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| These Are the Tech Job Hot Spots [INFOGRAPHIC] | | Friday, September 28, 2012 7:39 PM | Seth Fiegerman |
|  Silicon Valley is still the biggest hot spot for tech jobs in the U.S., but a few other areas have almost caught up. There were 9,874 tech jobs posted online for Silicon Valley between January to August of this year, according to a new report from Bright Labs, a new data resource center from the job search startup Bright. Silicon Alley in New York was close behind with 8,976 tech jobs in the period. Another big tech hot spot has emerged recently just south of Silicon Valley. The small area between Venice and Santa Monica, Calif., known as Silicon Beach had 7,368 jobs in the first eight months of this year, the third most of any region, as startups flock to the area for cheaper rent. Bright Labs analyzed millions of job postings from websites like Monster and CareerBuilder as well from individual companies and filtered the results for tech positions as defined by U.S. occupational codes to find out the biggest regions for the tech industry. Most of the 10 biggest tech hot spots were dominated by the coasts of the United States. Dulles Tech Corridor in Northern Virginia had nearly 8,000 tech jobs posted, making it the third-biggest tech region. Florida's High Tech Corridor, which is made up of a mix of aerospace, digital media and energy companies, had 7,752 tech jobs posted in the period, making it the fourth biggest. The bottom line: You don't need to move to Silicon Valley anymore to be near a hub for tech jobs. Find out if you live in or near a tech hot spot in the infographic below: |
| Startup Marketplace Connects Fashion Brands With Boutiques | | Friday, September 28, 2012 7:00 PM | Lauren Indvik |
|  Name: Joor Quick Pitch: An online marketplace that connects fashion buyers with brands. Genius Idea: Joor makes wholesale buying more like shopping at your favorite online store. As a senior buyer for Ann Taylor, Mona Bijoor's job involved many back-to-back showroom appointments, spreadsheets and even a fair bit of paper and glue. "My husband would tease me about playing with paper dolls again," Bijoor recalls of the lookboards of apparel and accessories she made before placing orders every season. In March 2010, Bijoor launched Joor, an online wholesale marketplace that connects retail buyers with designers and brands. Brands can upload their collections to Joor, reach out to store buyers that might want to carry their merchandise (rather than cold calling over the phone) and process orders. Buyers, in turn, can discover new designers and submit orders. In design and functionality, Joor closely mimics the shopping experience on consumer-facing retail sites, like Net-a-Porter or Bloomingdales.com. Buyers can search and browse by brand, category, price range, tag and style number, and add looks they like to a shopping cart. They can also send and receive messages via an on-site inbox. Both brands and retailers can adjust their settings so they can't be randomly solicited. Joor now has around 20 employees, and has signed on more than 400 brands and 10,000 retailers, including recognizable names like Diane von Furstenberg, Theory, Bergdorf Goodman and Barneys. The startup raised $3.25 million in funding in September from several venture capital firms, including Battery Ventures, Lerer Ventures, Great Oaks Venture Captial, Landis Capital and Forerunner Ventures, following a $2.25 million Series A round in July 2011. Joor plans to use the funds to open an L.A. office and double its staff. Joor makes money by charging brands a $3,500 setup fee and a 3% cut of every sale. Competitors include Balluun, Brandboom and Boutique Fashion Brokers. Over the next six months, Bijoor says she's focused primarily on international growth -- in fact, when we last spoke earlier this week, she was boarding a plane to meet designers and retailers in Milan and Paris. At present, 10% of brands and 20% of retailers on Joor are international. |
| Kodak Exiting the Consumer Printer Business | | Friday, September 28, 2012 1:08 PM | Todd Wasserman |
|  The long, sad decline of Eastman Kodak continued on Friday as the company announced it was exiting the consumer printer business. The company, which is in the process of submitting a restructuring plan to Bankruptcy Court, will "wind down sales of consumer inkjet printers" and focus instead on selling ink to its existing install base. "Kodak is making good progress toward emergence from Chapter 11, taking significant actions to reorganize our core ongoing businesses, reduce costs, sell assets, and streamline our organizational structure," said Antonio M. Perez, Kodak chairman and CEO, in a statement. Perez added that halting consumer printer sales "will substantially advance the transformation of our business to focus on commercial, packaging and functional printing solutions and enterprise services. As we complete the other key objectives of our restructuring in the weeks ahead, we will be well positioned to emerge successfully in 2013." The move comes after Kodak stopped selling digital cameras in February to cut costs. Kodak filed for bankruptcy protection in January. Shorn of both businesses, Kodak will now concentrate on "commercial, packaging and functional printing solutions and enterprise services," according to the release. The company also plans to eliminate about 4,000 positions this year, or 23% of its workforce. Once a leader in the photography market, Kodak was unable to successfully adapt to the digital era. In an attempt to remain afloat, the company has proposed selling its trove of patents. The company also tried -- unsuccessfully -- to sue RIM and Apple over alleged patent violations, seeking more than $1 billion in damages. BONUS: A History of Kodak in Pictures |
