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Posts Tagged ‘jobs’

Fundamentally, what I liked about FriendFeed was that it gave me a way to take all kinds of social data and create a tailored way to view it. And though the idea never took off in the mainstream before their acquisition by Facebook, the desire for a service that can do this, remains. Despite their efforts, Facebook hasn’t solved this yet. And despite all the hype, neither has the new Google Buzz. There are at least a dozen other startups working on this problem too, but no one has even come close to FriendFeed yet. But a new one, still in stealth, offers hope.

Knowmore, is a New York City-based startup founded by Julian Gutman (ex-Google) and Joseph West (ex-Akamai). They’ve already assembled a team that includes Jeremie Miller, the inventor of XMPP/Jabber, Wilson Bilkovich one of the core developers of Rubinius (a Ruby implementation), and Wes Augur, a former principal R&D engineer at Digg. It’s a wide range of talent across a bunch of different fields. The total team is already up to 20 people, according to their jobs page.

Talent aside, what sounds interesting about Knowmore is their approach to the social noise problem. Rather than focusing on complex technologies that only seems to make social data more complicated (“why is this being shown,” etc…), Knowmore is building its product around user experience and human-centric design. The person who helped steer the early design of the product itself was Chad Pugh, the visual designer of Vimeo (though he’s not full time with the team).

As you can see on their splash page, Knowmore’s slogan is the “dashboard for the social web.” As you might expect, the idea is to port in your data from a variety of social networks, and let Knowmore serve it up to you in a way that cuts through the noise. As Mike wrote earlier this month, “social today feels like search a decade ago: lots of noise and lots of spam.” That’s exactly the problem Knowmore is going after.

They believe Facebook and Twitter cannot tackle these problems because they are communication pipes at their core. Knowmore is aiming to be a consumption platform instead.

So will it work? That’s impossible to know without seeing the product in action (the tentative launch date is Q2 2010). But the pedigree of the talent behind this startup and a simple execution of the core idea certainly makes it one worth watching.

Women, Hispanics and blacks have always been underrepresented in the ranks of the Valley’s tech companies.  A new analysis by the Mercury News shows that from 2000 to 2008, the proportion of women tech workers in Silicon Valley dropped from 25.3% to 23.8%, and that the national numbers dropped from 30% to 27.4%.  In 2008, blacks and Hispanics constituted only 1.5% and 4.7% respectively of the Valley’s tech population — well below national tech-population averages of 7.1% and 5.3%. It seems that the problem I highlighted in my last post on the dearth of tech women is actually getting worse, particularly in Silicon Valley.  And it’s not just the women who are being left out, but also important minority groups.

Is the Valley deliberately keeping these groups out?  I don’t think so.  Silicon Valley is, without doubt, a meritocracy.  In this land, only the fittest survive.  That is exactly the way it should be.  For the Valley’s innovation system to achieve peak performance, new technologies need to constantly obsolete the old, and the world’s best techies need to keep making the Valley’s top guns compete for their jobs.  There is no room for government mandated affirmative action, and our tech companies shouldn’t have to apologize for hiring the people they need.  But at the same time, without realizing it, the Valley may be excluding a significant part of the American population that could be making it even more competitive.  False stereotypes may be getting in the way of greater innovation and prosperity.

Consider the data that I highlighted in my earlier post.  It wasn’t always like this, but girls are now matching boys in mathematical achievement.  In the U.S., 140 women enroll in higher education for every 100 men.  Women earn more than 50% of all bachelor’s and master’s degrees, and nearly 50% of all doctorates.  The companies they start are more capital-efficient, produce higher revenue, and have lower failure rates than those led by men.  Yet women are still a rare commodity in the ranks of tech CEOs and CTOs.

How do we fix the “hidden biases” and discrimination?  The experts I’ve spoken to have many great ideas.  They suggest we create role models, provide mentorship and financing, and teach entrepreneurship. Foundry group’s Brad Feld says that simple acts of encouragement from parents, teachers, and peers would make a big difference.  Cindy Padnos, of Illuminate Ventures suggested a solution that particularly resonated with me.  She says that women should follow the trail mapped by Indian entrepreneurs (no, not the American natives, but my kind: the immigrants).

