This was six great start-up businesses presenting their products to both the panel and the audience. Each presentation is summarised below, followed by the result.

GoodJob

Looks to solve how to leverage SM as rec tool and employee referral programme.

Co’s love referrals but 80 from 20 so GJ makes it easy and of beneoft to emplyee

Reward and motivate is key. Points system throughout process. Cash is not king whereas prizes carry more value and create more buzz. Make it more fun!

Share on social networks, landing page, apply into ATS or by e-mail. Nice dashboard for employes and of course mobile app.

What is your business model? Monthly subscription model based on number of employees. $3k set-up.

How do you control quality? Only give points further up the process for some kind of success.

How many clients are using it? 45 clients, longest is 18 months. Mainly in Israel, some US and some UK.

Is their a risk that employees spend all their time on this rather than work? It is all automated rather than the employee actually having to do anything.

Hunite

Want to revolutionise the workforce by putting them first. Lots of different systems. Want to make all of the information available to everyone in one single, unified, personalised place. Bringing all of the disparate data onto a smartphone.

How do you achieve this with so many different back-end systems? Using integration API’s as have years of experience in doing this.

Who are your competitors? Large, risky, slow, expensive systems such as maybe Sharepoint.

How configurable is the system to allow for different organisation sizes/types?  Provide a best-practice guidelines to get started rather than have something too big from day one.

What doe the client ask for? Unified data without hurting existing systems. Have many different clients across sectors and countries.

Intune

Change how people share expertise internally. Best way to solve complex problems is to work with the right experts but if you don’t know who they are how do you find them? Creates a swarm with tags that then highlights people with these tags. They are then sent an invite to join the swarm. www.intunex.com

Who is a typical customer? Medium to large across diverse geographies. Have a direct sales team but also looking for partners.

How do you check the quality of skills? All profiles are open so assume they will be honest!

What makes this a great company? How can you defend the feature just being added to other systems? I didn’t catch the answer to this one which suggests it wasn’t a great answer!

How do you measure the success of a swarm? They come and go quickly but have a reward system. This wasn’t very clear.

Sciomino – the social mining tool

People directory on a mission. Tag based search filters. Pulls data from various sources and creates yet another system the employee has to use. Filters out the stream to give only relevant messages. People directory 3.0.

Who will buy this? Originally HR so sometimes CEO, sometimes Intranet owner. Need help on this!

Who is the designer? Internal designer

Where are you with customers? Only 3 right now as wanting to build first to prove concept.

What is cost? $2.5 per user per month.

Why did 3 clients buy it? First was early adopter, second had internal challenge to solve.

Who is biggest competitor? Yammer, Jive, Sharepoint!! They just make it more difficult than it needs to be.

Why choose this product? Built it for own network but then realised it was something they could sell. Happened by accident!

I love the open honesty that they have a great product but are not really sure how they can market it! Seems to be favourite so far.

Small Improvements (Si)

All about timely feedback. Continuous, objectives, 360 degree, reviews. Activity stream based. Award badges. Performance reviews on a single page. Can see an overview of all people in one screen also if chosen. Also shows comparisons. 50 clients with some quite high profile examples!

Product ensures all staff get to know how they are performing. Free for 10 users.

Who is sales contact? HR buy the product.

Can information be anonymous? Yes.

Can anyone input feedback on a colleague? Depends on settings as can be on an approval basis.

What is customer fear? Being able to switch off various features at launch phase and maybe use later.

What is most important problem you solve? Giving timely feedback so people stop making mistakes or, carry on doing a great job.

Do you only want to work with small companies? Yes because they waste our time during the sales process! Will work with big customers if they want to use the product.

TalentBin

Big data and social everywhere. Help recruiters find great talent where they choose to engage. Not all are looking and even if recruiters know who they are, the candidates don’t want to go through the effort to apply. They create web CV’s (resumes) based on their social actions. Implicit data is often more valuable than explicit.

Does a search based on key tags and brings back web CV and lets the recruiter contact them direct via social contact details. Works for various technical roles i.e. not just software engineers. All of this data is available via the API.

What is the business model? Charge $5,000 per recruiter licence.

What about privacy? Only using public information.

Does it look for soft skills? Not currently as hard skills are what are more important to recruiters.

What is main threat? We have to embed ourselves in the eco system and be better than the rest by adding proprietary data.

Are LinkedIn going to beat you? Inmail is not reliable so TalentBin looks to discover real e-mail address.

Winner takes all so what is speed of development? Already have first round funding but building as fast as they can!!

And the winner is…….

TALENT BIN!!!!!!

Well done to Small Improvements for second place

DISCLAIMER

I have tried to get the information as accurate as possible but due to the interactive nature of the session and different accents I may have misinterpreted some of the views. If you are one of the vendors and would like to provide better information than I have included feel free to leave a comment below or contact me direct (Twitter is best!) @petergold99