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<title>Haaze.com / maralyn45 / Published News</title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com</link>
<description>Test Web 2.0 Content Management System</description>
<pubDate>Mon, 28 Mar 2011 07:10:03 +0000</pubDate>
<language>en</language>
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<title><![CDATA[Zapoint constructs resumes from social networks]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=zapoint-constructs-resumes-from-social-networks</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=zapoint-constructs-resumes-from-social-networks</comments>
<pubDate>Mon, 28 Mar 2011 07:10:03 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>maralyn45</dc:creator>
<category>Mobile &amp; Electronics</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=zapoint-constructs-resumes-from-social-networks</guid>
<description><![CDATA[&quot;Office Depot has 40,000 employees, and they don't know who there speaks Vietnamese,&quot; Chris Twyman, the CEO of Zapoint, says in his pitch. The Cambridge, Mass., company is launching a &quot;Skills Map&quot; for 300 major companies that, he says, will tell them more about their employees than anything in their own human resources systems.Zapoint gleans this data from information that people post on personal social-network pages -- Facebook, LinkedIn, and so on. Unlike resumes, which employees may update only when they're job hunting and even then not make public, people continually self-report and publicize a lot of work-related skills data. They just don't do it with job hunting or career development in mind. And employers generally can't capture it because their data collection systems (such as they are), are inward-focused. They don't look out toward social networks. Zapoint&amp;39's Skills Mapper can compare two people at a company -- or people from different companies.(Credit:Zapoint) On the other side of the fence, the data that big employers do have about their workers is generally walled off from the public. Who you report to, what training you have, and so on -- that stuff is not made public. Twyman thinks that's an archaic way to manage information about a workforce. &quot;The social nets are marching in. You've got to embrace them,&quot; he said in an interview earlier this month.  So Zapoint, which was founded in 2006, is attacking these silos of employee information by creating a series of reports on the people at 300 major companies. It's focusing on general job descriptions and doing cross-industry comparisons. For example, marketing execs at pharmaceutical companies. The company is figuring who's who, and who has what skills. It knows how good an entire team is at a given company, too, since it knows who works with whom. It knows names. &quot;It's LinkedIn on speed,&quot; Twyman said. If you're one of the people who's been corralled in a Zapoint roundup, now your skill set can be compared to your competitors. Maybe you think that that's good, maybe not, but you can't do much about it. If you're in HR, the worry is that now your competitors can see who your best-trained people are, and poach them. But there is an upside. Individuals could also use this information to see how they stack up, and start working toward improving their skills in ways that matter' or they could use the competitive information to get promotions or raises. Likewise, employers can use the data for skills development. And at the moment, Zapoint is not actually releasing individual dossiers and names. It is telling the 300 companies that it has profiled that it has the data, and is showing them only information in the aggregate. It will sell them the names attached to the data, though, and then let them fill in the information that Zapoint can't collect: the org chart that shows how all the people and skills are arrayed in a business. I'm not sure that Zapoint's pitch to businesses -- &quot;We have data about your people' pay us and you can have it too&quot; -- will go over so well, but the company is one of several that is taking the historically private information of what we do at work and how well we do it, and making it public (See also: Honestly.com). The days of being able to hide behind a desk are coming to an end.Watch&amp;149' Reporters' Roundtable: Who owns your online identity<br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[SudoGlove: Bend index finger to accelerate car]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=sudoglove-bend-index-finger-to-accelerate-car</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=sudoglove-bend-index-finger-to-accelerate-car</comments>
<pubDate>Tue, 15 Feb 2011 08:11:10 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>maralyn45</dc:creator>
<category>Social</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=sudoglove-bend-index-finger-to-accelerate-car</guid>
