Tech Review : Antezen

"Discover like minded professionals to work with"

ANTEZEN - Another website? You'd think - nothing new, thousands join the space every single day.

This site offers something new? Every site claims to be 'different'.

But amazingly as you enter the Antezen website and start exploring it in a little more detail, you won’t help getting impressed by some very interesting ideas and features that this site offers.

To begin with, I can not skip commenting on the well thought out name and logo of the site - Antezen (derived from the base word Ant) which is a symbol of dexterousness and perseverance. Neither failure perturbs an ant nor success brings complacency. And who can symbolise team work better than efficiently working ants in their colonies?

Antezen offers a cross between social networking and recruiting facilities. In other words, it bridges the gap between these two services which have been provided individually by numerous sites. Brains behind this particular endeavour had one objective in mind - to plug in a lot of gaps that have been left open by these two sets of systems-

1. Networking sites : Professional networking sites like Linked In and Social networking sites like Facebook. This is done by facilitating the creation of network of co-workers and ex-coworkers.
2. Recruiting sites and Job search engines : This is accomplished by clubbing the networking facility to make the recruitment more tailor made for the professionals concerned. This works extremely well for two end users - a company looking out to recruit a professional for a certain kind of work and a professional looking for a perfect job opportunity for him/herself.

For the second part, a very intelligent - SupeRecruiter software has been developed, which incorporates the most used but least technically implemented mechanism of recruitment - 'The Word-of-Mouth' mechanism. SupeRecruiter, superbly utilizes the information gathered from the first system, runs it through some smart algorithms and creates a perfect platform for perfect match making - between hiring managers and the professionals.

Through these two services Antezen has been able to create a very innovative system which is uniquely positioned in the market. It is commendable that the need of this middle layer could be anticipated in the midst of plethora of sites which are providing subsets of some of the functionalities separately. Antezen is well on its path to offering a super smart one-stop system which seamlessly integrates with Facebook and Linked In and completely eliminates the hassle of creating profiles at every single networking site.

Antezen primarily makes use of the technologies - Ruby on Rails and jQuery, which have been duly mentioned on the site.

Following are some of the worth-mentioning features of the site :

The services and working of the site are explained through self explanatory videos which very briefly demonstrate what a user/viewer can expect from it.

The attention to detail throughout the website is laudable. Every point which could be a potential for any kind of doubt or confusion in the users' minds is preemptively thought through and the guidance is provided there and then leaving the minimal to trial and error.

Users get to create bands or groups which empower them to moderate their own communication in a certain manner with different bands. These bands are like 'personal recipient list' of messages.

A brief summary email is sent to the users informing them about the updates which concern them. However the frequency of these mails can be controlled by the users directly.

I specifically liked the manner in which the contributions of World's Super Brains are acknowledged, immaterial of the area they made their marks in. Antezen considers them Gods of this world and taking the same thought a little further, they have their Angels too.

Guider Ant is another cool ant which is there to assist the visitors. Don’t miss using its helping hand (leg?)

Some more interesting features are in the pipeline, for instance the personalized e-Cube facility. This cube is almost like a virtual office space where you decide its décor, things you want to stick to its walls and whom to entertain and when. This clearly indicates that Antezen with such personal touch, aims to be the one standing tall above the rest.

The small little images of ants illustrating the particular activity - under network section, show the extra thought that has gone in each and every aspect. However for the sake of uniformity something on the same lines could be done for other features too.

As I explored the site in detail, I came to the conclusion that it has been designed strictly adhering to the principle "work speaks louder than words" which I really appreciate. However, at some places, words become indispensable to put the point across so a right balance is extremely important. The whole text on the site needs at least one iteration of editing. The website is in Beta stage and work is on to smoothen out all rough patches and to give it the final shape.