Jobot：通过微信帮你找工作微信机器人在中国有着巨大的市场。微软在中国最受欢迎的消息应用上运营的聊天机器人就有 2000 万个粉丝—— 而且它还是被狂热崇拜的对象 ——这表明消息聊天的对象不只是局限于你的朋友。
那何不如就来这里找工作或是进行面试技巧练习呢？这正是 Jobot 的目的所在——这一项目诞生于本周末的 TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon。
该服务基于微信平台，后者是一个广受欢迎的中国消息应用，拥有着超过 5 亿的月度用户。Jobot 从本质上讲是一个聊天机器人，它会通过提问来评估出最适合用户的公司。该服务使用 IBM Watson 系统，会为每个用户制定个性化的分析模式，比如文化适应性和工作氛围。这些收集自用户的信息可以帮助他们找到相匹配的未来雇主。
Jobot 不仅帮助求职者寻找潜在雇主，它还会帮助他们练习回答那些他们在招聘环节中可能会被问到的问题。
在每个回答的基础上，Jobot 会使用一个自动化的系统来管理问题，不过该服务的一名开发人员大卫·柯里尔（David Collier）表示，人们可以随时轻松插入任何一个环节。如果程式化问题问完了，而招聘人员还想要更多的详细信息，这会对应聘者有帮助。同样地，柯里尔告诉我们，由于公司本身也可能需要寻找特定类型的求职者，比如一些像实习生这样的初级职位，Jobot 也会非常适合他们。
现在，该服务还在不断完善中——首先，它还不是一款官方认证的机器人。此外，柯里尔还表示，他们计划对分析进行调整，以便让企业能够使用 Jobot 进行预先筛选。他们很有可能还会开发一个管理面板，病尝试与 Glassdoo 和领英进行集成。
柯里尔此前已经为微信开发了一个英语学习应用，并且还与其他消息应用进行合作，他表示，“微信上有 11 亿的用户，凭这一点我们可以有把握地说，伟大的事情即将发生。人们已经把消息聊天融入到日常生活——我们打算将这个转化为资本。”
Jobot Helps You Get Hired Using WeChat’s Messaging App
WeChat bots are huge in China. The machine-powered being that Microsoft runs on China’s most popular messaging app has 20 million followers alone — and it is a cult hero — which shows that messaging isn’t just about chatting to your friends.
Why not use it to find a job or practice your interview technique? That’s what Jobot, a creation from this weekend’s TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon, aims to do.
The service uses WeChat, the hugely popular Chinese messaging app with over half a billion monthly users. It’s essentially a chatbot that asses the best kind of company a user should work for using questions, powered by IBM Watson, to develop personality insights like culture fit and sentiment, for each user. The idea is that information gleaned from users can help them find the right cultural match in a future employer.
Not only does it let job finders seek out potential employers, but also helps them practice responses to the kinds of questions that they’ll be asked during the recruitment process.
Jobot uses an automated system to manage questions based on each answer, but David Collier, one of the brains behind the service, said that a human could easily step into the process at any point. That might be useful once the formulaic questions are out of the way and a recruiter wants more specific information. Likewise, Collier told TechCrunch that companies themselves could get involved in the project to seek out specific types of hires, entry-level positions like interns might be best suited.
Right now, the service is a work in progress — for one thing it isn’t an official bot. Aside from fixing that, Collier said there are plans to tweak the analytics to give companies the option to use Jobot for prescreening purposes. An admin dashboard and potential integrations with Glassdoor and LinkedIn are also on the cards.
“With 1.1 billion users on WeChat, we can safely say there are great things in store. People already have chat integrated into their daily lives — we plan to capitalize on that,” Collier, who has an English learning app for WeChat and works with other messaging apps, said.
