For fast-growing technology start-ups, there are many approaches to employee hiring and retention.
Two of the more successful ones, Facebook and Zappos, have very different methods, each with different goals: Facebook wants to hire entrepreneurs even if that means they will eventually leave, while Zappos wants to hire the best people to fit its culture and figure out how to keep them.
by Andrew LaVallee, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
Nonprofit organizations seeking to harness Facebook can get the most bang for their buck by using fan pages in addition to groups, streamlining their app usage and livening things up, one of its marketing execs said Friday.
Pages operate like profiles for organizations or businesses, can only be created by official representatives and can add applications, while groups are unofficial and can be created by any user.
by Eric Savitz, Blogger and Columnist, Barron's, Tech Trader Daily
Facebook plans to grow headcount by as much as 50 percent amid a surplus of engineering talent, CEO Mark Zuckerberg told Bloomberg. “No one else has been hiring,” he said. “It’s been a great environment for us because the economy has helped out.”
Here is the latest comic from our Joy of Tech friends at Geek Culture, Nitrozac and Snaggy. Joy of Tech appears three times a week in the Voices section of this site. (Click on the image to see a bigger version.)
Here is the latest comic from our Joy of Tech friends at Geek Culture, Nitrozac and Snaggy. Joy of Tech appears three times a week in the Voices section of this site. (Click on the image to see a bigger version.)
by Jessica Vascellaro, Tech Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will take to Oprah Winfrey’s couch today. What to expect? Questions about the economy? Mark’s not-so-secret Twitter account? The latest redesign?
Why should location-based social networks be worried about Google? Because its new Latitude product was able to gain over a million users in just a week, Google’s vice president of engineering Vic Gundotra told an audience at the Mobile World Congress today.
Here is the latest comic from our Joy of Tech friends at Geek Culture, Nitrozac and Snaggy. Joy of Tech appears three times a week in the Voices section of this site. (Click on the image to see a bigger version.)
Five major U.K. carriers are banding together to pool customer data so that it can be put into a giant database and then be used to sell advertising, The Register reports today. How long do you think it will take before this “database” idea lands on American shores?
Facebook’s announcement that they are opening up API access to user’s status updates (and more) is big news. The status update has become the ultimate social gesture. All last year, Facebook, who is the leader in social networking, focused on morphing the user experience, first to the news feed and ultimately to the status update as the primary user experience.
There’s something about the crisp autumn air that brings out the philosopher in Mark Zuckerberg. At this week’s Web 2.0 Summit, the Facebook founder mused, according to Saul Hansell of the New York Times, “I would expect that next year, people will share twice as much information as they share this year, and [the] next year, they will be sharing twice as much as they did the year before.”
John Battelle, CEO of Federated Media, decided to have a little bit of speculative fun onstage Thursday with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg at the Web 2.0 Summit. It’s the sort of “speculative fun” that could give tech bloggers a gossip-overload headache for weeks to come: Battelle decided to throw some fuel on the “Facebook might buy Twitter” fire.
Allow me to propose something crazy. Tech companies should start charging people to use their services. No, seriously. Let’s take the biggest example of a Web site that has no clear path to profitability: Facebook.
It hasn’t even been a month since Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told a German blog that growth, not monetization, was the priority for the social-networking site. In fact, he even went so far as to say that he didn’t see a revenue plan coming into play for three more years.
by Steven M. Davidoff, Editor, The Deal Professor, New York Times
I read with great interest your recent interview with Kara Swisher at the D6 Conference. I was particularly struck by your answer to Kara Swisher’s question about whether Facebook, the popular social networking site you created, can be sold by your venture capital co-owners without your approval. Your response: “I don’t think so.”
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