<description><![CDATA[The glove in the SudoGlove system contains flex, force, and vibration sensors, plus a 2D gyroscope on the wrist.(Credit:Jeremy Blum) Here's one case where giving the finger while driving is a very good idea. The index finger, that is. Bending it makes the remote-controlled car in the SudoGlove system accelerate. Tilting your hand turns the car. Pressing your ring finger makes it go in reverse. Pinkie pressure turns on the headlights, siren lights, and siren sounds. Clapping honks the horn.  Jeremy Blum wears the glove and control module (click to enlarge). (Credit:Jeremy Blum)  The SudoGlove, designed and built by engineering students at Cornell University, allows wearers to control a modded RC car using hand gestures. But it has implications for any hardware containing a wireless transceiver, says Jeremy Blum, a Cornell junior majoring in electrical and computer engineering and one of the students who worked on the SudoGlove as a final project for an information science class.  &quot;All the processing is done on the glove side of the system, and simple 8-bit control values are transmitted that can be used to do just about anything on the control end,&quot; Blum told CNET. Just the other night, Blum created a computer interface that can be controlled by the glove. He'll display it and the hand-controlled RC car at BOOM 2011, Cornell's technology and innovation showcase, on March 9. But unlike other gestural gloves that can be used to control virtual objects, the SudoGlove (so named for the Sudo programming command) is aimed at bridging the gap between users and traditional hardware devices.  &quot;By removing the distance between the user and traditional hardware devices,&quot; the students say, &quot;our goal is for SudoGlove to feel more like an extension of the body as opposed to an external machine.&quot;   To make the SudoGlove, Blum and peers Joe Ballerini, Tiffany Ng, and Alex Garcia outfitted a standard RC car with an Arduino Pro Mini microcontroller and other electronics components. An XBee wireless module receives commands from the glove, and an Arduino Pro Mini processes them and tells the reworked car what to do.(Credit:Jeremy Blum) The tricked-out Reebok glove got a flex sensor, two force sensors, a vibration sensor, and a 2D gyroscope on the wrist. The glove sends data to a battery-operated control module worn on a belt holster.  In all, the project involved 250 hours of combined labor, 150 feet of wire, and 600 lines of code. Even in a world where technology increasingly bows to the will of motion, that might seem like a lot of work to go into a toy car. Then again, maybe it's a small price to pay if the simple bend of a finger drives all of our gadgets one day.          Leslie Katz    Full Profile E-mail Leslie Katz   E-mail Leslie Katz If you have a question or comment for Leslie Katz, you can submit it here. However, because our editors and writers receive hundreds of requests, we cannot tell you when you may receive a response.   Submit your question or comment here: 0 of 1500 characters       Leslie Katz, senior editor of CNET's Crave, covers gadgets, games, and myriad other digital distractions. As a co-host of the recently retired CNET News Daily Podcast, she was sometimes known to channel Terry Gross and still uses her trained &quot;podcast voice&quot; to bully the speech recognition software on automated customer service lines. E-mail Leslie.  <br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Xiph resumes work on Ghost audio codec]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=xiph-resumes-work-on-ghost-audio-codec</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=xiph-resumes-work-on-ghost-audio-codec</comments>
<pubDate>Fri, 21 Jan 2011 08:10:13 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>maralyn45</dc:creator>
<category>Mobile &amp; Electronics</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=xiph-resumes-work-on-ghost-audio-codec</guid>
<description><![CDATA[The Xiph.Org Foundation, creator of the royalty-free Vorbis audio encoding technology made suddenly relevant by Google's WebM project, is nearing completion of a next-generation codec called CELT and has resumed development of one due after that called Ghost.&quot;Ghost research was postponed until recently to devote more resources to improving video,&quot; said Monty Montgomery, who worked on Vorbis and CELT, in a blog post last week. &quot;Ghost development now resumes where it left off in 2007.&quot;Vorbis, CELT (Constrained Energy Lapped Transform), and Ghost all are audio codecs, meaning that they're designed to compress sound data for more compact storage and easier streaming over a network. Codecs must balance compression with quality and rely on a combination of mathematical processing techniques and tricks to discard data that a human audience won't notice is missing.Vorbis, which competes with codecs such as MP3 and AAC that come with patent royalty fees, came to fruition in combination with the Theora video codec. The latter wasn't much of a success, but a more modern cousin called VP8 from Google has more potential. And Vorbis, combined with VP8, are part of the open-source, royalty-free WebM technology with which Google hopes to lower barriers to video on the Web.The Google backing has helped move the largely overlooked Vorbis toward the mainstream. And it's possible that CELT and Ghost could follow in Vorbis' footsteps as a relevant technology.CELT is getting closer to one critical step in completion, freezing the bitstream, which defines the sequences of data as it's streamed over a network.