Vladimir Kiryukhin has released vkTemplate — a small (1.5kb) templating plugin that runs on jQuery.
vkTemplate is a small yet powerful templating engine that can also be used to pass JSON data.
The plugin is designed to work with Ajax, and offers a powerful templating plugin for basic needs.
fcbkListSelection is a jQuery plugin for item selection, Facebook-style.
The plugin has numerous applications: social networks; games; personality tests; et cetera, et cetera.
The library doesn’t have many options, but pre-selects are always nice.
Items are marked up with simple unordered lists.
Overall, fcbkListSelection is a treat for everyone willing to add an extra touch to unordered lists in their projects.
This week we speak with Matt Wickstrand, founder of Kareer.me, an online platform to create personalised and sophisticated resumes. He tells us why he decided to learn to develop the technical side of his business himself and the applications he has found most useful along the way.
How would you describe your business?
Kareer.me is a service to help job seekers get more interviews and increase their chances of getting hired. While most job sites are optimized for employers and recruiters, Kareer.me is focused on helping job seekers; something that will always remain our focus. We’re a small team striving to make an impact in the way people find jobs.
How did you come up with the idea?
After hitting the wall on a previous startup, I was faced with two options; look for a job, or start another company. I considered both for a period of time, but was really frustrated at the lack of options that I had to create a professional online resume that allowed me to display myself in a more personal fashion. I’m not a great writer, but I knew that I had a compelling story to tell recruiters and employers through video and work samples. Kareer.me was born out of personal frustration and a burning desire to start another company. It wasn’t long before I was spending 80% of my time developing a plan and a vision for Kareer.me and 20% on my job search.
How long did it take you to get Kareer off the ground?
That’s an interesting story. While the idea for Kareer.me came to me in March 2011, I was actually faced with a larger obstacle at the time that really prevented me from a full-blown pursuit of the development of the site. I wasn’t a developer and I didn’t have enough capital left after the previous startup to continue to outsource the development effort. I was quickly forced into a single option: to become my own tech co-founder. I spent about six weeks learning to develop using different development frameworks and I was able to build a rough draft of Kareer.me during that time. I later re-built the site from scratch using all the knowledge I had acquired the first time around. I would estimate the build time to have taken ten weeks before I opened the site up for private beta.
What applications or tools do you find most useful for your business? Why?
I could honestly go on for days about the tools that have helped me grow and develop Kareer.me to this point. I’ll mention a few that have been indispensable as tools or resources for any tech founder:
Stackoverflow.com – If you’re a developer, then you know what I’m talking about. If you’re not, then this is a great place to start searching for answers to your technical questions.
Google – Google, you are awesome. Google makes running your small business super easy with its Google for business accounts. And it’s free. Host you email and get access to docs, spreadsheets, and everything else you need; all hosted in the cloud.
Rackspace.com – An affordable cloud serves. The near-zero overhead business is now a reality with services like Rackspace which also allows you to scale your site with ease.
ThisWeekInStartups.com – Hosted by Santa Monica entrepreneur, Jason Calacanis, this site hosts hundreds of interviews with high profile tech entrepreneurs. It gets you as close to a free MBA in tech startups as you’re going to get and is an awesome resource.
NetTuts.com – Tons of great tutorials for web development. If you’re interested in learning to develop your own site, start here.
There are a lot of other great paid resources, but these recommendations will give you a great start.
Can you tell our readers a bit about your business model?
Kareer.me works a bit different from other online resume services. In its simplest form, Kareer.me allows job seekers to create personalized web resumes for each job that they apply to. Each online resume is given a unique URL that you can share via email, online application form, twitter, linkedin, facebook, job boards, etc. Since each resume is unique, you’ll get feedback when your resume has been viewed by its intended recipient, so that you’ll know exactly when to follow up for an interview. Job seekers are given an opportunity to try the service and build and share three resumes completely free, and can upgrade their plan to create more resumes at a nominal monthly fee. Eventually, this service cost may be subsidized by other revenue streams, but I prefer to keep advertising to a minimum.
What is your growth strategy?
Kareer.me is a great fit for candidates with little-to-no work history and I think students are a prime example of this. While graduating, college-level students may not have a lot of work history but they have spent a lot of effort writing papers, researching, and working on various other projects. Since Kareer.me allows job seekers to show their personality and work portfolio, we’re focusing on developing and growing in this target market.
How are you promoting your company?
While it would be nice to throw a lot of money at SEM or other forms of paid advertising, it’s really not in the cards for a lot of new startups. Promotion for Kareer.me is a combination of both offline and online strategies. We’ve started conversation with several university career services centres to offer special services to their students and have worked diligently to get placement in several online blogs. Both have been great strategies, but it’s still too early to tell which method is best.
What’s been the most difficult aspect of setting up your business?
Learning to develop the site myself has definitely been one of the largest challenges, but also one of the most rewarding. I would say for any business, going-to-market is generally one of the most difficult challenges. Startups have a limited amount of time they can distribute across business functions and it’s difficult to track and understand where you are getting the most value.
What have you learned along the way?
