About Stephen Jagger

Co-Founder of PayrollHero.com

Recap: Crocodile in the Yangtze Asia Premier

Posted on April 12, 2013 by Stephen Jagger

Last night we hosted the Asia premier of the film Crocodile in the Yangtze in Manila, Philippines. We flew the director, Porter Erisman in for the event to speak to the group and do a question and answer session after the screening. It was a fantastic night!

The Crocodile in the Yangtze is a fantastic film that looks at the rise of China’s first Internet entrepreneur and former English teacher, Jack Ma, as he battles US giant eBay on the way to building China’s first global Internet company, Alibaba Group.

A big thanks to Amazon Web Services and EO Philippines for sponsoring the event along with us to make it happen.

*More photos here

Porter Erisman (left) taking questions after the screening

Porter Erisman and Mig33 CEO Steven Goh

STAC Silicon Valley Announces 2012 ON3 Winners (PayrollHero WINS!)

Posted on April 10, 2013 by Stephen Jagger

Exciting news! PayrollHero was chosen as one of the 2012 ON3 Winners and will receive a 3 month immersion package in Silicon Valley provided by Plug and Play Tech Center in Sunnyvale, California. Below is the press release that was just sent out to announce the winners. We are excited to amongst such a great group of startups!

A big shout out to Tin Sanchez and Nico Suria of the PayrollHero team who pitched at the event! Great work!

– – –

Contact: Christina Laskowski, President
STAC Silicon Valley
(415) 425-1900

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

STAC Silicon Valley Announces 2012 ON3 Winners
NEXTIX, Payroll Hero and SpellDial Win Plug and Play Tech Center Immersion

April 10, 2013 – Palo Alto, CA and Manila, Philippines – The Science & Technology Council officially announced the 2012 ON3 winners which include NEXTIX (GroupJump and Mii Move), Payroll Hero and SpellDial. The path of the 2012 ON3 Finalists started a year ago in April when each company presented their 3-minute pitch to a panel of judges during one of the four Regional competitions held in Davao, Cebu, Pangasinan and Manila. “The judges during the coaching sessions challenged us each time to justify our technology, target market, and team.” says Bobby Suson, Founder of GroupJump. “We used their feedback to finalize our presentation for competition day and we have been looking forward to the 2012 announcement.”

The ON3 competition is one that has an extremely unique format. ON3 takes place twice a year in the Philippines beginning with the Regional competitions hosted in cities across the country. There are two competitions in Luzon to enable participants from the northern and southern communities to participate, one in the Visayas and one in Mindanao. The best performers of the Regional leg come together to compete in the final competition where they are judged by a panel of angel investors, venture capitalists and professionals for their pitch performance. The short list of companies are then required to demonstrate ability to execute their business model over a period of three months and submit monthly reports. Companies that demonstrate an ability to execute and achieve milestones are then considered for the grand prize of a three month immersion package provided by ON3’s Platinum sponsor Plug and Play Tech Center in Sunnyvale, California.

Plug and Play Tech Center is a global accelerator providing a unique platform to help international companies succeed. “As a judge during the Regionals in Manila, the entrepreneurs demonstrated their drive and approach to solving a global problem using technology and I am confident that the entrepreneurial ecosystem for the Philippines is headed toward success,” says Saeed Amidi, CEO of Plug and Play. To help facilitate their immersion, ON3 2012 winners will be supported in part through a grant from the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) which will help offset the living expenses during their three month stay in Silicon Valley. The Department of Trade and Industry and the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) has championed the cross border partnership and development of the entrepreneurial ecosystem supporting STAC SV and its ON3 program. The private sector support has been led by Novare Technologies, SMART Communications, and Globe Telecom who not only support ON3 but each are active in contributing to the ecosystem independently.

ON3 is a nationwide business plan search for emerging technology companies in the Philippines. In August 2009, The Philippine Government (Departments of Science & Technology, Trade & Industry and Foreign Affairs) signed a Memo of Agreement with STAC-SV to formalize a working relationship that together would create a platform in the Philippines designed to support efforts of local entrepreneurs, scientists and graduate students with attractive global business models. The prototypeON3 competition was launched at the 2010 eServices conference serving as the first competition of its kind in the Philippines. Jojo Flores, co-founder of Plug and Play Tech Center who also serves as Vice President of STAC-SV, led the event and currently serves as the ON3 Director.

