The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘career’

The battle between Google and Apple continues. RJ Pittman, a prominent product manager at Google, has left the company to join Apple. We’ve been tipped off to a tweet he sent out two days ago that said “My last day at Google. Incredible experience. Amazing people. Moved mountains. Next chapter. Hello Apple.” Pittman has since removed the tweet from his Twitter feed, but judging by the tweets still visible in Twitter search, it’s true.

We’ve also received an email that Pittman  sent to his coworkers and friends about the move (we’ve redacted a paragraph about hanging out with his family during his time off):

Yesterday was my last day directing traffic at Google. It has been an incredible ride, and an amazing experience. Google is one of the most fascinating companies to work for. Working at Google scale is pretty incredible and the people are one of a kind, to say the least. It’s been an amazing 3 years of my career. It was very hard to say goodbye to all the people I call family at the Googleplex around the world. The company afforded me the opportunity to be ‘me’ inside the walls of a 20,000 person company that generates $20B in revenue. For that, I will always be grateful. I learned so much about the world, our users, and most of all…me. I left with a very heavy heart yesterday. Leaving was much harder that I expected. Admittedly, I’m feeling a bit useless today, my first day as a Xoogler. But I’m hoping this feeling will wear off soon. (Noogler is our term for a newly hired Googler, and Xooglers are the band of ex-Google alumni)

I was sprung from Google by a little company down the road that you might have heard of called Apple. Some might say I owe most of my career in technology to a little start up company that created the computer that I first learned to program, the Apple II, in 1980. By 1984, my life would be changed forever with the introduction of the most revolutionary creation of the decade, the Macintosh. A year later I would find myself spending more time with my first Mac than any other living being for my foreseeable teenage future. I’ve owned almost one of every Apple product released since then, and still own my first Mac that started it all some 25 years ago. In a strange but not so strange way, this is a sort of homecoming for me, despite never having worked for Apple. Life works in curious ways, and I love it when every so often it comes full circle. I couldn’t be more excited for what lies ahead. They’ve created a pretty neat role for me, which I will be able to talk about soon after I’ve started working there.
…

It’s unclear exactly what project Pittman is working on (his email only says that it’s a “pretty neat role for me”) and there’s little chance Apple’s PR team is going to give us any guidance. That said, my hunch is that he was recruited at the behest of the Lala team.

Apple acquired the streaming music service in December, less than two months after Google and Lala worked in tandem to launch Google OneBox Music Search. Pittman was one of the key players on that project, and worked closely with Lala to get it off the ground.

That said, Apple could be after his other talents — Pittman had previously presented at the launches of other search-related products, including a Google Labs event. And before that, he founded Groxis.

We’d previously heard that Google and Apple had a gentlemen’s agreement not to poach each other’s employees. Obviously, that’s no longer the case.

Do you remember to the days of college, when you were required to sort through your curriculum and career goals with your designated college advisor? Education startup MyEdu aims to replace this by helping students virtually access their academic information and create a roadmap tailored to their career goals.

To date, over 2 million students at 750 universities have used MyEdu to earn their degree. MyEdu’s suite of online products try to streamline the entire process of a college student’s lifecycle, from selecting a college through to earning a degree. The suite includes detailed course descriptions, grade distributions, official course evaluations, and student reviews to pick the right classes; and schedule Planner to build the best schedule that fits a student’s time constraints and goals.

MyEdu also includes a graduation and degree roadmap to help students build a plan and stay on course towards the degree they want in order to graduate. And the academic progress dashboard allows students to track their grades in a centralized place. MyEdu charges a $20 annual subscription for the entire academic suite.

The startup, which just raised $5.5 million in funding from Bain Capital Ventures, has a compelling model to help both students and parents participate in the college planning process. And as colleges are now rapidly adopting web technologies as a educational tool (i.e. Blackboard); it makes sense for universities to do the same for college advising.

Every entrepreneur is familiar with the moment. The moment when you stumble across an annoying problem – a problem that you’d pay money to solve – and suddenly a synapse fires in your brain.

“Holy crap, if I’d pay money to solve this, so would other people. There’s a business here!”.

It’s the moment that has kick started a million businesses and generated billions of dollars over the decades. And on Sunday evening, not for the first time in what I laughingly call my career, I experienced it.

