If you can claim to be a data scientist and have the chops to back that up, you can pretty much write your own ticket even in this tough job market. A quick search of the popular job posting sites –Indeed.com, SimplyHired.com, or Dice.com – shows a huge demand for data scientists or anyone who can demonstrate other “big data”skills.

The reason? Companies in all industries now understand that they need to make better sense of the massive data sets at their disposal — data sets that can include computer log files, social networking feeds, digital video or audio, you name it.

That’s led to a spike in demand for data scientists — professionals that understand math and statistics but also have a flare for “art.” They understand how to display or visualize that raw information so its value can be understood. Petabytes of data are useless if no one can make sense of it.

Some headhunters have gotten creative, emailing reporters who cover the beat looking for recommendations. Here’s one recent email:

My client is one of the largest professional services firms in the world and they are looking for very senior data analytics experts who can apply his/her advanced analytics, predictive modeling, and data visualization skills to the fraud/dispute arena.  Exceptional compensation packages are available in the $300,000 to $500,000 range for the appropriate technical and leadership experience.

(Send me email if you want more info.)

Alice Hill, managing director for Dice.com, said her company just started tracking the category in December so it’s too early to have long-term comparisons of starting salaries or number of posts over time, but big data is nonetheless hot. “We can see shortages coming and when there are shortages, salaries go up,” she said.

“We’re starting to see terms like data scientist, natural language processing, showing up in many industries — it’ s not just mobile, not just high-tech companies,” said Hill. “The biggest thing about big data is it crosses every single industry. Wal-Mart was one of the first to start looking because of all the RFID chips and the tracking and supply chain management needs it has. “

She sees big data posts in financial services, in retail, in e-commerce. According to recent Dice posts, Amazon is looking for a data scientist in seattle, Sears Holdings seeks a Hadoop administrator in Chicago; and Cision wants a “wicked smart” software engineer/Big Data in Chicago.

The VP of a big data-related vendor on the east coast just finished a sweep of career fairs at a number of universities in search of a research scientist — someone who can help develop algorithms for machine learning and for core Java developers, programmers to take those algorithms and implement them in scalable compute environments like Hadoop and Cassandra.

But he also sees a burgeoning need for a “data scientist” staff position. That person would head up all the data aggregation and the big data architecture. People with the tech skills for that job are incredibly valuable, he said.

While he didn’t have hard numbers on data scientist salaries specifically, he did say that in the Washington, D.C., area, a sales engineer that understands big data analytics and can implement a Hadoop architecture can command at least a 25 percent premium in salary over another highly technical sales engineer without those skills, he said.

As more companies gear up their big data efforts, the imbalance between supply and demand of big data expertise will not evaporate any time soon. Big data and the skills necessary to make sense of it will be on the agenda at GigaOM’s Structure: Data Conference in New York next month.

Source

Could the app economy be the cure for the United States’ employment doldrums? A new report suggests that the nascent app economy spurred on by iOS, Android and Facebook apps has generated 466,000 jobs in the U.S. economy since 2007.

In the report by technology trade group TechNet, Michael Mandel of the South Mountain Economics, who conducted the research, found that 311,000 app-related jobs have been generated and another 155,000 jobs have also been indirectly created from the app boom. The figures are estimates and are based on calculations on the existing market for app-related jobs. Mandel warns that the figures could represent “jobs not lost” rather than net jobs gained.

But if the latter is true, it starts to paint a broader picture of the economic benefit from apps, which have only really been around in force for the last four years. We’ve already talked about some of the revenue brought in by apps and where it’s forecast to hit. Gartner said last year it expected mobile app stores to generate $15 billion in revenue in 2011. But it’s interesting to see how many actual jobs might be at work in this emerging economy. App jobs can be found in big software and gaming companies like Electronic Arts and Zynga to small one person start-ups working out of a home. Big companies are also devoting more and more resources to apps, and as apps help companies grow, it fuels the need for more jobs in human resources, sales, marketing and other non-technical positions. There’s also anemerging app development services economy growing out of the app boom.

The app economy has been a major engine for job growth in an otherwise sluggish labor market, said Mandel. And it’s likely to keep growing as wireless and social platforms expand.

Mandel arrived at his estimates by looking at the number of unique “help wanted” ads for apps in the the Conference Board HWOL database. He then factored in the historical rate in the computer and mathematics industry for employment ads compared to existing jobs. And then he applied a multiplier to estimate the number of indirect jobs created by apps.

The highest number of app positions in a metro area were created in the New York-New Jersey-Long Island area (9.2 percent), followed by San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont (8.5 percent),  San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara (6.3 percent) and the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue (5.7 percent) area. Overall, California generated the most app jobs by far with 23.8 percent of all jobs, followed by New York (6.9 percent) and Washington (6.4 percent).