&quot;As of December 2010, CELT is nearing bitstream freeze and has been submitted to the IETF [Internet Engineering Task Force] codec working group as an input codec,&quot; Montgomery said in a December update. Specifically, he's hoping to freeze the bitstream in January.CELT is designed to use less processing power than Vorbis to decode and to suffer less of a delay from when data starts arriving to when audio is decoded. With Vorbis, there's a lag of a tenth of a second, but CELT is designed to have a delay of only a twentieth that long--5 milliseconds.Short delays are important for natural conversation to avoid the alternating problems of awkward pauses and speakers talking at the same time that afflict high-latency communications.Ghost, in comparison, is designed with Vorbis' higher 100-millisecond latency. And it's far from completion.&quot;First and foremost, Ghost is vaporware,&quot; Montgomery said. &quot;At present it is merely a collection of ideas and some early-stage research. Eventually, it is intended to be a codec that improves upon and supersedes Vorbis in its current niche.&quot;A hiatus of more than three years may sound crippling in the fast-paced technology world, but codecs have a long lifespan. Vorbis was designed for a 20-year run, and it's halfway through.One improvement planned for Ghost is a wider range of useful bitrates, meaning that the codec would make audio sound better low-bandwidth and add more quality on high-bandwidth connections. Another is elimination of &quot;pre-echo,&quot; in which sound compression artifacts arrive before the actual sound is supposed to arrive.And Ghost is intended to break from the past. Codec gurus might be interested in Montgomery's words:Ghost will be a hybrid tone + noise codec that splits and separately encodes strong sinusoids [sine waves representing pure tones] from the time-domain 'toneless' signal [that's less regular]. It attempts to abandon the lapped transform techniques that have had a stranglehold on audio codec design for the past 20 years, beginning with MP3 and continuing on to AAC and Vorbis (and CELT).The work is funded by Linux and open-source software specialist Red Hat, so it's no surprise Ghost continues with Vorbis' intellectual property freedoms: no licenses are necessary to use the technology.<br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Apple TV to hit 1 million unit sales this week]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=apple-tv-to-hit-1-million-unit-sales-this-week</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=apple-tv-to-hit-1-million-unit-sales-this-week</comments>
<pubDate>Tue, 21 Dec 2010 08:10:04 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>maralyn45</dc:creator>
<category>Mobile &amp; Electronics</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=apple-tv-to-hit-1-million-unit-sales-this-week</guid>
<description><![CDATA[The (successful) Apple TV.(Credit:Apple)Who said the Apple TV was just a hobbyApple announced today that unit sales of its tiny set-top box are expected to reach 1 million by the end of this week.The Apple TV, which launched in September, is one-quarter the size of its predecessor, and allows users to rent and stream television shows and movies from iTunes on their televisions. The set-top box also features access to Netflix, podcasts, and Flickr. Users can stream music content from their computers, and use AirPlay to send multimedia content from their iOS-based devices to the Apple TV. It retails for $99.But that success didn't come overnight. Quite the contrary--Apple TV's trek to get to this point has been one for the ages.The first Apple TV launched in 2007 as a &quot;hobby&quot; for entertainment-seekers. Unlike the latest Apple TV, the first version of the device featured onboard storage, allowing users to store their entire iTunes library content on the device. However, over the next three years, Apple offered few updates to the device, allowing it to languish on store shelves.At a press event in September, Apple CEO Steve Jobs said that his company believed consumers didn't want to store content on their set-top boxes, and instead preferred to stream content. The result was the latest Apple TV, which Jobs said, was no longer the &quot;hobby&quot; its predecessor was.With the company expecting to have sold 1 million units of the new Apple TV by the end of the week, it certainly seems that way. It also seems that Apple is throwing down the gauntlet in the living room against the countless competitors it faces.Roku's XDS set-top box, for example, boasts a $100 price tag, and includes a slew of streaming options, including Hulu Plus, Netflix, and Pandora. Others include the recently released Boxee Box and the Logitech Revue, which offers Google TV software.But Apple didn't limit its chest-thumping to the set-top box market. The company also announced today that iTunes customers are &quot;renting and purchasing over 400,000 TV episodes and over 150,000 movies per day.&quot;<br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Next-gen Google Maps for Mobile previewed]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=next-gen-google-maps-for-mobile-previewed</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=next-gen-google-maps-for-mobile-previewed</comments>
<pubDate>Mon, 06 Dec 2010 08:10:33 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>maralyn45</dc:creator>
