Human Resources, Monster, Semantic search, Semantic Web

Monster Expands SeeMore Semantic Search, Analytics Recruiting Platform

Monster today introduced new SeeMore features built to meet the recruiting needs of small and mid-size (SMB) employers. Continuing its strategy to deploy its advanced search technology to a diverse customer base, SMB customers in the U.S., U.K., Canada and Australia now have access to a tailored version of SeeMore to manage resumes more efficiently and hire quality talent quickly.

“Like large enterprise companies, small businesses have invested significant time and money to build a database of candidates,” said Mark Conway, senior vice president and CIO for Monster Worldwide. “These customers are already using Monster’s database – with SeeMore, SMB customers can now search and rank candidates from their own database using Monster’s patented 6Sense® semantic search technology.”

SMB customers can now directly add candidates by email to be uploaded automatically into SeeMore and get instant access to their talent base without the use of an applicant tracking system (ATS) or database integration process. This new functionality is especially beneficial to SMB customers who receive resumes from walk-ins, referrals, niche and local job boards and classifieds, career fairs and social media – and struggle to manage resumes without an ATS. SMB companies who do not maintain an employee database with internal resumes of their own employees will now also benefit from SeeMore.

Using a simple, email-based integration, SMB employers can now:

  • Search their own resumes, and find candidates they were not able to
    find before
  • Have access to all the capabilities of SeeMore – Talent Matching and
    Talent Dashboard – now tailored for SMB
  • Gain fresh insight into their current talent pools – including their
    own employees – and understand talent gaps

Expanding its growing adoption in the U.S. among enterprise companies and staffing firms, Monster has introduced its first in a series of non-English versions of its cloud-based semantic search platform, with the beta launch of SeeMore in France. Built on Monster’s highly successful 6Sense® semantic search technology, the beta launch of SeeMore in France allows employers to search all of their talent pools in one place and to quickly identify and rank the best potential candidates by reading the resumes with a recruiter- like understanding of skills and qualifications.

“France is one of our fastest-growing markets in adoption of our 6Sense® semantic search and our multinational customers have been asking us to extend our search offerings beyond PRS to include SeeMore as well,” Conway added.

Through simple, seamless integration with all systems, SeeMore consolidates all of a company’s resumes from multiple sources in one safe, secure location. The precision of Monster’s 6Sense semantic search technology then searches resumes from internal databases, Monster’s database, referrals, and social networks, to sort and rank the best candidates all in one place. With SeeMore, companies move beyond talent sourcing to talent management, using advanced analytics for strategic workforce planning. HR teams can better streamline their talent management workflow reducing recruitment costs and improving the productivity of HR teams.

“With the Beta launch of SeeMore in France, HR professionals will be able to make more precise decisions regarding skills management and reduce recruitment costs, a true differentiator for large companies, even more so in these times of economic crisis,” said Gilles Cavallari, General Manager for Monster France and Southern Europe.

For more information on SeeMore and the full suite of Monster technology solutions, visit: http://findbetter.monster.com.


Austin Ventures, Parking, Traffic Control, Transportation and Logistics, Trellis Partners, Valet parking, Venture Funding

Flash Valet Gets $1.25 Million for Valet Parking Technology

Flash Valet, maker of cloud-based software that streamlines operations for parking providers, announced today it has secured a $1.25 million Series A round of funding. Led by Trellis Partners, with equal participation from Austin Ventures, G51 Capital, and 186K Ventures, the capital commitment will be used to support development and expansion of the parking technology into new markets.

“The team at Flash Valet has created an unrivaled value proposition for their customers – best-of-breed technology at a fraction of the price of other solutions,” said Alex Broeker, chairman of the board, Flash Valet. “The size of the parking industry is enormous and has been largely bypassed by cloud-based mobile solutions until now.”