| Apple's Biggest Blunders of the Post-Steve Jobs Era | | Friday, September 28, 2012 10:10 AM | Seth Fiegerman |
| 
Apple's CEO Tim Cook surprised many on Friday by publicly apologizing for the company's new maps application, which has been widely panned by customers and reviewers alike as inferior to Google Maps ever since it was introduced with iOS 6 a week and a half ago. In a letter published on Apple's website, Cook wrote: At Apple, we strive to make world-class products that deliver the best experience possible to our customers. With the launch of our new Maps last week, we fell short on this commitment. We are extremely sorry for the frustration this has caused our customers and we are doing everything we can to make Maps better. At first blush, it may have seemed like an insanely rare admission of failure from a company that not only prides itself on being insanely great, but insanely reluctant to concede its missteps. Yet, in the post-Steve Jobs era, Apple's top executives appear to be making more mistakes and to be more willing to admit them. In fact, Apple has issued public apologies in each of the past three months of this year. Apple's Other Public Apologies This Year Back in July, the company made headlines for withdrawing from the EPEAT environmental rating system, which informs consumers whether electronics manufacturers are making eco-friendly products. Apple initially claimed that its own environmental standards were higher, but after receiving a huge amount of backlash from consumers and environmental groups, one of the company's top executives issued a public apology. Bob Mansfield, Apple's SVP of Mac Software Engineering and Hardware Engineering said: We've recently heard from many loyal Apple customers who were disappointed to learn that we had removed our products from the EPEAT rating system. I recognize that this was a mistake. Starting today, all eligible Apple products are back on EPEAT. Just those four words -- "This was a mistake" -- were enough to surprise many of those covering the company, but it would only be a few weeks before they'd see these words once more from Apple. In August, Apple found itself apologizing yet again after multiple reports came out suggesting that the company had been cutting back its retail store staff as part of an effort from the new SVP of Retail John Browett to make the stores more profitable. The company denied that this was tied to profitability, but still admitted these changes were a mistake. Kristin Huguet, an Apple spokeswoman, said in a statement to Dow Jones afterwards: Making these changes was a mistake and the changes are being reversed. Our employees are our most important asset and the ones who provide the world-class service our customers deserve. Why Apple is Making More Mistakes Now The recent string of mistakes and apologies may simply reflect the reality that Apple has gotten a little sloppier as it transitions from the Jobs Era to the Cook Era. According to Tim Bajarin, principal analyst with Creative Strategies, some things will inevitably "fall through the cracks" as Apple continues to transition to new management and figure out its path forward a little more than a year after Jobs resigned from the company. "They have to fill some pretty big shoes and find their own way, in the sense that it's their company not Steve's anymore," Bajarin told Mashable. "That is why ultimately I think you see Tim Cook stepping up and admitting mistakes much earlier, rather than letting them get completely out of hand." Apple has made several other blunders in the past year under Cook, and while it hasn't publicly apologized for these, it has moved to clean them up quickly. For starters, the company's Siri and Genius ad campaigns have been criticized by many for abandoning some of the key elements that made Apple commercials great. While Apple continues to air its celebrity-drenched Siri commercials, the company was quick to kill off its Genius ads just a few days after they first aired during the Olympics, which was seen as an admission of failure by some (though Apple's ad agency said it was the plan all along.) In another blunder, Apple released its own standalone podcast app in July, which was quickly slammed by bloggers as poorly designed and generally slow to load. The app was so bad that it had a 2.5 star rating on iTunes for awhile after launching. After a month, Apple responded to all the complaints by issuing a big update to the app to make it work better. Then, of course, there's Siri, which has been criticized for its limitations pretty much since it launched with the iPhone 4S in October of last year. In some ways, Siri's problems are the most comparable to the new maps fiasco, in that both products were arguably released as beta products (a word Apple hates to use) that improve the more people use it. The difference, however, is that Siri was a new feature whereas the maps application has been central to the iPhone since it launched. While Apple has never apologized for Siri, some close to the company have slammed the product anonymously, with one ex-Apple insider quoted in Fortune as saying, "Stevewould have lost his mind over Siri." Apple Screwed Up Under Steve Jobs, Too Indeed, it's become a popular refrain anytime Apple makes a mistake with a product that it would never have happened under in the Jobs' era. Yet, Siri was acquired and incorporated into the iPhone while Jobs was still in control of the company. What's more, even Jobs apologized for the company's mistakes on occasion, albeit reluctantly. During the Antennagate controversy, Jobs initially blamed customers for holding the phone wrong, but after a few weeks of heavy criticism, Jobs finally conceded, "We screwed up." For the most part though, Jobs chose to rely more on his so-called reality distortion field to persuade the media and the public that he and the company were right, no matter what. Cook appears to have a different leadership style, both because of differences between the two CEOs' personalities and by virtue of the fact that Apple is stumbling a bit more these days as part of the transition. Bajarin says that he personally "cutsa lot of slack" because he is aware of how difficult it is for a big company to make a transition in leadership. The real question, though, is whether Apple's customers will be quite as forgiving. Image courtesy of Flickr, GDS-Productions |