About STAC Silicon Valley. The Science & Technology Advisory Council-Silicon Valley is a 501c3 non-profit organization that serves as an advisor to the Philippine Government in the areas of Science & Technology to promote entrepreneurship, support R&D investments by DOST and foster innovation. The organization’s members operate the ON3 Acceleration Program and are building a platform that will help support viable global businesses. STAC Silicon Valley is a partner of The Global Entrepreneurship Program, a U.S. State Department-led effort to advance entrepreneurship in emerging markets and developing countries. For more information about STAC SV: www.excelr8.org. For more information about GEP: http://www.state.gov/e/eb/cba/entrepreneurship/gep/index.htm

About NEXTIX Groupjump. Groupjump is a social and mobile e-group networking site that allows users the ability to fully control and manage the security and privacy of their virtual social groups. Groupjump can easily be accessed anywhere too—through the web, and mobile devices. For more information: www.groupjump.com

About NEXTIX Mii Move. MiiMove is the app that allows seamless real-time coaching and interaction between students and coaches around the world so you can improve and master any sport you like. Its platform enables users to engage the services of professional coaches from anywhere in the world, receive real-time instruction and analytical data to improve one’s game all on a social e-learning platform. For more information: www.miimove.com

About Payroll Hero. PayrollHero is a Consumer-friendly Time, Attendance, Scheduling and Payroll app that is in the cloud built for web and mobile. For more information: www.payrollhero.com

About SpellDial. Spelldial is an app that allows customers to remember names not numbers. Its platform enables users, merchants and brands to stay connected whenever wherever. For more information: www.spelldial.com

About Plug and Play Tech Center. Plug and Play Tech Center is a thriving Silicon Valley global accelerator that hosts a community of over 300 startups from all over the world. It accelerates growth of its startups via strategic partnerships, including 170 investors who participate in regular screening sessions exclusive to Plug and Play members. For more information: www.plugandplaytechcenter.com

About Globe and Kickstart Ventures. Globe™ is a leading telecommunications company in the Philippines whose mission is to transform and enrich lives through communications by way of its vision of making great things possible. Kickstart Ventures, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Globe Telecom, is an angel fund dedicated to investing and incubating Philippine start-ups. It is committed to build innovative businesses in cooperation with like-minded individuals and organizations by providing funding, mentorship and education. www.kickstart.ph

About Novare Technologies. A Philippine flag carrier with global reach in the world of strategic consulting, Novare Technologies continuously provides business value to its customers through its excellence and innovation, driven by best-in-class people. Novare offers a comprehensive, 360-degree approach to solutions architecture through consultancy, solutions development, and support: from backend integration of various solution vendor technologies, to the development and customization of multiple front-end applications on different platforms, Novare is a trusted partner of some of the most prestigious names in the Telecommunications and the Financial Services industries. Staffed by more than 130 professionals, it is headquartered in Hong Kong, with its Regional Operating Headquarters in Makati, Philippines, and branches in Silicon Valley, USA and Beijing, China. For more information: http://www.novare.com.hk/

About SMART Communications. Smart Communications, Inc. (SMART) is the Philippines’ leading wireless services provider with 49.0 million subscribers on its GSM network as of end-December 2011. SMART has built an international reputation for innovation, having introduced world-first wireless data services, such as Smart Money (the world’s first electronic wallet linked to a mobile phone), Smart Load (electronic prepaid top-ups in sachet denominations), Smart Padala (mobile-based remittance service) and the Netphone (Android-based operator feature phone). SMART is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Philippines’ leading telecommunications carrier, the Philippine Long Distance Telephone Company which is listed at the New York Stock Exchange. For more information: www.smart.com.ph

2 Days of Training (Zendesk and PayrollHero)

Posted on April 7, 2013 by Stephen Jagger

Our office in the Philippines is used by quite a few companies for events. We have, what we call, a “think tank” that works great for events. We have been the location for Google, Amazon and most recently been asked to host an event for Zendesk.

Zendesk is running a day long session on April 17th 2013 in our think tank and since Zendesk and PayrollHero share a few customers we thought it would make sense to run a bootcamp of our own the day before to make it easy for companies that wanted to attend both.

Join us!

PayrollHero – April 16th 2013 (Register Here)
Zendesk – April 17th 2013 (Register Here)

PayrollHero Manila Bootcamp Recap

Posted on March 28, 2013 by Stephen Jagger

We ran the first PayrollHero bootcamp in Manila, Philippines the other day and it was a great success. We had a full house of customers interested in learning more about the PayrollHero platform and how the time, attendance, scheduling and payroll functionality works within their operations. Below are a few pictures from the event… hopefully you can make our next bootcamp!

