The Social

MBAs make their way in engineer-crazed tech world

Editor's note: This is the second story in an ongoing series profiling college graduates throughout the United States as they hunt for technology jobs. Check out CNET's special report, "Wanted: A job in tech," for a story tomorrow on a grad student who landed a job at Google, where he'll apply his operations chops to cloud computing.

Julia Davis doesn't quite fit the profile of a typical candidate for a business school degree. After graduating from Lewis and Clark College in hipster mecca Portland, Ore., with a degree in psychology and an art minor, she worked at an art foundry in New York before ultimately finding her way to a consulting firm in San Francisco--and then to Skolkovo, a business school near Moscow in Russia. She finished the 16-month program in December, (most master of business administration, or MBA, programs are two academic years) and has spent the spring on the hunt for a job.

"I wanted to take my career in a more international direction," Davis told CNET. "I looked at the options and one of them was the Skolkovo program, which is co-sponsored by MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) in the U.S., so it has a brand name school associated with it. It was a new program, and it was focused on emerging markets, and the growth story in emerging markets was very compelling."

There's another reason why Davis isn't your typical MBA: She's planning to head to a tech start-up when she graduates. When she spoke to CNET, she said she was in talks with an early-stage start-up in a strategy role. You'll find lots of diverse characters in the tech world, but people straight out of business school with no prior experience in the industry are rare among them.

"I'd always been passionate about technology," Davis said. "I lived in San Francisco, so I was sort of in the thick of it, and then when I moved to Russia I saw not only everything that was happening internationally with technology but also innovation and entrepreneurship, and I just realized that it was an exciting space to be in."… Read more

How Uber's car-booking service can succeed in NY

NEW YORK--I had my Uber moment a few Sundays ago, standing on a corner in the hipster enclave of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, with my arms full of houseplants.

It had been raining off and on all afternoon. The subway line that could most reliably take me back to my apartment, following a lavish shopping spree at the borough's most notable gardening emporium, wasn't running because of weekend construction work. My alternative was to take a route that would involve two different subways followed by a 15-minute walk. With the houseplants. Bedford Avenue, Williamsburg's main drag, is a well-populated … Read more

Bin Laden, Twitter, and the frenzy of noise

It's difficult for the columns on a Twitter client app to resonate with emotion, but late Sunday evening, as the news unfolded that U.S. special forces had killed al-Qaeda leader and 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, they certainly did.

There were, at the beginning and end of President Obama's speech announcing the victory, 4,000 "tweets" per second, an estimate that the company increased to over 5,000 on Monday morning. Twitter also elaborated further and said that it experienced its highest sustained rate of tweets ever, with an average of 3,… Read more

Groupon: No more ads on Trump's 'Apprentice' site

Daily deals site Groupon owes a chunk of its fast growth to new customers brought in by its unavoidable ads all over the Web and on Facebook--but it doesn't want them appearing on the Web site of "The Apprentice," the reality show hosted by real estate mogul Donald Trump, a political firebrand of late.

In a blog post Thursday, the freewheeling Groupon took a rare serious tone as it explained its decision to ask advertising partner NBC, which airs "The Apprentice," to ensure that its ads not be displayed on the show's site. "… Read more

New blog cooks up dream Facebook features

Facebook recently announced a "Hackamonth" initiative to encourage engineers to spend time on side projects, but one designer outside of Facebook wants to add his input, too. Enter "Yo Zuck! Implement This," a new blog that dreams up Facebook features that don't exist yet--most, extremely practical ones, too--and works them into convincing-looking mockups.

Yo Zuck--a reference, of course, to Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg--is the project of Youssef Sarhan, a Dublin-based designer who tweets at the enviably short username @ys. Among the suggestions that have been posted so far have been drag-and-drop group chat, … Read more

Amazon misses earnings estimate

Amazon's earnings report for the first quarter of 2011 wasn't pretty, even considering that Wall Street was expecting tepid performance.

Analysts were expecting earnings of $0.61 per share--and Amazon posted $0.44. Net sales were up 38 percent year-over-year to $9.86 billion, but it's the earnings per share that really counts.

That's a sign that spending--for example, on projects like the Cloud Drive media storage service, its own Android app store, the cheaper ad-supported Kindle that was announced earlier this month, and the e-reader's new "library lending" feature--may have been higher … Read more

Farewell, 2003: The Friendster apocalypse is nigh

Social network pioneer Friendster, as we know it, will be gone on May 31. The company today announced to members that as part of its conversion from would-be Facebook competitor to "the social gaming destination of choice," it would be keeping accounts alive but deleting all user photos, comments, blog posts, and other profile content. Users interested in preserving that data are encouraged to use a tool to export their profiles to their hard drives.

It's another sad chapter for the company that could have become the social network that everyone used--basically, what Facebook is now. Or … Read more

Yahoo acquires TV check-in app IntoNow

Yahoo announced today that it's acquired IntoNow, a nifty little mobile application that will detect what you're watching on TV and then let you share via Twitter or Facebook that you're watching it. The price was either $13 million or as much as $30 million, depending on which tech blog you prefer to believe. (Oh, wait, now it's $17 million and some earnouts, or something. Money!) Financial terms were not disclosed.

IntoNow launched only 12 weeks ago and has just seven employees: "We were all surprised to say the least but it makes a ton … Read more

Twitter: We're staying in San Francisco

Twitter Chief Financial Officer Ali Rowghani posted a message to his Twitter account on Friday that confirmed the company will be keeping its headquarters in San Francisco, ending much speculation and city politicking. "Happy to say that Twitter is staying in San Francisco," Rowghani's tweet read. "We've signed a lease to move our HQ to the Central Market area."

A post on the Twitter blog announced that the move, to a building called Market Square, will happen in mid-2012.

"We are proud that Twitter will be among the first companies moving into the … Read more

Linux patent suit ruled against Google

A Texas jury has ruled against Google in a suit that alleged some of its use of open-source Linux code amounted to patent infringement, something that could have big implications for other companies using Linux technology and other open-source systems. In the verdict, delivered last week, the jury decided that Google should pay $5 million for the infringement.

The suit was filed in June 2009 by a firm called Bedrock Computer Technologies, which also named the likes of Yahoo, MySpace, Amazon, PayPal, Match.com, and AOL as defendants in the suit. Bedrock, as was reported when the suit was filed, … Read more