Sonar6 - Performance Management Blog

It’s Christmas again, and this year Sonar6 descended on Waiheke Island for a day of R&R.

Highlights included marathon beach volleyball games, some quite ‘refreshing’ swims, a very civilised game of croquet, and a splendid (if sandy) rendition of the Sonar6 gummi. We also tried a bit of hunter-gathering and netted a fair haul of pipis for the BBQ: classic kiwi beach tucker!

True to style, we couldn’t let the day go without some form of friendly competition – and this time we got our hands on some weaponry. The stars of that show were definitely Kai and Jonny, who managed to blitz the competition in skeet shooting and archery respectively – both on their first ever attempts.

And of course, special congratulations must go to John for winning the Loud Shirt competition; the shorts were just a bonus.

Merry Christmas from all at Sonar6; have a healthy and happy New Year!

With four New Zealand Post business units – Datamail, Express Couriers, Kiwibank and Converga – already using Sonar6 for talent and performance management, Sonar6 is now cementing a long term business relationship across the New Zealand Post Group.

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Sonar6 Employee Performance Management System Version 3 Enhances User Experience and Engagement; Enables Organizations to Rapidly Implement Great Performance Reviews

Quick Start Component Jump Starts Process and New Transparent Pricing Model Guarantees “No Surprises”

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We’ll be unveiling Sonar6 v3 at the huge HR Technology Conference in Chicago this month, as well as presenting at the Cool New Technologies session. Since the conference this year is showcasing Talent Management, Web 2.0 and Workforce Analytics/Planning, it’s the perfect opportunity to show our exciting new release off!

Sonar6 received the HR Technology award at last year’s conference but we weren’t there to collect. This year we won’t be receiving an award, but we’ll certainly have a lot of great new features on display! If you’re in the area, we’d love you to stop by and visit us on Stand 100. And if you haven’t picked up your ticket yet, simply print out this PDF and present it at the venue for free admission.

Full v3 press release here.

Last month Sonar6 went along to the awards ceremony for the 2008 Design in Business Awards. While we didn’t win, we had a enjoyable evening in some very talented company.

Congratulations to the team from tapware manufacturer Methven for winning this year’s award, and to the Highly Commended AuCom Electronics and phil&teds on their recognition. It was of course an honour to make it to the finals, and we appreciated the opportunity to practice our gracious loser faces!

Big news! Sonar6 have been selected to present at the “Cool New Technologies for HR” session at October’s HR Technology Conference in Chicago. There are four other vendors in this session, all described as mind blowing… Other than Sonar6, there’s BrandGames, InterviewStudio.com, cubeless and Orgnet.com, all companies we love because they are wired into making HR work in an emerging GenY workplace, so it should be a wild time!

Check out Bill Kutiks article on these five vendors.

The design in business awards celebrate companies that have used design to build competitive advantage. In fact their website states: There is growing evidence that companies who strategically use design perform and compete better than their rivals. At Sonar6 we love design! We love evaluating our progress from a user experience standpoint, rather than just measuring the length of our feature list… so we are stoked to be a finalist in the Design in Business Awards.

Traditionally these awards have been dominated by manufacturers - great companies designing bathroom fittings and clothes and furniture and baby buggies - so it is unusual for a software company like Sonar6 to feature, but even more unusually our friends at the very cool online accounting company Xero are also a finalist. Seven finalists in a design awards and two of them are SaaS companies… the world really is changing!

Not much to say here other than we have been running testing of Sonar6 on Google’s new Chrome browser and as you’d expect it’s all good. That might make us the first Performance Management application on Chrome!

One thing that we like about Chrome is that it gives most of its available space over to displaying the webpage (or web application), rather than filling half your screen with menus and tool bars, which of course means more room for Sonar6.

We thought that some of our geek fans would be all over Chrome from the get go and want to test it with an application that uses flash heavily…  so let us know what you think of performance and any issues you find.

Sonar6 founders Mike Carden and Mark Hellier have won the Bayer Innovators Award in the Information Technology and Communications category.

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Sonar6 founders Mike Carden and Mark Hellier have been nominated as finalists for the Bayer Innovation Awards for their contribution to innovation in Information Technology and Communications. Bayer have teamed up with the National Business Review to find New Zealand’s leading innovators – those who use their knowledge and commitment to improve the lives of New Zealanders and the wider world.

Apart from Sonar6’s two inventors the list of finalists includes innovators from several companies that we admire here at Sonar6, including 1000 Minds (who have very cool decision making technologies) and VortexDNA (whose software predicts human intentions). “It’s nice to recognized amongst compatriot innovators.”

The winners will be announced on August 5. Good luck to all the finalists.