(above: Nick Franklin, Zendesk Head of Southeast Asia Sales dropped by to showcase the Zendesk product)

(above: Anna, Cres and Tin, PayrollHero bootcamp leaders)
541233_584423674904039_2134292382_n (above: Tin getting the bootcamp setup)

Crocodile in the Yangtze: Asia Premier Screening (& Contest)

Posted on March 17, 2013 by Stephen Jagger

Exciting news! PayrollHero has arranged for the Asia Premier of the film “Crocodile in the Yangtze” to be showcased in the Philippines. We have put together an exclusive event and we are flying in the director, Porter Erisman, to join us!

A big thanks to EO Philippines and Amazon AWS for sponsoring the event along with us to make it happen. While the event is invite only, we are giving away 2 tickets – all you need to do is head over to the PayrollHero Facebook page and comment on why you should be chosen to attend. We will pick two lucky people to join us.

About Crocodile in the Yangtze:

Crocodile in the Yangtze follows China’s first Internet entrepreneur and former English teacher, Jack Ma, as he battles US giant eBay on the way to building China’s first global Internet company, Alibaba Group. An independent memoir written, directed and produced by an American who worked in Ma’s company for eight years, Crocodile in the Yangtze captures the emotional ups and downs of life in a Chinese Internet startup at a time when the Internet brought China face-to-face with the West.

Crocodile in the Yangtze draws on 200 hours of archival footage filmed by over 35 sources between 1995 and 2009. The film presents a strikingly candid portrait of Ma and his company, told from the point of view of an American fly on a Chinese wall who witnessed the successes and the mistakes Alibaba encountered as it grew from a small apartment into a global company employing 16,000 staff.

Vancouver JS Meetup Recap

Posted on February 28, 2013 by Stephen Jagger

This is a post from PayrollHero Senior Engineer Suman Mukherjee who recently arrived in Whistler, Canada from the Manila, Philippines office. #AdventureEngineer

On February 12th, the PayrollHero dev team in Whistler travelled down to Vancouver to attend the Vancouver JS meetup. We reached town a bit early, so we spent some time coworking from Launch Academy. Later in the evening, we went to SFU Harbour Center where the event was being held. Around 150 people attended the event. Two top notch speakers presented in the meetup. Robert W. Hurst of Chloi presented a talk on LucidJS and Perter McLachLan of Mobify presented a talk on Mobile performance.

Robert’s talk on Lucid started with giving us some background of event driven programming, how events are emitted and handled and we can structure our javascript around that pattern. Then he introduced LucidJS, a library, that he has been working on. Lucid allows you to set custom event, chain your events and even pipe your events together. Lucid also successfully handles subevents. The event emitters in Lucid also provide meta information about the event bindings and triggering. The library lets you encapsulate any object (not restricted to DOM nodes) and turn it into an event emitter. Specifically when used with DOM elements it allows you to take full advantage of the meta events. Robert’s talk gave us some new insights into the world of event driven programming.

Peter was the second speaker. Peter’s talk was mainly focussed on performances of apps on the mobile browsers. He shared the concept of adaptive websites, one that is not only responsive, but adapts itself based on the device. He discussed several strategies to optimize client side performance like trying to minimize JS and maximize the use of CSS, conditionally loading assets and keeping the DOM tree light so that it is easy to parse, simple CSS selectors, watch out for libraries that generate lengthy CSS selectors etc. Peter shared a list of common JS functions which restructures the DOM and how that affects the performance on mobile devices. He also discussed some other low hanging fruits like gzipping resources and non blocking scripts in the beginning of the page. This can bring returns at the lowest cost. He also showed us how the optimization strategy of domain sharding has become an anti-pattern. He also discussed how in some cases prefetching resources based on a user’s common pattern of navigating a website can be very effective in delivering content faster. Peter’s slides are also available on speakerdeck.

Both the speakers were awesome. It was the first meetup I attended in Vancouver and totally loved it. Those who love JS and are live close to Vancouver can sign up for the VanJS meetup group here.

– Suman.

Press Release: PayrollHero.com Secures $1M in Seed Funding

Posted on February 20, 2013 by Stephen Jagger

PayrollHero.com Secures $1M in Seed Funding To Continue Product Development And Expand Sales/Marketing Efforts In Southeast Asia

PayrollHero’s time, attendance, scheduling and payroll solution helps companies manage their workforce through a cloud based, web and mobile solution that is built for today’s employees.