Thirty years ago, there were hardly any Silicon Valley firms with Indian-born founders.  UC-Berkeley’s AnnaLee Saxenian documented that 7% of tech companies started in 1980–1998 had an Indian founder.  A survey conducted by my research team at Duke University found that this proportion had increased to 15.5% from 1995 to 2005. My team also determined that in this period, Indians started 6.7% of the nation’s tech and engineering firms.  These are pretty astonishing numbers considering that according to the U.S. census, in 2000 less than 0.7% of the U.S. population and only 6% of the Silicon Valley high-tech workforce was born in India.

I know from personal experience that Indian immigrants didn’t have it easy.  They suffered from the same types of stereotypes as women, blacks, and Hispanics.  Despite having co-founded a software company that we took from startup to $120m in revenue; profitability; and IPO in a record five years, I couldn’t get Research Triangle Park (RTP) VCs to even return my phone calls when I was ready to start my second venture.  I later found out why: “my people” were great at mathematics and made great engineers, but didn’t make great CEOs — “we” didn’t have the necessary management skills, didn’t like diluting our equity ownership by raising venture capital, and couldn’t “fit” into the rough-and-tough American business-management culture.  That’s what one RTP VC told me over lunch, to explain why his firm wasn’t inviting me to pitch my business plan.  They were very busy and had to be selective in who they met.

So how did “my people” rise above ignorance and bigotry?  When the first generation of Indians in Silicon Valley succeeded in shattering the glass ceiling, they decided to help others follow their path.  They realized that they had all surmounted the same obstacles.  And they could reduce the barriers to entry for others behind them by sharing their experiences and opening some doors.

In 1992, a number of highly successful Indian business executives formed a group called The Indus Entrepreneurs (which is now called TiE). Their mission was to give back to the community by fostering entrepreneurship.  They would hold monthly events, teach entrepreneurship, and provide mentoring and support.  And they would facilitate Indian-style matchmaking between entrepreneurs themselves and with investors and corporate partners.  They created two categories of members: a charter member, who took the role of guru, and a regular member, who would be a disciple.  The Guru had to donate time and money (minimum $1500/year) and was not allowed to gain any personal financial benefit.  When disciples achieved success, they would be expected to pass it forward by becoming charter members and helping others behind them.

One of my current research projects is to document and quantify the accomplishments of TiE. But I already know the impact TiE has made. After my lunch with the RTP VC, I cold-called TiE co-founder, Kanwal Rekhi. He told me that my experience was no different from what he and others in Silicon Valley had endured.  Rekhi advised me to look outside the region and to recruit a white male as president of my company.  TiE Charter Member Vinod Khosla advised me to contact VCs in Boston and gave me several introductions. After I followed Rehki’s and Khosla’s advice, it didn’t take long for me to get a term sheet from Greylock Partners (of Boston).  When the word of this got out, the RTP VCs came begging that I take their money.  (I didn’t take their money and after I achieved success, I became founding President of TiE-Carolinas and would usually spend five to seven hours weekly — even when I was really busy — mentoring fledgling entrepreneurs.)

Telle Whitney, President of the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology, says that TiE has done an amazing job and that its work is a great example of a mobilizing, formidable force in making change through networks.  But all networks are not created equal.  To achieve systemic change and have more women and minority-group members as entrepreneurs, we need to involve corporate leaders.  They need to personally be mentoring, proselytizing, and demonstrating by example a different model of investing in women and minority-group entrepreneurs.  There is nothing more powerful within an organization than having its own CTO talk about the importance of, for example, promoting women.

I agree with Telle. Neither Rekhi nor Khosla knew me from Adam, but both readily gave me invaluable advice.  That is the type of mentoring that women, blacks and Hispanics need. In addition to establishing stronger networks for these groups, we need to have the CEOs and CTOs of all of our top companies volunteer their own time to help others follow in their footsteps. They need to do this because this is the best path to diversity and this diversity will enrich their organizations. And we need to have VCs mentor the women and minorities they typically ignore. They need to do this not only for social good, but also for their own survival.

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Here are some links to women and minority networking groups which readers may find useful (If you know of others, please detail these in your comments).

Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology

Astia

Forum for Women Entrepreneurs and Executives

National Center for Women & Information Technology

Silicon Valley Black Professionals

Silicon Valley Hispanic Professionals

Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers

Springboard Enterprises

The African Network

Women 2.0

Young Women Social Entrepreneurs

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Editor’s note: Guest writer Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. Follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa.

As much as we love Apple products here at CrunchGear, sometimes we don’t particularly care for Apple the company . Realistically, if you look at their track record, there’s quite an interesting list of abuses towards their customers with the supposedly untouchable Steve Jobs at the center of it all.

View original here:
CNN & Cracked take the piss out of Apple and Jobs

Concord moved from a relative stalwart to one of the hippest watch brands on the planet.

Here is the original post: 
The Concord C1 Code Chrono: This means something

In recent months, there seems to be a mad rush of companies trying to one-up each other with how open-source they are. Twitter is the latest, as they have launched a directory of all the open source projects they’re currently working on and/or contributing to.

The list is fairly impressive. It includes open source projects in Ruby, Scala, Java, C/C++, and other various tools. Some of them you may have heard of, such as Cassandra, the P2P structured storage network Facebook began in 2008. While some of them you may have not, such as Murder, the code deployment project that uses Bittorrent. Underneath the short description of each project, you’ll see the icon for the Twitter employee that is working on it.

Just in case it wasn’t clear how Twitter feels about open source — from the page: “Twitter loves open source. Twitter is built on open-source software—here are the projects we have released or contribute to.” They then go on to note that if you want to work on stuff like this (programmers love this stuff), you should check out their jobs page. Apparently, it’s working. Today, another former Googler joined up.

Currently, Google has one of the more interesting problems I’ve ever seen. While I’d never tell anyone to slow down their pace of innovation, with Android, I can’t help but wonder if Google might have to do just that, because it’s seriously starting to trip over itself.

Mobile World Congress is doing a great job of highlighting this problem. Yesterday, we saw not one, but two new sexy Android phones announced just by HTC alone. HTC, you may recall is the manufacturer of the Nexus One, the Android phone that Google felt so comfortable with, it decided to sell itself. Now, just over a month later, at least one of these new phones, the Desire, is simply a better version of the Nexus One. Consumers must be getting whiplash at this point.

Leading up to the Nexus One launch, I wondered if Google was just eating its own dogfood (as it said) or its own children. After all, the Nexus One was launching just weeks after the Droid, Verizon’s Android phone that was being marketed as the best Android out there. (And yes, an “iPhone killer“.) Plenty of Droid owners were pissed off that they had just laid down their money (and locked themselves into a carrier contract) for a phone that was being upstaged just a few weeks later by Google itself. But now the problem is already getting much worse.

It’s not just Google that is upstaging other barely-released Android phones now, it’s the other Open Handset partners, like HTC, doing it on their own. And while it’s great for consumers to have choices, the problem is that consumers must also now deal with the fear that anything they buy will be upstaged by something better in just a few weeks. Why would I buy a Nexus One if I can get the HTC Desire? And why would I buy an HTC Desire when it will just get upstaged by another new Android device shortly after? And so on…

It some ways, it’s similar to a problem Apple has long had. With iPods in particular, for a while there, Apple was pushing out new ones so quickly that those who bought the last one would groan about the pace of updates. But again, it’s much worse with these phones because (at least in the U.S.) consumers are buying them tied to multi-year contracts that are expensive to get out of. So even if you didn’t mind shelling out another few hundred dollars for the new hardware, you’d also have to pay another few hundred dollar fee for the right to do so.

And there’s another card Apple is better at playing: silence. While the HTC Desire doesn’t yet have a U.S. release date (it will be in Asia in April, and other countries probably soon after that), by pre-announcing it, it already makes it seem like people would be crazy to buy a Nexus One right now. Apple is good at keeping silent until they actually release a product (the iPad is an exception here, but it’s a completely new entry), so they can squeeze a few final sales out of the old products that will soon be obsolete. Sure, if you follow Apple closely, you can usually read the tealeaves and know not to buy a new piece of Apple hardware around a certain time, but most people don’t care enough to read that deeply into rumors, so they happily buy right away. But it’s different when companies are out there touting their own bright new shiny objects that make the old objects in their class much less shiny.