<category>Technology</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=next-gen-google-maps-for-mobile-previewed</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Google&amp;39's Maps for Mobile 5 will feature vector graphics for 3D maps, faster performance, and offline caching.(Credit:Google)The next generation of Google Maps for Mobile has been previewed by Google's Andy Rubin while demoing a prototype tablet running Android Honeycomb at D: Dive Into Mobile.The fifth iteration of Google Maps for Mobile will feature an overhauled visual style that is based on vector graphics rather than the flat, bitmap images of the current version. The upshot of this change in graphic architecture is that maps now require much less space for storage and less bandwidth to download. Overall performance of the Google Maps software should be improved, but more importantly, lighter map data requirements makes possible the offline caching of routes. This means that once a route is locked in, users will not need to maintain an internet connection for the duration of the trip, which will make Google Maps navigation much more useful for those of us who stray off of the wireless grid occasionally. Of course, altering the route or choosing a new destination will still require a connection, but small reroutes for a missed turn or two may not.The other advantage of the vector map data is that Google Maps will now offer 3D building data for over 100 cites. These 3D landmarks can be tilted, rotated, panned, and zoomed with multitouch controls. It's a neat feature that may be useful for users who prefer to navigate visually, but I've alway felt that 3D maps are more eye candy than useful navigation tools.Google Maps for Mobile 5 will be available for download in the coming days. However, while compatible phones will benefit from the improved performance and possibly map data caching, features such as advanced multitouch controls and 3D rendering may be restricted to handsets with the hardware to support them. Phones that will get the full Maps for Mobile 5 experience include the Samsung Galaxy S, the Motorola Droid, Droid X,Droid 2 and Droid Incredible, the HTC Evo, the Google Nexus S, and T-Mobile G2. (Notably missing from this list is the GoogleNexus One.)<br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Gazaro helps you get money back from Best Buy]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=gazaro-helps-you-get-money-back-from-best-buy</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=gazaro-helps-you-get-money-back-from-best-buy</comments>
<pubDate>Thu, 02 Dec 2010 08:10:03 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>maralyn45</dc:creator>
<category>Mobile &amp; Electronics</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=gazaro-helps-you-get-money-back-from-best-buy</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Gazaro Protect lets you register Best Buy purchases, and will alert you if you become eligible for a price protection refund.(Credit:Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)If you want to get a deal on a tech product, there are dozens of good sites to help you find the best price for it. These sites have clear business models: Take a cut of the sales, via affiliate fees, or get some advertising dollars. But now Gazaro, traditionally another deal finder and tracker, is offering a service to help consumers save money after they purchase an item, by making it easier to use the price-protection guarantees that some stores have.Just as Yapta and some other travels sites do for airfares, Gazaro Protect will do for your Best Buy purchases. You e-mail the service your receipts (for online purchases) or paste a URL or scan a barcode with the Gazaro iPhone app (for in-store purchases), and if the price of the product goes down post-purchase during the guarantee period, you get an e-mail alert. It's (for now) still up to you to deal with the store to get your refund, but at least with Gazaro Protect you'll be reminded that your money is sitting on the table, so you don't leave it there. Gazaro CEO Alexander Rink tells me he's looking forward to working with more stores in the future, and also with credit card issuers whose programs offer price protection. (For those of you wondering, Amazon doesn't offer price protection guarantees.) Best Buy doesn't officially endorse or support Gazaro Protect, but through its BBY Open interface, Rink says, it was easy enough to build the product. But Best Buy should love the product anyway. Protect helps retailers extend the relationship with consumers for a very limited expense. Sure, it'll cost Best Buy a few bucks every time a customer redeems a price protection refund, but in exchange for that, the store gets to interact with the customer again, and reinforce the relationship, and probably sell them more stuff. It's a cheap form of customer re-acquisition. After looking at Gazaro Protect, I have to wonder why retailers aren't more aggressive about their price guarantee programs.  See also: OtherInBox handles e-mail overload' knows too much.<br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[The 404 716: Where we're thankful for enhanced pat-down searches (podcast)]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=the-404-716-where-were-thankful-for-enhanced-pat-down-searches-podcast</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=the-404-716-where-were-thankful-for-enhanced-pat-down-searches-podcast</comments>
