Trol­lim was cho­sen by TechCrunch as the Best Inter­na­tional Startup at TC50 yes­ter­day — well done!

Trol­lim is a com­pe­ti­tion plat­form for pro­gram­mers unlike any other you’ve encoun­tered before. Trol­lim assesses the cod­ing level and per­for­mance skill set of pro­gram­mers via one to one or one to many cod­ing “bat­tles” no mat­ter where they are in the world. Think of Eminem’s rap bat­tles in the movie 8 mile — but this time not for rap­pers but for programmers.

(Dis­clo­sure: Trol­lim is a client of Blonde 2.0 and Blonde 2.0 is proud to intro­duce the world to this new amaz­ing plat­form.)

Once a pro­gram­mer reg­is­ters on Trol­lim, he must take a per­son­al­ized skill test. Once that test is fin­ished, he is allowed to com­pete in Bat­tles with other programmers. Now he is ready to take his first cod­ing test. Trollim’s test­ing engine will exam­ine the details the pro­gram­mer sub­mit­ted and will show him a piece of bro­ken code related to his skill set. The chal­lenge is to fix the code in the fastest and most effi­cient man­ner pos­si­ble with­out the use of pro­gram­ming short­cuts. His per­for­mance is rated not only against his chal­lenger but other pro­gram­mers who share a sim­i­lar skill set.

Com­pa­nies are able to spon­sor the Bat­tles and receive detailed sta­tis­tics on the pro­gram­mers and their level of skill. Enter­prises will be able to license the plat­form for inter­nal use, thereby enabling these com­pa­nies to gain a deeper insight into the skill set of their pro­gram­mers and poten­tial hires.

The rat­ing of the programmer’s skill set is depen­dent on a set of tests that he takes and is com­pared to other pro­gram­mers with the same skill set. Trol­lim warns cheaters that they “will be caught and locked away in the Trol­lim Dungeon.”

How Trol­lim works

Just like on Twit­ter, on Trol­lim the pro­gram­mer can fol­low other pro­gram­mers (Trolls) and they can fol­low him back. Users can search for other Trolls based upon cri­te­ria such as coun­try, city, age group,  cod­ing lan­guages, skills and more. The pro­gram­mer can invite Trolls he fol­lows into a bat­tle any­time he likes. Trolls can only com­pete against each other  if they share appro­pri­ate skill sets (i.e. lan­guage, years of expe­ri­ence, etc). Battles are found both on the Bat­tle and Search pages. Users can also find bat­tles using the Troll uni­verse map. Users can­not par­tic­i­pate in more than 10 Bat­tles at any given moment.

There’s also some­thing called a Rum­ble Battle. This bat­tle allows one Troll to fight many Trolls and the para­me­ters for who can par­tic­i­pate varies on the Rumble’s spon­sor. Bat­tles can be selected by geo­graph­i­cal loca­tion, age and other para­me­ters set by the sponsor. A Rum­ble can be cre­ated by the Trol­lim web­site or by a com­pany spon­sor­ing the Rum­ble. Trolls who win the Rum­ble or get high scores receive extra rat­ing points. Some of the Rum­bles will also include prizes. The value of the prizes is directly related to the Trolls skill level.

Israel-based Trol­lim allows pro­gram­mers to show com­pa­nies their skill set and make them­selves attrac­tive can­di­dates for posi­tions in com­pa­nies they are seek­ing to work at. Enter­prises are able to use the data pro­vided by Trol­lim to fur­ther under­stand the skills their in-house pro­gram­mers cur­rently have and to find new pro­gram­mers that may have the skill set they are look­ing for. No other cur­rent plat­form enables both pro­gram­mers and enter­prises to max­i­mize on these pro­gram­ming skills as well as Trol­lim does.

Ayelet Noff is founder and CEO of Blonde 2.0, a con­sul­tancy spe­cial­iz­ing in help­ing brands use social media tools such as social net­works, the blo­gos­phere and social soft­ware to cre­ate brand aware­ness, recruit employ­ees or achieve any other goal. See her busi­ness pro­file, con­tact Ayelet, fol­low her on Twit­ter or leave a com­ment below.