These are still early days and that’s why Mandel was forced to come up with his own estimates, because there is no good tracking done by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But I think we’re likely to see a lot more growth, especially as smartphone and tablet penetration increases.

As I wrote earlier, consumers are increasingly favoring apps over a browser in part because it’s a pretty streamlined experience that is dedicated to one purpose. Over time, we will likely see the growth in app jobs level off as more companies look to leverage the web and build more cross-platform HTML5 web apps. But for now, there’s still a lot of interest in native apps that are built atop popular platforms. And that means this is where to find a lot of new jobs.

< a href=”http://gigaom.com/2012/02/07/app-economy-has-created-almost-half-a-million-jobs/”>Source

Apple is the king of the PC heap, as long as you consider the iPad among those devices. Research firm Canalys does, and its most recent look at client PC sales, focusing on the fourth calendar quarter of 2011, shows the PC market growing, but mostly as a result of strong iPad sales for the year.

With Apple’s more than 15 million iPads shipped during the quarter, the worldwide PC market grew 16 percent year over year. Not counting tablets, of which the iPad is easily the most successful, the PC market actually shrank by 0.4 percent worldwide when compared to the same period a year ago, according to the Canalys data.

Apple’s success both with the iPad and its Mac computers allowed it to take top honors for the quarter, knocking HP to second place overall. Canalys says the lack of a valid HP tablet competitor, now that the TouchPad is shelved, will mean that HP will continue to struggle against Apple’s success.

The iPad wasn’t the only tablet to do well during the quarter, however. Canalys says that the Amazon Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet also helped contribute to the success of tablets in the U.S. Amazon ranked as the second strongest tablet manufacturer worldwide, while Barnes & Noble took the fourth place spot.

All told, iPads accounted for 22 percent of all worldwide PC shipments in the fourth quarter of 2011, as measured by Canalys. It’ll be interesting to see what effect a new iPad launch in the coming months might have on the worldwide momentum of tablets, and the larger PC industry.

Source

thePlatform is pushing cross-platform compatibility with a new offering that will let its customers create one video player that can be delivered to any device or browser that is trying to access it. That capability is being rolled out due to increased demand for HTML5 video, despite a lack of real standards across browsers for the display and rendering of video players.

“The big thing that has changed… is that just about every media company has an HTML5 player out or on their roadmap,” thePlatform CEO Ian Blaine told me in a phone interview. “I can’t think of a single company that hasn’t adopted HTML5 as part of its mix.”

Blaine says that HTML5 has better cross-device support than other options, especially when you take iOS devices into account. The problem is that, although the HTML5 video tag is widely supported amongst all modern browsers, it’s also rendered differently depending on which browser a viewer is using, and in some cases, on which version of a browser that’s being used. That means that publishers frequently have to put extra effort into setting up HTML5 players to ensure that they work as designed.

It’s that sort of individual browser tweaking that thePlatform hopes to eliminate with video players that will work in any browser. Customers can build players with the thePlatform’s Player Dev Kit and view changes in a real-time preview pane. And once a customer has customized its player, it will work over a number of platforms without any further development necessary. thePlatform’s smart player will automatically detect the device and browser being used and automatically serve up the correct video assets in Flash or HTML5 depending on the viewing environment.

thePlatform’s offering also has one advantage over some other video players, in that it has figured out how to make mid-roll ads work in HTML5, which has proven to be a stumbling block for some publishers. According to Blaine, that meant publishers were either stuck monetizing their content only with pre-rolls — which basically was leaving money on the table — or stitching ads into the videos, which removed the ability to serve up dynamic or targeted video ads, neither of which was an acceptable outcome.

Source

Apple: launches interactive textbooks for the iPad

The textbooks, available via the new iBooks 2 app, include animations, diagrams and video. The books will not carry advertising.

The tech giant, which unveiled its new education apps during an event in New York yesterday, has partnered with education publishers including Pearson, McGraw-Hill and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt to produce interactive textbooks, priced at around $14.99 (£9.69).

Phillip Schiller, senior vice president of worldwide marketing, said the textbooks provide a “more dynamic, engaging and interactive” way for students to learn.

“Education is deep in Apple’s DNA and iPad may be our most exciting education product yet.”

“With 1.5 million iPads already in use in education institutions, including over 1,000 one-to-one deployments, iPad is rapidly being adopted by schools across the US and around the world,” he said.

Apple has also launched iBooks Author app, which enables anyone with a Mac to create and self-publish a range of books, including textbooks, cook books, history books and picture books, and add interactive features to them.