<pubDate>Wed, 24 Nov 2010 08:10:19 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>maralyn45</dc:creator>
<category>Technology</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=the-404-716-where-were-thankful-for-enhanced-pat-down-searches-podcast</guid>
<description><![CDATA[It's the last day of the week for us! Mark Licea joins us today to fill in for the day before Thanksgiving. We hope all of your enjoy your new TSA-approved enhanced pat-downs when you're flying to see your loved ones. Justin isn't even leaving the city, but he's making daily trips to the airport to meet his special security officer.First Black Friday Deal!(Credit:CBS Interactive)Speaking of the TSA screenings that have become all the rage on the news these days, Jeff thinks that it's the dearth of news in American media that is letting the issue blow up on cable news and across the Web. In part, Wilson agrees given that the new regulations, backscatter (cool name for a band) X-ray scanning machines and pat-down searches have been planned for months. While the general populace might be a bit surprised by the new TSA regulations, Wilson doesn't believe it makes it right to be photographed through our clothes just because we want to fly.<br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Android-themed bar opens in Tokyo]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=android-themed-bar-opens-in-tokyo</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=android-themed-bar-opens-in-tokyo</comments>
<pubDate>Wed, 24 Nov 2010 08:10:17 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>maralyn45</dc:creator>
<category>Technology</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=android-themed-bar-opens-in-tokyo</guid>
<description><![CDATA[(Credit:Asiajin)Looks like Tokyo's Cafe Ease, which offers aniPad for use on every table, has some competition. Bar Android (Facebook page in Japanese) has just set up shop as what appears to be the first Android-themed watering hole in Tokyo. Located in Shibuya, a few train stops from Cafe Ease, the pub is strangely open only on Mondays from 7 p.m. to 11:30 p.m. But that's Japan for you.So if you're in that part of town, check it out. You'll find gingerbread cookies, possibly even frozen yogurt, eclairs, and doughnuts on the menu, with drinks and snacks at a reasonable 500 yen ($6) and meals going for 1,000 yen ($12). Though whether little green androids serve up the food, well, let us know.  In addition to hanging with other Android fans, patrons can charge their Android phones and chill out playing Angry Birds on their devices. Fortunately, rumor has it the bar also welcomes non-Android users. (Source: Crave Asia via Asiajin) <br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Palin's publisher sues Gawker over book excerpt]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=palins-publisher-sues-gawker-over-book-excerpt</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=palins-publisher-sues-gawker-over-book-excerpt</comments>
<pubDate>Sat, 20 Nov 2010 08:10:15 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>maralyn45</dc:creator>
<category>Marketing and advertising</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=palins-publisher-sues-gawker-over-book-excerpt</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Want to read parts of Sarah Palin's biography before it's officially released Head over to Gawker, which has been displaying excerpts from the book since Thursday.That's despite the fact that Palin's publisher, HarperCollins, filed a lawsuit yesterday against Gawker Media, citing copyright infringement. <br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Comcasta4a4s Tunerfish social TV app gets a new face]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=comcastâÂ€Â™s-tunerfish-social-tv-app-gets-a-new-face</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=comcastâÂ€Â™s-tunerfish-social-tv-app-gets-a-new-face</comments>
<pubDate>Mon, 30 Nov -001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>maralyn45</dc:creator>
<category>Latest News</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=comcastâÂ€Â™s-tunerfish-social-tv-app-gets-a-new-face</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Comcast got into the social TV game in June with the launch of a new service called Tunerfish. Today, the company announced a bunch of upgrades that general manager John McCrea said should lead to more sign-ups and growth.Tunerfish was developed by team members from Plaxo, which was acquired by Comcast in 2008 &amp;8212' McCrea was Plaxoa4a4s vice president of marketing, and Tunerfish product director Nida Zada was Plaxoa4a4s director of user experience. Through the Tunerfish website and the iPhone application, users can share what theya4a4re watching on television, see whata4a4s trending among their friends or the general userbase, and earn rewards.When I asked about Tunerfisha4a4s numbers, McCrea didn&amp;'t give a specific user count, noting that it&amp;'s still a new product, but he revealed that the number of a4Asharesa4 increased 500 percent between July and October. And its users are loyal &amp;8212' 10 percent of them return to the website or iPhone app seven days out of seven.One of the big changes revealed today is a new look. Tunerfish ditched the boring text-only