For any new entrepreneur it’s important to understand one thing: everything takes at least three times longer than you think! Even if you can build the product quickly, there is still a learning curve to understand your customers and adjust your product to fulfil their needs. I recommend having at least a year of runway, but 18 months is ideal. Always keep an eye on your market and the subtle trends that are occurring so that you can be the first to capitalize.
What piece of advice would you give to someone setting up their own startup?
For me, it’s been extremely important to have a deep technical understanding of the product. I wouldn’t recommend building a tech company without either having a technical co-founder or being able to develop yourself. I’ve done both and having the ability to develop the site within your team makes decision making and development much faster.
Registered developers can now download iOS 5.1 beta 1 for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch right now and check out what’s new in the next major update to iOS 5 firmware. Since beta firmware is not available for public, many of you don’t actually get to know what’s new in a beta firmware, iOS 5.1 beta 1 in this case. For you, we’ve posted the full iOS 5.1 beta 1 changelog down below so that you yourself can see what’s new in iOS 5.1 beta 1.
![ios 5.1 beta 1 600x219 Whats New In iOS 5.1 Beta 1 [Full Changelog]](http://webification.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/ios-5.1-beta-1-600x219.png)
The following issues relate to using the 5.1 SDK to develop code.
When creating an iCloud account, you can use any Apple ID as long as it is a full email address and not a MobileMe account. If you have a MobileMe account, you can move that account to iCloud. You can find more information at: http://me.com/move
30 November, 2011
By Lauris Veips
NSNetService class and CFNetService APIs do not include P2P interfaces by default. To browse, register, or resolve services over P2P interfaces, an application needs to use the Bonjour DNSService*() APIs noted below.kDNSServiceInterfaceIndexAny in the following API’s will not include P2P interfaces by default. To include P2P interfaces, you must now set thekDNSServiceFlagsIncludeP2P flag when using kDNSServiceInterfaceIndexAny or set the interfaceIndex to kDNSServiceInterfaceIndexP2P. The affected APIs are:
DNSServiceBrowseDNSServiceRegisterDNSServiceResolveDNSServiceRegisterRecordDNSServiceQueryRecordApp Icons and Profile Photos are not loading in apps using Game Center.
setSortDescriptors: method of NSMetadataQuery is not supported.Starting in iOS 5.0, in order to facilitate finer-grained playback control, a movie player is not automatically prepared to play upon creation. Call the prepareToPlay method to prepare the movie player. For more information, see MPMoviePlayerController Class Reference
Using shake-to-shuffle causes Music app to freeze and playback to stop.
FIXED: Deleting an issue that was marked as the currently reading issue could cause a crash.
In iOS 5, the signing of certificates with MD5 signatures is not supported. Please ensure that certificates use signature algorithms based on SHA1 or SHA2.
Earlier today Apple seeded the first beta of iOS 5.1 for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch to developers. Apple only releases beta firmware for registered developers. So if you’re not a developer, you can not legally download iOS 5.1 beta 1 for your iOS device. Registered developers can easily download this beta from the Developers Portal.
Apple formally released iOS 5 to the public on October 12. Since WWDC 2011, at which iOS 5 was first announce, seven betas of iOS 5 had been seeded to developers and with each passing beta, Apple’s latest and undoubtedly the greatest iOS platform update ever become less ridiculed with bugs. When the final public version dropped on October 12, there was such a downloading frenzy that iTunes activation servers were having trouble coping up with the activation requests.
The iOS 5 launch went smooth and after than on October 17, Apple started shipping its new iPhone 4S to consumers in seven countries. As people got down to using this new iPhone, a startling discovery was made. The iPhone 4S had pathetic battery timing for some users. It wasn’t a hardware issue, rather it was a bug in iOS 5 firmware that caused battery drainage issue on iPhone 4S. To cater to this issue, Apple started reaching out to iPhone 4S owners and got data from them, with their permission of course, that could prove to be helpful for them in developing a fix. Merely after a month had passed since public release of iOS 5, Apple released a minor iOS 5.0.1 update in order to fix iPhone 4S battery issue. However things didn’t turn out so well as many users claimed that they started facing battery drainage issues, not only on iPhone 4S this time but on other supported devices as well, after they had updated to iOS 5.0.1. Apple soon promised to release iOS 5.0.2 in a couple of weeks to fix this issue once and for all.
However now it looks like this battery drainage bug is bigger than we expected. Mind you, the release number, iOS 5.1 that is, indicates a major upgrade. Minor upgrades such as iOS 5.0.2 are usually pushed out as they normally only contain meager bug fixes and patches. This bug causing battery drain seems big enough to need a major iOS 5 update version, and its totally possible given the fact that its not only iPhone 4S in particular that’s giving pathetic battery timing. No definitive release date as yet for iOS 5.1, however sources claim that there will be a couple of further iOS 5.1 betas before public release, which can take place sometime around mid-December.
JS Bin is a handy web application for collaborative coding and debugging.
You can edit and test your code within some context (e.g., include jQuery), and then send it to a peer or friend for further review.
JS Bin is awesome for sharing witty snippets, but building libraries will probably require better tools.
