Over the tail of the last week, I was in Silly Valley at SourceCon. Having been to the Spring one in NYC, I was looking forwards to this for a few weeks. The two reasons why I went were to network with The conference attendees and to learn more about the methods and procedures of sourcing. Here’s a short recap as to how it went.
Following on yesterday’s post of our privacy policy, today is the current draft of our Terms of Use. Just as before, it’s our latest, because we’re still working with counsel to finish it (and her husband is in the hospital, so she’s understandably distracted. On that note, we send out our well wishes).
The full text of the policy will be after the jump, but here’s the basic upshot of it:
* You own your data, not us
* In exchange for using the system, you grant us access to your data
And, at the advice of those lawyers, I have to say the above is the general intent of our privacy policy; however, the text after the jump is the actual and operative policy.
If you have comments or questions, please have at it in the comment section.
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Well, sorta. We’ve completed our MVP and have opened the curtain for a select number of people. In other words, we’re in alpha. The formal relaunch of the main page will be coming over the next few days, so if you’re not on already on the waiting list, now’s a good time to join us.
In anticipation of the upcoming launch of SEATS, we are publishing the latest draft of our privacy policy. The latest, because we’re still working with counsel to finish it (and her husband is in the hospital, so she’s understandably distracted. On that note, we send out our well wishes).
The full text of the policy will be after the jump, but here’s the basic upshot of it:
* We say “knowing” because it is at least theoretically possible that something we do might end up feeding into some marketing or advertising scheme by some other company somewhere. For example, if we were to say “Dana from Company ABC uses SEATS.” as a part of a testimonial on our website, another company might take that information and do…. something with it. Our pledge is that we will not ever willingly enter into any arrangement where we are supporting advertising and/or marketing.
And, at the advice of those lawyers, I have to say the above is the general intent of our privacy policy; however, the text after the jump is the actual and operative policy.
If you have comments or questions, please have at it in the comment section.
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Today, I went to recruitDC, the local recruiting unconference. Unlike last time, today’s festivities were only a half day. Personally, I found that length to be a little more congruent with my own schedule, as it left the remaining half day to work on our upcoming SEATS launch.
The morning started with a “buzz” session, which consisted of several people sitting at a table, having a round table discussion. For the table at which I was located, we had a freelance recruiter, three corporate recruiters, a corporate sourcer, a business development person and me (the lone vendor). A rather wide ranging crew, we talked about the start, middle and end of the hiring process, as well as ways to improve the end result. Just speaking for me, corporate culture is one of the biggest factors of working at any company, and most job descriptions have the same generic corporate culture boilerplate (“we’re an EEOC company who only have the best and brightest in our fast paced environment, blah, blah, blah”) — if they even have that.
The keynote was from John Sumser on All Recruiting Is Local. John’s talk was very enlightening as he touched on a number of factors that contribute to the unique character of any geographical region. For example:
I highly recommend breezing through his presentation for the demographic information alone.
The other talks were not really up my alley, but the keynote alone was well worth my time. As always, it was good to meet fellow travelers focusing on the recruiting space in the DC area. I’m already looking forwards to the next one.
A few days ago, President Obama signed the patent reform bill. As a result, RE’s strategy towards intellectual property (IP) will change to fit the new environment.
In the old approach (sometimes referred to as “first to invent”), patents were something we would get after we (a) got funded, (b) had a strong cash flow and (c) had the resources to pursue them. Why afterwards? For more on why patents are not all that valuable for most startups and why we are changing our position, hit the jump…
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Today Netflix announced the formal division of its business into two separate businesses, Netflix (streaming) and Qwikster (DVDs by mail). When Netflix originally announced its pricing plan changes in July, I suggested that this could be the inevitable outcome. But what’s next for Netflix? Following the separation to its logical conclusion, Netflix could spin off Qwikster into its own separate company, with no remaining ties to Netflix. Alternatively, they could create a tracking stock, allowing private or public investment in just one of the two businesses (this is most often done for the high-growth subsidiary). Or Netflix could retain the Qwikster brand, with its own management team, and that team could focus on ways to grow the DVD business (which, IMHO, is in an inevitable decline).
The action to take depends on Netflix’s corporate strategy and goals. I speculate that Netflix is attempting to become a streaming-only business, with no DVD operations to consider when negotiating for content streaming contracts. I also suspect that, if Netflix looked at its customer behavior data, they’d discover that people stream different content than they request on DVD. So, as Netflix separates itself from the DVD business, they will attempt to acquire different content libraries entirely, not just different content streaming terms.
So what content are people streaming? To answer that, let’s look at two separate indicators of actual user behavior: InstaWatcher, which offers an advanced searching/sorting interface to the Netflix instant queue, and the Pirate Bay, possibly the best-known source for finding a Bittorrent (peer-to-peer) file sharing cloud. Neither of these sites distributes content, but both make it easier for users to find the content they want and start downloading it.
InstaWatcher tracks which content users add to their queues via the site (or begin playing via the site). The most popular content since the site started tracking statistics in March 2009 are overwhelmingly movies (Mad Men season 1 creeps into the lineup at number 38). And virtually any way you view the InstaWatcher stats on most popular content, movies top the list.
The Pirate Bay, on the other hand, tracks the most torrented content — a good indicator of what people will choose to watch when they don’t restrict themselves to readily-available content (i.e., in Netflix’s library or via on-demand streaming from a cable/television service like Comcast or Verizon FiOS). And here, the data shows a different story: following 9 movies (including new DVD releases like Thor and the as-yet-unreleased Rise of the Planet of the Apes), the 10th most popular torrent is WWE Night of Champions, followed by the Vampire Diaries season 3. True Blood season 4 follows shortly behind.