The company has come under fire from some critics, however, as books authored using the new tool can only be sold via Apple digital outlets.

Apple already hosts more than 20,000 educational apps in the App Store and also promotes the use of iPads in classrooms as an educational tool, by connecting to big screens.

Source

Protests against the proposed anti-piracy bill SOPA, combined with a recent statement from the Obama administration criticizing the legislation, seem to have had some effect. Reports out of Washington say the bill has been put on hold indefinitely, until some kind of “consensus” can be reached. Is this a victory? Not quite. Government watchers say this move could be just a delaying tactic, and note that an equally unfavorable bill called PIPA is going ahead in the Senate. As a result, many of those planning to stage web “blackouts” in protest of the legislation are continuing with their efforts, including Wikipedia.

As Stacey noted last week, the list of those planning to go dark on Jan. 18 to protest the bill that some say could “break the Internet” has been growing longer since word of the protest first emerged over the past couple of weeks. The online community Reddit has committed to shut down, as has I Can Has Cheezburger humor network and the tech blog Boing Boing — and on Monday, the co-founder of Wikipedia said the English version of the user-edited encyclopedia would also join the fight.

Reports that the SOPA legislation had been shelved — just days after the bill’s chief sponsor, Rep. Lamar Smith, agreed to remove one of the bill’s most controversial elements (the requirement that ISPs remove offending websites from the central domain-name system) — led some to believe the law was effectively dead, but a number of observers have questioned that assumption. Among them is O’Reilly Media founder Tim O’Reilly, who said on Twitter that reports of SOPA’s demise“are premature” and those protesting against the legislation should “keep up the fight.”

In an interview with GigaOM’s Colleen Taylor last week, O’Reilly said he was fighting the legislation because he doesn’t believe piracy is the kind of problem that requires a draconian legal solution. Instead, O’Reilly argues that the media and entertainment companies that have spent so much time lobbying for SOPA and PIPA should focus on adapting their business models for the digital age.

SOPA may be shelved, but PIPA is still very much alive

Wales also told his followers on Twitter that SOPA was far from dead, and noted that the Senate version of the anti-piracy legislation — which is known as the PROTECT-IP Act or PIPA — is “still going strong.” And according to Wales, who quoted a source in Washington, the bill’s sponsor has made it clear he plans to bring the legislation to the floor for a vote (although Senator Patrick Leahy has proposed that the Senate should also reconsider the DNS aspect of the bill that’s expected to make its way to the floor for comment next week).

Despite the moves by Wikipedia and other sites to go dark in protest (and similar efforts aimed at getting people to change their Twitter avatars, which have been spearheaded by Google staffer Hunter Walk), not everyone is convinced a blackout is the right approach: Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, for one, said closing a global business in reaction to that kind of political issue is foolish. In followup messages, Costolo said Twitter has “been very active and will continue to be very active” in protesting SOPA and PIPA, but didn’t provide any specifics.

Meanwhile, Reddit plans to continue with its blackout, and members of the online community argue that the shelving of SOPA is just a bargaining tactic — in other words, the government is hoping if it gives the impression it has caved in to criticism, it can somehow generate more support for the Senate version of the legislation, in a kind of bait-and-switch move.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation also said that despite the Obama administration’s criticism of SOPA, and the agreement to remove the DNS-blocking provision(or at least reconsider it), the “fight is still far from over.” The non-profit agency said while SOPA had been shelved, its proponents could easily try to revive it, and the very similar Senate bill PIPA was still expected to come to the floor next week. Both bills “must be stopped if we want to protect free speech and innovation on the web,” the EFF said.

Whether the protests planned by Reddit and Wikipedia will have any long-term effect on the legislative support for either SOPA or PIPA is still a question mark, of course — and so is the fate of a proposed bi-partisan alternative to the two bills known as OPEN, which is sponsored by two of the most prominent SOPA and PIPA critics, Sen. Ron Wyden and Rep. Darrell Issa. Will that bill get any more interest from Silicon Valley as a viable solution to piracy, or will it suffer the same fate as its predecessors?

Source

As the project environment grows in complexity, project management will require team, stakeholder and executive collaboration in 2012 like never before. On-the-job application of training, custom-made project approaches, innovative project tools and smarter resource management will be essential for driving the greatest business impact.

Not only project management, but also the definition of “project success” has changed to encompass more than the triple constraint of time, cost and scope. Collaboration is a common theme throughout many of the 2012 top 10 trends for project management, which were determined by a global panel of ESI International senior executives and subject matter experts.