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2015年09月21日
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招聘网站 Hired 有了新掌门
Hired 管理层近期做了一些调整：公司总裁梅胡尔·帕特尔（Mehul Patel）已被晋升为首席执行官，而前任首席执行官、创始人马特·米基维兹（Matt Mickiewicz）则出任首席产品官。
帕特尔曾供职于 Lyft、甲骨文、CNET 和 Kaggle 等公司，两年前加盟 Hired。帕特尔告诉我，这其实并不是像一些人所认为的那种大规模调整。实际上，他透露管理层更迭计划已酝酿了很久，甚至在正式宣布之前，他本人就已承担了越来越多的管理责任。
帕特尔说：“这并不是一次重大调整。”那为什么要选在此时做出这种调整呢？他补充说，“种种迹象表明，这种模式是成功的，我们开发出了适销对路的产品。我们的业务增长正在提速，所以更换首席执行官似乎也是一个不错的时机。”
帕特尔其实在今年 7 月份便已成为 Hired 的首席执行官，只不过他对自己的晋升相对低调（我认为，对于任何一个之前看到过他 LinkedIn 主页 的人来说，他们其实已经知道帕特尔获得晋升。）
Hired 最近还任命了该公司历史上首位首席营销官——朱尼·哈姆（Juney Ham），此人是投资顾问创业公司 Upside 的联合创始人。
在业务增长方面，帕特尔表示 Hired 自 2012 年创建以来，年营收始终以两倍的同比速度增长，预计明年的营收将达到 1 亿美元。Hired 已经在 9 座城市投入全面运营，还在另外 4 座城市进行试运营。Hired 刚刚签了一份租赁合同，在旧金山的 Mid-Market 区租用了 2.5 万平方英尺的办公地。
Hired 的客户包括 Facebook、Twitch 和 Uber 等公司。此外，据帕特尔估计，Hired 工程团队 95%的人员都是由该公司自己招来的，作为一家以人才招聘为主的创业公司，这也是自然而然的事情。
Hired 表示，它会结合计算机算法和人为因素，以严格的程序对求职者进行筛选，所以雇主根本不必一份份地仔细查看厚厚几摞简历。接着，招聘企业会给求职者发来一封信，里面对他们将要获得的待遇做出细致描述，如果他们最终接受了这份工作，还将从 Hired 获得 2000 美元的奖励。
也许最为重要的是，求职者不用与试图填补某项岗位空白的招聘企业直接打交道，而是要与 Hired 人才顾问合作，他们会基于求职者的具体要求做出职业推荐。
Hired 最初专注于技术岗位，后来将业务范围扩大到销售领域。帕特尔表示，最终 Hired 可以被用于“营销人员、人力资源师、会计以及建筑师等——所有知识型员工应该都可以通过这种方式找到工作。”
Recruiting Startup Hired Has A New CEO
There’s been a bit of a leadership shuffle at Hired: President Mehul Patel has been promoted to CEO, while the previous CEO, founder Matt Mickiewicz, has become chief product officer.
Patel (who has also worked at Lyft, Oracle, CNET and Kaggle, and who joined Hired two years ago), told me this isn’t as big a deal as you might think. In fact, he said there was a longtime transition plan in place, and even before the official switch, he’d been taking on more and more business responsibilities.
“It’s not a dramatic change,” he said. So why make the change now?
“All the signs were this model is working and we have product market fit. The growth rate of the business is increasing, so it seemed like a good time to have the CEO transition.”
Patel actually became CEO back in July, but the company has been relatively quiet about it (though I guess the promotion was apparent to anyone who looked at his LinkedIn page).
The company recently hired its first CMO, too — Juney Ham, co-founder and investment advisor of startup Upside.
On the growth front, Patel said Hired’s revenue has been tripling year-over-year since it was founded in 2012 and is projected to reach a $100 million annualized run rate next year. The service is fully launched in nine cities and in beta testing in another four. And the company it just signed a lease on a 25,000 square foot office in San Francisco’s Mid-Market neighborhood.
Companies that have used Hired include Facebook, Twitch and Uber. Plus, naturally, Hired itself — Patel estimated that about 95 percent of the engineering team came in through the Hired service.
Hired says it screens job candidates through a rigorous process combining algorithms and human curation, so employers don’t need to sift through a giant pile of résumés. Candidates are then wooed by the companies with “reverse cover letters,” they get transparency into compensation and they receive a $2,000 bonus from Hired if they accept a job.
The service was initially focused on tech roles, but it has since expanded to sales jobs. Ultimately, Patel said Hired could be used “for marketers, for human resources, for accounts for architects — all knowledge workers should be able to find a job this way.”
来源：techcrunch
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2015年09月20日
硅谷
就业技能培训平台LearnUp获得A轮800万美金融资
LearnUp成立于2011年，总部设立于旧金山。
LearnUp主要业务为就业技能培训和职业指导，并且LearnUp会为用户联系一些大公司帮助他们找到工作。
LearnUp此次获得A轮800万美金融资。此轮融资由New Enterprise Associates 和 Shasta Ventures领投，其他投资方为Greylock Partners、Floodgate和 High Line Venture Partners。
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2015年09月18日
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企业在线问答公司AnswerDash（Qazzow）获得种子轮290万美金融资AnswerDash成立于2012年，总部位于美国西雅图。
AnswerDash通过技术嵌入功能答案帮助企业更好地回答消费者的问题，从而帮助企业削减相应的用户支持开支，同时保持用户不流失。
本轮融资由Voyager Capital 领投，Arnold Venture Group、Summit Capital、The W Fund、WRF Capital跟投。
UW spinout AnswerDash raises $2.9M to support growth of online contextual help platform
What started as an idea inside the Information School at the University of Washington is now a full-fledged business that’s raising cash from venture capital firms.
