business posts

Download Squad job boards, whether you're hiring or looking for work

by Victor Agreda, Jr. Nov 3rd 2009

Need a sysadmin, coder, designer or other web working new hire? Virtual, on-location or whatever, the Download Squad job boards have you covered. Post your resume using emurse, or (better yet) post a job position in no time and immediately get an engaged, targeted audience of job seekers. We'll also start showing some search-powered job results on posts, like what you see here, but with a relevant job find:

Still not convinced? Did I mention that those looking for hires will see their jobs on our boards, on the boards at TUAW, plus those jobs are sent over to Juju, Simply Hired, Indeed and other job aggregation services. TUAW and Download Squad together serve up over ten million views a month, and serve over a million visitors each month. If you don't think your job posting will get seen, think again. We'll also write up interesting and amazing people and positions right here on the main page of Download Squad from time to time, further extending your hiring reach.

Try it and let us know what you think!

Tags: business, contract, downloadsquad, employment, emurse, features, freelance, hire, job boards, JobBoards, jobs, work

Filed under: Business, iPhone

Twitter's Jack Dorsey working on a pay-by-iPhone system

by Jay Hathaway Oct 19th 2009

Jack Dorsey, one of the founders of Twitter, is rumored to be working on a new project that will let you use your iPhone to pay for things without a credit card. This system, code named "Squirrel," might end up being called Square and using SquareUp.com as its primary domain. Square payments have both a software and a hardware side: there's an app to enter the amount of the payment and sign for it, and a dongle that attaches to the iPhone and reads your card.

Square basically turns your iPhone into a pay station. You swipe your card, have the employee enter the amount to charge, and sign with your finger. From there, the cost of your purchase goes straight into the store's bank account, minus a little bit off the top for Square.

The info on Jack's new business was pieced together by Engadget and Mashable, with some help from Coolhunting (who wrote about the Square payment system before anyone knew Jack was involved).

The only rumor I've seen that doesn't make sense here is Mashable's assertion that Jack's new company is called Self Edge NYC. Self Edge is actually an upscale denim shop that started in San Francisco, and it looks they'll be accepting Square payments. Self Edge is listed and linked on the SquareUp website.

Tags: business, iphone, jack dorsey, JackDorsey, payment, square, squareup

Filed under: Business, Adobe

Adobe devours analytics firm, is your data the dessert?

by Jay Hathaway Sep 15th 2009

Adobe announced it's buying Omniture, the web analytics firm it's been using to track usage stats on its products for years. Omniture is one of the largest analytics companies out there, serving a roster of customers including America Online (this blog's parent company), British Telecom, Disney, eBay, and Ford. Adobe's using thick corporate-speak in its press announcements about this acquisition so far, but the upshot is that they can target content to users with the help of Omniture's behavior-tracking capabilities. That means Adobe is now well-positioned to get into the advertising business.

While Adobe sees Omniture as a business opportunity, some privacy-conscious web users see it as a spyware peddler. You may remember Omniture as the company behind the slightly shady 2o7.net domain, which looked to many users like an IP address, but was actually a domain that Omniture used to track stats. Omniture eventually (sort of) explained 2o7.net, but hasn't stopped using it. They also still offer an option to opt out of the domain's tracking cookies. I haven't heard much of an uproar about 2o7.net in the past few months, but Omniture's privacy policies still say that "the 2o7.net domain is the primary domain our corporate customers use to measure visitor behavior on their website(s)."

Tags: adobe, analytics, business, omniture, spyware, tracking

Filed under: Business, Social Software, Microblogging

Yammer introduces improved iPhone app, threaded conversations

by Jay Hathaway Aug 26th 2009

When Yammer first launched, I thought it wasn't going to last long. A Twitter for business? It sounded like an opportunistic idea to latch onto Twitter when it was clearly about to take off. Yammer has taken on a life of its own, though, and it's got the new iPhone app and threaded conversations to prove it.

The Yammer app has something that Twitter apps to date have been struggling to achieve: push notifications. These are especially important for a service like Yammer, because they alert you to new messages without using up texts on your iPhone. Yammer has also taken a page from the Facebook/Friendfeed playbook and created thread conversations that look similar to the ones you see in your Facebook activity stream. The threaded view is only available on the web, but it will come to Yammer's desktop app soon.