1. Programme management will gain momentum, but resources remain in short supply

Increasingly, large initiatives undertaken by corporations and government agencies are being recognised for what they are and aren’t – namely programmes, not projects, which require a highly advanced set of skills supported by appropriate tools and methods to successfully execute. Yet many organisations struggle to find the right people and lack the management practices necessary to ensure success. In 2012 we will see more investments made in competency models, training, methodology development, tool use, and career paths to ensure that professionals who carry the title “programme manager” are fit for the role.

2. Collaboration software solutions will become  an essential business tool for project teams

The proliferation of collaborative software, such as SharePoint, in the project environment is going to intensify in 2012. Fueled by increasingly complex and virtual projects as well as tightened budgets, today’s environment demands a more efficient way to manage communication and workflow.

Collaboration is central to project management and having a site which allows project artifacts to be created, shared, and distributed within a repository that provides web-based access and critical functions such as automatic distribution and notification, version control, and user authentication, greatly enhances productivity.

3. Learning transfer will become the new mantra, but with little structured application

Learning transfer – the ability to apply training back on the job – will continue to be on the minds of project management office (PMO) chiefs and learning and development (L&D) professionals who want their project managers to return from training ready to apply what they learned immediately and accurately to their projects. While L&D and business heads agree that sustained learning is a sound idea, very few organisations will invest in a formal process to make it happen. In 2012 we will see many organisations discussing the importance of learning transfer without really putting in place a structured approach to ensure it happens.

4. Agile blends with waterfall for a new “hybrid” approach

Having moved from “manifesto to mainstream,” agile development has confronted project teams with the difficulty of implementing the experimental and hyper-collaborative approach. To transition an organisation into fully adopting certain aspects of agile, project teams are combining traditional and agile elements to create their own hybrid approach. In areas such as planning, requirements, and team communication, organisations are designing custom-made methodologies to do what works for them.

5. Smarter project investments will require a stronger marriage between project management and business process management (BPM)

In the financial services industry, and specifically in the insurance sector, there will be a continued laser-like focus on performing business processes as efficiently as possible to drive down operating costs. The philosophy of BPM is fast becoming a key factor in project selection. When new projects are proposed, their value will be judged to a large extent on the impact they will have on the organisation’s business processes. The more impact the project has on reducing internal costs, the higher it will be ranked. The “smart” money will be spent on driving costs out of the business. Given the high premium being placed on efficient processes delivered through projects, BPM is a key concept with which project managers will need to be intimately familiar.

6. Internal certifications in corporations and public sector will eclipse the PMP

With roughly 470,000 Project Management Professional (PMP) credentials having  been awarded worldwide thus far, the PMP remains the most popular and ubiquitous credential on the planet. However, it is not the prominent credential everywhere. In the US government as well as Fortune 500 corporations, a hierarchy of “internal” credentials has overshadowed the PMP in terms of prominence. To be sure, the PMP remains important, but it is now just one rung on the career ladder to get to the top.

7.  More PMO heads will measure effectiveness on business results

While introducing tools, using methodologies, mapping project management practices, sending project managers to training, and increasing the number of PMPs in the organisation are important metrics for a PMO head to collect and report on, they do not speak to the effectiveness of the PMO from a business perspective. To judge business effectiveness, PMO heads need to determine if their work has had a positive, quantifiable effect on the business in terms of troubled project reduction, lower project manager attrition, and faster time to market. In 2012 the practice of measuring the outputs, not the inputs, of project management will gain traction.

8. Good project managers will buck unemployment trends

Even though unemployment is at record levels in many countries, good project managers are hard to find. Recruiting continues even in tough economies and organisations need individuals who can perform the basics flawlessly. The hunger for project management basics, in particular risk management, will continue to surge in 2012, especially in such countries as India and China where project manager attrition rates are disturbingly high and continuous training of new staff is critical.

9. Client-centric project management will outpace the “triple constraint”

For years, time, cost and scope were the metrics upon which the success of all projects and their managers were judged. While the triple constraints remain important, they are no longer the be-all-and-end-all for project success. While risk and quality have also been cited as additional “constraints,” the clear trend in 2012 is the value the project delivers to the organisation. The new definition of project success is that a project can exceed its time and cost estimates so long as the client determines that it is successful by whatever criteria they use. In today’s environment, project value is determined by the “recipient” – or client – not the “provider.”

10. HR professionals will seek assessments to identify high-potential project managers

Because project management is such an important function, human resources (HR) professionals will be tasked more intensely with identifying high-potential project managers in 2012. The challenge HR professionals will face is that there is no silver bullet assessment for identifying great project managers. Existing knowledge and skills assessments are of little use since they are not designed for entry-level project manager positions. Nonetheless, candidates must be measured not only on their technical abilities, but also on the all-important business and interpersonal skills. To the best of our knowledge, no one has yet developed such an assessment, but HR professionals will continue, and intensify, their assessment search this year.

