Systems Administrator
Jr-Mid Level Open Source & Windows Systems
Kaango Classifieds is seeking out an addition to our dynamic Engineering team. A successful Kaango Systems administrator is ready to contribute daily, drawing on their own experience and collective team wisdom to recommend Best of Breed, Enterprise-appropriate solutions for whatever business problems might be presented. The ideal candidate would have 4 years experience in LAN, WAN and/or Help Desk experience.
The chief duties of the System Administrator at Kaango is monitoring and management of all LAN and WAN system resources. The SA role has responsibility for 50+ systems, workstations and servers, with the majority of WAN server administration under RedHat Enterprise. LAN servers feature an Active Directory deployment for office security, network access permissions and remote access. In addition to responsibilities for corporate hardware, the Kaango SA is also responsible for vendor management and making recommendations on vendor selection.
Required
- Windows-based Networking and workstation setup; MS Windows Vista predominant
- PC&Network troubleshooting and remediation
- Ability to work independently and as a member of a team to fulfill corporate and personal objectives
- Internet security for Windows and open source environments
- IP Chains/Firewall/ACLs
- Excellent communication skills
- Remote server/package installation and maintenance
- Experience operating internal asset management, change management and licensing compliancy company-wide
- Professional integrity
- Interest in joining a fast-paced, high reward startup environment
Nice to Have
- Apache/LAMP stack administration
- Server performance tuning
- Production Support experience with mission critical Enterprise Systems and Services in a 24/7 environment
- Virtualization and quality control networks/labs
- MySQL/RDBMS performance tuning and capacity planning
- System benchmarking
- Utilization and resource management experience for large volume data services
- Agile Methodologies (SCRUM specifically)
Contact careers@kaango.com to submit your resume.
Comments Off
Kaango welcomes the Journal Register Company, a multimedia publishing company, to our growing list of over 200 media groups. The Journal Register Company launched 13 property sites in Connecticut in July of 2008 and 27 property sites and 1 regional classified portal in Philadelphia in December of 2008. Michigan, Ohio and NY are slated to launch by end of Q1 2009.
Journal Register Company continues to strengthen their online business by strategically partnering with leading online vendors to drive new online products and online advertising solutions in their local markets.
Journal Register Company owns 22 daily newspapers, approximately 300 non-daily publications and operates 239 individual Web sites that are affiliated with the Company’s daily newspapers, non-daily publications and its network of employment Web sites. These Web sites can be accessed at www.JournalRegister.com. All of the Company’s operations are strategically clustered in six geographic areas: Greater Philadelphia; Michigan; Connecticut; Greater Cleveland; and the Capital-Saratoga and Mid-Hudson regions of New York. The Company also owns JobsInTheUS, a network of 20 employment Web sites.
Comments Off
Kaango welcomes Regent Communications, Inc. (www.regentcomm.com) and Radio One- Richmond (www.richmondradioadvertising.com) to our growing list of radio media groups looking to provide online classified ad solutions for their listeners. Fourteen (14) new sites, representing 65 FM and AM radio stations in 14 mid-sized markets, will be launched by early February 2009. Both Regent and Radio One Richmond will also provide its listeners the opportunity to ask experts questions via Kaango’s Ask the Expert® service. If you are a radio media group interested in providing your listeners with the opportunity to place or find ads, and at the same time increase your listener retention and radio station’s monthly revenues, please contact clientsupport@kaango.com.
Michel Claussen, Director of Client Services, is working with Salesforce.com to offer Kaango clients a robust support ticket tracking tool. The software will integrate with Rally Software to allow clients to submit issues directly to the Kaango team. Each client will be able to view a list of issues, obtain the current status and view estimated resolution dates.
High-level flow of the Salesforce.com to Rally integration.
Michel has completed requirements gathering, tool evaluation and is now working to build the implementation plan. In a few weeks Michel will be requesting participation in the initial rollout. If you are interested in participating, please email clientsupport@kaango.com .
Kaango Issue Resolutions Released Sunday, November 16:
Order Process:
DE560: Ensure bundle pricing is consistently reported on each step through checkout
DE729: Synch live pricing summary and order entry for bundles
DE725: Ensure custom enhancements are properly bound to ads when transaction is complete
DE567: Ensure changes on sandbox page in management tool
DE709: Home page feature ads use thumbnail for liners when enhanced image processing selected
DE629: Ensure broken image icon does not display for valid images on front and back end
Statements and Reporting:
DE685: Add appropriate statement lines for Verisign processing reconciliation
Ask The Expert:
DE695: ATE ability to save expert moderation settings
DE698: ATE add “please wait” when performing user search.
DE696: ATE send email to asker after question has been submitted
DE697: ATE ensure moderate emails are sent
DE486: ATE: enable XML link
Comments Off
One of the best ways to get users to spend more money is to invite them to do so! The Kaango system allows you to send emails to classifieds advertisers as soon as we receive a liner ad in the system. Numerous publications in the Kaango network effectively us this strategy and generate conversion rates of up to 60%! This translates into additional revenue each month as liner advertisers spend more money after you thought you had closed the transaction!
Steps to send out upsell emails:
1. Collect email addresses when taking orders.
2. Include the email in your import feed.
3. Turn on the “Upsell Email” feature in the Kaango management console.
4. Customize your message in the upsell email and offer at least one “free” photo to get the advertiser engaged in updating their ad.
Once we receive the email via your import feed we do the following:
1. If the user is not yet in our system, we will create an account for the user and link the incoming advertisement with that account. We will send an email to the user explaining this and offering the user the opportunity to upgrade the ad.
