Business

Silly rabbit.

Lots of interesting numbers from a recent ComputerWorld survey on IT-related jobs. One thing that sticks out:

The new report shows that currently employed IT professionals see application-development, support, security, and analysis as the important skills to acquire. According to the report, the top five skills that hiring managers are expected to seek are:

— App Development: 49% — Support/Help Desk: 37% — Security: 29% — Network Administration: 28% — Business Intel: 24%

This product announcement really has me excited. The do-not-call registry caused the telemarketing industry to shift their gears and develop a new strategy, the robocall. When a human being calls you, you can ask them to take you off their list and, legally, they have to comply or face stiff penalties. Their response? Robocalls. Speaking from personal experience, the vast majority of telemarketing calls I’ve received have been recordings, with no way for me to relay my do-not-call request.

Enter Nomorobo, a free service that screens your calls in real time. If it determines that the call is a robocall, it intercepts the call with a warning message heard only by the caller, and your phone doesn’t even ring.

Of course, not every robocall is evil.

Doesn’t block school closings, appointment reminders, weather advisories and other legal robocalls.

Nomorobo launches on September 30th. My hopes are high that this will work.

This is an interesting business model. RocketSpace rents space to tech startups, a common enough practice. But instead of offices, or even cubicles, RocketSpace uses long tables, shared within a single company, or between multiple companies. Tight quarters, noisy, with some nice perks.

What RocketSpace, the office rental company he started in San Francisco in a building on its last legs in late 2010, does provide is lots of high-speed Internet access, proximity to well-regarded young companies, amenities like free beer and occasional chats with the likes of Steven A. Ballmer of Microsoft, Dick Costolo of Twitter and the venture capitalist Vinod Khosla.

And RocketSpace is succeeding. By packing tenants into tight quarters, they achieve a 20% rent increase per-square-foot over traditional office space.

Companies that have passed through RocketSpace, either as local start-ups or initial satellite offices, include such tech darlings as Zappos, Uber, Spotify and Kabam, an online gaming company.

I suspect we’ll see this model make its way into other tech markets.

The NFL reached a tentative settlement on the brain-injury lawsuit filed on behalf of more than 18,000 former NFL players, including the family of Pro Bowl linebacker Junior Seau, who committed suicide last year. Almost coincidentally, Tim Carmody wrote this intriguing post for Kottke.org about football players and the harm that befalls them.

This is all to say that what offensive linemen do in football is not well understood. When the NFL finally started to act on widespread concussions and the resultant uptick in chronic traumatic encephalopathy — if you never have, please read about the life and death of Dave Duerson — they focused on open-field helmet-to-helmet hits and defensive players targeting quarterbacks, running backs, and receivers (so-called “skill positions”). They ignored the constant battering that offensive linemen take, how repeated brain injury poses the greatest risk for long-term problems, how linemen are rewarded for staying on the field and playing through pain, and the ways in which they’re encouraged to both be more aggressive and prioritize someone else’s safety over their own.

Worthwhile read. I hope the money from the settlement reaches the people who need it. At the very least, I hope it provides health care for all 18,000 of those former players.

Interesting comparison on total funds raised:

Indiegogo campaigns were found to have raised far fewer successful dollars than Indiegogo, with around $98 million total all-time, while Kickstarter had about six times that, or $612 million. Kickstarter has had 40 projects cross the $1 million threshold, with only 3 doing the same on Indiegogo, and Kickstarter’s average success rate is 44 percent, while Indiegogo’s is around 34 percent (which doesn’t take into account the many delisted projects that failed to raise at least $500. Including those delisted efforts, the previously reported 9.3 percent success rate on 142,301 total campaigns matches up nicely.

Much of the data was gathered by scraping the sites, so unsuccessful campaigns that are dropped from the site are not counted, but that shouldn’t make enough of a difference to change the apparent results.

Back in the good old days, it was easy to pass a used cell phone along to a friend or family member. Then this happened:

In the mid-’90s, wireless companies began to place digital locks on their phones so that consumers couldn’t transfer them to a new carrier. It’s relatively easy to unlock a phone—you can download the necessary code for a few bucks. But as of January 26, under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), you can no longer do this legally. The 1998 law, aimed mostly at curbing digital piracy, also outlawed cellphone unlocking, but the US Copyright Office had always granted an exemption since unlocking phones really has little to do with copyright.

OK, the exemption makes sense, seems like a reasonable solution. But wait.

The wireless industry didn’t like that—it argued that because carriers often subsidize the cost of phones, it’s not fair to let customers take their device to a competitor. The Copyright Office has apparently embraced that argument: This year, for the first time, it denied the usual requests by organizations and individuals to extend the exemption.

Read the article. This is an environmental disaster waiting to happen.

Uber is a car service with a kick-ass iOS app. Launch the app and a map appears showing all the “black cars” in your area, with the time until the closest one can get to your location. Tap a button, the car is instantly dispatched. When the driver gets close, they’ll call and/or text you to let you know the car is near. You rank the drivers (1-5 stars) and they rank you, too. Terrific experience, just a bit more expensive than a cab, but much more convenient and incredibly reliable.

The fact that they are raising so much money is a sign of both the maturation of this space, and of its competitive nature.