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Posts Tagged ‘been-tinkering’

Remember Philip Kaplan, better known as “Pud,” the guy who created FuckedCompany at the tail-end of the first Internet bubble? Yeah, him. He just joined Charles River Ventures this week as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence. The EIR position is usually where venture firms park executives they want to work with but who don’t yet have a company. EIRs get to see a lot of deal flow, work with the portfolio companies, and usually end up starting their own companies which the venture firm can invest in.

For those of you too young to remember, FuckedCompany was the original deadpool site. Mike once wrote an April Fool’s joke announcing that TechCrunch had acquired the site, which some people still ask us about seriously. But it was always just one of many projects.

Kaplan went on to found AdBrite, which is now one of the top 25 ad networks. Kaplan is still chairman of AdBrite, but he’s been tinkering with his own projects for most of this year, including several fun Twitter apps like flirt140 (Twitter dating), fast140 (a typing challenge game), Tweetname (domain name registry via Twitter), and AlumTweet (Classmates.com for Twitter), and href=”http://www.hitmelater.com/”>HitMeLater (a snooze button for email). He says he has about 16 sites or apps that are currently live.

So what’s the big idea he will be pursuing for Charles River Ventures? He’s still figuring it out, but he think sit will have something to do with the intersection of business networking, social networking, and finance.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

I don’t know about you, but when I look at an online map and see outlines of buildings, I get a little frustrated. I want to be able to click somewhere, and find out exactly what’s there. And with a new feature in Google Maps, you can do just that.

If you right-click somewhere on the map, it will bring up a menu with a bunch of options. The new last option allows you to select “What’s here?” And if Google knows — which it does for a lot of places — it will pop up information about what is actually at the location you’re pointing at. If it knows the name of say, a store that is there, it will give that to you. Otherwise, it will give you the address of where you are pointing.

And if you’re zoomed out, it works too. The example Google gives is that if you’re looking at a zoomed out view of the Galapagos Islands, using this feature can get you the name of each individual island. Same with Hawaii, as you can see below.

Sure, in some cases you could find out what was at certain points on a map previously by switching to satellite view, or better yet, Street View. But this is much easier.

And this technique, which is called “reverse geocoding,” has been a part of the Maps API for a little while now, according to Google. So you can use it on your maps as well.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

If your annoyed by TPS reports right now, consider yourself lucky. This week saw the staff reduction of MySpace by 30%, to bring the total number down around 1000 employees. Things dont look good abroad as well.

But the situation might be turning a corner. Last week the U.S. Labor Department issued their Unemployment Insurance Weekly Claims Report. While it showed an increase of 608,000 in jobless claims last week, the number of continuing claims dropped to under 6.7 million.

Here is our layoff tracker, which is updated regularly. If your on the hunt for a new job, CrunchBoard may be the place to find a new opportunity. Check out a snapshot of the jobs available below:

• Sr. Java Engineer
  Cramer Production Business Trust - Norwood, MA

• Senior Brand Strategist
  Red Lever Inc- Santa Monica, CA

• Sr. Front End Developer
  eHarmony - Pasadena, CA

• Member of Technical Staff- Systems
  Kosmix - Mountain View, CA

• Ad Product Manager
  Cirius Technologies,Inc. - Sunnyvale, CA

For job hunters in Europe, check out our Europe CrunchBoard.

Don’t forget we’re looking for a few good hackers here at TechCrunch.

Click here to see all the jobs on CrunchBoard.

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