SDR News

The Internet has changed a lot of things over the last decade or two — including how we search for jobs. Sure, the basics are the same: Find an opening and apply for it. But the web has permanently altered the employment process. While networking is (and has traditionally been) the best way to find a new job, the second-most effective tool is another type of networking: sites like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, according to a poll released today by placement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Old-school employment search tricks like attending job fairs and reading newspaper classifieds got the lowest ratings. Here’s how the web is changing how we look for jobs. Facebook claims it has more than 250 million users; Twitter’s traffic has grown ten-fold in the past 12 months; and LinkedIn —most useful of the bunch for job hunting because of its employment- and recommendation-focused profiles. It’s seen its total visitors double since last year. Employment-focused web sites have been popular with VCs as well as job seekers. Simply hired.com recently raised $4.6 million in a fourth round of funding, and Glassdoor, an anonymous employer and salary review site, raised $6.5 million B round last fall. At the same time, it’s estimated that privately held Craigslist more than $100 million in revenue this year, a 24 percent jump over the 2008 estimate, with much of that revenue coming from job listings. Meanwhile, for America’s newspapers, total revenue from job listings, a former cash cow for the industry, dropped 42.5 percent in 2008 to $2.2 billion, the , according to the Newspaper Association of America. Other job search sites, like Monster.com and CareerBuilder, which charge significantly more than Craigslist to list jobs, are also seeing huge increases in traffic, with 33 percent more visits overall, according to comScore. As the Challenger survey notes, the ease of sending out shotgun blasts of resumes and hoping one hits the right recruiter is making things much more difficult for employers as well. “[F]or every qualified candidate who comes in from the Internet, there are 10 to 20 who do not even come close to being a good fit." The problem with the ease and accessibility of the Internet is that many job seekers make it their primary job search tool.” So, what are your tips and tricks for landing a job?

 Read more…

A possibly related story: How the brain hard-wires us to love Google, Twitter, and texting. And why that's dangerous. Basic drives for food, sex, and sleep have been overridden by a new need for endless nuggets of electronic information. We actually resemble nothing so much as those legendary lab rats that endlessly pressed a lever to give themselves a little electrical jolt to the brain. While we tap, tap away at our search engines, it appears we are stimulating the same system in our brains that scientists accidentally discovered more than 50 years ago when probing rat skulls. They at first thought they had found the pleasure center but this supposed pleasure center didn't look very much like it was producing pleasure. It is an emotional state Panksepp tried many names for: curiosity, interest, foraging, anticipation, craving, expectancy. He finally settled on seeking. Panksepp has spent decades mapping the emotional systems of the brain he believes are shared by all mammals, and he says, "Seeking is the granddaddy of the systems." It is the mammalian motivational engine that each day gets us out of the bed, or den, or hole to venture forth into the world. Panksepp says that humans can get just as excited about abstract rewards as tangible ones. He says that when we get thrilled about the world of ideas, about making intellectual connections, about divining meaning, it is the seeking circuits that are firing. The juice that fuels the seeking system is the neurotransmitter dopamine. Our internal sense of time is believed to be controlled by the dopamine system. Actually all our electronic communication devices—e-mail, Facebook feeds, texts, Twitter—are feeding the same drive as our searches. Since we're restless, easily bored creatures, our gadgets give us in abundance qualities the seeking/wanting system finds particularly exciting. Novelty is one. Panksepp says the dopamine system is activated by finding something unexpected or by the anticipation of something new. If the rewards come unpredictably—as e-mail, texts, updates do—we get even more carried away. No wonder we call it a "CrackBerry."
 Read more…

 

Researchers from MIT, Carnegie Mellon and Akamai have developed a network-routing scheme that could save 'internet-scale' companies such as Google, Amazon and Microsoft million of dollars each year by moving data to locations with the best electricity prices for a particular day. Energy consumption has accelerated as applications move from desktop computers to the Internet and as information gets transferred from ordinary computers to distributed "cloud" computing services. For the world's biggest information-technology firms, this means spending upwards of $30 million on electricity every year. The scheme simply considers both the most efficient routing path for data and the potential cost savings of routing it somewhere farther away. The researchers studied price fluctuations at locations across the country and used data from Akamai caching servers to test the idea out. In the best possible scenario — which would require more efficient servers — they estimate that companies could save as much as 40% on the electricity bills (tens of millions each year). Downside is that the scheme relies on companies' hardware having some sort of "energy elasticity." In other words, their servers need to use substantially less power when idle than when running full tilt. Google recently built a datacenter in Belgium that relies entirely on ambient cooling--on days when the weather gets to warm, the center's servers are simply shut down. Maggs says that an energy-aware Internet-routing scheme is an extension of this idea.