Source

Come the revolution, the proletariat will no doubt want to get a move on rounding up not only the politicians and corporate fat cats responsible for the U.S. economic decline, but Hollywood’s aristocracy as well. Alas, as Gawker Stalker no longer features Google Maps, this will prove time-consuming, cutting into the ensuing Enlightenment.

Well, good news, comrades! Gwyneth Paltrow is here to help with a location-based iPhone app for Goop, her weekly lifestyle newsletter which urges readers to “nourish the inner aspect” via buying stuff you certainly don’t need, and probably can’t afford. (Like Oprah’s Favorite Things, except nobody gets anything free.)

For a mere $3.99, iPhone users receive Goop’s classist and clueless content in a whole new medium — one that includes a couple of videos featuring the flaxen-haired screen siren dropping serious Benjamins throughout Manhattan, and that handy location feature to help users pinpoint the locations Gwyneth likes to go.

Indeed, the Goop app even offers a “Favourites” feature so you can keep track of which of Paltrow’s “favourite” places are also your own. Notably missing from the selections are Zucotti Park (Ground Zero for the Occupy movement), as well as the best place the breadless might obtain a suitable substitute such as 6^th-degree vegan cupcakes — or as fake British people spell it, “cupcaukes.” (Note the superfluous “u,” which denotes all things classy.)

Please also note: Our French revolution riffing aside, when we recommend Goop as a tool of proletariat uprising, we are totally joking. Given the current climate of increasing economic disparity, we can’t help but wonder: Is Paltrow joking too?

Study our Diploma in Android App Development - Distance Learning
Study our Diploma in iPhone App Development - Distance Learning

Source

If there’s one thing Claudia Kotcha will tell you about building apps that employees want to use, it’s to think about your employees really want. Kotcha, the former VP of innovation design and strategy at Proctor & Gamble, ought to know — she spent years creating products that millions of actual consumers loved.

One of the traditional problems in IT departments, she explained, is that engineers view themselves as the end-users instead of the real employees who use the products. And like real-world consumers, emotion often trumps cost-effectiveness or what has the most features. Often, they just want stuff that looks nice and that works.

In order to help application developers get it right, she brought in designers to help them see things from a different perspective, what she calls “cognitive diversity.” Her partner on stage, Bernd Christiansen, CTO of Citrix’s Online Services Division, also said that designers are critical. He said companies should make multiple designs to figure out the best products to actually develop.

And if you can’t figure out a way to implement an entire design, just quit, he said. Getting it half right probably won’t cut it, and just ends up being more of the same. It’s worth getting it right. Christiansen explained that he watches employees get work done on their phones walking from the car to the office, only to watch their productivity drop as soon as they get inside.

That’s because companies often force employees to use different technology inside. If IT gives them as close to the consumer experience as possible, they’ll be more productive, he said, because this generation of workers doesn’t care about how technology works. It just wants to put technology to work.

Source

Be involved in cutting edge work as part of an international team, working on exciting projects for clients located in the USA, the eastern states, without leaving the beachside lifestyle or your friends and family in Perth.

We are a new innovative mobile and social media agency based in the heart of the Joondalup CBD. Due to our rapid growth and the constant inflow of projects, we are looking to build up our team in the following areas:

• Sales and Business Development
• Marketing and PR
• Graphic Design and Front End Coding
• Mobile and Social App Development, Architecture and Project Management

We can also offer work experience or internships to those who are looking to gain exposure and experience to the industry while studying.

Blow us away with your:

• Passion for mobile and social media, and your creative flair
• Experience building apps for facebook, the iPhone, android and tablets
• Experience creating facebook groups and engaging effectively with the end user
• Copy writing for websites, social media, apps, articles (on- or offline)
• Extensive knowledge of digital media

The kind of work and projects that you can expect to be working on include:

• Projects for well-known brands and companies; for example, we have recently released an iPhone app for TV show SLiDE http://itunes.apple.com/au/app/slide/id452726059?mt=8, the first app for an Australian TV show.
• Facebook apps for shows, like Australia’s Next Top Model
• Developing cutting edge software for a large American sporting apparel company.
• Creating new and innovative concepts, mixing mobile, social media and web for our clients.

If you like what you hear and would like to find out more, send us your CV, a covering letter telling us about your experience and examples of your work.

Phone calls will not be taken at for initial applications so please make sure to address all your criteria in the application.

Source