In the post-industrial period, comparatively small investments of time and money are dedicated to launch new tools and services that are firstly thrown into the hands of individual users, generally for little or no money. When this offering reaches or gets close to the proverbial tipping point, corporations and governments start to pay attention. Consumerisation effectively acts as a huge proof of concept.

The first example that comes to mind is ICQ; it supposedly started with pimply kids flirting and talking about music, right? Next thing, intranet based IM applications are vanilla services in business. Same for P2P, even email if you want to go that far back. The music discussions and flirting (may be) are gone but the design stayed.

So, next time you feel like rolling your eyes when someone tweets what she had for breakfast, may I kindly suggest you have a Stella, relax and reflect that in all likelihood the trivial stuff (maybe) will fade away from twitter, but its infrastructure will certainly remain.

Job search engines have received some air time a while back (not all of it great, e.g. content snatchers, blah blah), mainly via myspider.com.au, Ansearch’s jobsinoz and recruit.net (for which I did a bit of consulting back in the day).

I think their role in the ecosystem is still in the making (i.e. distribution partner to job boards? to direct employers? alternative to a niche strategy?… well we have the whole economic downturn to work it out.

I hope you are having a nice week

Act 2: Commercial break. The latest VW EOS ad screens. The song for the ad reminds Jorge of the song that Julia Delpy’s character in ‘before sunset’ sings to Ethan Hawke’s whilst they are in her Paris apartment

Act 3: Jorge looks for the name and artist for the ad song online. Yahoo answers and Answer Bank yield old results – looks like the EOS has a bit of a reputation re. using catchy songs

Act 4: YouTube’s EOS ad clip comments provide the song and singer names

Act 5: Jorge goes to iTunes and buys/downloads the song. Jorge is definitely not going to buy an EOS in the foreseeable future

Act 6: Jorge goes back to the couch secretly hoping that Basia Bulat is paying VW for advertising/royalties, not the other way around

Have a great long weekend

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Or, has anyone done it already, let me know

You were able to get a .asia top level domain since around mid-march and it’s still early stages. Last time i checked the process is a little more protracted than the registration of other domains (.com et al) and I think it is a more expensive too.

A couple of people I have spoken to think this is a rip off. Although I don’t have a major problem with the conspiracy theory, my view is that for a few hundred dollars it’s worthwhile going through the process and see if the new domain takes off. To me that’s a better option than losing a web address that I would have liked to own because it goes with my regional presence, branding, etc.

If you need a hand with this drop me an email jorgeatlatinocean.com, though it is pretty easy

cheers.

referred site: The DotAsia Organisation

Just to bring to your attention what might be the type of online operation we’ll see more of in the coming months if it works for their stakeholders, Recruitment portals or markets are intended to aggregate employers and recruiters and take the friction out of a what is still very convoluted, and therefore costly, exchange. A couple of players coming up with soft and hard launch dates soon:

- VacancyBid, you can catch Danny Nerezov, the 24-year old CEO, on Facebook any day of the week. From their site:

VacancyBid is a Sydney based company which exists to lower the cost hire for employers, and create maximum revenue opportunities for recruiters.

- NeedRM; I met CEO Michael Rhodes many moons ago about this initiative, so I guess the business model has been reasonably worked. The tag line for the company from their homepage:

NEED Recruitment Market is a recruitment revolution that has the capacity to change global business dynamics. As an efficient recruitment marketplace that sits between employers and recruiters, NEED delivers real value to traders by harnessing the speed and global reach of the Internet.

I will be watching with interest to understand how they go to market and how well received they are specially in the context of:

- the continued growth of the BPO/Managed services deals between employers and one agency which brings its own exchange platform, thus locking out unauthorised delivery by other agencies

- the continued scarcity of talent, e.g. recruiters wondering “why do I need to go and bid for work which may not be overly profitable if I still have job orders I cannot fill?”

- the fact that these markets may rely on externally sourced data to reveal its effectiveness, that is employers/recruiters have to go back to the system and flag an engagement as closed (person placed)

In some ways, recruiters are already bidding for work using the classifieds model: if the see company abc publishing an ad for an accountant on a job board, I won’t be surprised if they receive a few calls from agencies canvassing the demand on an ongoing basis.

As I said, the marketplace is still partially intermediated. There’s a few challenges, I certainly don’t have the solution. My bet is technology alone will not diminish friction.

have a great year

Anyhoo, I was reading today about how LinkedIn is not going to be bought by News… Just in case they change their minds and/or Nye stops playing cat and mouse, I reckon this is a fab purchase because it enables News to

a) move up the value chain re. employment [from classifieds (immediate placements) to relationships with professionals (workforce planning)]

b) nurture an interesting audience for its other advertising and content

So there

Have a great weekend