SINGAPORE, Feb. 20th 2013 – PayrollHero, a software company focused on time, attendance, scheduling and payroll for Southeast Asia has announced today that is has closed a $1M CAD seed round of funding from 500Startups, LX Ventures, The Futura Corporation, 8capita Partners, Ryan Holmes (CEO of Hootsuite), Dan Martell (CEO of Clarity), Benjamin Joffe (aka Mr. Asia), Christian Cotichini (Founder of MAKE Technologies) and other angel investors.

With offices in Manila, Philippines and Whistler, Canada, PayrollHero is a subscription based cloud software platform that uses the employees face and GPS location as the metric for clocking in and out to ensure that the right employee is in the right place at the right time. The company enables transparency between employees and management around time, attendance, scheduling and payroll via attendance analytics.

PayrollHero was created out of necessity from company founders Michael Stephenson and Stephen Jagger. They had set up a Philippine outsourcing company and could not find a suitable time, attendance, scheduling and payroll solution so ended up building their own. After showing their internal system to other business owners in the Philippines who expressed similar dissatisfaction with the options available they decided to look deeper into the Philippine market and the rest of Southeast Asia.

“There was a really big opportunity in Southeast Asia for a time, attendance, scheduling and payroll solution that was in the cloud and built for web and mobile. We set up PayrollHero and set out to become the market leader in this space,” said PayrollHero CEO Michael Stephenson.

PayrollHero currently supports payroll for companies in the Philippines and plans to expand its payroll capabilities to other countries within Southeast Asia in the near future. The companies time, attendance and scheduling solution works worldwide and currently has users in Canada, USA, Cambodia, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia and India.

“We wanted a payroll solution that was cloud based and built for the Philippine business environment, PayrollHero was exactly what we were looking for and took our payroll processing time for 700 employees from 16 days to 5 minutes” – Walden Chu, CEO, The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf Philippines

With this injection of funds, PayrollHero can add talent to its “Adventure Engineering” team and continue to add new clients to its expanding client base.

“PayrollHero makes payroll sexy, and they make lots of money doing it! It’s one of those few cloud-based services that every business, from SMB’s to large enterprises, can and should use to increase productivity and save costs. The ability to scale PayrollHero is limited only by the number of businesses that want to improve employee attendance, scheduling, and payroll,” said George Kellerman, Venture Partner, 500 Startups

For more information, visit www.PayrollHero.com

About PayrollHero
PayrollHero.com – Optimizing Work Productivity with Happiness
Consumer-friendly Time, Attendance, Scheduling and Payroll in the cloud for web and mobile.
We use your employees face as our primary biometric to avoid buddy punching and ghost employees. These clock-in pics are further given a mood rating to establish an array of business intelligence to your companies corollaries between productivity and mood. For more information, visit www.PayrollHero.com – http://www.payrollhero.com/press_kit

New Feature: Enable/Disable Email Notifications

Posted on January 30, 2013 by Stephen Jagger

Now within PayrollHero you can enable and disable the email notifications that go out from the system. While you have always had the control to edit the emails, the ability to pick and choose which ones you wanted did not exist – until today. Under “settings” and “email templates” you can edit, enable and disable each individual email that PayrollHero sends out.

PayrollHero: Philippine Feature Set

Posted on January 14, 2013 by Stephen Jagger

I was asked the other day for a list of features that PayrollHero has for Philippine companies. Here are the main features of PayrollHero for clients in the Philippines looking for Philippine payroll.

If you have questions or want to chat further about how PayrollHero can help your business – feel free to fill in the form at PayrollHero.com and we will be in touch right away.

Time:
Clock In/Out
Break In/Out
Grace Period for Lates

Attendance:
Review attendance
Resolve Attendance
Edit Attendance
Export Employee Attendance Report
Resolves Lates and Absences
Resolves Undertime
Resolves Overtime

Scheduling:
Create Shifts
Create Multiple Shifts
Schedule Calendar
Weekly Scheduler
Paid Day Off
Unpaid Day off
Scheduling Worksites (location)
Non-scheduled clock ins
Holiday
Calendar Notes/Events

Payroll:
Gross and Net Pay Calculations
Tax Computation
Government Mandated Contributions
13th month pay calculation
Calculates Pay for Special Holidays
Calculates Pay for Regular Holidays
Calculates Payroll for all kinds of Holidays
SSS, Philhealth, PagIbig reports (monthly and quarterly hardcopies)
Paysheet reports, payslip reports (Detailed and summary)
Payroll Register ( Breakdown of Payroll, this report allows to specify an arbitrary date range to report)
Bank reports (electronic and hardcopies) PH integrate to your bank own payroll program.
BIR reports (1601C, 2316, 1700, Alphalist (soon)
Employees ID Card Template with company Logo
“Various employment documents
– Government Certificate of Contribution
– Certificate of Employment”
Various Forms ( for employees application in various Government agencies) BIR 1902 ( TIN application, SSSE1 ( SSS application), Philhealth M1A ( Philhealth application), Pag-Ibig FPF090 MDF ( Pag-Ibig application).