And this is before most of the new fall television season premiers (the major networks start premiering this week and next).
The Pirate Bay’s “top 100″ list has a much more dramatic recency bias than InstaWatcher, whose “most popular” listing considers all activity since March 15, 2009. Taken together, this suggests a trend: people are starting to stream content they otherwise would have watched on television, as shorter shows (hour-long dramas and 30-minute sitcoms). This makes sense, because these shorter shows are shows of convenience, things you watch when you have an hour or 90 minutes free. Watching a 2- or 3-hour movie on a DVD takes a bit more advance planning.
So what does this mean for Netflix? It means that, if I were Netflix, I wouldn’t be overly worried about losing the Starz content (which was Netflix’s largest source of movies), and I’d be more concerned about working deals with TV content providers to “syndicate” entire seasons of popular shows. I’d be negotiating for True Blood, Weeds, the Sopranos, and other premium content people can watch a show at a time. And I’d be thinking about doing deals to finance the production of television shows, by going directly to studios. Warner Brothers studios, which produces popular shows like The Big Bang Theory and the Vampire Diaries, comes to mind; so does the BBC, which produced Coupling, the forerunner to Friends, and Doctor Who, whose re-imagined series enjoys surprisingly mainstream popularity. And I might consider working with Hulu to offer new network television via Netflix streaming.
Whatever Netflix does, the next year or two will be fascinating to watch, and I suspect Netflix will be at the forefront of the evolution of streaming media for years to come.
If you’ve seen our branding so far, our tagline is “Your Resume. Everywhere.” This was a great tag line for our old product, when we were working on synchronizing resume data across multiple sites. We’re not doing that anymore; in fact, we’re largely focusing on recruiters rather than job seekers. So, that particular tagline is not longer particularly relevant to our target audience.
We’re still working through a few permutations, but the one we’re going with for now is “Recruit Anywhere. Anytime.”
As a part of our Baltimore work weekend, we put together what we are considering to be our MVP for SEATS. It’s been a tough process; for some reason, it seems like it’s easier to add things to the pot rather than take them away.
One of my personal hardships with running lean while creating SEATS is my desire to add features to the product. I know that there are some really spiffy things we could add into the product (leveraging location from the phone to alert a recruiter about a job seeker is nearby who matches one of their open positions or leveraging Google Maps to give an applicant an estimate of what their commute would be like so they can make a rational decision about a job, a plugin for WordPress — just for three quick examples). But as neat as those features might be, the MVP is the Minimum Viable Product, not the Mondo Viable Product. And so, off to kill our babies we go.
Here’s what we believe to be the MVP for SEATS:
However, some of the items in the Administrivia pile are actually non-trivial: For example, granting access to a group of job posting to a set of recruiters so everyone can work as a team to fill positions.
If you’re reading this list and thinking something like, “Wait! What about _______!?!”, bear in mind this is Minimum Viable Product, not the final product. We’re going to release before we’ve added every feature because we want to work with customers to make sure we’re on the right path, rather than building some grand edifice that no one wants. With that in mind, please let us know if there’s some feature that you’re dying to have in an ATS.
For the longest time, we’ve been using GoDaddy for domain names. And for primarily three reasons:
And yes, #1 & #3 are effectively the same reason.
That changed today. For those who might have tried to access our website this morning or tried to send us an email, it failed. What’s more, it failed ignominiously. Why would such a thing happen?
Well, because GoDaddy changed our domain name from pointing to our servers to pointing to theirs instead (you know, the ones that are plastered with advertising and oh so tasteful?). I called GoDaddy to find out what happened; it turns out our domain had not been renewed. Even though we had set the “auto-renew” flag to true, even though we had two credit cards on file which were both valid, GoDaddy elected not to renew the domain.
Their position is that the specific RE domain was not linked to the credit card, and so it lapsed. When I asked about notifications, they said, “well, we sent out an email saying your domains were expiring and you should do something about it”. Yes, they did send that email. Of course, they sent out a ton of other emails for the other domains I have with GoDaddy (all of which were set to auto-renew) and everything worked out fine for those.
The net result of this is that we are moving from GoDaddy to DNSimple. DNSimple is much more techie friendly, there’s no annoying upselling and advertising everywhere, and the rates are cheaper, if you have enough domains. Which we do.
The lesson here is that GoDaddy didn’t have to loose me as a customer. If their “your domain is expiring” email had been adeptly worded — or, even better, a dedicated email saying “your domain will expire because the financial information is incorrect” — it would have been caught and all this anguish wouldn’t have happened. But, it did and we’re moving right along.
DNSimple uses a flat rate tier structure; coupled with their rather high transfer fees and we’re going to be more in the red this year over DNS but will make back the costs on year 2 and be black there on out. But, DNSimple isn’t all peaches and cream; the transfer interface is a bit clunky, not to mention very manually intensive. Of course, if I had the copious free time, I could probably script something up using their RESTful API, but that’s actually more time consuming (coding/testing/etc — the by hand approach I can do here and there while I’m doing other things).
Another thing; we’re going to stay on GoDaddy until all the subsidary domains change over to DNSimple and we’re satisified with the stability of our configuration. We’ll probably migrate the main domain cluster over an upcoming weekend to limit any possible disruptions. Watch this space and our twitter feed for more details.
