The new version 4.10 of Beyond411 features significantly faster web searches and greater protection of end-user privacy. It is now available for OTA install. 

Using the Yahoo web search API and Beyond411’s internal markup language BML, web searches are now roughly twice as fast as before; these speedups are similar to those already achieved in 4.0 for local search.

Context menus allow the user to choose between visiting the original and mobilize-optimized versions of a page, with optimization performed by Skweezer.

End-user privacy is significantly enhanced. Unlike Google mobile search, Yahoo’s search service does not correlate end user search using cookies or rewrite links to track the user’s browsing history.

The Jobster team was proud to be a part of Facebook’s f8 launch event today. The introduction of our new application built on F8 Platform extends some of the functionality of our Facebook Career Center directly to Facebook users’ profile pages — making it easier than ever for users to let jobs find them through personal tags.

Our release is below. We’ll post more specifics on functionality in the coming days.

The 4.0 release of the Beyond411 search tool has now left beta and is available for general use. 

The focus of this release was speed and usability of in the core usage scenario of yellow pages searches. Beyond411 4.0 now has the some of the fastest launch and search times among applications in its category.

Context menus simplify integration with the Blackberry address book and email. For more information and download instructions, please see the project page.

Over on the Jobster Blog, Brian Fioca takes a look at Broadening the scope of your digital resume:

At Jobster, we’ve always been about hooking people up with their dream job, dream workplace, or dream colleagues.  By filling out a Jobster profile, people are contributing to the network that we’re building to help further their careers - whether it’s using skill tags, job titles, companies, date ranges, and now colleagues, references, and endorsements.  Jobster career networking is another step beyond the resume that allows members to show off the connections they’ve forged, references they’ve secured, the colleagues they’ve had, as well as endorsements from people who thought they were superstars.  With our latest release of Jobster, we’ve added the ability to jump-start your network by fetching your work contacts from your online address books like Gmail, Yahoo!, and LinkedIn.  Are there people you know or have worked with already on Jobster? We’ll show you which ones are already members during the invite process.  By expanding your network, you not only show off your connections, but you also bring more potential for future career matches into the mix for yourself and the people you’ve worked with.  You can also keep up with what’s going on around your network with your news feed, and now directly email members who are in your network.

While we were at it - we finally decided to let you see a history of Jobster members who have visited your profile.  From your personalized home page, you’ll find a link to see the last 50 people who have visited your profile and how long ago they stopped by.  Intrigued by what you see there? Drop them a note, bookmark them so you’ll be notified when they post jobs, or even invite them into your career network with the hopes of getting to work with them in the future.

One of our biggest Jobster releases ever went live last night.

Among the notable additions are Cost Per Applicant (CPA) job advertising, redesigned Jobster profiles, and a number of improvements to networking.

We see Cost Per Applicant (CPA) job advertising as a first step toward a set of ecommerce offerings representing more efficient models for online job advertising. With our CPA job advertising, there are no flat posting fees. Employers advertise a job and only pay when jobseekers apply.

In addition to our new CPA advertising, we introduced a number of feature enhancements that we believe will be a valuable to professionals:

Improved Networking:  Consumers can now expand their Jobster network by importing webmail addresses from Gmail, LinkedIn, and other popular online services.  We also show which contacts are already Jobster members.

Improved company profile pages: Hoover’s and D&B information about companies in addition to our user-generated content.Jobster now incorporates

Inline salary data: When jobseekers find a job they’re interested in, they can now quickly research salary information about the job from the Jobster search result page.

Microformat support: Jobster now provides vCard data to allow consumers to export contact information about network contacts to an address book, hResume support for downloading profiles as a digital resume, and tag data for cross-site lookups

Profile statistics and visits : Consumers can now see the last 50 people who visited their profile and connect with them in one click.

Email network members: Consumers can now email members of their Jobster network directly from their profile pages.  Privacy settings for this feature are available under the new Account Settings page.

Network news feeds: Now consumers can keep track of what their contacts are doing on Jobster.

