We’re looking for a skilled, organized recent graduate who has a passion for e-books. You’ll join a recently funded startup busy revolutionizing the delivery of educational content. Symtext has a great product set to launch for the fall semester, as well as significant customer traction from schools, professors, students and publishers. If you’re independent, extremely organized, and a good project manager with excellent communication skills, please learn more about us at www.symtext.com, and contact us.

This is a contract position with a high probability of becoming full time.

Responsibilities

• Work with schools and professors to identify their content needs, and work with publishers to source this content
• Coordinate various types of projects: collecting digital content from publishers, helping professors setup their courses and students with Symtext, assisting custom integration projects with university IT and Administration
• Add metadata to content and facilitate upload to the Symtext platform; help develop content classification systems
• Provide product training and demos for professors, schools and publishers
• Develop and maintain training and support materials including the site FAQ, knowledge base, etc.
• Help with the day-to-day operations of the company from preparing presentation to doing research and attending events

Qualifications

• Degree in Business or Master of Information preferred
• Highly organized with demonstrable experience managing projects of some kind
• Outstanding written, verbal and interpersonal communications skills
• A natural problem solver and hard worker
• An understanding of e-books and Web 2.0 products and services
• Interested in start-up environment: must be comfortable with risk, fluidity and change
• A sense of humour…

Candidates will be required to provide references upon request, and may also be asked to take a practical test.

To apply, email me at ian AT symtext DOT com.

TAXI Canada Inc. is a company with core expertise in Strategic Planning, Advertising, Design, Interactive, Relationship Marketing and Content.

Qualifications

• Fluency in the principles of user-centered design methods, information architecture, usability best practices, interface and interaction design
• A minimum of 4 years relevant experience, preferably at a creative agency
• Track record of producing unique and innovative interaction models and selling them through design approval processes
• Relevant post secondary education
• Well versed in interaction design thinking and execution
• Experience in architecting the interaction on websites that utilize a variety of technologies
• Ability to work in a dynamic and fast-paced environment
• Knowledge of architecture-related software (OmniGraffle, Illustrator, Visio, Photoshop, MS Office, Acrobat)

Responsibilities

• Develop and deliver logical information models, user flows, wireframes, sitemaps, nomenclature documents, content mapping, and navigation schemes
• Contribute to the overall creative development of online initiatives
• Concept generation and modeling
• Assist in translating complex business requirements, user requirements and specifications into interaction designs
• Work collaboratively with other members of the technical team and creative department to create compelling user experiences

Apply

Please send applications to scott.mcneill@taxi.ca

Richmond Hill (GTA), ON

OrderDynamics, one of Canada’s leading SaaS eCommerce providers is seeking a skilled and passionate Senior .NET Web Application Developer. An ideal candidate has worked on a number of Enterprise-grade Web Applications and has experience with features like WCF, COM+ and MSMQ. An exceptional understanding of .NET internals is required and a candidate ideally knows their way around windbg. Candidates will also be required to demonstrate exceptional knowledge of web-centric technologies like XHTML, CSS, JavaScript (including libraries like MS AJAX, jQuery, etc.). Experience with a multi-tenant SaaS product is beneficial.

The position is based out of Richmond Hill, Ontario (just outside of Toronto).  The Office environment is young and casual but also fast paced.

Experience

Degree or certificate in Computer Science, Computer Engineering or college level application development program. At least 5 years experience developing production web applications in C# is required.

Responsibilities

1. Designing and implementing application features and bug fixes in a variety of eCommerce-related .NET Applications authored in C# (majority being ASP.NET web applications)
2. Implementing standards-based Web User Interfaces using XHTML, CSS and JavaScript, primarily for eCommerce Websites
3. Documenting implementations, providing assistance to the Technical Writing Team
4. Communicating with clients regarding progress, feature requests, answering general questions, application support

Requirements

• Strong object oriented design and programming using C# and ASP.NET 3.5
• Knowledge of common Patterns & Practices
• Strong knowledge of Microsoft SQL Server 2000/2005/2008 (programming with T-SQL)
• A desire to take part in the full development process starting with design of features through implementation
• Job experience working with C#, ASP.NET, .NET framework, JavaScript, AJAX
• Experience working in a team environment
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills

Additional Assets

• Knowledge of Active Directory, IIS, Exchange and other Microsoft Server Products
• Team Foundation Server
• Experience with other eCommerce Products, OMS, CRM, etc
• Experience with graphic design tools such as Adobe Photoshop

Salary

Commensurate with experience; $80,000+

To apply for the job

Candidates will be required to provide written answers to a short test prior being accepted for an interview.

If accepted for an interview, candidates will be required to provide sample source code that demonstrates strong knowledge of C# and ASP.NET. Additional consideration will be given to candidates who provide sample code using .NET 3.0/3.5 technologies such as LINQ, WCF, WPF or Silverlight.

