The Next Net

Iron Chef Mountain View

From an account by a chef who is participating in Google's search for a new executive chef:

I was shown to the kitchen to begin my food preparation for the following day's preliminary battle. It's a large, well-equipped kitchen with dozens of cooks. . . . Many of the ingredients are organic and locally grown. There is every imaginable seasonal produce item, the finest natural meats and poultry, fresh fish, lobster, rock shrimp and organic tofu -- both Japanese and Chinese.

I am blown away.

There is a huge walk-in just for condiments. There are four varieties of Thai chile paste, Indian curries, hot chile pastes from India and Indonesia. I am led to a storage room for just organic grains, nuts and seeds. I gently caress the bottle of 12-year-old balsamic vinegar and pop a fresh macadamia nut into my mouth.

Gentlemen, prepare for battle!

Cubicle Culture: The Work Blind

An enterprising employee made this work blind that is a photograph on a giant piece of vinyl that can be stretched across his cubicle entrance showing him working industriously at his computer. But is there any work actually going on in there? Great idea to drive your boss crazy.

(via O'Reilly Radar).

Shakeup at Good

Mobile startup Good Technology is laying off a chunk of its salesforce as it shifts to rely more on its cell phone carrier partners Sprint and Cingular to resell its mobile e-mail software. A rumor on F***ed Company pegs the layoffs at 70% of Good's workforce.

I tracked down Good CEO Danny Shader to ask him about this, and he told me "those numbers are massively wrong." While he declined to give me the correct numbers, he did confirm that many of his phone sales force was let go because his carrier partners "want to do more of the selling themselves." He added that he is actually bulking up the number of people in his field sales force who call on larger enterprise accounts (the phone sales force focussed on smaller accounts). Shader also notes that his main competitor, Research in Motion, went through a similar phase where it layed off some sales people as it's relationship with the wireless carriers took off. So, you see, all of these layoffs are actually a good thing.

Update: The number laid off was 100 people, or one fifth of Good's total workforce.

Co-Worker Warning Signs

A few warning signs to look out for, from "Top 10 Signs your stuck with a bad co-worker" at the Business Evolutionist:

10.) You've cooked potatoes with more personality than this guy

7.) Sings along with every song as they're listening to their iPod - and the only album they have loaded is Cher's Greatest Hits.

6.) They keep talking about their rare collection of pet rocks

5.) Every Monday they bring over 100 action photos of their kid playing soccer - and wants to make sure you see every single one of them

3.) Continuously offers to do a Tarot reading for you

2.) Still hanging on to that Saturday Night Live skit, referring to people as "The Tim-inator" and says "Making Copies".

How about: Still thinks he's in the Kiss Army (and he's on a recruiting mission)? That'd be my No. 1.

Outsourcing Blogs (and Splogs) to China

File under amusing and scary: If this blog post is to be believed, two young entrepreneurs are starting a business to outsource blog writing to cheap Chinese workers. How do you outsource something that is already primarily done for free and doesn't generate much cash? You create a bunch of splogs (spam blogs) whose soul purpose is to produce buzz for advertisers' products:

Our general business model is a two tiered effort to hire Chinese citizens to write blogs en masse for us at a valued wage. The first tier is to create original blogs. These blogs will pop up in various areas of the net and appear to the unknowing reader to be written by your standard American. Our short term goal for these original blogs is to generate a steady stream of revenue through traditional blog advertising like google adwords. We estimate that our current blogforce of 25 can support around 500 unrelated blogs. Hopefully a few of those will be hits. The long term goal is to generate a large untraceable astroturfing mechanism for launching of various products. When a vendor needs to promote a new product to the internet demographic we will be able to create a believable buzz across hundreds of ‘reputable’ blogs and countless message boards. We can offer a legitimacy to advertisers that doesen’t exist anywhere else.

The second tier of our plan is a blog vacation service where our employees fill in for established bloggers who need to take a break from regular posting. As all bloggers know, an unupdated blog is quickly forgotten. For a nominal fee we can provide seamless integration of filler.