I’d filed my TechCrunch column earlier in the day and with little else planned, I decided to relax by watching some old episodes of Jonathan Creek: the BBC comedy drama about a magician’s assistant who solves seemingly impossible crimes. The show ran for four series in the UK between 1997 – 2004 and, I think, was also shown on BBC America. I’ve looked for the DVDs over here but I can’t find them, nor can I find a legal way to view them online. Like the petty criminal that I am, then, I headed to YouTube. Sure enough all four series were there, as was a recent one-off reunion special.

As I worked my way through the entire back catalogue, I remembered just how great a show Jonathan Creek is. David Renwick’s scripts are brilliant – apparently each one took him several months to write, thanks to the intricacies of the puzzles each episode contains. The show is so good in fact, that I started to feel guilty: I know that Renwick isn’t going to receive a single penny of residual payment from my YouTube viewing. If only there was some way to contact him, tell him how much I enjoy the show, and offer to send him some money for the lost DVD sale. (Note: it’s not the BBC I care about losing money – they can afford it – but Renwick himself.)

And then I realised that I’m not alone in having this desire, or alone in wanting to pay money to solve it. In fact several times recently I’ve found myself on the other side of the equation. Back in December, I decided to give away the US ebook edition of my last book for free, online. My reason for doing so are outlined here – basically it wasn’t widely available in the US and I wanted people here to read it so they might buy my next one.

Since then I’ve had several dozen emails, tweets and other digital notes from people who have read the book for free, asking if there’s any way they can retroactively pay me some money to say thank you. No, really. Most asked for my Paypal details, or a way to send a check for the ebook cover price of $9.99. Others offered to buy me $9.99  worth of beer at events they knew I’d be attending; an offer which would have been much more enticing had I not given up drinking last October.

And that’s when I had the moment. I want to pay David Renwick for work of his that I’ve already enjoyed, but I can’t. People want to pay me for work of mine, but – expect through some tortuous email exchange, which resulted in me turning down the dozens of offers of money because it seemed somehow weird – they can’t.

I thought of putting a note on my site suggesting that people donate to charity instead, but I couldn’t figure out the best way to implement that, or to thank/reward the people who did. Equally, there’s no way of me finding out what Renwick would like me to do to reward him – send him a check? Donate to charity? Buy something from his Amazon wishlist? Does he even have one?

Of course, I’m not the first person to realise that there’s a need for content creators to be rewarded for stuff that is consumed for free online. Peter Sunde, the founder of Pirate Bay, recently announced the launch of Flattr, his micropayment service that allows creators to be paid tiny amounts of money for their work.

Subscribers pay $5 a month, which is then divided up equally between all of the Flattr-enabled sites that the user wants to reward during that period. Setting aside the irony that the guy behind Pirate Bay is now claiming that creating content should be rewarded ( “People love things and they want to pay” he told the BBC, with a straight face), the fact remains that Flattr is a terrible idea.

Dividing your monthly subscription equally amongst all of the sites you enjoy means that the more you use the service, the less each site gets. And given that all of these services have a minimum pay-out (usually between $50-$100), it will be a long time before most creators will see any real reward. Also, the service puts all of the effort in the wrong place. I’m simply not going to sign up for $5 a month in the hope that the creators I enjoy will all use Flattr. There are a whole load of competitors: Sprinklepenny, Kachingle et al…I’d have to sign up to them all to cover all my bases.

For me, as someone who straddles both sides of the creator/audience fence, the idea of micropayments as a way to reward creators is a non-starter, mainly because it fundamentally misunderstands the psychology of why we want to reward creators.

Sure, part of the reason I want to pay David Renwick is guilt – a desire to do the right thing. But even that guilt has selfish motivations: if Renwick isn’t properly rewarded for creating something that gives me so much pleasure, I’m worried that he might be discouraged from continuing. I want to encourage him to carry on writing, so I can carry on enjoying.

Much more powerful is the fanboy motivation. Within all fans, there’s a subconscious desire for the artists they admire to be aware of that admiration. That’s why people send fan letters – not because they’re expecting a reply, although that’s a nice bonus – but rather for the fantasy that the artist will read it. We want a connection with our heroes. Allied to that desire to be noticed, is the desire for our peers to appreciate our generosity. There’s a reason why charity donation sites usually display the names of donors, and the amounts they’ve donated.  It’s an ego thing – if I see that my peers have donated an average of $10, I want to donate $20 to prove I’m more generous – and it drives the average donation upwards.

