The past few years have seen the social web truly take off.  Activity streams are replacing email and conversations are happening all the time, all across the internet.  People are now more connected, more informed, more knowledgeable and more adaptable than ever before.  What this means for the online recruiting world is that for every recruiter who has a job posting with a list of pre-qualifications; there are hundreds or thousands of people who would be a perfect fit, whether their resume says so or not. Until the birth of Linkedin in 2003, the online recruiting and job board industry was dominated by a few key players; namely, Monster and Career Builder.  Recruiters posted jobs, candidates applied for jobs, and so

Robert Andrews is puzzled. Why Are Russians Spending Like Mad To Save Journalism? He writes: The latest - after last year buying France-Soir, the country’s smallest daily, for €50 million, shipbuilder’s son Alexander Pugachyov is now spending a further €20 million on a marketing campaign to take it mainstream. He’s upping the print run by 20 times, has halved the cover price and has more than doubled newsroom staff from 40 to 100. Jealous? There’s no part of this that makes immediate sense. In fact, contrasted with the cutbacks, climbdowns and contraction many parts of the industry are seeing, it looks like madness. ... The Pugachyov scenario in France mirrors that of Alexander Lebedev in the UK ... The former KGB age

With the Game Developers Conference happening last week in San Francisco and Microsoft hosting their Mix conference in Vegas this week, gaming on smart phones has been a hot topic of late.  As it now stands from a platform perspective for all the modern platforms that developers can choose from today Android is currently bringing up rear when it comes to professional/indie game titles.  I will leave the iPhone out of this argument since it rules the smartphone world, everyone already pre-ordered their iPad. Last week Palm publically their new PDK framework for webOS at GDC to much applause and interest from the development community.  For having what the public deems as insignificant market share in the smart phone sector P

Palm announced their quarterly results - bad really bad.  Eric Savitz has a post on it with commentary from analysts. Palm stock had a brief run up yesterday at the bell and shortly afterward prior to the company's call.  Then the Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein opened his mouth - the stock plummeted.  The news had a bit of flash to it on the surface - the revenue numbers.  Then it was apparent to everyone that Palm was in deep trouble.  The reported numbers of shipped phones was not the big story - the actual number  of phones sold to users was telling - Palm will be for sale. In the channel business there are two main sales metrics:  1) sell-in - amount sold and stocked by partner (like Verizon) and 2) sell-thru - amount sold to end

Virtualization is hot.  Ask anyone.  It’s hot, but put the word "storage" in front of "virtualization" and the air goes out of the balloon, the soufflé sags, or, in other words, the joke falls flat. The answer lies in a complete mismatch of user expectations from a word that means something completely different for servers and storage systems.  Users get excited about the word “virtualization,” because they associate it with immediate, tangible benefits.  Server virtualization has the sort of immediate impact that almost sounds too good to be true until you catch up on Moore’s Law.  It eliminates hardware, consolidates rackspace, conserves power and cooling, adds load balancing, and g

I recently wrote about Twitter's business model as ultimately enveloping ever greater parts of its developer community. [Twitter Is The Black Hole Of The Twitterverse...] After all, why leave money on the table? Why not produce the best desktop client, or mobile client? Why let others build lucrative businesses out of your community? That seemed to be the way things were moving for Twitter after one of its engineers Tweeted: "If you had some of the nifty site features that we Twitter employees have, you might not want to use a desktop client. (You will soon.)" Khris Loux, co-founder of JS-Kit Echo, a commenting service, writes that Twitter has a choice of being a tyrant, or a benevolent king. How Twitter Can Become A New Bre

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="160" caption="Data Center Madness"][/caption] It’s been an interesting first quarter. Cisco and HP dumping on each other last month, 3PAR turns up the heat in automated storage tiering and then HP’s two-day analyst event in March, followed up by EMC’s grand vision for federated storage and then LSI’s analyst event in NYC. Next week is Iron Mountain in Boston where we’ll hear about the Mimosa acquisition. Then it’s SNW in April which will bring a ton of announcements. It looks like 2010 is shaping up as a good rebound year. Earnings reports in December were optimistic and the year-on-year comparisons with Q1 2009 should be excellent because Q1 2009 was so miserable. Tech companies are

I’ve been lucky enough to meet with a swath of companies this year, almost all of which excite me on various levels. One of the more interesting infrastructure conversations I’ve had is with a company called Bandwidth.com, who this year in Austin launched a new service over at Phonebooth.com. The service, like much in the telephony business, isn’t immediately exciting (due mostly to the utilitarian nature of telecom), but is really quite interesting at first brush, and looks to have the signs of a service offering with staying power once you delve beneath the service. Bandwidth is a company that’s been around for ten years, involved (unsurprisingly) in the bandwidth business. Starting out as a reseller, they’ve long since transi

Last week I wrote a post that covered many of the observation I made on my recent trip to mainland China. Given my background in IT, a natural area of interest for me was the build out of IT in China businesses that are not directly aligned with U.S. or European counterparts… in other words, what are the independent businesses doing when left on their own. I don’t believe it is surprising to assert that growth in China to date has come independent of any investments in technology made by the government or business. Cheap labor has made possible productivity gains that would require substantial technology investment in developed countries, but as a I pointed out in my last post, wage inflation is no longer a hypothetical, it is happe

As the CloudConnect event finishes up today after a great four days of presentations and gathering of some of the top people in the Cloud Computing sector, infrastructure and service provider Opsource has two major announcements today, both around their cloud computing efforts. First, Opsource is announcing that their cloud offering is exiting its public beta phase and is now available to all to purchase their computing services by the hour.  Although this represents a nice milestone for the organization, the bigger news is around the second announcement around the Service Level Agreement's (SLA's) that OpsourceCloud customers will enjoy. These SLA's that Opsource is delivering set the bar mighty high for the standard cloud realted