I’m a long time believer that the success of any mobile platform lies in the hands of the developer. How about a couple of tips for mobile developers and/or would-be developers? Blackberry is offering up a chance for fame and fortune.. well, not exactly, but it is a great opportunity for developers – enter the [...]
Opportunities For The Mobile Developer – Developers Developers…
Backlink: http://blog.gisuser.com/2011/08/24/opportunities-for-the-mobile-developer-developers-developers/
Real-time Web analytics has changed the nature of collecting, analyzing and reporting Internet data. As the name implies, it's a way to measure website traffic in order to understand and optimize a site's usage.
It used to be this was a specialized area, inhabited by a select few who knew their way around data well enough to tease out and report on the trends they found. No more. Today, the ability to collect and view data in real-time allows more people to get their arms around it. In publishing, for example, "they'd push a story out and forget about it and think about the next one," said Tony Haile of the analytics service Chartbeat, whose clients include the New York Times, Fox News, and Forbes. "What we're seeing now with the real-time Web is they're putting out a story but they're often iterating on it. They'll see a story is spiking (generating a lot of user interest) so they will draw out the audience and see what they can do with it. That ability to be much more adaptive is key to what's happening to the real-time Web."
Interested? Many programmers already have the skills they need to hit the ground running. "The core of our real-time engine is built in C, which is pretty much as old school as you can get," says Haile. "And then we combine that with things like Python and Tornado which are more conducive to real-time situations."-- Dino Londis
Real-Time Analytics Offer Real Programming Opportunities
Backlink: http://career-resources.dice.com/articles/content/entry/real_time_analytics_has_real
Microsoft is continuing its efforts to help returning soldiers with the Elevate American Veterans Initiative, through which the tech giant offers several opportunities to help veterans transition back to civilian life.
First, the company is actively hiring veterans who have
learned technical skills while serving in the
military. Although many are trained and certified on Microsoft
products, the real strength of the new hires is their relationship to the
military branch in which they served. Microsoft sees their role as sales and
marketing techs who can sell products and services back to their respective
branches.
The program is scheduled to run two years and has partnered with six providers to properly distribute money and services.
Microsoft has also just launched WeStillServe, a platform that connects members to Microsoft's employee-veterans to help match their skills to available positions. Resources include:
- Live chats with Microsoft employees who've also served and can act as advocates.
- Integration with Microsoft social media communities to better teach veterans about targeting their job search.
- Tools to directly map military occupations to available Microsoft positions.
-- Dino Londis
Returning Veterans Find Opportunities with Microsoft
Backlink: http://career-resources.dice.com/articles/content/entry/returning_veterans_find_opportunities_with
Here's a few Directions Magazine articles published in the past month that I found interesting:
Seeing a need to help 60 million Americans manage their $4 trillion dollars in retirement accounts, Mike and Ryan Alfred launched BrightScope in 2008. They headed to Washington, DC, to obtain electronic data on 401K plans from the Department of Labor. They assumed that since every employer is required to provide the government with this information, it would be readily available to any citizen.
But the brothers were wrong. Labor Department officials first said that they didn’t have these data; and when challenged, they offered to provide millions of pages of printed reports—at a cost of five cents a page. The entire data set would have cost a fortune, filled 1400 boxes, and been impossible to use. Undeterred, Mike and Ryan started a lobbying campaign. With the help of several Senators, they caused the government to relent and give them electronic copies of the reports they needed.
I was speaking with a 99er who struck on a business idea that seemed plausible that most any industrious tech can do: Support 10-12 small businesses that are close in proximity for a very low rate. This isn't the kind of network administration of the old days where you build a domain maximizing uptime. Today between XP/Win7 and Server 200x, the platform is relatively stable. The work is not so much running around each to workstation because Word crashed, but helping the small business wade through the vast amounts of options for each technology. The small business now needs advice on backup, compliance, data security, data integrity, remote access, antivirus endpoint protection, patching solutions, not to mention their web presence, search engine optimization, smart phones, etc, etc, etc.
I loved the idea when I heard it and when I read the USA Today article about small business owners being overwhelmed with this very problem; I was convinced that there is a business opportunity here.
Now I'm not suggesting that you perform all of these duties, but you can offer best suggestions based on their needs and their type of business. The business owner may not even know where to begin on backup, and you know a Google search will take her down a rabbit hole that she doesn't have the time for. You can bring in the teams that can perform these duties. Once in place you maintain them.
Of course you know Word will crash, and a doc will be lost, and a server will seize, but you'll be there because you are also on call. The difference from the old days of network support is that the remote access is reliable. If you need to come in, you drive over; It's as if you're down the hall. If the ISP goes down, you're the one who calls them. You then turn around and offer a failover ISP solution, something the business owner may not have even thought of.
You also will come in for a standard two hours a week to walk around and proactively deal with problems that the user may have thought too small to report. Try to take a meeting with the owner to discuss problems and solutions.
For this you charge $3 an hour. With 10 or 12 business, that's approximately 60K a year. Again, you are not building their SEO, or website, or buying their smart phones. You are their answer to any tech question they may have. You are their expert at a discount. When the system fails, you're the go to guy/gal.
Of course this is all flexible. If you have DBA skills, you can show them ways to better leverage their customer relations management software. It's whatever you want it to be.
--Dino Londis