You knew this had to happen sooner or later. But the first idea is a non-starter because the splogs will be outed faster than those Chinese sweatshop bloggers will be able to type out their first sentence. So I don't know about that legitimacy claim. But these guys might be onto something with the second idea: filling in for vacationing bloggers. Except who'd trust some unknown person halfway around the world with their reputation like that? Oh, right, I forgot. One of their main target demographics is teenage girl bloggers.

(Thanks Marginal Revolution!)

The VoIPMan Cometh to Yahoo

Yahoo continues to rev up its VoIP efforts. Recently, it added voice calls to its instant messaging software, but that is just the tip of the iceberg. It just hired SIPPhone president Jeff Bonforte to head up its VoIP products and strategy (disclosure: Jeff is a personal friend). And Yahoo is not done hiring. "I have so many openings for people," he marvels. At SIPPhone, Jeff created the Gizmo Project, a Skype-like PC phone application. Now that he's parachuted into Yahoo (that's him skydiving in the picture), he says, "I have to figure out how to integrate voice everywhere it should be—and to beat Skype." His strategy is due on his boss Brad Garlinghouse's desk by Friday.

Not that Jeff ever listens to me, but here's my suggestion: combine VoIP with targeted search ads that have a click-to-talk option that connect consumers with an advertiser's call center. Yahoo would be able to charge a lot more for those ads than for plain vanilla text ads. Also, combine VoIP with other applications like mapping or podcasting to make it more than just a replacment for the plain old telephone.

The thing about VoIP is that there is not much money in the calls themselves. But if you can use the growing popularity of VoIP to make money in other ways, then you might have a business.

Looking for a Few Good Chefs

Google's hiring, and this time it's looking for new chefs.

``These two chefs will play an important role in managing the company's growing appetites,'' said co-founder Sergey Brin in a news release. And nobody would deny that Google has growing appetites.

This job interview is not for the weak of stomach. In this kitchen version of ``The Apprentice,'' top candidates will prepare a meal for 30 employees at the Googleplex. Then four finalists will compete in a cookoff, with the two best being hired. Susan Wojcicki, a vice president and ``long-time seeker of Google chefs,'' said the new chefs will get stock options.

Now, that's enough to whet anyone's appetite.

Microsoft Gets a New No. 3

Microsoft just hired a new chief operating officer from Wal-Mart: Kevin Turner. Turner was head of the Sam's Club warehouse stores, and before that was CIO of Wal-Mart, perhaps teh most powerful CIO job on the planet). Back in 2002, B2.0 highlighted him (subscr. req.) as one of "20 Young Executives You Need to Know." Here's what we said about him back then:

When he was promoted to vice president for application development at age 29, Turner became the youngest corporate officer in Wal-Mart's history. He sold company founder Sam Walton on a major investment in the world's largest wireless mobile-computing network. Today more than 125,000 employees log on, doing everything from changing prices to ordering replenishments from warehouses. Turner's boldest current initiative is exploring radio frequency identification tags, which attach to goods and broadcast current digital information about the location and state of that inventory. The goal is to further improve Wal-Mart's already prodigious ability to manage supply-chain costs, reduce theft, and determine what's flying off shelves in real time.

Let's just hope he's not another Rick Belluzzo (the last high-profile No. 3 at Microsoft to be chewed up by the Redmond machine).

The Heir Apparently Not: Murdoch's Son is Out

Rupert Murdoch's son Lachlan, thought to be his heir-apparent, quit today. Ah, what's wrong? Daddy decided not to make you CEO?

Search Wars: Google Strikes Back

In the latest salvo of the search wars over Google's hiring away Microsoft researcher Kai-Fu Lee, Google is countersuing Microsoft, alleging that Redmond's original suit is merely a desperate scare tactic to stem the tide of Microsfties jumping ship to Google. The WSJ reports (subscription required):

In a sworn statement also filed Tuesday, Dr. Lee alleged that Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates told him on July 15 that Chief Executive Steve Ballmer "has been looking for something just like this, someone at a VP level to go to Google. We need to do this to stop Google." Dr. Lee alleged that Mr. Ballmer on July 8 told him, "It's not you we are after, it is Google." In the filing, he said that Mr. Ballmer tried to convince him to stay at Microsoft by offering a new job and more compensation.

Ooh, juicy!