Candidates should provide three references when applying for this position.

This is a full time position, with a complete benefits package.

If you are interested, please e-mail hr@mbccs.com with your resume and cover letter and salary expectations.

Only qualified candidates will be contacted for an Interview.

We thank all who applied.

Want to work with fun people, on a fun product, and make a huge difference? Then you want to be at Hot or Not. Hot or Not is one of the world’s top social entertainment and dating sites:

• Millions of people date through Hot or Not.
• Thousands of people find matches every day.
• We make money and AREN’T advertising supported.

Hot or Not is a fast-paced company that measures releases in days not weeks and rewards individual initiative and gumption.

The Role

This is key member of the team, and a growth position. We are looking for a web developer with strong front end skills that is passionate about web standards and ready to take on a huge code base.

You will

• Develop a world class product and user experience using agile methodologies.
• Fix bugs and improve the user experience.
• Experience developing and deploying high availability, high performance web applications.

You need:

• Strong knowledge of XHTML, CSS, JavaScript (with jQuery or other frameworks).
• Strong knowledge of LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP).
• Ability to pickup new environments and languages quickly.
• Compatibility with a workplace built around small, highly motivated teams.
• Familiarity with modern web frameworks is a plus.
• Knowledge of Ruby / Rails, Python / Django is a plus.
• Good understanding of current web technologies such as AJAX, or Memcached is a plus.

How To Apply

Applicants are asked to click on the link and apply directly. http://tbe.taleo.net/NA12/ats/careers/requisition.jsp?org=IPNETWORKXS&cws=1&rid=37

About us

GigPark is a Toronto-based web startup that’s growing fast

• Built with Ruby on Rails and hosted on EC2
• We develop iteratively and release regularly
• We care about quality - our code is well-designed and tested
• We work hard, but smart. We believe less code is better and simple UI design is key
• We’re not religious about technology. We believe in using the right tool for the job
• We like to give back to the open source community

About you

• You have a passion for the web
• You believe that database design is part of application development and you care what happens after your code is deployed
• You have a portfolio of open-source or commercial work you’re proud to show us
• You have opinions on better tools & technologies and love to try new things. You are also pragmatic and choose the best tool for the job
• You have a solid understanding of software fundamentals including: programming languages, scalability, security and source code management

Ideally you have experience with most of the following:

• Ruby on Rails
• SQL and database design
• HTML & CSS (we use Haml and Sass)
• JavaScript
• Linux or other *NIX OS’s
• Test-driven development
• Web standards

… but you love to learn new tools & technologies so you’re confident that you can quickly become an expert in any of these that may be new to you!

Design skills would be a bonus!

We’re offering

• Chance to join a growing startup before everyone knows the name
• Competitive salary

If you’re interested, or know someone that might be, please get in touch: jobs@gigpark.com

Rypple is a web-service that gets people fast, honest feedback. We’re a well funded, Toronto-based start-up with an experienced team, a growing community of users and partners, great buzz, and superb investors. We’re moving fast, building neat stuff, and we’re just getting started. We’re looking for few more awesome engineers to join our team.

Our engineering team is passionate, collaborative, smart, and gets things done. We’ve got skills in enterprise and web-app development, usability, gaming, social media, and mobile. Our work environment is creative and laid-back, but very focused on the fast-paced delivery of user value. We care about outcomes, not "formal process" or "our way". We’re flexible - with tools, technology, and our approach. We don’t like waste and we like to iterate.

If you have a proven track record of building successful software (e.g. people love what you create), then we want to talk to you. If you don’t think its crazy to build both scalable, high-quality applications and release early and often - then you’ll like it here.

At Rypple, you’ll:

• Join our dev team to design and build our online apps and the infrastructure we run our business on.
• Regularly deal with users, customers, and our industry partners. You’ll be expected to come up with new ideas to create value and then implement and improve on those ideas
• Be a generalist with technology but a specialist with building world class applications.
• Be highly adaptable to technical challenges and thrive in an adaptive environment.
• Be disciplined and get stuff done.

You’ve gotta have:

• CS or Engineering degree
• 3+ OOP and Java
• 2+ years building online app w/ both front-end and back-end web development (Apache, MySQL, HTML, CSS, XML, Linux)
• Communication skills (as in, you like to talk to customers and co-workers in plain English - you will be expected to get on the phone with users!)
• Demonstrated attention to the tiniest of details
  We’d love to see experience with:
• Google Web Toolkit
• Large web application system architecture
• Social web application design-
• Web API’s (REST, Facebook, Twitter, OpenSocial)
• J2EE and Hibernate
• Deploying and maintaining web server technology
• Lean and “Agile” dev approaches

Extra Special Points:

• "Nunchuku skills, bow hunting skills, computer hacking skills…"
• Teleportation, transmogrification, and/or telepathy
• Sweat the fine print: Include a definition of Kobayashi Maru and you’re guaranteed to have your application reviewed.

