Rural Business Hubs

"If we have to ensure inclusive and equitable growth, we need to knit and integrate our rural areas into the modern economic processes that are rapidly transforming our country" - Dr Manmohan Singh, Prime Minister of India.

The Rural Business Hub is a unique concept of Public-Private-Panchayat Partnership to address this lacuna in the market structure. RBH is an initiative of the Ministry of Panchayati Raj and the Confederation of Indian Industry to establish direct linkages between rural economy and industry. The key objective of the RBH is to involve industry to improve / refine the locally available resources and produce goods of quality and standards that are nationally and internationally acceptable. The concept is based on the successful Thai experience of One-Tambon-One Product (OTOP) model with suitable modifications.

Check out the Rural Business Hub website for more details.

Reliance Rural Mobile Application Contest

Reliance Developer Programme of Reliance Communications has launched the Rural Mobile Application Contest,2007 - 08. This is the 3rd such contest held under the aegis of Reliance Developer Programme (RDP) to encourage mobile application development in the country. The contest is an initiative to tap and unlock the talent of the developer community across India by giving them a platform to test and hone their skills in developing useful and innovative wireless applications.

The Contest is open to all Software professionals, Software Developers, Companies, Students, self employed professionals and Content vendors/ Aggregators.

This year the focus will be on rural applications for transportation, m-commerce, health care services, governance, education, information and location based services that cater to the needs of rural population.

Also, for the first time mobile applications will be developed for both GSM and CDMA technology. Applications can be submitted for WAP, Java, Reliance Java, Brew, Brew Lite, VoxML and Symbian environments.

The participants can look forward to attractive cash prizes and an opportunity to monetize their applications in perpetuity!

For more details on the contest and to register for the contest log on to www.dadp.com.

Source: mail from Chanda Mahajan, Reliance Developer Programme Team

T2.0 named JobeeHive.com

We are happy to announce that our product T2.0 has been named JobeeHive. We have recently launched the closed ALPHA version of JobeeHive at www.jobeehive.com. Do check it out. As stated on the website "JobeeHive is a unique platform that brings you career networking together with career information on companies and industries."

Further, we are optimistic that JobeeHive will help Talentify Rural Employment Initiative to reach the length and breadth of India. We have plans of how to do that. Will discuss our plans with you shortly.

Talentify Rural Employment Initiative

We are pleased to announce that as part of Talentify Rural Employment Initiative we have now started taking online requests for Free Resume Editing. Until now, Talentify has operated in pockets of Karnataka State helping rural undergraduates secure better employment opportunities. Taking a step forward, we want to reach the rural youth across India. We understand that Internet may not be an ideal medium to help rural undergraduates, but we hope that recent Internet penetration in India will change the scenario for the better.

Recently we have garnered more support from the tech community in Bangalore. Volunteers have been trained to review and edit resumes for rural undergraduates. In the coming months, we will also extend Career Guidance through an online platform, which we are currently working on.

This service is extended to only those students, undergraduates and graduates who are from a rural background. To be more precise, to avail this facility you will have to be a current or previous student of an institute based in rural/ semi-rural India. Please do not send in your resumes if you do not meet this criteria.

Rural students and graduates can mail in their resume at: talentify[at]gmail[dot]com with subject: rural employment. As this is a free service made possible by volunteers, please be patient while we respond to your request.

Volunteers who want to help in this noble endeavor can mail us at: talentify[at]gmail[dot]com with subject: volunteer.

Our Dream: 100% literacy and employment in rural India.
Let us work to make this collective dream a reality.

Pre-Alpha Version 07.07.07

We released our pre-alpha version with all the basic features tested in our lab on 07.07.07. We are happy with the User Interface and the performance. We will soon open it up for our select Alpha version users.

So...See you soon!
Team Talentify

new "reloading soon" page

We uploaded a new home page at http://www.talentify.com/. Its black and its beautiful, with a simple message that we will be back soon.




(uploaded on 9 June 2007 - Archive record)

Exciting Phase!

After nearly 2 months of research and market study, we have now crystallized our business model for Talentify 2.0. The features for our web app have almost been frozen. The technology is more or less decided - obviously we are building it using Rails.

We are really excited about this next phase, where our dream project will be taking shape. It's been a lot of hard work and there is lot of that waiting ahead of us. But, we love it!

The recruitment sector in India today needs freshness! It needs innovation! And we are here to bring that innovation and freshness!

Any 'innovation fanatic' out there in recruitment sector? Just mail us.

Seperating Talentify from For-Profit venture

After having several rounds of meetings, we have decided that it makes perfect sense to retain 'Talentify' name only for non-profit ventures as of now. Talentify will continue to train rural youth through several avenues and will prepare them for the contemporary job market. We plan to start an online mode to help rural youth with tie-ups with NGOs and corporate across India. Moreover, we will try to persuade corporate players to hire talented rural youth.

The 'for-profit' venture code named 'T2.0' or 'Talentify2.0' will be developed and promoted as another brand. We will soon let you know what we name it.

Ruby/Rails or Zope/Plone?

After a lot of research, we have zeroed down on our t2.0 framework to built on either Ruby on Rails or Zope & Plone. Let's now see who will be the winner. Each has its own unique strengths and weaknesses.

Here are a few things that we learnt researching and talking to experts:
Plone is a very feature-rich content management system, but it doesn't sound like it suits our needs, and managing large amounts of data is particularly troublesome. It doesn't sit on a relational database, you can use relational databases with it, but this is complicated and quite hacky. Plone is also extremely slow, there are lots of tricks to speed it up but this will take up more precious development time. The language its written in is Python, which is a good language to use and has a large community, if you are familiar with Python and you want to get off the ground quickly, then you should be looking at a framework called Django, its Python's answer to Rails.

Many experts have recommended us Ruby on Rails. Ruby on its own is a brilliant language to learn. It has been found that the Zope/Python framework and the language are very restrictive, and need constant hacking to get simple things to work. On Ruby on Rails, our friends are developing applications in days that took weeks in Zope/Python. We haven't looked much at Django but nothing we have seen has made us even think of choosing it over Rails, the main factor is the language itself, Ruby is much more fun than Python.

So we feel Ruby on Rails will be the winner because of its great, user-friendly and cool features!

Will keep you posted.
Cheers!

Team Talentify

Talentify....RELOADING SOON!

Talentify is a talent management, recruitment and training solutions provider. Talentify was founded in 2004 and is based out of Bangalore, India.

This will be the official blog for Talentify. However, this will be moved to talentify.com in the near future.

Talentify is currently working on a new project called T2.o!, which will be launched soon.
Visit http://www.talentify.com/ for more details.

We call on bloggers, publishers, recruiters and NGOs focusing on recruitment, talent management and education to join us make our dream of a talentified India a reality! Mail us at talentify@gmail.com or info@talentify.com

We will keep you updated.
Cheers!
Team Talentify