I’ve kept a frantic pace (at least for me) this last week with posts on Bilgistic. But I can see that I’m going to need help with feedback, information, or just general story ideas. So I’ve started up a Twitter account which you can follow. I won’t use this account to follow people so if you want to say something back, you can either @ reply to me or better would be to direct message me on the Bilgistic account. Thanks for the support so far. I’ll try to keep the good stuff coming.
Archive for the 'Jobs' Category Page 3 of 3
We all know the pains that are happening at EarthLink and it is quite a shame. I, like many of you, remember the old days of MindSpring. In fact MindSpring was my first ISP after I left Georgia Tech.
So I started trolling around EarthLink’s career site and found something very surprising and possibly telling. First, EarthLink has 21 open job requisitions. Not a large number given the massive layoffs they’ve experienced lately. But the most recent posting piqued my curiosity.
Posted on December 21, 2007 is an opening for a Director of Corporate Development. This position is said to be the
most senior level solely focused on Corporate Development, a Director of Corporate Development is responsible for managing all facets of Earthlink’s merger, acquisition & investment processes from start to finish for one or more designated segments of Earthlink’s targeted growth areas
Could it be? Sounds to me like EarthLink may soon take some of that $300 million of cash on hand and start spending it to acquire companies. This may be a really good thing for startups on the East Coast if what you do makes strategic sense to EarthLink.
We’ll have to keep a close eye on who gets this position because their background could determine how good this is for Atlanta and the East Coast. Not to mention EarthLink’s future as a functioning public company.
I noticed this posting over at GigaOM about additional personnel cuts at EarthLink (there is a side commentary about the fact that NO ONE posted a comment to this story but I digress). I pinged some folks (and have been pinged by some folks) that I know there (disclosure: I consulted for EarthLink for six months in 2006). It does seem as if there are some additional cuts coming at the end of this month. These may be in line with the previously announced cuts but I’m not sure.
With all of these EarthLinkers on the street, you have to wonder where they’ll land. I’d say it’s a perfect time for them to form teams and start some new companies. Unfortunately, I haven’t heard of this happening yet.
For you recently ex-EarthLinkers, maybe you can get back some of those jobs that were outsourced and are now coming back to Atlanta.
P.S. The EarthLink web site still blows. I can’t believe they still list all their press releases (back to 1995) on one freakin’ page (132K of HTML). I complained about that when I was there last year. Glad to see no one did anything about it.
When the folks at iRobot realized that hackers were itching to use the Roomba as a platform for their own robotic projects, they released the iRobot Create. This simple decision has spawned a whole community of individuals that are using the iRobot Create for homebrew projects.
A team of Georgia Tech students in ECE 4180 used the Create for their class project. It’s been written up in Engadget and there is a full description (with photos) on Instructables. The talcum powder “GT” caught my eye as did the pretty good rendering of Buzz from the PrintBot.
So why do I mention all this? Well, this team of four was pretty creative and developed a decent product over a semester (which may have commercial viability). If I were running a hardware based startup that needed to hire some college grads, I’d hunt down the four students whose names appear as output from the PrintBot (assuming they were the only ones involved in the project). I’d say their semester long project should bump them up to a second round interview for any company looking to hire some people. ECE 4180 is a senior level undergrad class and presumably these four will be graduating soon if they haven’t already.