logo and worked with the Liquid Agency marketing firm to design a cute fish mascot, which you can see in various guises above. And the website has been redesigned with what the company says is a cleaner look. That look is also reflected in an updated version of the Tunerfish iPhone app that just went live.Lastly, McCrea said his team responded to the biggest request from users &amp;8212' ita4a4s now possible to sign-up for Tunerfish using a traditional email address and password, rather than requiring users to log in via Facebook or Twitter.a4AThis really surprised us, but almost all of our low ratings in the app store were around that issue,a4 McCrea said.Comcast isna4a4t the only company interested in this area. For example, a Google Ventures-funded application called Miso also allows users to a4Acheck ina4 to their favorite TV shows.Next Story: Google&amp;'s Nexus One successor revealed: Meet Samsung&amp;'s Nexus S Previous Story: Microsoft and Cisco throw down the gauntlet for living room teleconferencingPrintEmailTwitterFacebookGoogle BuzzLinkedIn      DiggStumbleUponRedditDeliciousGoogleMore&amp;8230'          Tags: social TV, TunerfishCompanies: ComcastPeople: John McCrea          Tags: social TV, TunerfishCompanies: ComcastPeople: John McCreaAnthony is VentureBeat's assistant editor, as well as its reporter on media, advertising, and social networks. Before joining VentureBeat in 2008, Anthony worked at the Hollister Free Lance, where he won awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association for breaking news coverage and writing. He attended Stanford University and now lives in San Francisco. Reach him at anthony@venturebeat.com. (All story pitches should also be sent to tips@venturebeat.com) You can also follow Anthony on Twitter.VentureBeat has new weekly email newsletters.  Stay on top of the news, and don't miss a beat.<br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Is The Silicon Valley Talent Shortage Getting&nbsp'Worse]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=is-the-silicon-valley-talent-shortage-gettingnbspworse</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=is-the-silicon-valley-talent-shortage-gettingnbspworse</comments>
<pubDate>Mon, 30 Nov -001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>maralyn45</dc:creator>
<category>Latest News</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=is-the-silicon-valley-talent-shortage-gettingnbspworse</guid>
<description><![CDATA[photo a4s 2009 Colin | more info (via: Wylio)According to reports, Google is offering its employees a 10% pay increase for 2011 and $1000 holidaya4sbonuses company wide. Digg layoff refugees are met with open arms by enthusiastic HR vultures. Companies in existence for two months are getting acquired for their teams. Ask.com engineers are getting job offers on Twitter the second news that they are on the market breaks.Wait a minute, since when are Ask.com engineers such a hot piece of propertyWell, since the Silicon Valley engineering drought of 2010. GigaOm&amp;'s Om Malik brings up the shocking statistic thata4sjob postings in the IT industry have increased 69% since October of 2009. Plentiful availability of seed funding has made it easier to start a company and engendered a culture where doing your own thing is the only badass move. Read: &amp;''If I&amp;'m going to work for someone else, it better be a pretty damn good offer.&amp;''Among the companies that area4sexpected to hirea4smore in 2010 are Facebook, Google, Zynga and Twitter. And the latter three plan on expanding their offices to accomodate their rapidly expanding staff. a4sFrom one Google employee on itsa4srumored New York digs,a4s&amp;''Filling the entire block is still a lot of headcounts.&amp;'' But a multitude of smaller startups like Square and Dropboxa4sare also throwing their hats into the hiring ring.The gap between supply and demand is fueled primarilya4sby a Google and Facebook bidding war (around 12% of Facebookers used to work at Google). Says investor Shervin Pishevar, &amp;''There&amp;'s been an arms race for talent. Certain companies have been stockpiling talent with great benefits. Most of that talent has had golden handcuffs.&amp;''As Google has money to burn and Facebook has lucrative stock options, the fierce competition amongst the dominant players is most evidenced by their recent spate of &amp;''acqui-hires,&amp;'' Drop.io and Hot Potato for Facebook and Plannr and AdMob for Google.Mark Zuckerberg even has put the acqui-hire equivalent of a want ad on Quora, asking for cool suggestions for companies to acquire. Word around the startup world is that&amp;''Why not pay $1 million to hire a few good engineers&amp;'' isn&amp;'t an irrational question. Zuckerberg himself has said, &amp;''Facebook has not once bought a companya4sfor the company itself.a4sWe buy companies to get excellent people.&amp;''Twitter investor Chris Sacca digs deeper into the problem, &amp;''There is no shortage of talent available for the very best companies that are reaching escape velocity. It seems harder for smaller companies who are looking to add employee six or seven to find recruits beyond their network of friends.&amp;'' It&amp;'s the relative ease in hiring for companies like Twitter that makes it so much harder for most startups.With smaller startups competing with the giants and the giants competing amongst themselves, the job market has become cutthroat. More startups + fewer talent resources = salaries will continue go up. Google&amp;'s raise offer earlier today is just the beginning.Now might be a good time to take some Computer Science courses. CrunchBase InformationGoogleFacebookTwitterZyngaInformation provided by CrunchBase<br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Twitter Places Is Nothing New, But The Ability To Claim Venues Is Being&nbsp'Tested]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=twitter-places-is-nothing-new-but-the-ability-to-claim-venues-is-beingnbsptested</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=twitter-places-is-nothing-new-but-the-ability-to-claim-venues-is-beingnbsptested</comments>
