TechCabal

Also in partnership with Stanbic IBTC, Jobberman, VC4Africa, Memeburn and others, TechCabal will look for budding startups and put them through training sessions with industry professionals. The finalists will then present to a panel of judges that includes Iroko Partners CEO, Jason Njoku (iROKOtv, iROKING) amd Jobberman CEO, Ayodeji Adewunmi.

The juicy bit (and the reason you probably clicked this link) is the $22,000 prize for the winning startup – yes, they mean dollars. The winner gets $20,000, and the runner up gets $2,000 – no strings attached.

“We are really excited about the potential for the technology ecosystem, and way beyond the token prize money, ” said Bankole Oluwafemi of TechCabal. “We hope that the event will facilitate high value networking opportunities for startups and investors, as well as deeper awareness for Nigerians at large.”

Anyone can attend the event, all you have to do is register through the Social Media Week website. If you’re a startup that has received less than $200,000 (again, in dollars) in funding, you’re encouraged to apply and find out more details here.

May the odds be ever in your favour! (I really couldn’t help it, sorry.)

UPDATE: An earlier version of this post stated the prize money was $10,000. A $10,000 contribution from iROKING.com and $12,000 from Stanbic IBTC brings the total winnings to $22,000.

Jobberman is Nigeria’s biggest and most popular job site with over 800,000 users, and DealDey is a site that offers deals and discounts on products and services that range from salon visits to movie tickets.

“We are thrilled to see that Africa is being recognised as a home for Tech Startups, much more that we are a part of it. Building the largest list of job vacancies in Nigeria is what we’ve committed to do, and its great to be singled out for what we are building,”

- Jobberman CEO, Ayodeji Adewunmi.

Other startups on the list include BrainShare, Kivuko, Paperight, Mpayer, MoDe and mPawa.

The Blackberry app notifies users of new jobs hourly between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. This feature is not available on the Android version.

Jobberman already has a Nokia app available in the Ovi Store and a Chrome app for the Google Chrome browser.

Get the BlackBerry app here and the Android app here.

Jobberman, Nigeria’s number one job finder website has released an app for those of you that use the Google Chrome browser.

The app, a widget-like vertical box allows users to find jobs and takes you to the site when you click on any of the job listings. The app lacks the ability to search for jobs within it and does not list jobs categorically or based on location but it automatically notifies the user with a numerical badge showing their are new jobs and how many there are. Maybe in the future we will see more improvements to the app but this is a very good start.

You can get the app right now from Google’s Chrome App store.

What do you think about the Chrome app? Will you use it? is it helpful?

Forbes Africa’s February 2012 edition highlights the tTop 20 Startups in Africa according to the company. A large number of them are South African, followed by Kenyan and then Ghanaian startups. Nigeria, Tanzania and Cameroon are represented with one startup each.

1. Mxit. South-African based Mxit was founded in 2003 and was early to the mobile Instant Messaging game. Mxit currently has a userbase of 45 million. The service also allows users to Shop for music, videos and wallpapers on almost 3000 mobile handsets, including Java, Android, iPhone, BlackBerry, Nokia, and Windows Mobile.

2. Yola. Also from South Africa, Yola is a website building and hosting service, allowing newbies and small businesses without web development skills create and manage professional looking websites.

3. Dropifi Ghana-based Dropifi helps businesses respond to messages from customers. Dropifi also provides analytic services for webmasters.

4. Cobi Interactive Founded in 2009, South African based Cobi Interactive is a company that develops mobile software for its clients. Cobi Interactive’s clients include News 24, Mail & Guardian and BusinessDay

5. FloCash Based in the UK and founded in 2010, FloCash enables money transfers via email and mobile phones. FloCash charges 2.9% and an additional 20 cents per transaction.

6. Obami Obami is an educational social network and learning management system for educational institutions, teachers and students. Obami was voted Top 10 most innovative technologies, worldwide, in 2011 by Netexplorateur.

7. Bandeka Launched last year, Bandeka is an invite-only social network that aims to build relationships among well educated Africans around the world. Bandeka was coined from ‘Bandika’ which is Swahili for connect.

8. Jobberman Founded in 2009, Nigerian-based Jobberman bridges the gap between employers and prospective employees with its job placement and search service.

9. Motribe South African Motribe enables users build mobile social communities on its platform. Communities range from sports communities to music and places.

10. PesaPal Kenya’s PesaPal leads in mobile money transfers enabling its users buy and sell goods/services on the web via the M-Pesa, Zap mobile-platform, a host of other mobile money platforms or Credit and Debit cards. PesaPal recently introduced purchasing of tickets, enabling users buy event tickets at their convenience.

Next Page

In a monetisation move, Jobberman users can now get customised job alerts For N1,500 every three months or N3,000 a year. In a post, Jobberman says 50% of its successful applicants are picked within the first few hours of advertisements. It says this is because job vacancies are filled on a first come, first served basis.

Alerts can be customised by speciality, career, background and experience compared to the regular Jobberman emails which are based on a wide category of advertisements. Subscribers to this premium service can also create up to 5 alerts that match their profiles.

Can Premium be oversubscribed?

Here’s a question I have for Jobberman. N3,000 a year isn’t a lot of money. So what happens when this ‘premium’ service gets oversubscribed and majority of users get advertisements in their inbox at the same time. Will it still remain ‘premium’?

What do you think about Jobberman’s newest feature? Drop us a comment below.

Earlier today, Job-finding website Jobberman blocked Njorku, an African search engine from accessing and crawling through its content. Like other search engines and services, Njorku’s bots crawl the web in search of relevant jobs related to your search’s keywords.

In a Facebook update, Njorku’s founder said

“Now wondering why http://www.jobberman.com/ will block the http://www.njorku.com/ crawler … could this be a sign of something we do good or bad ?”

“…we are a search engine… not a job site… just a vertical search engine like Google, like indeed, like careerjet, like jobrapido.com.ng (which they allow anyway)… maybe cos we are African and Africans dont like Africans growing.”

In an email to Techloy, Jobberman founder Opeyemi Awoyeni said

“Jobberman.com has graciously provided tools and APIs for third party and partner sites to use our job listings in creative ways. The two approved methods are: Brandable Widget Service (widget.jobberman.com) and RSS Feeds.

We have however seen some sites and lately Njorku.com using other poorly engineered methods to pull jobs from our website. And we have had them blocked.

Why? They alone take more than 60% of our server resources, as a result causing downtimes and more expense in paying for CPU and bandwidth resources. This is because the methods being used to get the jobs from our websites are poorly engineered by the developers of these websites.”

I should normally say ‘Njorku is a search engine like Google and doesn’t deserve to be blocked’ but Njorku has its own ‘Browse Jobs’ page apart from its search feature. Now, this makes Njorku a competitor to Jobberman i.e in creating viewable jobs. It’ll be quite difficult to go through Jobberman and Njorku’s job page to find out which jobs have been pulled, I guess Opeyemi Awoyeni has a point.

Earlier this year, Jobberman was involved in a small controversy. Dealfish had posted a Google ad with the title ‘Jobberman: Find jobs…’. We all called that very unethical. Not the ad but the title. The title was very misleading.

What do you think about Jobberman’s block of Njorku and other job sites? Leave us a comment.

Source: Techloy