I posted on the HR Locker blog that the Bizspark team are genuinely fantastic to deal with. I meant it. In Ireland, Clare and Enda and all the rest of the team are true champions. Internationally, the Bizspark team are also extremely helpful. I would 100% recommend engaging with them.

This is the last blog post related to HR Locker from here. From now on all HR Locker blogs will be posted here.

John

The funding is being used to improve our existing products and bring them to new markets. We’re currently localising HR Locker for the Chinese market.

Both Enterprise Equity and Enterprise Ireland were great to work with through the fund raising process.

“The parties concerned may agree to use or not to use electronic signature or data message in such documentations as contracts and other documents, receipts and vouchers in civil activities.
The legal effect of a document, with regard to which the parties concerned have agreed to use electronic signature or data message, shall not be denied only because the form of electronic signature or data message is adopted.”

Looks like it’s legally ok to sign employment contracts online. Anybody know a really good lawyer in Shanghai?

Here are the main findings:

• To date in 2009 NERA Inspectors have carried out a total of 18,273 calls, interviews and inspections and unpaid wages
  due to employees totalling €1,474,650 were recovere.
• There were 3,001 inspections related to the Organisation of Working Time.
• 47% of the above resulted in a reported breach. That’s nearly 1,500 companies reported to be in breach this year alone.
• So far this year NERA referred 61 cases to its solicitors for prosecution.
• NERA dealt with over 112,600 telephone enquiries during the period January to September
  2009. This is an increase of over 37% on the same period in 2008. Over 8,800 email enquiries were dealt with
  during the same period. The most requested information categories continue to be redundancy, holiday/public
  holidays, terms of employment and payment of wages.

1) This contract of employment can be terminated for any reason, or no reason.

2) Here’s one from a European pilot’s contract: From time to time, foreign travel may be required.

3) Employees at IT company Nutzwerk, in Leipzig, have to agree to be in a good mood as part of their employment contract. More here: http://bit.ly/2ebrft

4) Dress Code: It is advised that you come to work dressed according to your salary. (This I assume to be a joke)

The good news is that the process, so far, has been painless. We have a test database and timesheets running in (on?) Azure. It took less than one man week of development time. Sure we’ll hit a few dead ends and nasty bugs will surface in QA but it’s a really encouraging start.

We did evaluate the other cloud offerings but feel for an app built entirely with Microsoft tools and technology it would be a natural fit to move to Azure. I’ll revisit this topic towards the start of December and report on our experiences.

The beauty of the Web is that it opens up a distribution channel to millions of users globally that previously could not be reached because of product distribution hurdles and prohibitive customer acquisition costs. Add monthly billing to the mix, access from multiple locations including home, and a laser focus on user experience and you can see how the success has spread.

What’s really refreshing is that this success empowers smaller companies and startups to grow, creating a virtuous circle. It also allows smaller companies to expand and compete in international markets better. With so much attention on consumer Web 2.0 applications many commentators are missing out on the real change: smaller companies are poised to steal significant market share from the big global gorillas. Maybe the Internet hype in 1999 was just a decade too early.