Google is once again dangling incentives before engineers.
Google's Chrome browser earned its developers millions in stock bonuses.
(Credit: Google)The company threw open its doors Monday to the engineering community Monday, announcing that it granted a Founders' Prize--"a multimillion-dollar stock bonus"--to the team that developed Google Chrome. "(The) future is shaped by small teams of creative people who want to make a difference. We're on the hunt for these kind of people -- let us know if you think you're one of them," wrote Alan Eustace, senior vice president for engineering and research at Google.
Google is still one of Silicon Valley's most generous companies in terms of employee perks, but Google's hiring slowed over the past year as the recession took hold and the company scaled back some of those famous extras. Google even was forced to cut employees in March, and has also suffered as a number of high-profile employees decided to seek (or expand) their fortunes elsewhere.
But CEO Eric Schmidt is ready to let the good times roll once again, announcing earlier in the year that Google was set to expand hiring and acquisitions, and backing up that confidence on Google's most recent earnings conference call.
Google also announced that Chrome now has 30 million active users. The browser trails market leaders Internet Explorer and Firefox by a wide margin, but it's growing faster than the competition.
Hot on the heels of its appointment of a chief technology officer last week, News Corp.'s MySpace on Monday announced that Mark Rosenbaum has been hired as its chief financial officer.
Although the appointment marks the first time that the social network has had a CFO, it is Rosenbaum's second stint at News Corp. He headed up financial operations at Gemstar-TV Guide International, when it was owned by the Rupert Murdoch-helmed conglomerate. More recently, Rosenbaum served as a consultant to MGM.
Mark Rosenbaum's MySpace profile picture.
(Credit: MySpace)In his new position, Rosenbaum report directly to Owen Van Natta, the former Facebook executive who became MySpace's CEO in April, after the departure of co-founder Chris DeWolfe.
Less than two months after Van Natta's hiring, MySpace announced a layoff of nearly 30 percent amid stagnant growth and what was increasingly a losing battle against Facebook in its quest for social-networking dominance. The company called its aim at financial efficiency a "return to start-up culture."
Hiring a chief financial officer is, as a result, a logical step.
"Having led companies at every stage of their development, Mark understands both start-up culture and mature businesses, and is well-suited to guide MySpace's financial organization through its next phase of growth," Van Natta said in a release announcing Rosenbaum's hire. "We're thrilled to add someone with his pedigree and experience to the team."
The news started to emerge in various Twitter feeds and personal blog posts Monday: David Recordon, a Six Apart developer and prominent open-standards advocate, has left the blog software company to take a job at Facebook.
Recordon, who formally announced the job change on his LiveJournal, will take on the title of senior open programs manager. "This past year as I've worked closer with teams at Facebook, I've been impressed by their products, smart people, and innovation," he wrote in the post.
It wasn't so long ago that Facebook was seen as the ultimate in closed-off technology, with profiles hidden behind a log-in wall and features built with in-house technologies rather than open standards. At that time, a hire like Recordon would've seemed to many a ludicrous match. But Facebook's changing: it joined the OpenID Foundation earlier this year, made a big chunk of its developer platform open-source, and its Facebook Connect universal-log-in product has earned both developer and mass-market approval.
Recordon told me he doesn't want to say too much until after he's actually started at Facebook, which will be on Monday. But I spoke to a few of his soon-to-be Facebook colleagues, and they sound excited: the 5-year-old company has never had an already-prominent open-source advocate on staff, .
Facebook, which plans to raise its employee head count by 50 percent this year, made several very prominent hires earlier this month when it acquired start-up FriendFeed in a deal that seems to have been aimed largely at getting its ex-Googler founders on board at Facebook.
Correction 2:25 p.m. PDT: This story initially misstated David Recordon's new title at Facebook. It is senior open programs manager.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg plans to increase the company's head count by as much as 50 percent this year. The young founder said in an interview with Bloomberg that since there are a significant number of engineers and developers looking for work, Facebook--still flush with venture funding, and with revenues on the rise--can scoop them up.
As you may recall, Facebook had aimed to hit 1,000 employees by the end of 2008, but the market crash stalled that aim. The company currently has 1,000 employees, the Bloomberg article said.
But Zuckerberg also said he's trying to keep down costs so that the company can finally achieve profitability. Facebook has been keeping a lid on employee perks for some time now, even though it does feed its minions for free, Google-style.
"The thing I want to remind people of is we're way closer to the beginning than the end," Zuckerberg said in the Bloomberg interview, published Monday, explaining why Facebook moved to a stripped-down, concrete-walled office building when it needed a bigger headquarters. "A lot of times buildings can be a signal that you've made it. I would rather that our building feel much more like a very large garage."