Giving 1c, or even $1, as part of a regular monthly split through services like Flattr does nothing to satisfy any of those desires. Splitting a regular monthly payment between dozens of creators doesn’t allow me to form a connection with any one of them. Such tiny amounts won’t encourage them to keep creating, nor will they allow me to show off my generosity to my peers. And of course, the chances of my favourite creator being registered with Flattr or any other single payment service is close to nil.

For all of those reasons, micropayment services are a non starter. An embarrassment, even.

Instead what someone needs to build is a macropayment service. A way to make a one-off payment to a specific creator to thank them for their entire body of work. If you insist on using a ‘micro’ word, then the correct one is ‘micropatronage’: an affordable version of the age-old practice of wealthy patrons supporting artists in substantive, public ways – ways that stroke the patron’s ego and/or guarantee their place in heaven.

Specifically, I’d love to see a service that allows me to reward David Renwick – or any other writer, journalist, artist, singer, filmmaker, or content creator – for his entire body of work. The value of the reward might be $5, or $10 or, if I’m wealthy, $100 or even $1000. The important thing is that I get to send the reward directly to the creator, and I get to show off that I’ve done so.

Here in specific terms are the four things the service should allow me to do…

• Make a ‘payment’ in whatever form suits the creator: through a Paypal transaction, by buying something from their Amazon wishlist, by donating to their favourite charity – even by paying off their bar tab at their local pub. It’s up to them. The more creative the better, actually. I’d love the idea of rewarding a starving artist through Pizza Hut gift certificates, if that’s what they want.

• Display the payment publicly. I want to Tweet that I’ve made the payment, or add it to Blippy – or whatever. But more importantly, I want my payment to appear on the artist’s website, along with my name. That way, I feel like my fan-dom is being acknowledged both by the artist and by other fans. What would be super cool would be if the artist figured out some other way to reach out to fans who support them: maybe people who donate over a certain amount get a DVD/signed book/print/whatever. But, again, that’s up to them.

• Allow me to reward the artist directly. No bullshit 10% commissions like Flattr charges. I’m a fan of David Renwick, so it’s him who should get the money, not the dude who created Pirate Bay – he’s made more than enough hay from other people’s creativity.

• Reward artists who aren’t signed up to the service. This is the big one. For a system to work, users have to be able to use it to reward anyone. That’s one of the things that made Paypal so successful. All you need to do to pay someone using Paypal is to enter their email address. If they don’t have a Paypal account, they receive an email inviting them to sign up to receive the money – which of course, due to the financial incentive – they do. This service should be the same. If the artist I want to reward isn’t registered on the service, I should be able to enter their email address and have the service contact them, asking them to choose how they’d like to be rewarded. When they’ve done that, I get an automated email with a payment link and am able to send the reward via whatever method they’ve chosen. Obviously once they’re signed up, future payments can be processed straight away. And if I don’t know the email address for a particular creator? No problem – I can enter their publisher, record label, newspaper or whoever else distributes their work and the site will figure out the correct contact email. Publishers forward mail to their authors all the time.

…and that’s it. As a ‘consumer’ (urk) of content, I want that service to exist so that I can start rewarding people using it. As a writer, I want that service to exist so that I can add myself to it and display a little logo on my site that links to my listing. That way, next time someone feels the urge to reward me, they can do so without having to ask first.

So what to do with this idea? If I were an entrepreneur, the answer to that would be simple. I’d figure out the specifics of how such a service might work, and then I’d build it. Or at least hire someone to build it. I’d set up a company either raise some seed money or boot-strap the thing myself. I’d do market research and figure out business models and all that stuff. I’d probably give it a name like Guiltvault or Micropatron (both gone). Maybe it would work, maybe it wouldn’t. That’s the fun of being an entrepreneur.

But I’m not an entrepreneur. Moreover, I’ve been one – several times – and I’ve sworn never to go back to that world. Also, there’s a part of me that thinks this idea could work best as a non-profit. Or even perhaps as a kind of open standard thing. Certainly with all the rewards going directly to the creators, no one else is going to get rich out of it – which might actually be the secret to getting publishers, agents and trade bodies on board with it.

So instead of drawing up an NDA and building a business, I’ve decided to do the opposite: to release the idea into the wild in the in the hope that someone – or some group of people – might want to run with it. For once, I’m actually encouraging the wisdom of TechCrunch commenters: I’m curious to know how you see the idea working, or why you see it failing. And if anyone with a history of making things actually happen feels like having a crack at building this, then you have my blessing. I’d be delighted to track your progress here on TechCrunch.

