SkillPages was a social platform for finding skilled people and had over 20 million users on the platform from over 160 countries. The CEO was Laura Shesgreen who was appointed after the company's co-founder and former CEO Iain MacDonald stepped down unexpectedly in 2013 due to sudden illness.
In December 2014, the Directors of the company sought the appointment of a provisional liquidator and said the company was for sale. On 2 February 2015, SkillPages announced that they had been purchased by London-based Bark.com.
The website was available in English and Spanish. It now redirects to Bark.com. The company was based in Dublin, Ireland, with offices in Palo Alto, CA, USA, and in Singapore.
Description
On SkillPages, members created a profile that displayed their skills through multimedia (images, videos and status updates). Users who are looking for skilled people could post jobs or directly mail people on the platform that had the skills they are looking for. SkillPages was available on desktop, iOS and Android.
Weedle
In 2009 by MacDonald and Michael Gallagher launched a private beta website called Weedle. MacDonald sold his previous company Perlico to Vodafone for €80,000,000 in 2007.
In March 2010 Taoiseach Brian Cowen, Prime Minister of Ireland, announced that Weedle had received funding of $4,000,000 to expand into the US and other global regions. Weedle investors included Dr Michael Smurfit and Weedle's co-founder and CEO MacDonald as well as the Irish government agency, Enterprise Ireland.
"Weedle is a leading-edge high-tech company developing as part of Ireland’s knowledge economy," said Cowen. "Weedle’s internet platform is a shining example of world-class research and development being used to create innovative technology with global reach and appeal."
SkillPages launch
In January 2011, Weedle relaunched as SkillPages.
The name SkillPages was chosen because it was the closest "one word" description of what the company does. MacDonald said it is difficult to fully explain a new concept in just one sentence or one word, but the name SkillPages clearly explained the "skill" focus of the company.
SkillPages reached 1,000,000 registered members in its first 150 days.
In June 2011, Irish Government Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation, Richard Bruton TD, welcomed the launch of a new feature called "Opportunities" during the official opening of the company's newly expanded headquarters in Blackrock, County Dublin, Ireland.
Minister Bruton said: "Today I am delighted to see in SkillPages the great success that can come from a combination of government support, partnership with universities and innovative people. We in Ireland must not only build on our traditional strengths to attract international companies here, but also learn from the highly innovative companies we already have here to drive a generation of Irish start-ups."
Referring to the new feature, MacDonald said that members can create an "Opportunity" detailing what skilled person they are looking for. Other members of SkillPages can then view these Opportunities, get presented with those that are relevant to their own skillsets and/or forward Opportunities to someone they know who might be interested.
The new feature was the culmination of extensive research by the R&D team in SkillPages with the assistance of CLARITY, the joint University College Dublin, Trinity College and Dublin City University computer science research initiative funded by Science Foundation Ireland. The Opportunities feature was later renamed Jobs.
By SkillPages' first anniversary in February 2012, the platform had reached 3 million members. At this point, 170 million social connections had been imported into SkillPages. The top five skills on the platform were photographers, software engineers, graphic designers, signers and writers. SkillPages users were creating 100,000 opportunities daily.
By June 2012, SkillPages had 5 million members. The company announced that it had raised $9.5 million in a Series B round of funding from previous investors, including the Irish VC firm ACT Venture Capital. This brought the total investment in the company to over $22.1 million.