Not everything he said was tinged with humility: he did confirm that he eventually hopes Facebook will have a billion users. Right now, it's over a quarter of the way there.
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The Washington Post and job search engine Simply Hired announced Friday that they have inked a deal that will allow Washingtonpost.com users to access Simply Hired's database of listings on the publication's site. According to the companies, Simply Hired's listings will be placed in widgets on news story pages. Most of the listings will be in Washington, D.C., but there will be some national listings, too.
In what may be a strategy Hulu might pursue with more shows going forward, the company announced Friday that it has posted answers from Joss Wheldon, the creator of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," "Angel," "Firefly," "Dr. Horrible," and "Dollhouse" to questions posed by fans of the shows. According to Hulu, more than 200 people asked Wheldon questions and he chose from the bunch and answered some on the company's blog.
Conversation tracking service BackType announced Friday that it closed a seed round of funding that netted the company $300,000. The round was led by True Ventures. Along with its funding announcement, the company also launched two new services Friday. The first, BackType Connect, will allow users to enter a blog post URL and the service will find all conversations about that post from across the Web. The company also launched a new site called BackTweets, which lets users search for Twitter conversations concerning a particular keyword or online article. Both features are free and available now.
In a turn of events unlike anything you've seen, Delfina Pizza, a restaurant in San Francisco, Calif., has printed T-shirts for their employees to wear with comments made on Yelp about how bad the restaurant is. Each shirt features a different review by patrons who helped give Delfina its one-star review on the popular local reviews site.
TongXue, a rapidly-growing Chinese social network, has raised $6 million in a round of funding that was led by Tano Capital. TongXue, which means "classmates," was originally founded in 2006 by a Harvard Ph.D. student as a community for Chinese students studying in the U.S. According to the company, it now has over 10 million registered users and it will use the funding to invest in "product innovation and brand promotion."
Social-bookmarking service Magnolia is in deep trouble. Founder Larry Halff, who has been keeping users up-to-date on progress being made on restoring the company's database server, which suffered from file system corruption last week, said in a blog post on Thursday that he believes that he let the Magnolia community and himself down by using a single backup for the site's data. The company's backup server also suffered from file corruption, leaving the entire site down and all its data unrecoverable.
In the blog post, Halff said he is "currently working with a data recovery company in hopes that (it) can recover a working version of the database." Unfortunately, neither he nor the company is sure if the lost data is recoverable, but he expects an update "as late as next week."
Online-chat application Meebo has added Facebook chat back to its service, the company's chief executive, Seth Sternberg, announced Thursday. According to Sternberg, Meebo is "now the first launch partner of the 'alpha' version of the Facebook Connect plus Chat integration."
In order to connect to Facebook chat through Meebo, users will need to log in to Facebook from the Meebo front page and add Facebook as a network account in the Meebo menu.
Tree.com, a company that owns a number of online properties in the personal-finance sector, announced on Friday that it has acquired personal-finance service Thrive from Loudwater Labs. Although Tree.com is a publicly traded company, the terms of the deal were not disclosed because it did not have a material impact on its financial statements. Thrive will remain an independent entity after the acquisition.
eHire, an online job-matching community, announced on Friday that it will officially launch its service on March 1. According to the company, its technology will allow prospective employees to create profiles containing their resume and qualifications.
Employers can sign up for the site and find qualified candidates by using the company's "matching engine" and scoring mechanism, which use algorithms to determine which candidates may be a good fit for an opening. The company plans to generate revenue from both the candidates and the employers by charging them subscription costs and success-only fees, respectively.
If you're looking for a new career, don't waste your time with the newspaper. There are a slew of outstanding job search sites across the Web that make it easier to find the career of your dreams.
Here are five prominent job search sites worth looking at, and why. See also our reviews of five lesser-known job search services.
CareerBuilder
CareerBuilder is one of the largest job search sites on the Web, but it's also one of the best. Combining millions of listings with extras like resume help and free career tests, the site is an ideal job search service.
CareerBuilder may feature a slightly cluttered home page, but with all the features it offers, it needs to. The site goes beyond simple job searching and allows you to browse by industry or work with partner sites to get personalized help in finding the perfect career. It even remembers your location after you leave the site, so you'll automatically be updated with new job listings every time you return.
Overall, I was impressed by CareerBuilder's bank of jobs. Searching for every job listing within 10 miles of New York City yielded more than 12,000 available positions. When I searched for accounting jobs within 10 miles of the city, it returned more than 2,500 listings. To some, that may be overwhelming and scrolling through them may be difficult. I understand that, but I'm a firm believer that the more jobs there are, the better the chances of finding the right fit. That said, I found that approximately 15 of the listings I examined were old and almost 20 others weren't available after I clicked on them. Maybe the site needs to do a better job of removing stale listings.