Flash Valet gives parking providers the freedom to operate away from cash registers and paper tickets by channeling communications and payment through something we have on us all the time – our mobile phones. Through Flash Valet’s cloud-based system, valet parking providers can track vehicles in real time to control and boost their revenue, manage employee time and attendance (including payroll integration), accept credit cards at the curb and through mobile payments, and more (full list of features available here) – all from one vendor. Parking companies get real-time visibility into their business from their phone or any browser, and with limited upfront investment.

Flash Valet has grown rapidly and now is available in over 50 locations in 13 cities in hotels, condos, restaurants and bars, hospitals, airports, arenas and shopping malls. That number is expected to more than triple over the next two quarters.

Jordan Baer, director of emerging technologies at AmeriPark, said: “Having worked in the parking industry for 11 years, Flash Valet is the first solution we’ve used that constantly adapts to our needs and makes us more efficient. It’s quick and easy for our employees to use, and our customers love that they can text for their car and pay with their phone. We expect to continue rolling out Flash Valet’s products throughout our organization. After all these years, it’s exactly what we’ve been looking for.”


Amazon AWS, Amazon S3, Amazon Web Services, amazonglacier, CloudBerry Lab, Glacier, Storage

CloudBerry Explorer Adds Amazon Glacier Support

CloudBerry Lab today released CloudBerry Explorer v.3.6, an application that allows users to manage files in Amazon S3 just as they would on their local computers.

In the new release CloudBerry S3 Explorer comes with support for Amazon Glacier, the recently introduced extremely low-cost storage.

From the new release CloudBerry S3 Explorer users can access and manage Amazon Glacier storage. Users can create vaults, move data to vaults and request to download them back to their computer. Users can create vaults in any of the available AWS regions.

Amazon Glacier is supported by both versions of CloudBerry Explorer: Freeware and PRO. Freeware version offers basic storage management capabilities such as browsing, creating, and deleting files, archives, vaults and uploading content from your PC to Glacier storage and vice versa. CloudBerry Explorer Freeware is available for download at http://www.cloudberrylab.com/free

PRO version offers some advanced features over Freeware version. It costs $39.99 per license and available for download at http://www.cloudberrylab.com/pro


Open Source, OpenStack, OpenStack Foundation, Rackspace, VMware

OpenStack Launches as Independent Foundation

OpenStack  today announced the launch of a new, independent OpenStack Foundation that will continue to promote the development, distribution and adoption of the OpenStack cloud software. As the independent home for OpenStack, the Foundation has already attracted more than 5,600 individual members, secured more than $10 million in funding and is ready to fulfill the OpenStack mission of becoming the ubiquitous cloud computing platform.

The goal of the OpenStack Foundation is to serve developers, users, and the entire ecosystem by providing a set of shared resources to grow the footprint of public and private OpenStack clouds, enable technology vendors targeting the platform and assist developers in producing the best cloud software in the industry.

“The launch of the OpenStack Foundation is not only an important milestone for our community, but a defining moment for the open cloud movement,” said Jonathan Bryce, Executive Director of the OpenStack Foundation. “When you look at what this community has done to innovate and make cloud technologies accessible, as well as make open source synonymous with cloud computing, you understand why huge technology industry leaders and users across the world are placing their bets on OpenStack. The opportunity for OpenStack to become the open source standard for cloud computing is real.”

Like the software, membership within the OpenStack Foundation is free and accessible to anyone. Members are expected to participate in the OpenStack community through technical contributions or community building efforts.

Growth of the OpenStack platform continues on an upward trajectory. Founded in July 2010 by Rackspace and NASA with the support of 25 companies and a few dozen developers, OpenStack has since grown to more than 180 participating companies and 550 contributing developers producing six software releases in a little over two years.

To date, Rackspace has been leading and investing in community management activities, but a year ago the company announced plans to establish an independent Foundation, recognizing the community was thriving and ready for a permanent home. Rackspace has now transitioned management activities and contributed the OpenStack trademark to the new Foundation, creating even greater opportunity for diverse contributors and a vibrant ecosystem necessary for long-term success.