How to Apply

Send your resume to us at jobs@rypple.com

Is a company that is built to exit the same as a company that is built to flip? Not in my opinion. Understanding how to build a company that is attractive to a potential acquirer can help entrepreneurs understand how to build product suites, acquire customers and pick technologies.

Possible Exits

Entrepreneur.com list five (5) possible exit strategies:

1. The Modified Nike Maneuver: Just Take It (basically preferred shares that pay a huge dividend)
2. The Liquidation
3. Selling to a Friendly Buyer
4. The Acquisition
5. The IPO

For me, #3 and #4 are almost identical. And #2 is not something you should aim for just staring out. Liquidation is something that happens at the end of your business. Whether it is something that happens in bankruptcy or other it is not a useful model when you are trying to grow a business. So if you merge #3 & #4 it leaves you 3 realistic exit strategies. This is not rocket science.

• Operate profitably
• Get acquired
• Go public

We know what the IPO market for tech companies looks like. That leaves companies with 2 choices. Build a profitable business or get acquired.

When I talk to startups everyone seems to think that acquisitions are a dime a dozen. That even based in Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, Waterloo that they are prime acquisition targets for Microsoft, Google, Oracle, Cisco and other Valley companies. Which surprises me! Sure all of these companies have done Canadian acquisitions, they are the exception and they are done for very specific reasons.

Why acquire a startup?

Benjamin Kuo talks about the takeaways looking at the acquisition deals done by Google, Microsoft and Yahoo. The other companies that have done a lot of acquisitions include Oracle and Cisco. Summarizing the 2007 Microsoft acquisitions including Multimap (mapping), Global Care Solutions (healthcare), Palarno (enterprise chat), AdECN (advertising network), aQuantive (public traded - advertising tech), TellMe Networks (mobile voice solutions), and Medstory (health search), he concludes:

Key takeaways from this, at least if you want to be acquired by Microsoft: you really need to expect to be in business for at least seven to 10 years; you need a lot of traction and a product that people have been using for awhile; enterprise software is hot, consumer web services are not; and you need to have a fit to their strategic plans.

Companies get bought for a variety of reason:

• technology;
• customers;
• people/talent;
• the scale for monetization offered by a corporate giant.

It starts to make a very short list for entrepreneurs about what’s important regardless of the type of exit you’re looking for. You need to have technology, customers, the right talent and a path to monetization. Companies are looking for technologies that solve problems with shared customers and that round out their offerings (then there is a the whole question about do we build it or buy it). They are looking for great teams of engineers, sales people, designers, i.e., the talent. And often large public companies bring a scale and access to market and manufacturing that are just not available to startups without huge amounts of cash. 

Does this all sound familiar? It’s pretty similar to investment criteria. There’s nothing wrong with building defensible technology that solves a problem for customers with a team of rockstars on a common technology platform.

Comments at http://www.startupnorth.ca/2009/06/11/built-to-exit/

Originally from http://blog.tweetbucks.com/hr/tweetbuckscom-social-media-intern-with-full-time-potential/

Chango Inc. is “hiring” 2 social media interns for the summer to coordinate our social engagement strategy for Chango.com and Tweetbucks.com!  Checkout our recent TechCrunch article and some of the online Buzz. Salary is zip, zero, zilch.  However here’s what you do get:

1. The opportunity to build your personal brand while pumping up Tweetbucks and Chango.
2. Work 4 days a week on our stuff, use our facilities on the 5th day to work on your own stuff.
3. A chance at a full-time job at the end of the summer as a Chango community manager
4. One intern will walk away with their own Macbook 13″ laptop at the end of the summer.  We will be running competitions throughout the summer and the overall winner gets the laptop.  Think social media “Apprentice”.
5. $50 StarBucks card each month + Wifi access.
6. Your own place in a cool brick & beam office in the coolest part of downtown Toronto.
7. A great chance to share your knowledge, and learn from a passionate group of experienced entrepreneurs, developers, executives and investors.

What you will be doing

• Build creative mini-campaigns to promote the Tweetbucks & Chango brands with next to no budget!
• Stay highly caffeinated while blogging, tweeting & talking all day about our service.
• Plan, shoot and produce video-blog segments
• Work with seasoned entrepreneurs and an extremely talented development team

Skill-sets required

• Highly comfortable using and communicating with Twitter and other social media services
• Excellent written English and communication skills
• Positive and self-motivated attitude willing to tackle tasks with limited supervision
• Some technically savvy

How to Apply

Successful applicants will provide us with a 2 page outline of how they will build the Tweetbucks brand using  social media tools.  Applicants should be creative design a low-budget campaign that might include Twittering, blogging, producing video blogs, fan pages, tweet-ups, competitions and more.   This is your chance to show us your creative side and your understanding of how social media works.   Submit a link to your proposal via our Contact form.   Hint: Checkout the I heart the Cube campaign @tswizz put together to try to win a car.