| Why Carriers Don't Care About Customer Service | | Friday, September 28, 2012 9:23 AM | Mobiledia |
|  Verizon has long enjoyed the best customer service ratings among U.S carriers, but its success has less to do with support than you may think. Several research companies judge and rank the major carriers' customer service efforts each year, but while Verizon still holds the crown, its competitors are catching up, and the rankings of the rest of the field do not measure up with their respective financial success. For example, J.D. Power still ranks Verizon on top when it comes to customer service, but the American Customer Satisfaction Index, or ACSI, paints a different picture. ACSI puts Sprint, the third-place carrier in the U.S, at top when it comes to customer satisfaction. Meanwhile AT&T, the country's second-place carrier, sits in dead last with a score of 69 out of 100. The numbers suggest that having the best customer service is not necessarily indicative of subscriber gains and losses. Providing good help certainly counts for something, but in the wireless industry, customers weigh other priorities before they consider how well a company's online chat assistance works, or how nice a representative was to them on the phone. The first question that comes to mind is "How good is the coverage in my area?" If a carrier's coverage is lacking, then chances are they won't choose it, even if the employees offer free milk and cookies at the local store. So Verizon remains the top carrier, in large part due to its investment in LTE and the widest footprint in the country. And its dominance will remain in place for the near future, especially with its extensive 4G build-out. Verizon's dominance also gives it a fair amount of leverage among consumers, even as it revamps its pricing and plans. The larger and more powerful a carrier becomes, the greater its ability to make drastic changes that cause its customer base major upheaval, but keep customer satisfaction ratings intact. The company, the critical darling of customer service for years, made two of the most dramatic changes in the history of the wireless industry in the past 18 months. Verizon was the first to put an end to unlimited data and recently revamped its monthly plans to focus on sharing data, with unlimited calling automatically included. Both moves garnered criticism from analysts, the press and customers, yet the carrier continues to rank number-one in customer surveys and gain subscribers. Why? The answer is simple. Because Verizon offers the best wireless service in more areas of the country than any other carrier, and in this nation's narrowing field of wireless competition, that's all that really matters. Sprint is another perennial leader in customer service surveys, and it still offers unlimited data. However, its financial situation is the exact opposite of Verizon's. The carrier is in debt and struggling to hold on to subscribers. Great customer service and unlimited data are nice attributes, but it isn't enough for the carrier to compete with superpowers like Verizon and AT&T because what it really comes down to is the network, and Sprint's just isn't as good as the other guys. Even T-Mobile, which competes on lower price, can't seem to win with customers. However, it's not necessarily because it doesn't provide half-way decent customer service. Instead, its wireless coverage is poor, lacking a true 4G network and a poor selection of smartphones. The reality is Verizon ranks number-one on customer service, but there's no real winner in the public eye. People love to complain about their carrier -- it's become something of a national pastime. But the truth remains that carriers are a necessary evil and whichever company offers the best coverage in your area is the one you're going to go with. So the next time you get that wireless bill in the mail and you uncover those hidden fees, or you receive a notification that you'll have to change your plan to fit the carrier's new offerings and you grab the phone to call and threaten to cancel, just stop. Canceling will cost you hundreds. So, pull up a coverage map and see that this carrier is truly what's best for you, whether you like it or not. Customer service doesn't mean a thing. Image courtesy of Flickr, jfingas |
| What You Can Expect at the Mashable Media Summit | | Friday, September 28, 2012 9:12 AM | Jennifer Diamond |
|  This year's Mashable Media Summit is a conference you don't want to miss. From an inside look at Reddit's growth to demystifying data driven journalism, you'll learn about the hottest trends and hear the stories that matter, from the biggest leaders in digital media. The Mashable Media Summit is a one-day conference that explores how new forms of technology are redefining media. The brightest minds in the industry will come together Nov. 2 at the TimesCenter in New York City to explore the latest innovations in the space and the future of journalism. Get your tickets now.