“Since its inception, we knew a foundation was the ultimate goal for OpenStack,” said Lew Moorman, President of Rackspace. “Today, we are proud to finalize the process by donating the assets, handing over community management and giving the OpenStack trademark to the OpenStack Foundation.”

In April 2012, intended Platinum and Gold Member companies formed a Drafting Committee to produce a set of Bylaws and legal documents for community review. In July 2012, 5,000 individuals and eighteen companies ratified the Foundation Bylaws and legal documents by signing up as members. Currently, the Foundation has eight Platinum Members including AT&T, Canonical, HP, IBM, Nebula, Rackspace, Red Hat and SUSE, and thirteen Gold Members including CCAT, Cisco, Cloudscaling, Dell, DreamHost, Mirantis, Morphlabs, NetApp, Piston Cloud Computing, Yahoo!, with Intel, NEC and VMware joining in September. Additional new companies who have begun supporting the Foundation as corporate sponsors include Brocade, eNovance, Gale Technologies, GridCentric, Huawei, Internap, Metacloud, PayPal, RiverMeadow Software, Smartscale Systems, Transcend Computing and Xemeti.

The Individual, Gold and Platinum members each make up a third of the Board of Directors, which provides strategic and financial oversight of Foundation resources and staff. Alan Clark, Director of Industry Initiatives, Emerging Standards and Open Source at SUSE, was elected Chairman of the Board, and Lew Tucker, Vice President and CTO of Cloud Computing at Cisco, was elected Vice Chairman of the Board.

“Our priorities and vision for the Foundation include strengthening the ecosystem, accelerating adoption and empowering the community to deliver the best cloud software out there,” said Alan Clark, Chairman of the Board. “OpenStack’s popularity and industry momentum calls for a solid operational foundation. The new board of directors is feverishly working to ensure that the Foundation is structured with the right executive leadership, staff, fiduciary models and controls all while looking to the priorities and vision for the Foundation. I am honored to serve and support this tremendously innovative community.”

“The OpenStack Foundation represents a new era of establishing open source standards for cloud computing based on multi-vendor collaboration,” said Lew Tucker, Vice Chairman of the Board. “The evolution of OpenStack to an independent foundation is a landmark achievement that reinforces the growing momentum and industry support that has galvanized around this organization and its mission.”

Separate of the Board, the fully elected OpenStack Technical Committee – an evolution of the Project Policy Board – will steward the technical direction of OpenStack software development and includes elected Project Technical Leads from each of the core software projects. Tim Bell, Operating Systems and Infrastructure Services Group Leader at CERN, was appointed by the Board of Directors to help establish a new User Committee, created to represent a broad set of enterprise, academic and service provider users with the Technical Committee and Board of Directors.

Led by Executive Director, Jonathan Bryce, the Foundation is hiring 10-12 employees who, under the strategic direction of the Board, will help carry out the OpenStack mission. Specific responsibilities include coordinating the project’s infrastructure, such as systems for testing the software at scale, community building activities, and managing the OpenStack trademark, which was transferred from Rackspace following the first board meeting.

Meet the new community leaders and learn more about the Foundation at the next OpenStack Summit, October 15 – 18, in San Diego, CA.


Uncategorized

Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: How Clouds Will Be Safer than Your Datacenter

Cloud adoption continues to be hampered by concerns about security and availability. Fast forward to the future where the IT landscape will support thousands of clouds that are protected in a seamless, consistent fashion.
In his General Session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, Sean Doherty, Vice President and CTO for the Enterprise Security Group at Symantec, will discuss how in this future of cloud computing, today’s adoption concerns will be in the past and your clouds will be safer than many data center operations.

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Uncategorized

Madagascar Appears on ICT Radar Screen

I read a story the other day about “the 10 poorest countries” in the world. The writer examined poverty statistics to determine this list. Some of the countries are known for terrible governments (eg, Zimbabwe), some had high per-person income levels – usually due to abundant mining — but abysmal income disparities (eg, Burundi), while others (eg, Madagascar) were just poor through and through.