Our Location

Work in the Fashion / Media District of Downtown Toronto - King St. West.   Starbucks is 10 seconds away with a killer patio.

Originally from http://jobs.well.ca/jobs/80-software-developer-2

We’re looking for an experienced software developer to build new features for the biggest online health store in Canada. The position is in a small team so you’ve got to be someone that enjoys the responsibility and freedom to build stuff — from thinking up new ideas to writing the actual code. The ideal candidate is someone that writes PHP web applications for fun, doesn’t think AJAX is that scary, and sometimes has nightmares involving large SQL statements. The position is full time in our downtown Guelph office.

Responsibilities

• Dream up, design, code and test features for a live e-Commerce site
• Prioritize plans and feature requests and work independently to produce great code
• Understand usability and design
• Work alongside our CEO to cook french-toast for breakfast meetings

Requirements

• Skill in (and passion for) PHP/Python/Java/Ruby, Javascript, Unix, MySQL, HTML, CSS
• Have a portfolio of previously worked-on web applications
• Clear verbal and writing skills

Bonus Points

• Knowledge of Flash / Flex
• Graphic design portfolio - Photoshop, etc.

Compensation and Hours

• This is a full time position; talk to us about salaries

About Well.ca

Well.ca is Canada’s largest online health and beauty store. We sell everything you can find in a drugstore, online.

Well.ca is a customer-oriented store. We want to make sure that every single customer gets the best, most honest and caring service we can offer. So we’re looking for caring, friendly people to work on our team.

This is a great place to work if you’re keen on working in a fast-growing start-up environment. Because we’re a relatively small team, every team member gets to contribute. We are looking for people who are creative innovators, can adjust easily to change, like a job that varies day-to-day, and are passionate about everything that they do.

Apply for this Job

Make Web, Not War is happening today in Vancouver (June 2, 2009) and next week in Toronto on June 10, 2009. (Let’s not start about disaster that is the web presence, frames, Flashturbation, no deep linking, etc.). Microsoft released the Web Platform Installer, WebPI for short, version 2 includes IIS7, SQL Server, Visual Web Developer, ASP.NET and PHP. That’s right, PHP and the ability to install popular PHP and .NET open-source applications including Wordpress, Drupal and more.

Here’s my take, it’s great to see Microsoft embrace web technologies. The web is a mash of technologies from operating systems to application servers to database servers to web servers to development frameworks to AJaX frameworks to CSS frameworks. It’s all about choice. You can mix and match the pieces that make the most sense for you at a moment in time. And now that choice, flexibility and power come to web developers that run Windows operating systems.

Not everyone has the flexibility of choosing each of the layers. When I worked at Rye High, I built applications initial in ColdFusion 6 and Oracle 8i because it was what was available. The addition of FastCGI and PHP to IIS opens the available tools to many developers and IT professionals that run Windows in their corporate environments. The WebPI makes it drop-dead simple to install PHP and Drupal or MediaWiki. Pick the right tool for the users, the tasks, your infrastructure and support. Make informed decisions.

Are there limitations? Definitely, part of the fun is playing in the boundaries and pushing as close to the edge as possible.

Come together right now over me

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it” – Alan Kay

The event is about focusing on the task at hand. Let’s make a better web. Let’s solve problems. By helping developers gain access to the applications and platforms they want is important. Microsoft is starting to understand, again, the power of an ecosystem. Rather than fighting to convert PHP developers to ASP.NET, you can see the empire embrace and enable the tools that are a part of the web.

Further evidence of this acceptance of PHP as a language and a tool of the web can be seen PHP SDK for Windows Azure. The addition of Java in the Azure world.

Toronto –  June 10, 2009

I’ll be talking about the web, open platforms, innovation and karma at the Toronto event on Wednesday, June 10th at the Ted Rogers School of Management (use the entrance at 55 Dundas Street W.) and runs from 8:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m..

It’s a full-day event with presentations by:

• Mano Kulasingam, Digiflare Inc.
• Brendan Sera-Shriar, PHUG.ca / Rich Media Institute
• Stephen Nichols, Softcom
• Yann Larrivée, PHPQuebec

The Toronto event will feature breakfast, keynote, web partner community showcase, another keynote, lunch, breakout sessions, a Windows Server 2008 InstallFest, a web developer technical session and the FTW! competition final showdown. It’s be a very full day.

The registration fee for both the Vancouver and Toronto events is “donate what you want”, with a suggested donation of CAD$10. The money will go to a good cause: PREVnet.ca, the anti-bullying network.

Hope you’ll come out!