Sonar6 - Performance Management Blog

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 was visited last week by America’s Cup sailor Ray Davies. Ray was the strategist onboard Team New Zealand as they won the Louis Vuitton Cup and challenged for the America’s Cup off Valencia last year. He talked to our development team and our HQ sales and marketing team about the similarities between winning yacht races and running a startup technology company…

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To paraphrase every second client conversation I have: “The pressure cooker of the war for talent means I have to rapidly solve this enormously complex problem of attracting, retaining and getting the best out of people. WHERE DO I START?”

In this brief article Mike Carden explains why performance management is the most critical piece of any talent management strategy, as well as offering 4 tips to accelerating performance management in your organization.

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

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A “tip of the cap” to Bill Kutik and the team at Knowledge Infusion for their collaborative work on some quality radio (well podcast actually).

The Bill Kutik Radio Show is a great listen – straightforward, educational and edgy banter about… well… er… HR Technology. It has a great mix of vendor and customer perspectives and always a few gems in each one around opportunities and issues in our market.

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I was lucky enough to recently meet with Debbie McGrath, founder and Chief Instigator of HR.com – a very cool web portal for the HR community with over 175,000 members!

In Australasia I constantly hear that the HR profession is starved of good local flows of information and commentary around talent management. It immediately occurred to me that HR.com should be a great resource for many of our Australasian customers and fans also. So… if you have not already, check out HR.com, AND membership is free !

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