Saskatoon, SK and Charlotte, NC, April 19, 2010 – UniversalBusinessListing.org (UBL) and VendAsta Technologies today announced a strategic partnership to offer reputation management services integrating their product offerings.

UBL has become a recognized component in the local business listings marketplace where it has guided individual companies and major interactive agencies with the submission, correction, and enhancement of their online business profiles to over 250 search publishers. UBL is a service of Name Dynamics, Inc. (PINK SHEETS: BBTC.pk)

VendAsta’s reputation intelligence solution StepRep serves large agencies and directory publishers providing solutions directly to small and medium businesses. StepRep helps businesses discover what is being said about them online, benchmarks their footprint against competition, uncovers trends, and provides solutions to increase buzz.

“We are very pleased to announce our partnership with UBL. One of the things that StepRep does is show a business where they are visible and where they should also be listed. It frustrates a business owner to tell them about a problem with their marketing but not offer a solution,” explains VendAsta CEO Brendan King. “UBL’s syndication solution helps us take it a step further and actually improve that visibility.”

Doyal Bryant, Name Dynamics’ CEO, said: “VendAsta has created a powerful and cost-effective tool for our businesses to keep a watch on their online identity; it’s a logical fit with our listing distribution. It is critical today that businesses not only ensure they are accurately represented online, but are able to rapidly respond to comments, reviews and ratings.”

The companies will be showcasing their solutions at the Yellow Pages Association annual conference in Las Vegas from April 17 to 20th.

About UBL

UniversalBusinessListing.Org is a Local Search Industry service that allows businesses to post their business listing once and have it distributed to all major Search Engines, Online Yellow Pages, Social Networks, 411 Directories and GPS Navigation Devices. The Universal Business Listings are a service of Name Dynamics, Inc. (PINK SHEETS: BBTC.pk), headquartered in Charlotte, NC. It was founded by media and telecommunications veterans Doyal Bryant and Chris Travers. For additional information, please visit www.UBL.org.

About VendAsta

VendAsta Technologies Inc. (www.vendasta.com) is a software development company based in Saskatoon, Canada. VendAsta develops reputation intelligence and social discovery tools. It first launched StepRep, its reputation intelligence solution, in January 2009. At the beginning of 2010, MashedIn was launched as a social discovery platform that searches across multiple social networks. VendAsta raised $3 million in venture funding in the summer of 2008.

Saskatoon, SK, April 14, 2010 – Flutter, released today by the MashedIn development team, could be used by those looking to network at conferences, break the ice at social events, or find out whether they know someone in an unfamiliar city.

Flutter (www.mashedin.com/flutter) examines the user’s network of friends across three different social networks – Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. From this data the application can identify connections to people that the user might not personally know, but with whom he or she shares mutual friends.

When the user logs in on a location-aware mobile device, Flutter displays a list of other mobile users who’ve recently tweeted or visited Flutter within a given radius. The list can then be sorted by the number of shared connections, by proximity, or by time.

CTO Jason Collins said that the power of Flutter is that it can uncover relationships across multiple social networks. “For instance, someone who only uses Facebook might turn out to be connected, via a mutual friend, to someone who only uses Twitter.”

Flutter was designed to showcase MashedIn’s powerful cross-platform social discovery technology. The MashedIn platform grinds through massive amounts of data to help reveal previously concealed connections among social network users.

MashedIn is a product of VendAsta Technologies, based in Saskatoon, Canada. In 2008 VendAsta received $3 million in venture funding to develop social software solutions for small and medium businesses.

Saskatoon, SK, January 28, 2010 – Today, VendAsta Technologies announces the release of MashedIn (www.mashedin.com), an application that allows people to discover mutual connections across multiple social networks. MashedIn provides the user a widget that can be added to a website or blog where visitors can authenticate with either Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn to reveal common connections to the widget owner.

People have different groups of friends or connections on different social networks they use.  Being able to see mutual connections across multiple networks increases the chance you’ll find common linkages.  Mashedin provides a great value to businesses and business professionals. People can visit a business web presence or profile and be able to see if anyone they know is connected. For the business, it is like receiving a warm introduction to someone who is otherwise completely anonymous. Each connection you uncover provides more context for the visitor.

“MashedIn, like life, is really all about who you know and who they know,” says CEO Brendan King. “MashedIn allows people to leverage their investments in social networks like Faceboook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. People use these networks to connect with weak ties – people they didn’t, until now, communicate with all that often. MashedIn lets you profit from the experience and knowledge of your close friends, weak ties, and everybody those people know – without explicit communication. It does this by building trust, which is attained by discovering common ground and mutual connections. After all, let’s face it, recommendations from people you know trump all other types.”

