: How many times have you worked with an employee with whom communication is very difficult. I know of many employees who are afraid to pick up the telephone to speak to US clients. Interaction within a group improves the overall efficiency of the team.

There are two types of video resumes, where candidates speak about themselves for few minutes. The second one, which is more of an evolution of the first, allows employers to post jobs and set relevant questions to those job profiles. Candidates can answer the questions, at their own convenience. The advantage in the second one is that the candidates are answering to questions that are more relevant . iVirtual (in India) and VIP (in USA) are one of those service providers, who allow employers to post questions and review them later on the web, at their own convenience.

Web Development without Flash »

Our clients loved flash; they wanted those cool animations on the site. But the problem was that the flash development was not so easy to get into. Most graphics people we got were good at Photoshop and could do basic tweens in Flash. ActionScript was pretty complicated for them. For a non-flash developer, Flash was not that intuitive. Even simple things like accessing a database was quite complicated, like using intermediate XML files etc. Overall, Flash was a pain in the back. Luckily, JavaScript evolved over time. Using jQuery, we can do many cool transitions and animations, without using a separate plugin like Flash. I had problems with Flash on my 64 bit Vista.

We now hear that Apple is not supporting Flash on its iPod, iPhone and iPad. You can read Steve Job’s letter here.

Websites, without plugins are always welcome!