Sure, this isn’t all Google’s fault since it open-sourced Android and created the OHA to let other partners do whatever they want. And again, yes, it’s great to have options. And sure, some of the Android phones compliment each other quite nicely — as in, some have physical keyboards, and some don’t. But plenty of them are simply better versions of recently released Android phones. And while sales of Android phones are gaining momentum (60,000 handsets a day now), I can’t help but wonder if we already have a “too many chefs in the kitchen” problem with Android. One that is only going to get worse with time. At least with the iPhone, we know that only Apple is going to upstage older versions, and that it will do so once a year.

Here’s what I do know: if I were in the market for an Android phone right now, I would need a Xanax.

[photo: flickr/laihiu]

Check out the jobs on CrunchBoard. Jobs from New York to San Francisco to Germany. See jobs in Europe here.

In the last couple of weeks we have added more than 50 jobs on CrunchBoard, including a Ruby Developer and student intern here at TechCrunch.

Here is a quick sample of some jobs posted.

uStream,
Account Manager and more – Mountain View

MyWire
Platform Architect – Redwood Shores

isocket
Web Developer – Burlingame

Linkedin
Senior Software Engineer – Mountain View

BookRenter
Ruby on Rails Developer – San Mateo

CollegeHumor
PHP Developer – New York

See the rest of the postings here!

App store analytics company Distimo has released its December report on mobile apps, this time zooming in on the physical location of publishers in Google Android Market, and how the prices of their apps compares to those of developers in other countries.

Distimo found that publishers in the Euro zone (Austria, France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands and Spain) tend to price their applications higher than those in the United Kingdom, the U.S. and Japan.

The average price of an Android app published by a developer in Europe is $4.42, which is 49% higher than publishers located in the United States ($2.96). For comparison, publishers in Japan price apps $2.28 on average, while the UK comes out at an average price of $3.31.

In Android Market, application prices are denoted in the publisher’s home currency, which is how Distimo is able to look at the differences in pricing per region. Looking at the physical location of publishers of paid applications, Distimo found that 65% is in the United States, and 12% in the United Kingdom. This makes sense of course, because those are the countries Android Market arrived first.

The Euro zone accounts for 20% of publishers, and Japan for a mere 3%.

Distimo doesn’t only track Android Market, and in fact has just broadened its analytics services to include Windows Mobile Marketplace and Nokia Ovi Store next to Android Market, BlackBerry App World and the Apple App Store.

Unsurprisingly, Distimo found that applications for BlackBerry and Windows Mobile are generally priced higher. This is likely the result of the fact that more enterprise applications make their way to those devices, and its owner are more keen on spending money for tools that help them to do their jobs more efficiently.

According to Distimo’s report, the average price of applications for Android, iPhone / iPod Touch and in Nokia’s Ovi Store hovers around $3.50. Windows Marketplace for Mobile and BlackBerry App World are clearly more expensive, averaging $6.99 and $8.26, respectively.

When I first started using Linux, back in the late 1990s and the Red Hat 5.2 era, the skills I gained weren’t very useful to many employers. I initially hoped that learning Linux would help me spring into some kind of “real” UNIX job

See the original post here: 
Linux skills now more employable than ever

If you’re on the hunt for a new job, check out our CrunchBoard. We’ve added nearly 50 new jobs from leading internet businesses in the last two weeks, including three jobs here at TechCrunch. Here’s a quick sample:

• Conferences & Events Producer
  TechCrunch – Palo Alto, CA

• Director of Technology
  Dictionary.com – Oakland, CA

• Senior Product Manager
  Playdom – Mountain View, CA

• Senior Product Manager
  GetGlue.com – New York, NY

• Rockstar Senior PHP Developer
  KickApps – San Francisco, CA

As Mike just noted as well, Apple has also posted a job posting for their iWork team.

Also, don’t forget that we’re looking for a Conferences & Events Producer, Account Executive and CrunchBase interns here at TechCrunch!

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

Click here to see all the jobs on CrunchBoard.

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