Improved profile view: Profiles now better display experiences, skill tags, career network members, video resumes, and any endorsements.  Profiles also have a more polished look no matter how much information a consumer adds. 

Improved profile edit : Creating and editing your Jobster profile has gotten much easier.  Entering your skill tags, uploading your resume, setting your availability, adding links, adding work and school experiences and answering questions have been completely redesigned using feedback from several usability studies to help make the profile creation and editing process easier and more powerful. ‘Make a connection’ and ‘Things you can do’ boxes let you know what you can do with Jobster.

Endorsements: You can now endorse people who you agree to be references for and those endorsements will appear prominently on the user’s profile. 

Robert McLaws (who describes himself as a “moderate Republican”) looks at tech employee campaign contributions broken down by company and party:

Robert writes:

It’s still too early in the game to draw concrete conclusions, but here’s the patterns I see thus far. As Todd already determined, Google’s employees are by far the most politically active, with Microsoft coming in a relatively close second, and IBM in third. Microsoft had by far the most people contribute to the Republican party, but there was still an enormous relative gap in spending between the two parties over at everyone’s favorite Collective.

What really shocked me was the gap in spending between the political parties at Google and Yahoo. Yahoo didn’t have a single soul contribute to the Republican party, which means that right-leaning employees either smart to wait it out, or they simply don’t exist. Only time will tell which one it is.

Almost as shocking was the fact that the Republicans are currently winning at both Apple and Adobe. I don’t think you can draw any conclusions from that yet, though. One contributor could easily turn the tides at both companies, and it seems that employees on both sides of the ideological fence are waiting for the process to separate the wheat from the chaff (although that colorful phrase suggests there are amazing candiates in the field, a view which I don’t share as of yet).

The breakdown of contributions by candidate mirrors overall national trends, with Hillary leading up the Democrats and Mitt Romney leading the Republican pack.

Demetri Martin covers video resumes on the Daily Show. Not as funny as it might be, but given our own involvement with video resumes it made me grin.

“…the excitement of a resume with the production values of a home video.”

I finally scraped the evil rootkit out of my Windows box, ironically by way of Ubuntu.

I installed Ubuntu while the Windows partition was on the floor.  Ubuntu, by the way, was beautiful, and we might still be using it if not for the fact that my wife feels that OpenOffice is “clunky” and not a true replacement for office.  The fonts and antialiasing were beautiful, significantly better than Windows. Application installation, the usability of the shell, etc. was great. Hardware detection also worked really well, with one exception: My Canon MP780 printer did not work absolutely reliably, sometimes I would get an unspecified error attempting to print.

Another impressive addition to Ubuntu Feisty Fawn is the ability to reliably read and write NTFS partitions, which it mounts automatically.

Support for writing NTFS partitions in Linux enabled me to go into the Windows directory and locate root kit malware that might otherwise be undetectable. The other thing that I think was helpful was l2mfix, which helped repair some of the admin permissions tweakage that rootkits perform and to detect suspicious files.

I’m really impressed at the progress that desktop linux has made. A truly professional class office suite is the only missing ingredient. 

A new beta release of Beyond411 is available for over-the-air download at http://thebogles.com/beta/b411.jad; this is a beta 1 of version 4.0.

The new version is faster and easier to use than previous versions. Searching the yellow pages and showing driving directions are typically twice as fast as before (under three seconds on my phone); other operations like adding an item to your address book are also much faster. Context menus on address book items make the new version easier to use.

These improvements are enabled by a custom markup language called BML, similar to HTML. Rather than displaying yellow page results in the browser, the new version displays BML results using a built-in rendering engine.

BML combines the compactness of the custom, fixed feature protocols used in some applications with the flexibility of markup languages like HTML. New features can be added by updating the markup on the server without having to download new bits to the client. Native phone UI like custom context menu items can be specified in the markup.

Because of the scope of the new features, this is a beta release. Keep your hard hats on and please report any issues you encounter. A “Yellow Pages (classic)” menu item returns the old school results in case you are encountering any issues or simply want to compare the speed.