This Nov. 2, we'll be hitting on the biggest trends in media and what to watch for in 2013. The Mashable Media Summit will dive into: Digital media 2013 trends Reddit's evolution into a media company Demystifying data-driven journalism The biggest lies in advertising The digital revolution of public television Social analytics: What you can and should be measuring The future of branded video content The digital election of 2012 Facebook's reinvention of the entertainment industry Social networks: The new publishers Other speakers include Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit, Tom Bedecarre, CEO of AKQA, Joan Walsh, editor at large at Salon, Kay M. Madati, head of entertainment and media at Facebook, John Keefe, Senior Editor for Data News & Journalism Technology at WNYC, Emily Bell, Professor of Professional Journalism at Columbia Journalism School, Jessica Bennett, executive editor at Tumblr and Dan Roth, executive editor at LinkedIn, among other industry leaders. In addition to a dynamic lineup of content sessions, you'll have the opportunity to connect with high-level media professionals across advertising, journalism and technology. And like at all our conferences, the Mashable team will be in full force, so you'll have the chance to hang out with our company crew. Check out the highlights below of last year's sold out Mashable Media Summit. You don't want to miss this year's one-day event, so get your tickets now! Mashable Media Summit Information Date: Friday, Nov. 2, 2012 Time: 10:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. Location: The TimesCenter, 242 West 41st Street, New York, NY 10036 Tickets: Purchase early bird tickets on Eventbrite. A Look Back at Last Year's Mashable Media Summit Supporting Sponsor Sponsorship Opportunities A limited number of sponsor opportunities are available for the Mashable Media Summit. This is an excellent opportunity to get in front of Mashable's passionate and influential audience. Contact sponsorships@mashable.com for opportunities. |
| Amazon May Be Getting Into the Wine Business | | Friday, September 28, 2012 8:09 AM | Lauren Indvik |
|  Amazon may be trying its hand at the wine business once again, after having shuttered its efforts in that area three years ago. The online retailer invited around 100 wineries to an event in Napa, Calif., on Monday, Terry Hall, a spokesperson for a regional trade association, told The Wall Street Journal. Derrick Peters, whose LinkedIn profile claims that he does business development for a "new group" at Amazon, reportedly told attendees that Amazon is preparing to launch a third-party Marketplace for wine sellers in the next four weeks. Wineries will be able to list their products through Amazon, but like other Marketplace sellers, must handle shipping and compliance on their own. Amazon is charging wineries a $39.99 monthly participation fee, plus a 15% cut of every sale, according to Sonoma's Wine Industry Insight and the WSJ, citing industry sources. The retailer is also negotiating with shipping and compliance companies to provide low fixed rates for vendors, but nothing has been offered at this time. Amazon stopped selling wine in late 2009 after its shipping partner, New Vine Logistics, halted operations. The company is avoiding that pitfall this time around by putting shipping responsibilities in the hands of the wineries themselves. The new venture poses a big threat to Wine.com, which offers free shipping on its wines for $49.99 per year. That model will have little stay if pitted against Amazon Prime, which offers free two-day shipping on all of its products, plus access to Amazon's streaming video and e-book lending library, for $79.99 per year. Amazon could not be reached for comment. Image courtesy of Flickr, tribp |
| Your Publishing Content Has a 72-Hour Shelf Life | | Friday, September 28, 2012 7:49 AM | ClickZ |
|  A new type of data storage has been released called a yottabyte, a unit of information equal to 1,000 zettabytes, or 10^24 bytes, or four levels up from the good old terabyte. Why should you care? Because if you are in the publishing business this is a warning signal to you. The world is saturated with content. According to Parks Associates, the average consumer's hard drive is filled a slew of information, from photos, to music, to scanned documents. But here's the scary part: 83% of the content we save is not able to be located by the person who saves it within 72 hours. This means your content has a 72-hour shelf life. As publishers, we rely on our articles, columns and works of art not to be just read by the consumer, but cherished. Now that we have trained our readers to save everything to the point of turning them into document hoarders, what can we do to make our material stand out? This will be an interesting requirement that grows from this new phenomenon called "reminder marketing." For example, ShopAdvisor scours Zinio magazines' editorial content and advertisements to look for products customers can purchase online. While you are reading your digital magazine, you may come across a handbag or a camera and see a small shop button. Clicking this button keeps you in the magazine but allows you to see the current price of the product and gives you an opportunity to buy it. But even better, this product advises you on whether it is a good time to buy or if the price will be lower soon. If you choose to follow the pricing, long after you read the issue and forgot which articles were in it, you will get an email driving you back into the magazine to access the product and shop for it. This new trend in content overload and required "reminder marketing" is definitely going to keep us on our toes. Don't believe it? Try this simple test yourself. Think of a presentation or document you wrote last month, or a photo someone sent to you. See if you can find it on your hard drive within 60 seconds. Good luck! Image courtesy of Flickr, Paul Lowry |
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