Crowdfunding Site Kickstarter Kicks Off U.K.-Based Projects From Today, Eyeing Other International Launches
Crowdfunding site Kickstarter has kicked off the launch of U.K.-based projects today. As reported earlier this month, the move marks the first time Kickstarter projects will be able to be built around bank accounts located outside of the U.S. — making it easier for U.K.-based users to list and fund their projects as they can now enter payment info directly on Kickstarter, rather than via Amazon Payments.
Kickstarter is also eyeing other international launches, according to the BBC. Head of community, Yancey Strickler, told the news organisation he plans to expand the site to other countries soon. ”The request to expand internationally has long been one of our most requested features,” he said. ”We certainly are interested. We’re going to see how the UK launch goes and figure out the next moves from there. There’s a lot of places that will be interesting.”
Kickstarter has been letting U.K.-based users start building their projects since October 10 but from today these projects can now be launched and shared with prospective backers.
There is no U.K.-specific Kickstarter site — projects are listed alongside U.S.-based projects on Kickstarter.com, so from a site users point of view the change is quite a subtle one. You have to look out for a £ symbol (rather than a $ symbol) in the funding information to determine whether a project is U.K.-based or not.
Kickstarter further notes
All UK projects will be listed in pounds sterling. If you are pledging from outside the UK, you will see the approximate conversion rate to US dollars before you complete your pledge.
Kickstarter is charging the same five percent fee on successfully funded U.K.-based projects as it does for U.S.-based projects (and no fee for unsuccessfully funded projects). It says payment processing fees for UK projects are similar to those for US projects — namely
Pledges less than £10 are charged 5% + £0.05
Pledges of £10 or greater are charged 3% + £0.20
The site lists projects by city — with U.K. cities currently fielding projects seeking funding including London, Belfast, Birmingham, Manchester, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Cardiff.
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My Github Resume generates a résumé from your GitHub account
Résumés are becoming more and more useless, especially when it comes to programming jobs. Many prospective employees wish they could just send a link to their GitHub profile and be done with it. Many prospective employers wish they could just skim your GitHub profile and move on. Unfortunately, GitHub was never designed for such a purpose; that’s where My Github Résumé comes in.
The two-year-old service can automatically generate a résumé from anyone’s GitHub profile. Here’s an example of what one looks like: David Coallier (the creator of My Github Résumé).
The idea came to Coallier from a simple tweet:
When it comes to hiring, I’ll take a Github commit log over a resume any day.
— John Resig (@jeresig) February 5, 2011
From that, we got this:
As you can see, the generated résumé page includes text in the first person organized in five basic sections: Github Profile, Languages, My Popular Repositories, My Organizations, and About This Résumé. The last one is just a boiler plate that reads the same for everyone:
This résumé is generated automatically using information from my github account. The repositories are ordered by popularity based on a very simple popularity heuristic that defines the popularity of a repository by its sum of watchers and forks. Do not hesitate to visit my github page for more information about my repositories and work.
My Github Résumé may have been around for some time, but it still has a few areas to improve on. One issue is how the service handles being unable to find a given GitHub user (anyone can generate a résumé for any GiHub user). Here’s the error message:
We couldn’t find enough to build a résumé from. Make sure this is the good username
. Try again with another username?
You can get this error in various browsers, such as Internet Explorer 9 or Chrome for Linux. As Brian Zeligson points out, this message blames the user, not the service. Here’s a better way of doing it:
We couldn’t find enough to build a résumé from. Make sure this is the good username
While this service isn’t new, there’s currently a great discussion about it brewing on Hacker News. As the top comment points out, much like other similar services, My Github Résumé only lists your own projects, not those from other people or organizations to which you contribute to.
The résumé isn’t going away anytime soon, but the popularity of this service, at least among developers, shows just how badly outdated the concept really is. Hopefully it will inspire even better alternatives to the annoying system that is the cover letter, résumé, and interview process.
Image credit: stock.xchng
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Y Combinator-Backed Rentobo Helps Landlords Fill Apartments Without All The Messy Paperwork
Looked for an apartment lately? It sucked, right? You showed up and you had to fill out an application and submit all sorts of stupid paperwork — credit check, proof of employment, utility invoice (apparently to prove that you can pay a bill, like an adult), etc. And then, if you’re lucky, your name will be pulled out of a hat amongst the other half-dozen people who applied for the same property.
Well that whole process sucks for landlords and property management companies as well. After all, they’re the ones who collect all that paperwork and sort through all that data. Don’t you wish there were a better way? Thanks to Rentobo, there is.
Rentobo provides a platform for landlords, listing agents, and property management firms to not only post their open units across a number of different apartment listing sites, but it gives them a way to quickly and easily get information from prospective tenants with an online application process.
The team, which was part of the Y Combinator Summer 2011 class, started off originally with the idea of auctioning off apartment rentals. But it quickly realized that all the infrastructure it was building would be extremely useful in just getting most apartment listings online. So it began to focus instead on what it could do to automate the process and make things easier for both landlords and tenants.
For landlords, first and foremost there was the listing problem. Craigslist still looms large in most major metro areas, despite its crappy interface and lack of functionality. But then there’s Zillow, Trulia, and other sites as well. Rentobo provides a single listing interface for landlords and listing agents to post to all of those sites at once.
It provides a drag-and-drop interface for adding photos to listings, so that prospective tenants know what they’re getting into before they apply. And since all pictures are stored remotely, landlords aren’t constrained by the limit on the number of photos they can upload to Craigslist. All in all, its listings are pretty gorgeous.
But the listings management part of the software is kind of the easy part. Where Rentobo really excels is in reducing the amount of paperwork that changes hands, by allowing landlords to collect information from prospective tenants through online applications. Tenants could even submit information before they even see the apartment, so that there’s no paper to exchange if they do decide they want to apply for a place.
Rentobo is currently free while users beta test it, but when it officially goes live, the startup plans to make money from landlords based on the number of listings they manage using the platform. It’s also working to add the ability to collect application fees, as well as streamline the process for credit checks directly through the platform. Once those features are in place, it could also make some additional revenues based on applications it processes.
Read this article: Y Combinator-Backed Rentobo Helps Landlords Fill Apartments Without All The Messy Paperwork
Google launches its Business Photos service in India
Google has introduced Business Photos in India, extending the global reach of the service that helps retailers attract customers by posting panoramic photos of their store or shop-front to the Web.
The pilot program will see Google take 360 degree photos of businesses’ premises, which are then uploaded to Google Places to give prospective customers an inside look (literally) at the interior of the shop or office space, and its a sample of its products or services.
The search giant explains more details of the service, which costs nothing for companies involved:
The photographs are shot by Google appointed photographers who work directly with the business owner to arrange a time to do the photo shoot. The images will show prospective customers the interiors, decor, merchandise — and all of this will be done at no cost to the business owner.
As we said earlier this month, Business Photos can provide a fantastic advantage for business — particularly retailers or restaurants — in their quest to bring in more customers and revenue, and it is well worth considering.
The initiative in India has begun in Hyderabad and will be rolling out to other cities soon, Google says.
Companies that are interested in participating can register their interest in having a Google-sponsored photographer take their shots by signing up here. In particular, Google is encouraging restaurants, cafes, spas, salons, gyms, showrooms, and retail stores, but any business can upload its own shots to Google Places.
You can find full details of the initiative India at this Google blog entry, via trak.in.
Business Photos initially launched in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and France, before Google expanded it to Canada, The Netherlands and Ireland on May 1.
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