For my part, I’ve vowed to stay out of business – and it’s a vow I plan on sticking to. But if I can be of any help connecting people or throwing ideas into the ring, then give me a shout. Either way, I’ll be the first author to sign up to use it.

And, hell, if you make a billion dollars from the idea, at least you’ll know how to reward me for my contribution.

Social sharing is becoming a big contributor to traffic for many sites. While Facebook and Twitter drive more sharing than any other services, Google is trying to compete with Buzz, which is now part of Gmail but shares links to article and blog posts through Google Reader. Over the past month, according to AddThis, sharing through Google Reader is up 35 percent, with a big jump on February 9, the day Buzz launched.  This number only measures sharing through the AddThis button, which is on more than 600,000 Websites and gives you the option to share content through more than 200 services. So it is only a proxy for total sharing on Google Reader, but a decent one.

Google Reader still barely registers when compared to Twitter and Facebook, which account for 31 percent and 8 percent of all sharing via AddThis, respectively.  But Buzz is definitely giving it a boost.

You can now chart how different services do against each other on the sharing front via a new services directory on AddThis. For instance, Google Bookmarks does much better than Google Reader, with 5 percent of all AddThis activity.  It even beats Digg (which has 3 percent).  Google Bookmarks is probably used more for personal bookmarking than for social consumption, but it is smack in the middle of Twitter and Digg when it comes to activity via AddThis.

Another comparison is Tumblr versus Posterous, which suggests that Tumblr  is much more popular as a reposting tool, and is about neck-and-neck with WordPress.

It’s the type of scenario that keeps even the most seasoned entrepreneurs up at night. Your startup toils away for months on a new product or feature and – boom – a giant like Google comes along and walks all over it.

That appears to be the case for Dublin-based music video site, Muzu TV (see previous TCEU coverage), which today launched its new music video jukebox feature. A sort of Spotify-for-video, it’s not too dissimilar from Google-owned YouTube’s recent disco beta or ‘Music Discovery Project and Playlist Creation Tool’ to give it its full name.

IT software giant CA is acquiring cloud computing startup 3Tera. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. 3Tera’s product, AppLogic, helps enterprises build and deploy cloud-bases applications both to public and private clouds.

CA is opening up the purse strings to boost its presence in the cloud. The company recently acquired Cassatt, NetQoS and Oblicore. 3Tera allows companies to provision, deploy and scale public and private cloud computing environments. 3Tera also makes it easy for service providers to offer application stacks on demand. 3Tera’s client base includes 80 enterprises and service providers globally, which use the cloud computing technology to provide services to users

CA plans to integrate 3Tera’s AppLogic into its own suite of offerings. CA also plans to extend support of 3Tera to include both VMware ESX and Microsoft Hyper-V(TM).

Yammer, the San Francisco startup that offers a solid enterprise-grade microsharing and realtime communications service, is expanding its executive team after successfully closing a Series B funding round to the tune of $10 million earlier this month.

The company made one internal promotion, appointing co-founder and VP of Technology Adam Pisoni to CTO. In addition, Yammer recruited David Satterwhite to lead its sales efforts, while Steve Apfelberg was brought in as VP of Marketing.

Before working at Yammer, Adam Pisoni served in senior engineering roles at Geni and Shopzilla and co-founded and was CTO at Cnation. The company says Pisoni played an instrumental role in building Yammer’s communication platform from the ground up, adding that is now in use by over 60,000 companies and organizations (including TechCrunch).

David Satterwhite, who recently joined as executive vice president of sales, began his career in sales at Oracle and then held multiple roles at Clarify. Satterwhite went on to lead worldwide sales at NightFire Software, @Road, and newScale, before making the jump to Yammer earlier this year.

Finally, Steve Apfelberg served as the senior vice president of marketing and business development at Callidus Software before joining Yammer as VP of Marketing in October 2009. Prior to Callidus, he held senior roles at Siebel, Remedy, and Oracle. He’ll be working with Jon Grall, who recently joined Yammer as Senior Manager of Product Marketing after a brief stint as Product Lead at Dropbox.

Yammer has seen solid growth since winning the 2008 edition of our TechCrunch50 Conference, and with close to $15 million in venture capital and a slew seasoned SaaS executives at the helm, the startup is well-positioned to sign up more customers and grow to profitability in the next year or two. We’ll be monitoring them closely along the way, and not just when they go down.