2. If the user is in our system, we will associate the incoming advertisement with the user’s account. We will also send a notification to the user that the ad has been published and may be modified or upgraded.
Upsell emails are a proven way to increase your monthly revenue. For more information or specific training, please contact clientsupport@kaango.com
Comments Off
Last week, we conducted our first media user group meeting in Denver. Turnout was good, with individuals representing clients from across the country. More importantly, we had ample time to exchange ideas, explore new concepts and unveil the exciting upgrades we anticipate releasing this November. Day one was focused on our new user interface and data architecture. Our “K-Architecture” will allow Kaango to provide clients with virtually limitless ways to access and display data from the Kaango system. The user interface promises to be best-of-breed in our industry.
The second day of our conference was more like an internal Kaango meeting than a typical conference. We asked participants to rank their top four areas of concern with Kaango and we used the most popular issues as discussion topics for the day. Opening the format of discussion allowed our clients to engage in the same decision-making processes that we employ in our planning meetings. I believe our clients not only got a glimpse into what we face when prioritizing requests, but they also saw how thoroughly we engage in feature enhancement, defect fixes and conceptual planning.
The feedback on our conference has been uniformly positive. We will absolutely have an in-person meeting once a year, although the next one will likely occur outside of Denver. I believe that meeting face-to-face and exploring issues in more than a cursory fashion gives both Kaango and our clients comfort that we are moving in the proper direction and at the proper pace for all involved. Besides, it’s always great to see the faces of those with whom we communicate every day.
I congratulate our team on creating a great forum for our clients and for leading Kaango into what will be our most successful year ever.
Michael Kranitz
President & CEO
The Kaango Denver office is preparing to host the 1st Annual Users Group Meeting this week. We are expecting over 40 participants over the two day event including representatives from the following organizations:
- Bay Area News Group
- Denver Newspaper Agency
- El Paso Times
- Hearst
- Houston Chronicle
- Journal Register
- Lee Enterprises
- Los Angeles News Group
- Media News Group
- Pioneer Press
- Scripps
Topics covered will include a review of the new user interface for Kaango.com and it’s partner sites, upcoming new features, tips on best practices, and various open discussions with the newspaper experts. The event will be on October 8th & 9th. I will updated the blog with important topics discussed and some pictures early next week.
The Houston Chronicle (chron.kaango.com) recently launched its Kaango online marketplace and is now preparing its own local marketing program to create visibility for its marketplace. The messaging will stress that Chron’s new marketplace is fun, simple and, above all, free! Chron will use its print and online channels to communicate about the new marketplace and will include ROP, banners and ads in other Chron print publications. Houston also is preparing to launch Kaango Web2Print so advertisers can easily create online AND print advertising from one interface.
Please take a moment to read the article written by Steve Outing for ReinventingClassifieds.com.
POSITION FILLED AS OF OCTOBER 2008.
We are looking for a motivated, energetic, and multitalented Quality Software Engineer to join our team, own, define and execute software quality practices and procedures within the organization. A portion of your time will be spent defining and implementing automated testing for our legacy web applications and back-office data operations. Our goal is set to improve the quality of software releases and improve the system availability through regression and functional tests running through several environments in our multi-step release process.
The successful candidate must be able to plan, implement, and maintain test plans for our various product offerings and B2B APIs. Linux administration & scripting as it pertains to a Quality Engineering and test plan development. Build automation will also play a large role in your daily duties and the scheduled regression test plans that our application requires for quality verification. Using test recorders and other scripting resources, the candidate will be responsible for the quality of product and service that is released to our production systems.
Experience in a production environment and large volume, web-based product offerings is required. The successful candidate will contribute to the development of all technologies and services in a collaborative environment with external partners, operations staff, development engineers, and executives. The candidate will also be responsible for reporting overall system scalability, performance and availability metrics and assist in driving the business’ capacity planning through quantifiable test results.
Responsibilities:
- Design test plans for end-to-end testing on legacy systems and new features under tools such as LoadRunner, TeamQuest, etc.
- Experience on test design, automation and execution with respect to performance, scalability, stress, stability, etc.
- Review system capacity requirements and build automation test suite to improve release quality
- Define and execute build automation leveraging automated tools such as CruiseControl and unit test execution using tools such as PHPUnit, WAITn, etc.
- Design test cases, contribute in test automation and execute test cases.
- Selenium test creation; Test Recorder for UI testing and scripting automated under Selenium Remote Control for inclusion in build automation.
- Participate in capacity planning and give reports on the existing status of our applications and services; make “best practice” recommendations as they impact our test coverage and product release cycle.
Requirements:
- BA/BS: IS, CIS, CS, related technical degree; or equivalent applicable industry experience
- 2+ years of experience on system testing and/or Test automation and/or API/ XDK testing or developing software applications leveraging web server technology.
- Must have strong analytical and technical skills to understand software design & implementation and system behaviors from customer perspective.
- Excellent oral and written communication skills.
- Good exposure to testing suites such as Selenium and hardware offerings such as cloud computing.
- Knowledge of Windows and Macintosh platform web browsing clients; experience testing and troubleshooting cross-browser compatibility issues
- Familiar with software industry system test case design concepts, strategies and methodologies
- Exposure to Agile development methodologies; specifically SCRUM
Bonus:
- Definition and deployment of staged multi-part release process
- *NIX Shell Scripting
- Apache Web Server performance profiling
- PHP, .NET, Java or other web programming framework experience
- Experience working under Agile software development methodologies; specifically SCRUM.
Candidates must be eligible to work in the US. This is a direct-hire position.
Comments Off