UW-spinout AnswerDash today announced a $2.9 million seed investment round led by Voyager Capital, with participation from existing investors WRF Capital, Summit Capital, the W Fund, and Arnold Venture Group.
AnswerDash, formerly known as Qazzow, wants to fundamentally change how online businesses answer questions that customers might have.
Rather than forcing people to comb through an FAQ or use a written-based solution like email or live chat, AnswerDash’s technology embeds answers within a website’s functionality.
The company helps its clients offer customers instant, contextual answers to a question they may have while browsing a given web page on desktop or mobile. When a user clicks on something they have a question about — this could be an image, link, header, etc. — AnswerDash employs a machine learning search process to retrieve the most relevant questions and answers.
The idea is to reduce the amount of time customers search for answers online, ultimately helping businesses improve the consumer experience while retaining revenue that previously could have been lost due to user frustration.
“By enabling users to quickly and easily find their own answers to commonly asked questions, AnswerDash prevents costly and repetitive help requests that would otherwise arrive via e-mail, phone or live chat,” explained CEO Bill Colleran. “AnswerDash also reduces the likelihood that online shoppers will abandon their shopping activity because they fail to receive answers to their questions simply and intuitively.”
Colleran, a former longtime CEO of Impinj, joined AnswerDash in June when he replaced co-founder Jake Wobbrock, who started AnswerDash back in 2012 with fellow UW professor Andrew Ko and their Ph.D student, Parmit Chilana.
AnswerDash co-founders Jake Wobbrock and Andrew Ko.Wobbrock and Ko have held the CEO and CTO roles, respectively, at AnswerDash for the past three years —Chilana went on to become a professor at the University of Waterloo — but will return to their careers in academia this fall.
Wobbrock told GeekWire that “this was always a planned transition.” The co-founders will remain involved with AnswerDash in an advisory capacity, while Wobbrock will serve as a board observer.
“Our goal as academic co-founders was to take the technology we created out into the world,” he said. “We wanted to get the startup going, get it funded, build a great launch team, refine our product, and get customers and value proof-points. Once we had achieved this, we knew that the best people to take the company to the next level would be seasoned industry executives with years of experience building companies and taking products to market.”
The leadership baton is now passed to Colleran, who previously spent 14 years leading RFID technology-maker Impinj, and VP of Engineering Kevin Knoepp, who joined the team in January after spending more than two decades as a back-end technology executive.
“AnswerDash will continue its evolutionary arc from a small, research-based product team to a vibrant, innovative and fast-growing SaaS company,” noted Colleran.
Colleran said that the company has “matured dramatically” since starting three years ago. Now that the startup has established product-market fit — it has “dozens of customers” like Chef, PetHub, and PipelineDeals — it will use the fresh cash to expand its sales and marketing efforts while continuing to improve the AnswerDash platform.
Colleran has lofty ambitions for AnswerDash, which makes money with a tiered subscription model based on the amount of usage its tool gets and also produces unique analytics to clients that can provide insight into what types of questions customers are asking while browsing through a given website.
“AnswerDash’s service enables more efficient, succinct and clear communication over the web and on mobile devices, so over time our market will grow to include almost every website and mobile app,” he said. “That’s a huge opportunity.”
Total funding for the 13-person company is now $5.3 million.