(Editor’s note: Centralized Web job boards are in decline. Dan Finnigan, CEO of Jobvite, explains why in this guest post. Previously, he was Senior VP at Yahoo and GM of HotJobs, and before that a Director on CareerBuilder’s Board as CEO of Knight Ridder Digital.

Monster’s acquisition of Yahoo HotJobs signals a significant landscape change for a job board industry facing significant economic pressure and I believe the deal also marks a “new normal” in how companies are hiring talent. Online recruiting is transitioning away from “the Big Three” job boards. The Internet is becoming the job board.

Of course, unloading and closing properties that are not part of Yahoo’s strategy going forward is smart. (Though selling a job advertising board smack in the middle of this downturn and extreme unemployment must have been as hard as selling an empty, foreclosed home in Las Vegas right now.)

But more importantly, this acquisition is an indicator of a rapid evolution as more hiring takes place online. Venture-backed startups are transforming this industry as new technologies begin to change how companies find and attract talent.  The elephant in the room is that the economic jolt of September 2008 has permanently altered the job market and dramatically accelerated labor trends underway for many years, such as the growth in job turnover throughout a person’s career.

Increases in unemployment, under-employment and turnover are boosting traffic to nearly all job boards and job search engines – and the number of online applications to resource-depleted recruiting departments. Companies are spending more money sifting through unqualified applications, so they are naturally spending less on job boards and taking advantage of free sites, like Indeed, to post and distribute their jobs.

To combat the influx of poor-fit applications, companies are turning to new technologies and online services to target talent and search across the open Web for people who may not be actively searching for a job on a board. This is possible because 42% of working adults in the US now maintain a profile somewhere online—most notably on LinkedIn and Facebook, but also on Twitter and services like Jigsaw, an SF-based, user-generated database of professionals. And the downturn is growing this number.

The more innovative recruiters at growing companies like Zappos and Dell are now are using social media to engage prospective candidates in a genuine and inexpensive way: building candidate communities in their career site and blogs, search engine optimizing job listings, distributing jobs through social networks to dramatically drive referrals, and tracking web analytics by job to determine their best sources of talent.

To me, the more interesting acquisition was Monster’s purchase 18 months ago of Trovix, a Bay Area startup that built a behavioral algorithm for matching jobs and resumes to help recruiters sift through applicants and jobseekers through jobs. But, the irony is that they will be “unveiling” this new technology, dubbed 6Sense, on this weekend’s (expensive) Super Bowl, the annual marketing battleground of the big, horizontal job boards.

As funny as those ads can be, they are not likely to solve the job boards’ bigger marketing challenge: how to convince companies to spend more money “posting and praying” that the best person applies for their job when the broader, open Internet is fast becoming the new, cost-effective “job board” of talent.  This week’s combination of Monster and Hotjobs isn’t going to solve that problem either.

Image via Flickr/Frank Gruber.

The idea of working at Google is a dream job for many engineers all around the world. So where better to go to get ready for this career than the Googlle Institute of Software of Software Studies, right? Hold on a second. Read that name again.

Yes, it appears that some jokers in India are attempting to leverage not only Google’s name, but their logo and even favicon to trick people into thinking they their quite-possibly-bogus online university is related to the real Google somehow. Dubbed the “School For Future Software Engineers,” the Googlle Institute has a website that looks like it could some sort of legitimate online training school — if it weren’t for the sketchy naming, branding, and plethora of dead links.

They apparently offer two certifications: “GCPA – Googlle Certified Professional in Advanced Computing,” which promises to teach you technologies related to “Windows Professional” and “Linux Professional.” The other certification is “GCPE – Googlle Certified Professional in E-Commerce,” which gives you more consumer-oriented skills, such as Photoshop. These courses take two years to complete, but the site notes that they also offer “Modular courses – duration 60 days to 90 days that can enhance your computer skills and offer you “GOOGLLE” certification, no matter what your specific requirement.” Oh goody, a Googlle certification.

The site also features a bunch of pictures of students sitting around outside at a campus, sitting in a classroom, graduating, the works. The only problem? As far as I can tell, there is no actual campus. Actually, almost every link on the site leads to dead end pages that don’t actually exist.