<pubDate>Mon, 30 Nov -001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>maralyn45</dc:creator>
<category>Latest News</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=twitter-places-is-nothing-new-but-the-ability-to-claim-venues-is-beingnbsptested</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Okay everyone, let&amp;'s calm down. Currently making the rounds on the Internet is that Twitter is about to launch a Foursquare-killer, Twitter Places. The only problem They actually launched it about five months ago. They wrote about it, we covered it, so did just about everyone else on the web. That said, there is one potentially new element of Places that we haven&amp;'t noticed before: the ability to claim a place.We&amp;'re not entirely sure how new this is, and have reached out to Twitter about it (update below). But what&amp;'s interesting is that it appears that Twitter&amp;'s headquarters is the only venue that has been claimed so far (by @twitter, naturally). And looking over the site, I can&amp;'t find a way to claim any other venue. Here&amp;'s the TechCrunch headquarters, for example, unclaimed.Since the launch of Places five months ago, Twitter hasn&amp;'t done much in the geolocation space. Meanwhile, rivals Facebook and Google have been moving fast to build up and own their own Place databases. Being able to claim a place on Twitter would seem to suggest that the company is thinking about adding to their offering. Google, Facebook, and Foursquare all allow venue-owners to claim their places. And those that do get (or will get) analytics about their venues on those services.A more robust Twitter Places offering could also be another potential revenue-generator for Twitter. Again, location-based analytics are the obvious play here.Update: Here&amp;'s what Twitter has to say:Claiming Twitter Places is not available at this time. We&amp;'re experimenting with a variety features. Allowing businesses to claim a Place is a natural thing to consider for the future.CrunchBase InformationTwitterInformation provided by CrunchBase<br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Andreessen Horowitz Raises $650M Fund, Just Shy Of $1B Under&nbsp'Management]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=andreessen-horowitz-raises-650m-fund-just-shy-of-1b-undernbspmanagement</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=andreessen-horowitz-raises-650m-fund-just-shy-of-1b-undernbspmanagement</comments>
<pubDate>Mon, 30 Nov -001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>maralyn45</dc:creator>
<category>Latest News</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=andreessen-horowitz-raises-650m-fund-just-shy-of-1b-undernbspmanagement</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Just 15 months after Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz officially jumped to the venture capital darkside with the close of a $300 million fund, Andreessen Horowitz is announcing the close of a second $650 million fund. In less than two years, the firm has rocketed up to a whopping $950 million under management, an investment staff of 18 people and a portfolio that includes everything from Skype to Zynga to Foursquare.What&amp;'s more This fund closed in three weeks time. &amp;''It was a busya4sthree weeks,&amp;'' Andreessen offers to those VCs struggling to raise money. (I have a feeling some haters are gonna hate for that quip, Marc&amp;8230')Is it Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz&amp;'s membership in the elite club of entrepreneurs who have built and sold two companies for more than $1 billion each Is it Andreessen&amp;'s seats on the boards of Facebook and Hewlett-Packard, two of the most talked about and powerful boards in the Valley Was it the stellar angel investment portfolio that included a raft of open source, enterprise and Web 2.0 stars and has essentially acted like a deal generation pipeline for the fund Or was it that the first fund succeeded in grabbing the most competitive deals like Foursquare, but also made some gutsy and, at the time, controversial mega deals like Skype A mix likely. The biggest feedback from LPs: When they called around to other investors and entrepreneurs doing reference checks remarkably few of them said Andreessen Horowitz acted like assholes. As discussed a few times on my AskAVC show, that&amp;'s a rarity in this industry and high praise.Horowitz says half the people he&amp;'s told the news to have asked why the fund was so big and half have asked why the fund was so small. The former because