How We Really Read Job Ads - At Work. What A Dead Squirrel Taught Me About Value Pricing. During the summer months, we spend as much time as we can enjoying our screened in porch. We eat our meals, read and play board games without worrying about mosquitoes. Without question, it is our favorite part of the house. All that changed a couple of weeks ago when we noticed a strange odor coming from our beloved porch. Over the next couple of days, it grew from a mild annoyance to one of the most toxic, disgusting smells we have ever experienced. It became impossible to approach the porch without gagging. Flies were everywhere. I got as close as I could with my flashlight, but I couldn’t see anything (not that I looked all that closely). My mother in law, having lived in New Jersey, considers herself an odor expert. NW Pest Control told me that they could come the next morning.
Bob from NW Pest Control showed up the next day exactly when he said he would. Our porch was saved and life could return to normal. [Image: Flickr user Dawn Huczek] How to hack the recruitment process to find the best developers for your startup or agency. Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Jason Cartwright, the founder of Potato, a 65-person Web development agency headquartered in London. He’s previously worked for a variety of startups, as well as larger organisations such as Volvo, the BBC, and Google. Hiring developers for your tech company undoubtedly involves making some of the most important decisions you’ll reach for your organisation. Aside from potentially producing poor work, the wrong person shaping your code can do untold damage to your product and the development culture of a team.
The right developer on the other hand can start you off on the correct footing, pivot any incorrect tech choices, network to pull in more skilled coders and motivate them to do their best work. One of the most common causes of death among startups is people. The wrong hire can do untold damage to your product, culture and sanity. Recruitment consultants – just say no Here are some dubious practices we’ve encountered. RC: “…development?” Conclusion. Wall St sees Knight as software risk wake-up call. Chinese-calligraphy-endure-knife-the-moral-of-this-drawing-forbearance-word-heart-with-a-knife-102064753.jpg (450×470) Draw+mice+vintage+image+graphicsfairy002sm.jpg (1440×984) AnonyMouse. Logo.jpg (996×522) Logo2010_color-100x639.preview.png (800×511) 1 (778×329) Mysql_logo.jpg (399×291) 4-analyse-logiciels-libres-bandeau.jpg (500×250) Hybris Raises $30M Led By Meritech And Greylock To Take Its Multi-Platform “OmniCommerce” Solution Global. As consumers and businesses continue to move to a multi-screen world where they expect services like payments, and their e-commerce back-end systems, to work the same wherever they are, e-commerce companies that are rising to the challenge are seeing just rewards.
In the latest development, today Hybris Software, a specialist in multi-channel commerce solutions, announced that it has raised a $30 million round of investment to grow its business. The backing comes from new investors Meritech Capital Partners — storied backer of Facebook, Box, Yammer, Evernote and many more — and Greylock Israel, which were joined by Huntsman Gay Global Capital (HGGC), hybris’ biggest backer to date. Similarly, Carsten Thoma, president at hybris, notes that the opportunity right now in terms of verticals is in the B2B market: “Today, about 60% of hybris’ customers are using the solutions for business-to-consumer businesses, and about 40% are using them for business-to-business models,” he says.
Bain Capital Ventures Staffs Up. 2012 was a big year for Bain Capital Ventures—the firm raised $600 million for new investments, and focused on expanding its newly launched operations into Palo Alto, under the direction of managing director Ajay Agarwal. Today, the VC firm is announcing a number of new investment partners, helping Bain accelerate its growth in Silicon Valley. Matt Harris (New York), Todd MacLean (Silicon Valley And Boston), Salil Deshpande (Silicon Valley), and Jack Sweeney (Boston) are all joining (and in come cases, re-joining) the firm. Deshpande joins Bain from Bay Partners, and since 2006, has invested approximately $75 million into 20 companies.
These investments center around two themes: open source and enterprise software infrastructure, and infrastructure and platforms around social graph APIs. Investments include Buddy Media, (acquired by Salesforce.com), SpringSource (acquired by VMware), Engine Yard, Lending Club (peer-to-peer lending), and others. Want To Build A $1B Consumer Company? Look For Long-Haul Founders And Don’t Fear Incumbents. Editor’s note: Jacob Mullins is a VC at Shasta Ventures who primarily focuses on consumer web and mobile companies. Follow him on Twitter @jacob. With the recent talk about the growing “billion-dollar club” in startups, I’ve been wondering, as a Series A investor, what characteristics a $1 billion consumer tech company has.
