As the week began, all eyes in the tech world were on the Techcrunch Disrupt event in San Francisco, from which some of the biggest tech news of the week came.
While Gild is a site for job seekers that turns applying for jobs into a competitive game through challenges that test their tech skills. While Gild is new and the employers using it are bigger companies, there’s no reason this concept can’t evolve into something that small and medium-sized businesses can utilize to find top talent more effectively.
Praized Media announced the launch of Needium, which helps SMBs generate leads from social media by watching social conversations for potential business opportunities based on stated user needs and wants (eg, a tweet from a given location that says, “I’m hungry!”) and explicit mentions of a company’s name.
Q&A platform Opzi aims to be the Quora for businesses of all sizes. It joins players like Focus.com in the growing Q&A-for-business space.
Also out of Techcrunch Disrupt came Producteev, a task management platform that enables users to create action items directly from email, IM and social media.
To delve deeper into the startups that launched at Techcrunch Disrupt, check out this comprehensive round-up of videos.
Another business productivity tool that launched this week is a scheduling app called SkedgeMe. This app joins the likes of Tungle.me and Doodle in offering a Web-based tool for professionals to schedule meetings and appointments.
For companies with internal training needs, a new product called Mindflash came out of beta this week, promising a platform for conducting and managing those trainings.
In the not-exactly-news department, we came across a series of posts from Sitepoint, who after outlining What Cloud Computing Can Mean For Your Business, explained how to get started setting up your cloud infrastructure.