These are just the biggest new features. There are also countless small improvements - landscape mode and camera support for the iPhone app, for example - that you can check out on Yammer's blog.

[via TechCrunch]

Tags: business, iphone, microblogging, social-networking, yammer

Filed under: Business, Social Software, web 2.0

Mixero's "reducing the noise" tagline appears to be ironic

by Jay Hathaway Jun 11th 2009

There's an entire class of Twitter clients that focus on filtering "noise" from Twitter by allowing you to group the people you follow, so you only have to read what you want. Tweetdeck is the most popular of these, and Mixero is a new one that looks like it could be big. The problem this kind of client solves is entirely artificial. In fact, I'd say there's a very good chance that the people clamoring for groups and fllters are "social media marketing gurus" who follow huge numbers in hopes of getting more follows in return.

Marketers buy and use apps too, in a big way, so I'm not blaming Mixero for being smart enough to have a built-in target audience. Mixero is chock full of features, and lets you customize groups six ways from Sunday, but the tradeoff is a UI that makes "reducing the noise" sound a bit ironic. I don't mean to single out Mixero, but I'm increasingly starting to think of these widescreen Twitter apps as "business class." If you don't treat Twitter as a business, and you still prefer them, we'll have to agree to disagree. That's the cool thing about Twitter, though: we all get to use it our own way.

But the popular refrain "there's no right way to use Twitter" only applies up to a point. If you're just using it for marketing, and you're following as many people as possible, you may have discovered the elusive way to do it entirely wrong. If you're not a marketer, but you're following so many people that it's not enjoyable for you without "reducing the noise," you may need to stop worrying about "Twitter etiquette" - which seems to be mainly dictated by marketers looking for mutual follows, anyway - and unfollow some folks until you find a happy number.

Tags: business, mixero, tweetdeck, twitter, twitter-clients

Filed under: Business, News

Newssift: business-oriented news trend browser

by Jay Hathaway Mar 23rd 2009

Newssift is a way to gauge the media buzz around various business topics, companies and people. It analyzes qualitative data from a whole bunch of news sources, and lets you browse stories on a subject and see if the overall media vibe is positive or negative. It strikes me as a sort of Metacritic or Rotten Tomatoes for the business world.

Newssift has a search feature, and also a list of popular topics to browse from the front page. You can combine more than one topic into a single search, and save searches if you want to keep up to date on them. Newssift also shows a breakdown of the sources on a specific topic, so you know how many stories are coming from newspapers, TV or blogs. I'm not in the financial field, so I'm not sure how useful a tool Newssift is, but it's definitely an interesting experiment.

Tags: business, finance, news, newssift, trends

Filed under: Web services, web 2.0

Telonu: Think "Yelp" for the workplace

by Christina Warren Dec 16th 2008

Yesterday, Telonu launched the beta for its free, workplace focused community content website. In Telonu's words, you can "Rave, Rant, Rate™ your workplace, the people there and lots of other stuff – anonymously or not." Essentially this is Yelp, but for schools and companies -- and just as importantly, the people or management at those schools and companies.

When you register with Telonu, you are asked for your full name and to pick a separate username. When you post a "Tell" or add a comment, you can choose to either use your name, your username or to post anonymously. Your name and username are never linked, so if you want to respond to something, but don't want to reveal your identity, you're covered.

On a school or company or individual's main page, you can see "Tells" -- which are reviews or general information about the subject in question, access the subject's "Watercooler" and "Stock pages and "Ask" or submit answers to a question.

Tells are just reviews or comments, generally from current or former employees. These focus on the various aspects of the workplace itself, like pay and benefits, work/home life balance and career growth potential. Right now, the bleak economic climate is leading to lots of layoffs, and many laid off employees are giving their two cents. This is good information for potential future employees, because you can tell a lot about how a company operates based on how they handle layoffs.

Tags: business, company ratings, CompanyRatings, rate, telonu, yelp

Filed under: Business, Social Software, Search

Twitter reportedly buying Summize

by Jay Hathaway Jul 7th 2008

There have been reports flying around Twitter and several prominent blogs that Twitter is making a move to acquire Summize, a popular Twitter search engine. In case this is the first you're hearing about Summize, here's a rundown of what it does. It can search Twitter for any string -- most importantly, an @name -- which makes it indispensable when Twitter's tracking function is down. Second, it aggregates and lists the most popular search terms, so you can get a sense of the Twitter zeitgeist.