Philippine Payroll File Support:
Maybank
BPI
BDO
HSBC
RCBC

Analytics:
Leaderboard
Weather vs Attendance
Home Location vs Attendance

Philippines CyberPress Awards PayrollHero “IT Startup of the Year”

Posted on December 26, 2012 by Stephen Jagger

The I.T. Journalists Association of the Philippines, also known as CyberPress, held its annual awards ceremony at the Arts in the City events center in Fort Bonifacio, Taguig the other night. The event saw the country’s top technology journalists, guests from the IT industry, PR firms and partners gather for the year end celebration and the annual CyberPress Awards recognizing the Philippines’ top I.T. company, startup, product, story and Lifetime achievement awardee for the year.

It is a great honor that PayrollHero was chosen as the IT Startup Of The Year!

From the press release… “Payroll Hero, a Filipino start-up that is making a name in the international scene, was selected as “IT Start-up of the Year.” Payroll Hero uses employees face as primary biometric to avoid bundy punching and ghost employees. These clock-in pics are further given a mood rating to establish an array of business intelligence to companies corollaries between productivity and mood.”

The 2012 Winners:

I.T. Company Of The Year – Samsung Philippines
I.T. Product Of The Year – DOST’s Project Noah
I.T. Startup Of The Year – PayrollHero.com
I.T. Story Of The Year – Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012
Lifetime Achievement Awardee – Diosdado “Dado” Banatao

—
Official Press Release (via daddyjoey.com):

CyberPress Fetes 2012’s Best In Local IT

For launching a number of hit products that allowed the company to dominate the consumer tech market, Samsung Philippines was cited as “IT Company of the Year” by the IT Journalists Association of the Philippines, also known as Cyberpress, during a recent awards ceremony in Taguig City.

The South Korean firm, which rolled out this year popular devices such as the Samsung Galaxy S3and the Samsung Note II, beat tech behemoth IBM Philippines by the slimmest of margins to take the crown.

IBM Philippines celebrated its 75th anniversary this year and was an early front-runner in the race. Known by the moniker “Big Blue”, the company brought in this year Sam Palmisano, its former CEO and chair in the Philippines, and opened two new offices in Davao and Clark, Pampanga.

Although it narrowly lost out to Samsung as the country’s top tech firm, IBM’s first female local chief was named “IT Executive of the Year” by the Cyberpress. Mariels Almeda Winhoffer, who is in her first year in office, was recognized by the IT scribes for deftly leading the company in a number of initiatives, particularly in building up the Philippines as the social analytics hub of IBM.

The DOST’s Project Noah was adjudged as “IT Product of the Year”, a pioneering program that contributed in saving thousands of lives in a year that saw devastating typhoons pummel the country.

Payroll Hero, a Filipino start-up that is making a name in the international scene, was selected as “IT Start-up of the Year.” Payroll Hero uses employees face as primary biometric to avoid bundy punching and ghost employees. These clock-in pics are further given a mood rating to establish an array of business intelligence to companies corollaries between productivity and mood.

The passage of the Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012, which set off a wave of protests from Pinoy netizens, was the runaway choice as “IT Story of the Year”.

Honored as this year’s “Lifetime Achievement Awardee” for his meritorious contributions to the local and global IT industry is Silicon Valley-based Filipino tech icon Diosdado “Dado” Banatao.

Banatao, who is currently chairman of PhilDev Forum, pioneered a number of PC technologies such as the graphics accelerator chip that are still being used in the high-tech industry. His brother, Victor, received the plaque in his behalf.

Also during the awards night, members of the Cyberpress raised more than P40,000 for victims of Typhoon ‘Pablo’ by auctioning off three major raffle prizes (iPhone 5 from Globe Telecom, iPad Mini from Bazinga, and an Olympus digicam from Metrobank). Chinese phonemaker ZTE, through its local distributor MSI-ECS, also donated 50 phone units for the typhoon victims.