I examined the pool of consumer companies that have had exits over $100 million within the current era of consumer tech, which I consider to be post-recession 2008. I wanted to see what I could learn and ideally reverse-engineer common characteristics that would help me identify the next big winners when I see them today or in the future. I created a dataset pulling from a number of venture capital data sources, including CrunchBase, and narrowed it down to my own specifics: U.S., venture-backed companies that have had realized outcomes, both IPO and M&A, over $100 million since 2008. Common Characteristics Of Consumer Tech Companies Here are a few highlights: Age. Alan Austin to Exit Wilson Sonsini. Spotlight - Alan Austin. Alan Austin (SF/1975–1987) has been a driving force in the constantly changing technology sector for more than 33 years. Before e-mail, before personal computers and even before word processing, Alan used his skills as a young lawyer to counsel emerging technology companies.
Today he is the managing director and chief operating officer at Silver Lake Partners (www.silverlake.com), a leader in large-scale private investments in technology companies. Much has changed since Alan began his professional career as a clerk for Associate Justice William O. Douglas at the U.S. Supreme Court. The Harvard University and Stanford Law School graduate joined Orrick's Corporate Group, where he primarily focused on securities and the technology sector.
"I have very fond memories of that time at Orrick. Alan was named partner in 1980 along with five other Orrick lawyers: Ralph Baxter, Roger Davis, Norm Hile, Bob Feyer and former litigation partner Tower Snow. "We are activist owners," said Alan. World's Total CPU Power: One Human Brain | Wired Science. By John Timmer, Ars Technica How much information can the world transmit, process, and store? Estimating this sort of thing can be a nightmare, but the task can provide valuable information on trends that are changing our computing and broadcast infrastructure. So a pair of researchers have taken the job upon themselves and tracked the changes in 60 different analog and digital technologies, from newsprint to cellular data, for a period of over 20 years. [partner id="arstechnica" align="right"] The trends they spot range from the expected—Internet access has pushed both analog and digital phones into a tiny niche—to the surprising, such as the fact that, in aggregate, gaming hardware has always had more computing power than the world’s supercomputers.
The authors were remarkably thorough. For storage media, they considered things like paper, film, and vinyl records, and such modern innovations as Blu-ray discs and memory cards. Even so, there are some significant estimations here. Storage. Www.chicagofed.org/digital_assets/publications/chicago_fed_letter/2012/cfloctober2012_303.pdf.
Talent Bin review. Welcome to Part 2 of this blog series covering my learning points and thoughts from over 30 #tru events, and plenty of other events last year. I will be running this series for the next 6 days. You can catch up with Part One HERE if you missed it. In this post I’m going to continue with my thoughts on why recruiting is local, even in the global world we work in. Because recruiting is local, you can’t take any one approach or strategy, and expect it to work globally. My trip to Singapore and Hong Kong at the tail end of the year revealed that the biggest frustration recruiters had was that they were being governed by corporate giants from afar who signed global deals for technology or attraction tools, or expected the same benefits package to be attractive everywhere, when the reality is that is that local is different.
Local people want different things, usually dictated by what other companies are doing. Bill. Whitetruffle.com at Website Informer. Whitetruffle | Matching tech talent with the best startup jobs. White Truffle by NappSwearengen. Vistico's World. Online Dating. We don’t need more data scientists — just make big data easier to use. Virtually any article today about big data inevitably turns to the notion that the country is suffering from a crucial shortage of data scientists.
A much-talked-about 2011 McKinsey & Co. survey pointed out that many organizations lack both the skilled personnel needed to mine big data for insights and the structures and incentives required to use big data to make informed decisions and act on them. What seems to be missing from all of these discussions, though, is a dialogue about how to steer around this bottleneck and make big data directly accessible to business leaders.
We have done it before in the software industry, and we can do it again. To accomplish this goal, it’s helpful to understand the data scientist’s role in big data. While difficult to generalize, there are three main roles served by the data scientist: data architecture, machine learning, and analytics. By way of example, think back to the web content management revolution at the turn of the century. Data Architecture. Why becoming a data scientist might be easier than you think. Maybe the business world has jumped the gun with all the talk about a looming skills shortage in big data and advanced analytics. There’s mounting evidence that it doesn’t take much to turn a novice programmer or statistician into a perfectly capable data scientist.
Maybe all it takes is just some cheap cloud computing servers, or a few weeks studying machine learning with Stanford professor Andrew Ng on Coursera. Much of this evidence comes via Kaggle, a platform where companies and organizations award prizes for the best solutions to their predictive-modeling needs. In September, for example, I covered a first-time Kaggle user and admitted data science neophyte named Carter S. who won a competition using a simple but effective method he dubbed “overkill analytics.”
Impressive, sure, but Carter builds insurance-industry risk models for a living. Ask Luis Tandalla. Once Tandalla got started, he told me, he got passionate about learning more. The Coursera connection Andrew Ng. Bright.com: Job searches done the dating-site way | Internet & Media. Job searchers can now approach their quest as many do for love -- relying on data and science. Or, at least, "science" (as most anyone who's ever tried online dating can attest). Bright, a job search engine launching today, uses data to show employees and employers how compatible they are using a scoring system that CEO Steve Goodman said will revolutionize the hiring the process.