But there’s always hope. Madagascar, for example, has landed on our radar screen in the Top 10 “raw” ranking among 22 African nations we’ve surveyed.

What does that mean?

We started our research at the Tau Institute with the struggles of developing countries – “the world’s poorest” – in mind. How could we develop a truly relative ranking, one that shows which countries are doing the best with what they have? We’ve integrated several publicly available sources of information and adjusted them for local cost-of-living levels and income disparity to produce our ranking, known as the Tau Index.

Its purpose is to find the countries that are the most dynamic, ie, which have the most potential for continuous upward economic progress, regardless of where they stand today. It provides a unique view of technology-driven progress, whether you’re looking at developed countries or developing nations across the entire spectrum of relative wealth. (I’ve written extensively on this topic – you can find my most recent articles at http://rogerstrukhoff.sys-con.com )

99 Countries Surveyed
We have an overall ranking of 99 countries at this point, and have broken the overall result into regional and income-tier groupings. We also have a “raw” ranking. The overall ranking integrates income levels, local cost of living, bandwidth measurements, and other publicly available socioeconomic measurements. The raw ranking focuses on the income and technology integration, leaving the socioeconomic factors aside.

Most “developmental” and “competitiveness” rankings and the like simply tell us what we already know, ie, rich countries are at the top, developing countries at the bottom. It’s easy enough to draw a nice, smooth curve as incomes rise from less than $1,000 to more than $50,000 throughout the nations of the world. Measurements of health, infrastructure, technology development, etc. follow this curve faithfully.

But economic progress in this era of globalization and the Worldwide Web is a very odd thing. Ethiopia, for example, has the lowest income (at $374). It does not score well overall, or in our regional or tiered rankings.

Yet the country’s national airline, Ethiopian Airlines, is Africa’s second largest, is the first outside of Japan to buy the new Boeing 787, and is working to establish the nation’s capital, Addis Abbaba, as a major regional hub. Looking at our numbers, we find that Ethiopia does score relatively well in the raw rankings, placing 4th among 22 African countries we’ve surveyed.

Back to Madagascar: it ranks 7th on that particular list, three notches behind Ethiopia but two notches ahead of Egypt. In our overall rankings, Madagascar is a more modest 13th among the 22 African nations, and 82nd overall out of 99 countries surveyed. Compare this to Egypt’s 8th place in Africa and 65th overall.

As I’ve stated, our research is intended to start conversations, not finish them, so please contact me to learn more about what we’re doing.

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Uncategorized

Cloud Storage Gateways & Cloud Integrated Storage: Sorting the Terminology

Every emerging market goes through a time of confusion where both vendors and analysts try to “define” the solution to a pervasive problem. Meanwhile, companies actually experiencing the problem are left to sort through a cacophony of mixed messages and terminology, all the while struggling to understand how this “category” of products solves their problem. As cloud storage moves closer to the IT mainstream, we see this same story arc playing out, with analysts and vendors coining a new category of products – “Cloud Integrated Storage” (CiS) – that is subtly different from the “cloud storage gateway” term that previously captured the entire category.
According to an ESG report, CiS entails “primary and/or most active data staying onsite (as a tier or cache).” It operates “for less active data … as an easily scalable archive” and offers “powerful remote data protection and business continuity capabilities.” While this description is quite elaborate, in layman’s terms, CiS simply delivers cloud storage in addition to traditional storage to on-premise environments. In fact, it may all sound very familiar to those already using advanced cloud storage gateways and appliances.

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Cloud computing, cloud security, two-factor authentication

Stay Safe in the Cloud With Two-Factor Authentication

The use of two-factor authentication has been around for years, but the recent addition of this security feature in cloud services from Google and Dropbox has drawn widespread attention.  The Dropbox offering came just two months after a well-publicized security breach at their online file sharing service.