来源：GeekWire
日本在线英语辅导公司Langrich被收购，在线教育已成日本热潮
美国远程教育公司EnglishCentral上周早些时候宣布了对日本公司Langrich的收购。
Langrich总部位于日本东京，提供在线英语辅导一类的服务。签署换股协议后，该公司将并入EnglishCentral，其投资者 KLab Ventures以及Hitomedia 都将成为EnglishCentral的小股东。据KLab公司发言人表示，此次并购标志着第一次日本创业公司被美国同类大公司收购。
Langrich成立于2010年，通过Skype语音软件提供英语教学，授课老师均为菲律宾籍。和其主要竞争对手Rarejob以及DMM一样，Langrich提供一对一教学，并专注于会话技巧。今后，其用户还可以通过电脑或者手机观看录制好的视频课程，并配上EnglishCentral的智能化语音识别技术来学习词汇和发音。
EnglishCentral首席执行官Alan Schwartz在采访中表示：“在日本，我们还将继续使用Langrich作为我们的品牌。”
“EnglishCentral不会更改旗下公司或平台的名称，包括很多在韩国、中国以及巴西的领先的在线学习公司。”
EnglishCentral总部位于马萨诸塞州阿灵顿，每月拥有超过10万付费用户。其服务范围包含全球各地超过100个国家的400多所大学。在扎堆的远程教育领域里，EnglishCentral这家创业公司最大的亮点或许就是有退款保证了。如果学生在三个月内不能得到提升，EnglishCentral会退还全部学费。
Schwartz表示，EnglishCentral将会接手Langrich现有的包括教师在内的260名员工，同时还表示：“我们也会每个月增加几十名教师，并且我们不会再限制教师国籍，菲律宾籍之外的老师也可以考虑。”
日本的补习班（juku），也就是培训学校产业价值大约100亿美元。而英语口语课程就占据了当中很大一块市场。随着互联网的发展，智能手机的日益普及，很多这些课程被搬到了线上。
这对线下实体学校造成了很大冲击，因为对于学习者而言，在线学习更为划算，以至于目前许多实体学校已如强弩之末，而在线教育却已经成了日本最热的创业领域之一。
“2007年，日本最大的实体英语培训学校Nova破产之后，整个日本培训市场一度停滞不前，但近几年，情况有了转机。”Schwartz解释说：“Rarejob现在已经上市了，你可以看到它的财务状况，其注册用户数量增长了将近50%。DMM的增长还要快。它们是日本在线市场上，最主要的两个竞争对手。而去年，我们的收入也增长了90%。”
还有一件事进一步证实了日本在线辅导热潮的火爆，上周的亚洲科技东京舞台上，日本国内的在线教育公司Mana.bo就拿下了特等奖。
Japanese edtech startup acquired by US startup amid online tutoring boom
American edtech startup EnglishCentral earlier this week announced the acquisition of a Japanese startup offering similar online tutoring for English learners. Langrich will be acquired in a share-swap agreement that sees the Tokyo-based startup’s investors – KLab Ventures and Hitomedia – become minority shareholders in EnglishCentral. According to a KLab spokesperson, it marks the first time that a Japanese startup has been acquired by a larger American one.
Founded in 2010, Langrich uses English tutors in the Philippines to provide English instruction via Skype. Like its main competitors, Rarejob and DMM, lessons are one-on-one and focus on conversation skills. Langrich users will now benefit from a video lesson archive for web and mobile, as well as EnglishCentral’s speech recognition technology for studying vocabulary and pronunciation.
“We will keep the Langrich brand as our consumer brand in Japan,” Alan Schwartz, EnglishCentral’s CEO, tells Tech in Asia. “EnglishCentral will remain the name of the company and the name of the platform that we provide to our global partners, including many leading online learning companies […] in Korea, China, and Brazil.”
EnglishCentral, headquartered in Arlington, Massachusetts, boasts more than 100,000 paying users per month. The service is available in more than 100 countries and at over 400 universities across the globe. Perhaps EnglishCentral’s biggest differentiator in the crowded edtech space is its money-back guarantee – the startup refunds 100 percent of a student’s lesson fees if they don’t level up after three months.
Schwartz says that EnglishCentral will retail all of Langrich’s current employees – a total of 260 including teachers. “We’re also adding dozens of teachers a month, and we will not limit teacher hiring to the Philippines going forward,” he adds.
The Japanese juku – cram school – industry is valued at roughly US$10 billion.Eikaiwa – conversational English lessons – take a big chunk of that market. With strong internet infrastructure and a population that’s increasingly fond of smartphones, many of those lessons are moving online. That could hurt brick-and-mortar schools, which have already faltered, since online learning is more cost effective for learners. This shift to online has created, arguably, one of Japan’s hottest startup verticals.
“After the Nova implosion (once Japan’s largest physical English conversation school, Nova went bankrupt in 2007), the whole market in Japan stalled, but things have changed in last several years,” Schwartz explains. “Rarejob is now public and you can see from their financials they are growing at close to 50 percent in terms of registered users. DMM we believe is growing even faster. They are the main competitors in the online market in Japan that have traction. We grew 90 percent last year in terms of revenue.”
Further evidence of Japan’s online tutoring boom could be seen at Tech in Asia Tokyo’s Arena pitch battle last week, where domestic edtech startup Mana.bo took the grand prize.
Editing by Terence Lee
Source:techinasia
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