Archive for August 7th, 2009

Name a government agency that works … here’s one if you’re stumped.

August 7, 2009

DARPA – the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency — is the Defense Dept.’s famous research branch.

Created at the height of the Cold War to bolster U.S. military technology following the Soviet Union’s Sputnik satellite launch, the agency has a long history of innovation.

Most famously, DARPA’s researchers first linked together computers at four locations in the early 1960s to form the ARPANET, a computer network for researchers that was the core of what eventually grew into the Internet.

Other breakthroughs have fueled big advances in commercial areas , including:

  • GPS
    DARPA co-funded the original satellites used for GPS in 1960. By the 1980s its research helped miniaturize GPS receivers, making them portable and inexpensive enough for use in everything from automobiles to cell phones.
  • COMPUTER MOUSE
    An agency-sponsored researcher named Douglas Engelbart invented the now ubiquitous device in 1964. The original model was made of wood and had a single button.
  • INTERNET
    DARPA developed the military network, the ARPANET, from which the Internet later emerged. Launched with four connected sites in 1969, it eventually linked universities and think tanks before an international network was commercialized in the mid-1990s.
  • UNIX
    In the 1960s, the agency funded the further development of the computer operating system known as UNIX, which remains in widespread use today by Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Sun Microsystems, and others.
  • PARALLEL COMPUTING
    In the 1990s, DARPA funded research into a technology that breaks apart highly complex problems into pieces and solves them in parallel. It is now commonly employed in high-performance computing.

Excerpted from Business Week, Can the Military Find the Answer to Alternative Energy?, July 23, 2009
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_31/b4141032537895.htm

Posted in Mktg - Product & Innovation | 2 Comments »

Who needs Monster if you’ve got LinkedIn and Tweeter ?

August 7, 2009

Punch line: Online job-search and headhunting is changing rapidly, and frontrunner Monster is losing ground to CareerBuilderLinkedIn, and even Twitter

* * * * *

Excerpted from: Business week, Recruiting: Enough to Make a Monster Tremble, June 25, 2009

US Cellular used to spend up to $4 million a year to post jobs and screen résumés through the three heavyweights of online job search—Monster, CareerBuilder, and Yahoo! HotJobs.

But with the 2009 recruiting budget slashed to $1 million and 2,500 openings to fill, the wireless carrier’s director of talent acquisition ditched the big job boards and instead inked a deal with social networking site LinkedIn. For an annual fee of $60,000, US Cellular now has access to the network’s 42 million members, many of whom are employed—the so-called passive candidates that recruiters covet, since conventional wisdom is the best people already have jobs. Using LinkedIn, USC recruiters made a hire in 30 days for a position that typically takes six months to fill.

For Monster, the growing appeal of LinkedIn to recruiters is just one more headache to contend with. Other social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, are also becoming popular destinations for employers. And niche sites such as TheLadders and BlueSteps, both of which target high earners, are gaining followers among recruiters and job seekers alike.

While traffic to Monster is up because of the growing ranks of the newly unemployed, its share of job listings among the big three has declined from nearly 40% in December 2007 to 34% in May. Monster has lowered prices for some key customers and hired 130 salespeople—a 31% increase—to win back business. In January, Monster unveiled a cleaner site that, among other things, reduced the number of steps required to upload a résumé from 20 to 4. A career-mapping feature shows job hunters how they can transfer from one field to another.

Monster’s next step is to address the one-size-fits-all nature of Monster’s site, which gets about 12 million unique visitors a month. It’s rolling out “contextual search” technology that distinguishes between, say, someone who went to Harvard and someone who lives on Harvard Avenue.

Perhaps Monster’s biggest threat comes from LinkedIn, a six-year-old social networking site with a distinctly professional bent.  For $7,000 per user at a client company, hiring managers get a customized LinkedIn Web site, or “dashboard,” and souped-up search capability so they can reach out to qualified candidates

Twitter is also gaining traction in the realm of job search. Kara Nickels got an e-mail one morning from an insurance industry client that needed 40 lawyers immediately for a big document review. The legal recruiter quickly sent a message—or “tweet”—to her 150 followers, which was re-twittered by legal blogs that follow her. By the time she arrived at her Chicago office, Nickels had 10 replies and filled every post by lunch. “With job boards it takes a couple days before people look,” she says. “But Twitter is immediate. I’ll still use the job boards, but if you don’t use social media now, you’re behind the curve.”

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_27/b4138043180664.htm

Posted in Social Media & Networking | 2 Comments »