 Read more…

 

It's a record for consumer data theft after allegedly stealing 130 million credit and debit card numbers. The US Department of Justice announced Monday afternoon that 28-year-old Albert Gonzales and two co-conspirators had been indicted for conspiracy. The former record theft of 45 million credit card numbers has been topped. By a factor of three. Gonzales, going by the online name of "segvec," and his two buddies (soupnazi and j4guar17, in case you were wondering) allegedly began researching the credit card systems used by various companies in October of 2006 and devised the attack to steal the data in question. The team chose an SQL injection exploit to get around corporate firewalls to steal credit and debit information. Their success had led to charges of conspiracy to hack into certain retail and financial organizations, as well as conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Three hackers face charges for stealing over 130 million credit and debit card numbers via malware and an SQL injection attack on corporate servers. The head honcho now faces 20 years in prison.
 Read more…

 

TomTom has officially launched their turn-by-turn iPhone car navigation system for both U.S. and Canada in the App Store for $99.99. On Sunday, international versions of TomTom's app popped up in the New Zealand App Store via iTunes …he higher price reflected here does not include the companion car mount kit. Map coverage includes the U.S. with all states, Hawaii and Alaska plus Canada (all provinces) and Puerto Rico. The app is compatible with iPhone 3G or 3GS using OS 3.0 or later. The optional iPhone car mount cradle (expected to be around $90) utilizes a mounted antenna for “enhanced GPS performance" it also charges your iPhone, provides an amplified speaker for turn-by-turn instructions and lets you dial hands-free. The mount enables an easy flip to view both horizontal and landscape orientations and integrates with your iPhone address book.
 Read more…

 

All businesses have sensitive data they need to destroy when they replace PCs, but disposing of hard disks properly can be an expensive business. This has led one IT manager in the UK to come up with his own, home-made solution — Bustadrive. It uses a powerful 'hydraulic punch' to physically deform a hard disk, rendering it virtually unreadable, and requires nothing more than a pull of the lever on the front — similar to a drinks-can crusher.
 Read more…

 

First Tr.im shut down in dramatic fashion. Then Bit.ly tried to save Tr.im with a collaborative, independent project called 301works. Then, Tr.im suddenly reopened. Now, there’s yet another new twist, as Tr.im has announced that it is going open source< and that its parent company, Nambu Network, is completely renouncing all ownership of Tr.im<. It will be “community-owned” by September 15th. Oh, and the company took every chance it could to bash Bit.ly and Twitter. Some really bad back story here - not revealed.Before Nambu got into its detailed plan to turn Tr.im into an open-source software, it went right into harsh criticism of Bit.ly and Twitter. Specifically, they revealed that Bit.ly made a $10,000 offer for Tr.im, which they rejected. They also called the 301works initiative a “Bit.ly public relations stunt.” That initiative, 301works.org, is little more than a bit.ly public relations stunt, which is why we have not joined it. It has little substance, claiming to address link-rot while it does nothing of the kind. If a URL shortener decides to close, only the donation of the domain name and the data can address the existing links. For any high-volume URL shortener, like tr.im, it is unlikely a commercial entity would do that given the offers we have seen come in this past week to immediately hijack all tr.im URLs.” Nambu then went into detail over what would be happening to Tr.im in the next few weeks.
1. Nambu will renounce its ownership of the Tr.im domain.
2. The source code will be released to everyone, under the MIT open-source license
3. The link-map data of Tr.im URLs will be available to anyone in real-time, including click data and the number of URLs created for any specific URL. It’s also going to publish statistics related to usage.
4. Nambu’s Eric Woodward will personally guarantee any shortfall in Tr.im’s operation budget.
5. Tr.im will now accept donationsThere’s more, but the point is that Tr.im has decided not to sell, but to give its entire code structure to the masses. That is a positive step for innovation – that code could build some really powerful URL shorteners in the near future – but Nambu’s motivation for opening up is less than thrilling.
 Read more…

 

Reader's Digest will restructure its debt with a bankruptcy filing by exchanging $1.6 billion in debt for stock. Even with these measures, Reader's Digest, which was taken private in 2007 by Ripplewod Holdings LLC, will still emerge from this period with over $500 million in equity.
 Read more…