This “Googlle” is apparently a division of C.B.Online Pvt. Ltd., which is some sort of online business “solutions” provider based in India. Googlle’s headquarters is apparently in Orissa, India at the Rajarani Petrol Pump Complex. That sounds a lot like a gas station to me, but who knows. Regardless, I’m sure it’s not as nice as Google’s actual offices in India (they have four main hubs for the bustling and burgeoning tech scene there). Hopefully they have something to say about this site.

[thanks Deb]

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

What is it about the dawn of a new year – and, in this case, a new decade – that inspires such an interminable parade of lists? The 100 best albums of the decade (The Strokes? Seriously?), the 30 best TV series of the decade (The Wire? Seriously?), the 10 most influential games of the decade (The Sims? Seriously?) – even the 10 best conservative movies of the decade (just — seriously?).

Apparently in the days between Christmas and New Year, the world stops demanding actual journalism – or writing. Instead, stuffed large with leftover turkey and re-gifted booze, we’re happy to accept any old rehashed crap, provided it’s appended with the words “…of the year” (2.5 billion results on Google) or “…of the decade” (72.8 million results).

But not so at TechCrunch. There’s a reason why we had more stories on Techmeme’s list of the ‘ten objectively biggest tech stories of 2009‘ than any other single news source, and that’s because – even in a week when no one is reading anything we write – we retain our passion for real journalism and impassioned campaigning, along with our hatred of lazy, crowd-pleasing bullshit.

Nah, just kidding. Here’s this week’s list of the best lists published on TechCrunch this past week…

2010: My Fifth Annual List Of The Tech Products I Love And Use Every Day
Arrington has been doing this for five years now: naming the 24 products and services he can’t live without, presumably so that his legions of fanboys can use the self-same apps and in doing so become even closer to their hero. Let’s just hope Foursquare’s servers can cope with the tsunami of new users signing up just to fake check-in at the Pyramids.

Snapstream’s Top TV Trends of 2009
Leena reports on Snapstream’s interesting – if utterly predictable – research into the most frequently used words and phrases on American TV in 2009. According to their findings, which are generated by analysing closed caption text from all of the major channels, this year’s top television obsessions were “Iran, Michael Jackson, Swine Flu, North Korea, AIG, Pirates, Hamas, (The) Inauguration, Ted Kennedy, and Balloon (boy).” In other “no shit” news, we also learn that over-exposed media darling Twitter was mentioned more frequently than Facebook, MySpace and other social media platforms. Twemendous.

Amazon’s Best-Selling Products of 2009
If you were in any doubt that 2009 was the year that ebooks finally reached their tipping point then consider Amazon’s list of best-selling products for 2009, as analysed by CrunchGear. Not only was the Kindle their best-selling electronic item but the utterly mainstream Dan Brown was the device’s best-selling author. What was it Clay Shirky said? Here’s comes everybody!

370 Passwords You Shouldn’t (And Can’t) Use On Twitter
From the depressing to the terrifying, Robin scored an interesting scoop this week by uncovering Twitter’s (not very well hidden) list of banned passwords. To save you the effort of paging through all 370 words and phrases, all you need to know is that there are no fewer than five euphemisms from vagina (not counting vagina itself, which is also there), but only two for penis (with penis itself curiously absent). The word ‘monkey’, meanwhile, is inexplicably on the list twice. Can’t be too careful with monkeys.

Ten Technologies That Will Rock 2010
And finally, while everyone else on TechCrunch was looking backwards, Erick whipped out his crystal ball and tried to predict what we’ll be looking back on this time next year. No surprise to see “the tablet” on the list, or Geo(location) or real-time search. In fact, no surprises at all: if Erick is right (and when is he not?) then 2010 is going to be the most dull and predictable year ever. I mean, HTML5 is going to rock 2010? Would it have killed him to have included hoverboards or robot maids?

X-ray sunglasses?

Cybergeese?

Come on!

…

Still hungry for lists? Here are twelve Lists That Didn’t Make My Top List Of TechCrunch Lists…

Six New Years Resolutions For Apple And The iPhone In 2010
Top Ten Mobile Voice Searches Of 2009
Flixster Users Name Top 2009 Movies
The Top 10 MobileCrunch Posts of 2009
The Best iPhone Apps Of 2009 (Appvee Edition)
Single Most Innovative Product of the Decade
Unexpected Success Stories
Biggest Losers in Tech
The best console games of the decade
PC Games of the Decade
The Biggest Product Flops of the Decade

…and of course…

JibJab’s Year In Review Plays Off 2009, With Help From Keyboard Cat

Have a great year! Of the decade!

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