EXPO has jobs and NYC has talent

With all the debate about whether NYC has become a city competitive for tech startups, one of the indicators we could look toward would be how fast digital jobs in the area get filled.

Two years ago, we would gladly pay a headhunter outrageous fees to find us a low level developer. But the competition wasn’t from other tech startups. It was from the conglomerates and banks that were paying premium rates for tech folks, pricing startups out of the market for dev talent. Nowadays, things are different.

We’ve got 4, soon to be 5-6 job specs out there, and we’re getting great response. High quality, deep experience, and entrepreneurial attitudes. My opinion is that this type of demand isn’t an indication of an already robust startup city, but rather will be the cause of one. With AOL layoffs and other media companies hitting the skids in 2009, tech talent is out there, conspiring, networking, searching. They’re realizing that the cushy job security they thought they had by taking the clock-punching jobs at big companies wasn’t actually that secure. So, the benefits of joining a small company — launching exciting new products, garnering larger responsibility, EQUITY — are becoming more attractive, more valuable in the career assessment process.

I’m predicting that some spurts of growth occur in NY from the talented seeds that the big companies are dropping all over the City. Existing high-growth companies and new ones springing up will be able to surge forward faster than anticipated with access to the exciting new talent in 2010.

EXPO enables member points to be donated to Red Cross for Haiti

I’m so proud of the effort by our marketing maven, Jess Thorpe, who made it easy for people to donate to the Red Cross through their membership points with EXPO. The additional incentive of a cashless transaction hopefully will make this a great service for EXPO to offer to our members and Haiti.

For more info, click here

Moving from Blogger to Wordpress

In this case, I not only changed from blogger.com to a self-hosted wordpress blog, I also changed the custom URL.

My hosting choice was Bluehost.com. (Google “Bluehost discount” for the best affiliate link rates.) Setup with wordpress was very easy, as bluehost has a great integration tool on their dashboard. In addition, there’s a simple Wordpress tool for you to just suck in all of your blogger.com posts automatically into Wordpress. In WordPress, go to Tools > Import. Select Blogger from the list. It took about 3 minutes to dupe my entire blog into wordpress.

1) For a general overview, here’s a plain english guide to the steps for the blog hosting move. There are many technical holes in this, so just use it as an overview checklist of things to solve.

2) Forwarding from blogger to wordpress. This site walks you step by step with pictures through a) forwarding posts from old to new, b) not getting penalized by googlebots for duplicate content, and c) leave a custom message as you forward people from your old to new blog

3) Here is a site that will help you ensure that your URLs match so that the old blog post points correctly to the new blog post.

4) Google Wemaster Tools recently opened up the ability to TELL its bots that you’re moving URLs. This is fantastic since you can’t do a 301 redirect in blogger.com since you don’t have access to the root directory. Activate a Google Webmaster account for your blog in order to get to the tool to alert Google.

The biggest test is that after a few months, my pagerank has held relatively steady. Therefore, my thought is that Google is okay with what I did. Does anything else really matter?

EXPO Elves

Behold, a Christmas gift left by one of our developers for another.  It was a 2.5 hour labor of love. If you were wondering, the first thing unwrapped was the tissue box. We are taking bets how long it takes before he unwraps his phone.

EXPO launches in-home video research

(Click to view)

In-home video research used to cost an astonishing amount of money. Think about it…how much would it cost to hire a camera crew to follow someone around? You had to screen and qualify applicants (you might not even know what they look like or sound like), you had to hire a camera crew for no less than a full day (even if you were interested in just one sliver of the participant’s life). Nothing could be done quickly — you had to coordinate schedules of applicants and crews, and make sure everyone knew what was supposed to happen. Imagine the costs if you wanted to follow the participant to measure their reaction over time!

And even after all that, what are the chances you could get an authentic, sincere response from the participant, with a bunch of strangers and equipment invading their home?

Marrying the skillset of user-gen content, and the comfort of social media, EXPO has been able to harness the power and knowledge of our community to tap into video ethnography for a fraction of the cost. We can hyper-target a demo, or screen by qualifying questions, and then provide very detailed assignments to our community. This level of care results in a broad video ‘picture’ to accompany research findings. We’re calling it “Kitchen Table Conversations“, to evoke the sense that people are really inviting you into their homes, where they’ve always been most comfortable sharing their lives with you.

In times when social media has made putting personal videos and pictures on public display passe, it’s hard to imagine trying to make a research point without showing real faces in their real words. We recently did a video ethnography for AdAge in conjunction with JWT, on the “Rise of the Real Mom”. We think that EXPO helped AdAge capture the triumphs and tribulations of the unsung heroes that have helped this nation get through the financial crisis…moms!

UPDATE: Will Richmond from VideoNuze did a MUCH better job explaning KTC than I did. I guess the power of being a neutral third party.