Exactly What Is Two-Factor Authentication?

Of course, most online applications require a user name and password in order to log on.  Much has been written about the importance of managing your passwords carefully.  However, simple password protection only goes so far.

Two-factor authentication involves not only the use of something the user knows such as a password, but also something that only the user has.  An intruder can no longer gain access to the system simply by illicitly obtaining your password.

Authentication Tools

  • ATM Cards:  These are perhaps the most widely used two-factor authentication device.  The user must both insert the card and enter a password in order to access the ATM.
  • Tokens:  The use of tokens has increased substantially in recent years.  Most of these are time-based tokens that involve the use of a key sized plastic device with a screen that displays a security code that continually changes.  The user must enter not only their password, but also the security code from the token. Tokens have been popular with sensitive applications such as on-line bank and
    brokerage sites.
  • Smart Cards:  These function similarly to ATM cards, but are used in a wider variety of applications.  Unlike most ATM cards, smart cards have an embedded microprocessor for added security.
  • Smart Phones:  The proliferation of smart phones has provided the perfect impetus to expand two-factor authentication to widely used internet applications in the cloud.  In these cases, users must enter not only a password, but also a security code from their phone or other mobile device.  This code can be sent to a phone by the service provider as an SMS text message or generated on a smartphone using a mobile authenticator app.  Both Google and Dropbox now use this method.

Yahoo! Mail and Facebook are also introducing two-factor authentication using smart phones.  However, their methodology only prompts the user to enter the security code if a security breach is suspected or a new device is used.

So What’s Next?

Cloud security is a hot topic and two-factor authentication is one way to mitigate users’ well founded concerns.  As a result, development and adoption of two-factor authentication systems is proceeding at a rapid pace and should be available for most cloud applications within just a few short years.

The shift from token based authentication to SMS based authentication is also likely to accelerate along with smart phone use.

Two-factor and even three-factor authentication using biometrics will become more popular.   Finger print readers are already quite common on laptop computers.  Use of facial recognition, voice recognition, hand geometry, retina scans, etc. will become more common as the technology develops and the price drops.  The obvious advantage of these biometric systems is that the physical device cannot be stolen or otherwise used by a third party to gain access to the system.

As with any security system, two-factor authentication is not 100% secure.  Even token systems have been hacked and there is no doubt that there will be breaches in SMS authentication tools as well.  However, two-factor authentication still provides the best way to stay safe in the cloud and it’s advisable to use it whenever possible.

This post is by Rackspace blogger Thomas Parent. Rackspace Hosting is a service leader in cloud computing, and a founder of OpenStack, an open source cloud operating system. The San Antonio-based company provides Fanatical Support to its customers and partners, across a portfolio of IT services, including Managed Hosting and Cloud Computing.

Uncategorized

More Modernizing Data Protection, Virtualization and Clouds with Certainty

This is a follow-up to a recent post about modernizing data protection and doing more than simply swapping out media or mediums like flat tires on a car as well as part of the Quantum protecting data with certainty event series.
While I was traveling saw this advertisement sign from Datalink (who is a Quantum partner that participated in some of the events) in a few different airports which is a variation of the Datadomain tape sucks attention getter. For those not familiar, that creature on the right is an oversized mosquito with the company logos on the lower left being Datalink, NetApp, Cisco and VMware.

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Telx Named “Bronze Sponsor” of Cloud Expo Silicon Valley

SYS-CON Events announced today that the Telx, a leading provider of global interconnectivity, cloud enablement services and data center solutions, has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 11th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 5–8, 2012, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Telx is a leading provider of interconnection and data center services in strategic, high-demand North American markets. With 17 premier C3 Cloud Connection Centers by TelxTM, Telx increases speed to market and reduces connectivity costs by providing direct connections to a community of the industry’s highest performance networks and access to 1,000+ customers, including leading telecommunications carriers, ISPs, cloud providers, content providers and enterprises.

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The cloud news categorized.