"We believe that there is a job for everybody that wants to be gainfully employed," he told CNET in an interview. The company is backed by a variety of angel investors who have collectively invested $6 million, a pretty significant amount for investors who are using their own money. Over a period of 18 months, Bright conducted a study with over 8.6 million job seekers to refine its technology. The company's data science team -- neuroscientists, mathematicians and nuclear physicists -- processed 2.8 million resumes and 2.1 million job descriptions.
The service is free to job seekers. The Science Behind Those Obama Campaign E-Mails. One fascination in a presidential race mostly bereft of intrigue was the strange, incessant, and weirdly overfamiliar e-mails that emanated from the Obama campaign. Anyone who shared an address with the campaign soon started receiving messages from Barack Obama with subject lines such as “Join me for dinner?”
“It’s officially over,” “It doesn’t have to be this way,” or just “Wow.” Jon Stewart mocked them on the Daily Show. The women’s website the Hairpin likened them to notes from a stalker. But they worked. The appeals were the product of rigorous experimentation by a large team of analysts. It quickly became clear that a casual tone was usually most effective.
Writers, analysts, and managers routinely bet on which lines would perform best and worst. Another unexpected hit: profanity. After a pause, he offered a qualification: “We do know that getting all those e-mails in your in-box is at least mildly irritating to some people. Five Things Email Marketers Can Learn from the Obama Campaign | Contactology. InShare7 Staffers for President Barack Obama's re-election campaign have revealed some of the email strategies they used in the 2012 re-election campaign. "Hey" — The Most Successful Email Sent By the Obama Campaign Email marketing was responsible for most of the $690 million raised online by the campaign, reports Bloomberg Businessweek's Joshua Green. The tone and content of all of the campaign’s email strategies surprised a lot of experts and pundits. Citing one email campaign that had the subject line, "Hey," The Daily Show fired off a rant in a segment called "Spamalot.
" "You don't need to resort to the kinds of fake familiarity that . . . spammers use to get me to buy an iPhone 6," host Jon Stewart quipped. As it turns out, that "Hey" subject line was one of the most effective messages of the campaign, Green reports. That email message raised $2.7 million. 1 // Test. AB Testing was at the heart of the Obama email strategy. 2 // Don't get in a rut. 3 // Listen to Your Subscribers.
Talent Management. Kill the Password: Why a String of Characters Can't Protect Us Anymore | Gadget Lab. “This summer, hackers destroyed my entire digital life in the span of an hour,” says Wired senior writer Mat Honan.Photo: Ethan Hill You have a secret that can ruin your life. It’s not a well-kept secret, either. Just a simple string of characters—maybe six of them if you’re careless, 16 if you’re cautious—that can reveal everything about you. Your email. Your bank account. Your address and credit card number. Photos of your kids or, worse, of yourself, naked.
No matter how complex, no matter how unique, your passwords can no longer protect you. Look around. This summer, hackers destroyed my entire digital life in the span of an hour. The age of the password is over. Since that awful day, I’ve devoted myself to researching the world of online security. First thing I do? This summer I learned how to get into, well, everything. The common weakness in these hacks is the password.
Passwords are as old as civilization. So we were lulled into complacency. Pages: 1 2345View All. Twitter. IT Staffing Trends: Outlook and Solutions | cPrime Blog. An article on the trends, challenges, and advantages to the IT Staffing world Simply put, IT spending is big business. By the end of 2012, Forrester Research predicts that global spending on IT services will hit 3.8 trillion, with projected growth rates of 7.5% in 2012 and 8.3% in 2013 for business and government purchases of information technology goods and services1. Domestically, IT spending is following this “trend to spend.” According to Gartner Research, 350 U.S. firms indicated that each plans to invest more than $1 billion in IT during 2012 to improve business performance.2 Fueling this spending is the move to the “big 4” today: cloud, mobile, social and data analytics.
Even in the current cautious economic environment, companies are choosing to continue to invest in upgrading existing IT systems and infrastructure, and developing new systems, in order to stay competitive. IT Industry Growth Trends: Mobile, Cloud and Analytics Figure 1:Mobile Growth Trends. The conclusion? 1. 2. 20 Top Tips to Recruit Passive Candidates | Dice Resource Center. Hiring Is a Dog from Hell. LinkedIn IPO: Witness The Recruiting Machine.
LinkedIn is Disrupting the Corporate Recruiting Market. Job Boards 2.0. Images.globalknowledge.com/wwwimages/pdfs/2012_Salary_Report.pdf. IT Guy: Adapting to the Cloud.
The New Job Hunt. Surveys Don't Cut It - How Do You Climb Inside A Techie's Head? - Articles Surfing. How Personality Tests for Job Seekers Work.