It's too early to speculate about what effect the acquistion could have on Twitter itself, or how the resulting service would look with Summize's features integrated. We do love the idea of combining two services we use every day, though. Basically, we're keeping our fingers crossed that these rumors are true.

Tags: acquisition, business, buyout, Summize, Twitter

Filed under: Business, Internet, Security

I know what you downloaded last week

by Drew Olanoff Jun 20th 2008

We're talking part one, the one with the hot version of Jennifer Love Hewitt. And oh yeah, that's who you were downloading last week, and we know alllllll about it.

A recent study by Cyber-Ark, who asked 300 IT Professionals about the topic of System Admins checking out what you're doing online at work, says that 1 in 3 IT professionals snoop on their co-workers surfing habits and stats.

I mean why not, right...all the info is right there! They're just "protecting the company from harmful usage".

Sheah, right.

IT Professionals download more pr0n than the entire state of Texas.

Even scarier? 47% of those surveyed said that they accessed info about you that had nothing to do with their job.

No wonder most SysAdmins have the password g0d. Oy!

What might be even worse, is that the other 2 in 3 surveyed lied out of fear that someone was snooping on them while they were taking the survey, thus uncovering the fact that they snoop on us. OMS our heads hurt!

SysAdmins, do you snoop? Worker folk, are you snooped upon?

You can hiphopanonymously write a comment here and let us know about it.

Tags: business, jennifer love hewitt, JenniferLoveHewitt, snooping, system admins, SystemAdmins, work

Filed under: Business, Finance, Web services, Social Software, web 2.0

Social networking with your money

by Joey Celis Jun 19th 2008

Myspace, Facebook and Twitter, the concepts are pretty much the same. You follow someone with interests that intrigues you, see what their doing, what their saying and sometimes you do what they say. Now what if they told you where to spend your money, would you? Covestor thinks so.

Covestor takes the social networking formula and applies it to the stock market in a 2 part system. The first requires members with some sort of investment background (we'll call them experts) to build portfolios. The second has average users reviewing these members and if they like what they see, they follow them.

If these experts buy or sell a certain stocks, users get to see that and choose if they would like to buy or sell along side their experts. Covestor is currently working on a fully automated system as well. You'll just be able to put down a bunch of cash and the system will invest your money as your experts invest. Of course as an expert you get a percentage of the action, since people are following your advise.

So is this the next step in social networking? We already take advice on what to wear, where to go and what to eat. Why not take it a step further with having strangers tell you what to do with your money?

Tags: business, finance, investing, social networking, socialnetworking

Filed under: Business, Productivity, Social Software

Go from Twitter bird to Wall Street vulture with StockTwits

by Jay Hathaway Jun 11th 2008

Despite some recent competition from sites like Plurk, Twitter is hanging tough as the microblogging center of the web. Now stock-market investors are catching on to Twitter, too, with an add-on site called StockTwits. StockTwits collects tweets that mention a stock symbol, prefaces with a dollar sign. For example, $AAPL was very popular this week, with the Steve Jobs keynote at WWDC.

If you want to see what the Wall Street speculators on Twitter are talking about, head over to StockTwits and check out the info in tag cloud form, in stream form, or by searching. Each tweet is displayed under a graph of the recent performance of the stock mentioned. There's also a cloud of users, so you can easily locate your fellow investment junkies and connect with them over Twitter. Of course, we can't vouch for any of the advice you might get, but this looks like an intelligent use of microblogging technology.

[Via Tim Sykes]

Tags: business, investing, stocks, StockTwits, twitter, wall street, WallStreet

Filed under: Finance, Office, Productivity

Show your work with Project Calculator

by Jay Hathaway Jun 10th 2008

Are you a freelancer, a student, or someone who just really likes to bill people by the hour? You might get some use out of Project Calculator, an OS X app that helps you keep track of how much time you put into each of your projects. It lets you run a timer or enter your hours manually, and then does all the calculation you need to send someone a bill. You can output your Project Calculator in a number of formats, including PDF, HTML and plain text, so your clients will never give you the old "I couldn't open the file" excuse.