The MashedIn team overcame considerable technical obstacles to make the application a possibility. “MashedIn is deployed entirely in the cloud on Google App Engine,” notes CTO Jason Collins. “This framework, combined with MashedIn’s parallel processing extensions, allows us to query social networks in a massively parallel manner and traverse large graphs of social connections. This approach allows for relevant, meaningful social connections and recommendations to be presented to the user almost instantaneously, despite having to gather and process large amounts of data from a number of third-party sources.”

VendAsta, (www.vendasta.com) based in Saskatoon, Canada, develops software to leverage social networks and improve trust. The first solution released by the company in early 2009 was a reputation management tookit for small businesses called StepRep. MashedIn is designed to have broader applicability for people to improve trust and identity through social connections.

VendAsta raised $3 million in venture funding in the summer of 2008.

For the last couple months there have been murmurs around the office that one of our developers, Kevin Pierce, was up to something pretty amazing. Those of us who don’t know JavaScript from a jack-in-the-box were kind of left in the dark, but we were told his project had something to do with dramatically improving page load times for our application MyFrontSteps.

MyFrontSteps, to put it simply, lets you share your list of trusted home service experts with your friends. Say you’re friends with a bunch of people, and each of those people trusts a number of experts. Every time MyFrontSteps shows you a list of the experts you trust, it also needs to retrieve the list of your friends, and cross-check the friends against the experts:

• Friend A trusts experts X, Y, and Z.
• Friend B trusts experts X and Y.
• Friend C trusts experts Y and Z.
• Friend D doesn’t trust anyone.
• Friend E trusts…

Now, each of these cross-checks only takes a fraction of a second, but if you’ve got a page requiring hundreds of cross-checks, those fractions can add up. By the time they’re all done, the user has spent a non-fractional number of seconds waiting for the page to load.

These cross-checks take forever when they have to be done serially – one after another. Obviously things would go much more quickly if you could conduct these operations in parallel – all at the same time. Kevin’s simple task was to find a way to make that possible.

And so he…uh…well, maybe I’d better let Jason describe what Kevin did next:

He started poking around the gory depths of the App Engine source and discovered that all of the API calls stub out in MakeSyncCall. This inevitably led to the discovery of the partner MakeCall which yields an RPC object that you can wait on. Of course, if I can wait on one RPC object, I can also wait on many of them.

What this means is…well, I really have no idea what it means. The gist is that MyFrontSteps can now do a hundred things all at once instead of painstakingly, one after the other. As a result, we can now present information in a way that it wasn’t realistically possible to do it before.

Kevin’s possibility-expanding solution has now been made available to other developers. It’s known as asynctools, and if you’re looking for a way to execute Google App Engine API calls in parallel, you’re welcome to it – it’s open source.

Because asynctools utilizes the Google App Engine API in ways that it hadn’t been utilized before, it’s drawn a little attention from the Google team. Here’s what they had to say about it on the Google App Engine Blog:

asynctools is a rather nifty toolkit that allows you to execute datastore queries in parallel in the Python runtime. The interface is slightly more involved than using standard queries, but the ability to execute multiple queries in parallel can substantially reduce the render time for a page where you need to execute multiple independent queries.

I got lost after “rather nifty”, but that’s good enough for me. Kudos to Kevin and everyone else who chipped in on this rather nifty innovation!

Congrats to all at VendAsta Technologies who have helped create such an exciting and innovative company

MyFrontSteps, Homebook (for the hundreds of millions of Facebook and MySpace users), StepRep (for the millions of home service providers) are all exciting to see as they lift off

VendAsta’s consulting work has been immensely rewarding as we help big companies take advantage of modern technologies to solve today’s business challenges

I suspect that in most work environments people have gone through the experience of having new team members simply show up. A new team member suddenly thrust upon them as the result of some decision made from on high. Personally it is something that I have always hated. I guess it is okay if your definition of a team is “Two or more draft animals used to pull a vehicle or farm implement”. But when your definition is as ours; ” a group of individuals who interact dynamically, interdependently and adaptively to achieve specified, shared, and valued objectives in an environment of respect and trust”, then it is ludicrous that the team shouldn’t have a say in it’s own composition.

At VendAsta we are changing our hiring process to truly value the team. Applicants will start with an initial screening and generally there will be a second Interview with an HR team unless the employee is an obvious hire and is known to the team. So once the HR team approves the applicant they will then face the real test. Lunch with the team of people they will ultimately work with.

The team will arrange a lunch or dinner with their potential new team mate. The reviews, opinions and general sentiment of the team will ultimately decide whether or not a formal offer is extended. This is good for the team and good for the applicant. Nobody wants to work with people they are not compatible with.

For the record, it’s not all just a free lunch. The team has to complete a confidential review. What they like about the applicant, what they don’t, how they see them fitting, potential conflicts or anything else they want to point out. When 90 days are up the team will revisit the hire and make recommendations.