CareerBuilder also features a "Narrow Search" function under the search field, which allows you to pick specific companies, locations, and categories. It's a useful function that cuts down on search time and significantly improves your ability to focus on a handful of positions you're interested in. But if you're unsure which company you'd like to work for or exactly where you'd want to work, this feature probably won't come in handy.
Narrow Search makes finding jobs easier.
(Credit: CareerBuilder)Indeed
With the help of a simple layout--two search fields and nothing else--Indeed makes it easy to search for a job in any given area. Indeed allows you to search online job listings, newspapers, and other job boards, but it also provides salary information, forums to connect people of similar interests, and a job trends search field that offers solid insight into the state of any industry.
Indeed's simple design.
(Credit: Indeed)I used Indeed to search for jobs in fields ranging from accounting to law and it worked well. It even did a fine job of finding obscure positions like volleyball instructors and piano lesson tutors. In fact, I found that Indeed had more job listings than its major competitors in most of the searches I performed.
But if you're looking for extra features like resume guidance, Indeed isn't the ideal destination. It does have some extras, but most of them fail to compare on any level to those offered by competing services.
Monster
Monster is a well-known site that has solidified its position as a major force in the job search market. But the site's suspect design and relatively few search results leave much to be desired.
Monster's Career Benchmarking tool is outstanding.
(Credit: Monster.com)If Indeed offers the simplest design, Monster's is the most cluttered. The site sports a basic job search field next to a location search, but below that, the page is inundated with ads, extra job search features that the average user may not care about, and a worrisome warning from the company saying its database was illegally accessed and sensitive data was stolen. Needless to say, it doesn't instill confidence.
When I started searching for job listings in New York, I was surprised that Monster only returned 5,000. Thinking it was a small issue, I then looked for accounting jobs in the city and the service only returned 544 active listings. That's less than half of what CareerBuilder and Indeed returned, but it should be noted that unlike CareerBuilder's results, every Monster listing I read was active. Unfortunately, Monster doesn't offer a "narrow search" function like CareerBuilder, so finding a specific company's listings was made more difficult than it could have been. That said, I was happy with how quickly the site returned search results. It was the fastest in this roundup.
Where Monster really shines is in its extras. The site features tons of career advice, resume help, interview guides, and application history so you can see which jobs you've applied for. One of the best features on the site is Monster's Career Benchmarking tool, which asks for information about you and determines where you stand in your field as compared to your colleagues. It's a great way to find out if you're achieving your career goals.
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Last month, Twitter posted a job listing saying it was looking for someone who knew business, and now it looks like the microblogging site has found one--the first of several, it appears. Twitter has hired Kevin Thau, a veteran of tech companies Buzzwire and Openwave, as its director of mobile business development.
According to Twitter stats app Twitterholic, Thau has been using Twitter since early March of last year. He's been hired in part to handle the "crushing amount" of partnership proposals that Twitter receives. The mobile front is particularly important for Twitter, as it's the primary platform for many users. It's also been a contentious space, because it involves dealing with cell phone carriers around the world. Skyrocketing costs have forced Twitter to cut some of its international mobile numbers.
It's the first business development post that the San Francisco-based Twitter has filled. But it's currently also looking to hire a business product manager and a director of strategic partnerships. Twitter hasn't put forth a concrete business plan yet, but executives have hinted that business partnerships or corporate accounts may be part of the strategy.
Joshua Schachter, the founder of Yahoo's Delicious social-bookmarking service who left the company last June, has taken a new job at Google.
In an e-mail interview, Schachter said he's started work at the rival Internet company but doesn't yet know what he'll be working on. He's a a member of Google's technical staff, according to his LinkedIn profile.
TechCrunch reported the new hire Monday after First Round Capital Managing Director Josh Kopelman mentioned the job in a Twitter posting.
Schacter created Delicious to help manage bookmarks he posted at an earlier site, the once entertaining but now dormant collection of links at Memepool, and continued to work on the project after Yahoo acquired it, so he's got plenty of experience with the concept of bookmarks. Perhaps he's just the fellow to help spruce up Google Bookmarks--or perhaps he'd rather try something new for a change.
Box.net has made two new interesting hires. The Web storage provider on Thursday announced the addition of Jen Grant as the new VP of marketing, and David Lee who will be taking up the reins as Box's director of Product Management.
Grant was formerly the head of Google's marketing team for Google Apps, while Lee was heading up work building advertising into several of Yahoo's video projects.
From a brief interview on the company's blog Lee says one of the things he hopes to improve is Box's business and collaboration features. Lee formerly worked on WebEx's MeetMeNow Web conferencing service as a UI designer, which could be a good or bad thing depending on how you look at it. Last month company began a beta program with a handful of new features aimed at SMBs, filling in the gap between its consumer and enterprise offerings.
