Peter Chun

LongJump, a hosted applications environment that competes with the likes of Salesforce and Coghead, is introducing a new visual workflow system meant to streamline business processes.

Companies will be able to set up this workflow system in conjunction with existing LongJump applications, such as those that track businesses’ assets or contracts. Before the introduction of this workflow system, these applications could be used to manage databases of relevant objects. Now they can also be used to program and execute on procedures that regularly occur around them.

Do expense requests usually go through your company’s hierarchy before getting approved? You can now chart this process in LongJump with “states” and “actions”, respectively represented as circles and vectors in the visual workflow creation tool. Each circle represents a type of person within the company (supervisor, manager, CEO, etc) that must make a decision on the expense request (approve, deny, issue check, etc). These decisions cause the request to travel along the vectors until a final conclusion to the process (request fulfilled).

This process would ordinarily be accomplished over email or even physical slips of paper that make their way through various “in” and “out” boxes around the office. Now it can all be handle in one central online location with variously designated user accounts for employees.

LongJump says that its workflow solution is the first to come integrated with a full-featured database application suite. Competitors include Appian (a hosted solution) and Tipco Business Studio (non-hosted), but these must be used with something like Oracle or SAP. Since many large corporations are happy with their existing database solutions, this new workflow product will appeal mostly to small and medium-sized businesses.

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Here are some of the jobs posted to CrunchBoard over the past week:

• VP Operations and Finance
  Zivity, San Francisco CA
• Director, Product Management
  Fox Interactive Media, Beverly Hills CA
• Technical Product Manager
  Brightcove, Cambridge MA
• Senior Product Manager
  Photobucket, San Francisco CA
• Senior Developers (PHP/MySQL)
  Playlist.com, Palo Alto CA
• Senior Web Engineer
  MyStrands, New York City NY
• Sales Representative
  Keibi Technologies, San Francisco CA
• Interactive Programmer
  McKinney, Durham NC
• Applications Developer - J2EE, Websphere
  Scholastic, New York City NY
• Lead Programmer
  Drizzoo, State College

International readers can check out our British and French job boards as well.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

LinkedIn, the boring social network that won’t find you a date but may land you a job, is expanding beyond people profiles.

On Friday morning they will launch company profile pages that partly serve as fact sheets for about 160,000 companies and partly serve to reveal the connections that members have with them.

These private pages (you have to be signed in to see them) pull in some information from Capital IQ, a sister company to BusinessWeek, such as company descriptions, industries, types, statuses, headquarter addresses, sizes, founding dates, and websites. Many of the companies to which people belong on LinkedIn, however, aren’t big enough for Capital IQ to recognize them. So the bulk of the data shown on these company pages comes from LinkedIn’s own knowledge of people’s careers.

LinkedIn uses this knowledge to display recent hires, related companies, recent promotions, top locations for employees, and so-called “popular profiles” (people who get lots of profile views and mentions in the press). The data has also been used for company comparison purposes. You can see which companies employees usually come from and leave for, as well as which companies the current employees are most connected to.

Additional features include relevant news articles to a company (first discovered on LinkedIn last December) and personalized job listings.

The company says that it plans to wiki-fy these company profile pages in the next few months, allowing employees to edit company overviews, upload logos, and add other custom modules. Some of the information on these pages will also be distributable via widget.

The addition of company profile pages (which, dare I say, remind me of Facebook network pages) and the plans for more user generated content are good moves for LinkedIn, since the company needs to give users better reasons to return and use the site on a regular basis.

LinkedIn says it attracts one million new users each month and plans to have company profiles for a million companies. The social network has raised $27.5M so far.

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Social network for night owls MingleNow appears to have been a victim of Yahoo’s recent acquisition of BlueLithium. According to a post on the service’s blog, MingleNow will officially close on January 7th. No official explanation has been made for the closure. We assume that Yahoo simply isn’t interested in maintaining another social network, especially since its purchase of BlueLithium was for its ad network, not its other holdings. See our early coverage of MingleNow here. The product is now in the deadpool. Via RWW

Website-creation tool Doodlekit is over a year old but has somehow managed to fly under the radar, even after releasing its free version this past October.

Several similar services are out there: Weebly, Synthasite, Jimdo, Google Pages, SiteKreator, and Sampa to name a few. They all intend to make it possible for non-techies to make modestly attractive and functional websites without touching a line of code.

Doodlekit succeeds in this respect, but it goes even further by providing a suite of advanced features, all of which can be set up with a few clicks of the button: forums, customizable forms, shopping carts, advertising, user accounts and profiles, restricted areas for approved members, file uploading, full site search, RSS feeds, photo albums, blogs, basic site statistics, and domain mapping. Some of these features are available for free, but many will require that you pay $15 or more per month. See this pricing sheet for how the service packages break down.

All in all, it’s nice to see a website creation tool that appreciates the fact that many low-level users won’t be satisfied with flat pages anymore. They want to collect data from their users, support small online communities, publish rich media, etc. Doodlekit is moving in the right direction while others (with the possible exception of SiteKreator) continue to provide a fairly limited range of dynamic content possibilities.

As the WYSIWYG market develops, I’d like to see companies like Doodlekit leverage easy database creation/management tools like upcoming Blist. Then, a wider range of people will be able to collect, manage, and publish their organizational data online without needing to rely on web developers. As for more short-term improvements to Doodlekit, it would be nice to see an even better WYSIWYG HTML editor (I have yet to find any online that doesn’t end up frustrating the hell out of me). They could also take some tips from Weebly and implement drag-n-drop editing functionality, which I find more intuitive and satisfying than clicking through several pages to make changes.

Suggestions and long-term visions aside, Doodlekit strikes me as a solid offering in its current incarnation. The company says it has reached 1,700 hosted sites since starting to offer a free version six weeks ago. I expect that number to increase substantially as the word gets out.

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