Now we want to hear from you. What do you think of “Becomed” as our name? What was your initial impression that the name gave you of our service, and did it change after you started using it?

To answer, just comment on this blog post. We’d love to hear what you think, and as an added incentive we’ll randomly choose one responder and give them a free 6 month upgrade to Becomed Pro.

To complement this change in marketing strategy we’ve also changed the pricing plan on Becomed.com. Rather than paying a $12 lump sum for an upgrade for Becomed Pro you can now pay only $2.99 a month and as long as you remain a subscriber we’ll just bill you automatically. You can cancel any time so there’s no commitment, and the price is now a lot more manageable for those of us on a budget (and who isn’t, these days).

Let us know what you think of these changes. We’re still working diligently to bring you exciting new functionality, and these changes will hopefully bring more revenue to pay for it.

Stay tuned for more news soon!

We’ve added a permanent link to Joshua’s video tutorial under our “Links about Becomed” section of our blog.

First, we looked at the days in the week during which our users joined Becomed (the blue bars in the graph). It seems that most of our users join at the beginning and middle of the week, on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Our theory is that, for our employed users who are looking for a new job, this could be explained by being disappointed by their current jobs returning to work after the weekend. And perhaps our unemployed users decide to join on these days after weekends of soul-searching and a renewed motivation to find a job.

We also looked at the days during which our users applied for jobs (the green bars in the graph). It seems that the job application trends correlate with the trend of signups for Becomed: Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday seem to be the most active days, perhaps for the same reasons.

Finally, we looked at the days our users are being interviewed (the red bars in the graph). It seems that, by and large, Tuesday is the most popular day for interviews, followed by Thursday.  We’re not quite sure why that is, but it is our experience that mondays are usually very busy days for executives, and so interviews are postponed to later in the week. Naturally, there are no interviews on Saturday and Sunday.

We’ve also released the mobile version of Becomed, m.becomed.com . It is a version of Becomed.com optimized for mobile viewing, to allow you access to your active job applications on the go. For example, you can use it to review your application’s history and research while waiting for your job interview.

We’ve also introduced two new sections to the site:

• Contacts – allows you to keep track of your network of professional contacts. We’ve implemented a feature that allows you to export all your contacts in Outlook CSV from your email application or webmail providers and import them automatically into Becomed.
• Tools – allows you to search for job postings directly from within Becomed, and also links to other useful websites such as salary comparison sites and professional social networking.

We hope you like the new sections.

There are hundreds of thousands of people unemployed right now, all going through some process of applying for jobs. Most people will apply to dozens if not hundreds of positions, and it’s incredibly difficult to keep organized. Becomed.com is the tool to keep your organized in your job search and make sure you never miss a thing.

I started writing it on Monday, March 23, 2009. Three days later, I opened it to the public.