We almost balked at the $20 pricetag for Project Calculator, but after trying it out, we realized that this app can save you a lot of time for the money. Keeping a spreadsheet from scratch is ok, but having everything set up for you and organized by customer and by client is a lot easier and less fiddly. Appropriately, Project Calculator frees up some time for you to actually work on projects.

Tags: billing, business, finance, finances, freelance, Project Calculator, ProjectCalculator

Filed under: Business, Internet, web 2.0

Facebook expands mini-feed again, announces more changes

by Jay Hathaway May 26th 2008

The Facebook mini-feed continued its expansion on Friday, adding YouTube, StumbleUpon, Hulu, Pandora, Last.fm, Google Reader, and your personal blog to the list of sites that can share data to Facebook. The import feature already included Flickr, Picasa, Digg, Yelp and del.icio.us. What's Facebook's goal with all of this? Over at ReadWriteWeb, Josh Catone speculates that Facebook is going to become the operating system of Web 2.0, sucking up the best features of other innovative sites.

Josh's idea makes a lot of sense, especially when you consider that the new Facebook profile design, scheduled to launch shortly, won't let you hide your mini-feed when you're looking at your profile. Facebook says this doesn't matter, because hiding it for yourself never affected which stories others could see, and they want users to know what they're broadcasting. If it doesn't affect anything, why take away the choice to hide it?

We'll engage in a little speculation of our own: by expanding the amount of info in the mini feed, and giving users as much exposure to it as possible, Facebook increases the value of advertising in the mini feed. They haven't announced any formal plans along those lines, but their recent moves (think Facebook Chat) seem to be targeted at increasing the time users spend on the site, which in turn increases its value to potential buyers. Just some mini-food for thought.

Tags: business, Facebook, lifestream, web 2.0, Web2.0

Filed under: Business, Internet, E-mail, Web services, Google, web 2.0

Google and Salesforce.com announce Google Apps integration

by Brad Linder Apr 14th 2008

Salesforce for Google Apps goes live today, which basically means that Salesforce.com users can integrate Google Docs, Spreadsheets, Calendar, Gmail, Google Talk and other Google services with their Salesforce account.

Why exactly does this matter? Basically, it gives small business owners a one-stop shop for managing their workforce, customer, and marketing information. Saleforce has its own email application, for example, allowing you to keep track of business related emails from the same interface you use to manage contracts. But now that there's Gmail integration, you can send an email from Salesforce.com, Gmail, or a desktop application like Outlook linked to your account. All of your information will be viewable from the Salesforce web interface.

The folks at Common Craft put together a simple explanatory video which you can see above. We kind of like it better than the official video from Salesforce, but you can check that one out after the jump.

Tags: business, integration, salesforce

Filed under: Internet, Web services, Search

Find out what's open with WhatsOpen

by Brad Linder Jan 1st 2008

There are plenty of ways to find the nearest bar, coffee shop or book store. Mapquest, Google Maps, and Windows Live Maps all let you find and plot local businesses on a map. But none of those services let you know if a shop is actually open.

That's where WhatsOpen comes in. Just type in what you're looking for and where you're looking. For example, restaurants in San Francisco or coffee shops near Mountain View. WhatsOpen will bring up a Google Maps mashup with store information, phone numbers, and hours of operation. While WhatsOpen doesn't seem to include holiday hours, the site could come in handy if you're looking for a place to buy groceries in the middle of the night or if you have a sudden urge for coffee at 2am.

WhatsOpen recently launched a public demo that covers California. But you can also sign up for a beta account covering the US, China, and Europe.

[via VentureBeat]

Tags: business, google-maps, hours, mashup, whatsopen

Graveyard Shift - zombie-busting Time Waster

With Halloween fast approaching, it's a great time to get in some practice defending your territory against zombies. In Graveyard Shift, you take aim at zombies and other creepy-crawlies, blasting them into splatters of cartoony green guts. It's a casual first-person shooter, and it's very easy to get the hang of - use the mouse to aim, click to fire. Graveyard Shift has at least 15 levels, and it might even have some secret stages I haven't unlocked yet. They key to getting good at Graveyard Shift is learning to use ...

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