it&amp;'s a lot of money to raise so quickly in an industry that most people feel already has too much cash' the latter because Andreessen and Horowitz aren&amp;'t afraid to do a big, late stage deal if they can get a chunk of a company they love, like Skype. I mean, raising another $100 million might have taken, what Four weeksHorowitz says they didn&amp;'t go larger because they didn&amp;'t want the fund size to dictate their investment pace. They&amp;'d rather have to go raise money again if things go better than expected than to have to press to find suboptimal deals.It&amp;'s striking how fast the deal closed, because most limited partners are saying they want specialized funds, or firms that invest in just seed, just growth or specific sectors&amp;8211' so they can control their own allocations. Andreessen Horowitz is most definitely not that. &amp;''We think that&amp;'s wrong, quite frankly,&amp;'' Horowitz says. &amp;''We think the stages vary in quality and pricing a lot over time.&amp;'' For instance, when the two were doing angel investing in the early 2000s the Web was a space no one would go near except the most determined (read: crazy) people, who typically make the best entrepreneurs. The two got in a ton of great deals for cheap. But today with the glut of seed stage deals and lower overall quality of the entrepreneurs, Horowitz says the venture stage is a better vantage point to be competitive on price and pluck up companies that are already demonstrating traction.The two are also really excited about growth-stage opportunities, especially in the consumer Web space&amp;8211' a game so far dominated by Elevation, DST and a few others. &amp;''We we sold Netscape there were 50 million people on the Internet and half of them were on dial-up connections,&amp;'' Horowitz says. &amp;''Now it&amp;'s two billion. There have been multiple companies that got to $1 billion in revenues in less than five years. That&amp;'s not only never happened in technology before, but that&amp;'s never happened in the history of business, period. There are very interesting companies&amp;8211' early companies still&amp;8211' with giant revenues that aren&amp;'t ready to be public yet, especially given how much more difficult being a public company has gotten in the past ten to 15 years.&amp;''Ultimately, Andreesseen Horowitz still want to build big, publicly traded companies and they say they&amp;'ve walked from talented entrepreneurs with great products who were looking for a flip. There are plenty of investors who want that business in the Valley, and they can have it. &amp;''You can invest $2 million and sell a company for $20 million and make money,&amp;'' Horowitz says. &amp;''But that&amp;'s just not what we&amp;'re about.&amp;''Horowitz also argues the blended fund strategy is a better deal for limited partners. Several leading Valley firms have branched out into late stage or emerging market funds in recent years, and LPs who couldn&amp;'t get their money into the early stage fund before rushed at the chance to get closer to the firm. But if the early stage fund gets a home run, but the late stage or emerging market funds do horribly, only the LPs in the early stage fund make money&amp;8211' well, along with all the venture firm&amp;'s partners. If an LP is in both, he has to pay the carry on the fund that did well, while losing money on the other one.In many ways this approach of sticking with a company all the way, harkens back to the early Don Valentine, Arthur Rock, Tom Perkins days of venture capital. a4sAndreessen Horowitz doesn&amp;'t believe in just one partner being assigned to a startup, they hire a lot of experts and they&amp;'re all up for grabs. Some make sense when you need help recruiting engineering talent and some make sense when you are looking to go public. Continuity is an underrated asset, Horowitz says. When you rotate board members in-and-out, weird, reactionary decisions can result. People brought in to help later don&amp;'t know the entrepreneur and the company&amp;'s history as intimately. A missed quarter&amp;'s numbers may call a new board member to call for a founder&amp;'s head, but a board member who&amp;'s been with the company longer may know more context or what a better role for him might be.I did this interview over a midnight Skype connection from Jakarta, Indonesia&amp;8211' a country that is home to a good deal of the Internet traffic from Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare&amp;8211' all either angel or venture fund investments of Andreessen and Horowitz. Indeed, Asia generally is a big reason there are 2 billion people on the Web. So I had to ask whether the two kingpins of Silicon Valley would finally take a closer look at the global venture capital market with this fund. Nope. &amp;''It doesn&amp;'t mean you can&amp;'t start a big business anywhere else, it&amp;'s just harder to do them in a a4shighly repeatable way,&amp;'' Horowitz said. &amp;''You can make a blockbuster movie in Idaho, but a lot more of them come out of Hollywood.&amp;''It&amp;'s no wonder the guys are said to have such an affinity for the show &amp;''MadMen.&amp;'' Their firm is a throwback to venture capital&amp;'s classic, glory days.<br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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