Google Recruiting Process Tweaked

I missed this article when it first appeared yesterday, but the Wall Street Journal has published an interesting piece on how Google is modifying its recruiting and hiring processes.

In the past, the process favored academic credentials over industry experience, and was described as “glacial” and overly elaborate by many applicants who experienced it firsthand. Now, Google is attempting to streamline the recruiting process, seeking to reduce the number of interviews candidates must sit through, and amending qualifications and requirements for some positions.

As Google’s growth continues, it’s not surprising that it’s internal processes are forced to evolve. As it says in the article:

The recruiting fine-tuning is a further sign that Google’s in-house processes are in transition from those of a start-up to those of a big business. The eight-year-old company had 9,378 employees at the end of the third quarter, and analysts project that its revenue will top $10 billion this year. During the quarter, the company brought in an average of 16 new employees daily, up from 13 the quarter before. Its breakneck hiring has boosted staff from 1,628 at the end of 2003 to 3,021 a year later and 5,680 at the end of 2005.

Government Requirement for Secure Identity Technologies Could Produce Vendor Windfalls

All US federal government agencies are required to begin issuing new secure identity cards to employees and contractors on Friday under a White House directive that is expected to cost more than $1 billion, the Associated Press reports.

Analysts and government insiders are skeptical that IDs for a total of more than 10 million federal workers and contractors can be issued within two years as required by the directive.

The move from card readers and scanners from PINs and passwords is seen by government agencies as a major cultural and operational change. Some observers and market analysts believe the ultimate cost of the program easily could surpass $2 billion.

The Interior Department awarded a contract for the project to IBM Corp. and Lockheed Martin Corp., which is available governmentwide for the ID program.

Other approved service providers include Northrop Grumman Corp., Accenture Ltd., General Dynamics Corp., Bearingpoint Inc., and Electronic Data Systems Corp., while SI International Inc., Unisys Corp., Verisign Inc., L-1 Identity Solutions Inc., and Honeywell International Inc. also offer products that have been approved for procurement.

Information contained on the new security badges include a person’s photo and fingerprints. While privacy objections were voiced by some federal employees, the looming deadline overrode those concerns and others.  

HP, Oracle, Intel Take Another Run at the Mainframe

Speaking at Oracle’s OpenWorld Conference in San Francisco today, Hewlett-Packard CEO Mark Hurd estimated that about 65 percent of IT budgets are spent on keeping mainframes up and running.

Hurd also told attendees at the Oracle event that HP, Oracle, and Intel would work together to help customers move mainframe applications to HP servers using Intel’s Itanium processors and Oracle’s application software.  As part of the program, HP, Intel, and Oracle will assess a mainframe customer’s application requirements and recommend a similar application that runs on an Itanium server.

The partnership might prove successful, but Oracle is hedging its bets, separately announcing a mainframe partnership with IBM at the same conference.

Vendors of Unix- and Windows-based servers have attempted to rid the world of mainframes for decades, and this bid by HP, Oracle, and Intel probably won’t be the last. The mainframe has gradually lost its grip on most business-critical enterprise computing applications, but it’s not dead quite yet, as the figures cited by Mark Hurd attest.

US IPOs in Third Quarter of 2006 Hit Three-Year Low

As this report from Reuters demonstrates, the US IPO market in the third quarter of this year was grim.

We’ve seen encouraging activity at the beginning of the fourth quarter, however, with some technology IPOs actually moving ahead.

Session-border controller market leader Acme Packets, for instance, had a relatively successful IPO on October 12, offering 11.47 million shares at $9.50 each — above the proposed price of $8.00 to $9.00 per share. Acme Packets’ shares are trading today at $15.44, a sharp gain on its debut.

Meanwhile, Veraz Networks has filed to go public under the symbol "VRAZ" with an $115-million offering. The exact price and date haven’t been set, but the vendor of softswitches and media gateways for packet-based telephony seems confident about moving ahead in the current climate.

Interesting, both of the aforementioned companies sell IP-based network infrastructure to carriers and service providers looking to offer VoIP and related services. They are not Web 2.0 plays.

More to be Revealed About The Venice Project

Not much is known publicly about the The Venice Project, the latest business endeavor spawned by Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, the founders of Kazaa and Skype. If all goes according to plan, however, we’ll know a lot more about The Venice Project in the next few weeks.

According to a report at Informitv.com, Fredrik de Wahl, the chief executive of The Venice Project, will be among the keynote speakers at the Future of Television Forum, which spans November 16 and 17 at NYU’s Stern School of Business in New York. The stealth company’s CEO will give the first public presentation of the project at the conference.

The Venice Project’s website reveals that limited beta testing of the company’s software has begun, but not much else is known. The following text can be found on the site’s introductory page:

We’re working on a project that combines the best things about television with the social power of the internet – a project that gives viewers, advertisers and content owners more choice, control and creativity than ever before.

There’ll be a lot more information about The Venice Project coming this way soon. If you’d like us to keep you informed of our progress by email, please fill in your details below. And if you’d like to take part in our beta-testing program, please click the link to the left. We’ll get back to you as soon as we can.

The report at Informitv.com indicates that Janus Friis has said The Venice Project involves the creation of a streaming peer-to-peer platform for television, which is understood to be a video streaming layer built atop the global index technology that provides the foundation for Skype. Meanwhile, published terms of service suggest that it will involve users uploading and tagging content. The platform will provide a targeted advertising-supported system, sharing revenue with programming providers.

If true, the architectures of The Venice Project and Google’s YouTube will be different — with The Venice Project incorporating the peer-to-peer approach of Skype and YouTube using its current server-based approach — but the business models will be basically the same.

YouTube obviously has a head start, but we won’t know how compelling the Venice Project will be until it surfaces — or at least until we learn quite a bit more of the details behind the venture.

So, we’ll look ahead to November 16 and 17 in New York, even though — at the time I am writing this post — The Venice Project’s Mr. de Wahl is not listed as a speaker at The Future of Television Forum. I have sent an email message to the event organizer to receive confirmation that he will be speaking there.

IronPort IPO Rumored, but Time Not on Company’s Side

We’ve heard rumors in the last few days about messaging-security vendor IronPort attempting to push for an IPO before the end of the calendar year.

While there’s no question the public markets have been more receptive to technology IPOs lately than at any other time this year, it’s unlikely that IronPort could file all the necessary SEC regulatory submissions in time to get an IPO done in 2006. It’s more likely the company will hope the currently favorable market dynamics extend into 2007, while also hoping that Symantec, Microsoft, Trend Micro, and Secure Computing (which now owns IronPort’s old nemesis CipherTrust) don’t cut too sharply into IronPort’s market share and revenue growth in the interim.

The long-term prospects for IronPort aren’t particularly bright, unless it can round out its product portfolio through a merger (perhaps with DNS/DHCP appliance vendor InfoBlox, whose president and CEO, Robert Thomas, sits on the IronPort board of directors) or an acquisition that gives the company a stronger hand in outbound-content control or data-loss prevention (DLP).

MPAA: Camcording Responsible for 90% of Pirated Films

I knew that film piracy was a problem for the motion-picture industry, but I assumed that the tactics most pirates used were more sophisticated than simply sneaking a camcorder into a cinema and recording the images projected on the screen.

Apparently, though, according to the Motion Picture Association of America, 90% of pirated films worldwide are the result of camcording; and they contributed to an $18.2-billion worldwide loss for the motion-picture industry last year.

The motion-picture industry evidently has increasingly shut off sources of higher-quality bootlegs such as post-production facilities and film-marketing houses. The camcording phenomenon, however, is alive and well, and the motion-picture industry is devising new methods to counter it.