Dave Lefkow, a fellow Jobsterite, has some interesting anecodes about Mitre, a not for profit corporation that runs a number of important federally funded R&D centers.

Dave writes:

First, they don’t have a salesforce or a marketing department - because they don’t need one. They’ve built an $800 million business through referrals and word of mouth.

Second - in my experience as a recruiting consultant, the best places to work for always have high numbers of employee referrals. Most companies average 30% - MITRE gets over 50% of their hires through referrals.

Mitre has been named as one of the top 100 companies to work at by Fortune for three years running, and one of the best places to work for working mothers. They’re also doing an innovator in recruiting practices, as you’ll see from their Jobster campaign.

If you are an expert in information security, or know one, you might want to pass on some of the positions below.

Information Security Positions at Mitre

I am please to announce the release of Version 2.2 of the Berry 411 local search tool.

Install Berry 411 over the air by pointing your Blackberry at http://www.thebogles.com/berry411.jad, or download berry411.zip and install it using the application loader.

The major new features are a search history page, weather searches, and encyclopedia searches. The search history page saves typing by remembering past searches and allowing you to jump to any past search by typing the first few letters. Weather allows you to get local weather with a single click. The encyclopedia provides a variety of online reference material using mobile.answers.com.

Screen shots of these features are below:

1. Search History
2. Weather searches
3. Online encyclopedia

As a new feature of this blog, you’ll notice a sidebar feed of jobs I find interesting– this will include jobs at Jobster as well as at companies that use Jobster, such as Cisco, Nike, T-Mobile, Bearing Point, and many others.

Inquiring through this link will help you or someone you know get noticed for jobs, especially if you have direct or indirect connections to the hiring team.

At the moment we’re looking for a web producer, so if you know someone great please send them this way!

I had a good chat with the author of MyVoipWeb.

You should give it a try! Even in it’s current basic form it has a very interesting feature set– you can schedule automated wakeup and reminder calls from a web page, and even spoof your caller ID (which I didn’t even know was possible.) These applications hint some of the potential of large scale consumer oriented services that integrate voice and the web.

Judy’s Book is hiring– Judy’s book is a fellow company in the Ignition portfolio and I’ve been very impressed by their rapid progress. Check them out, especially if you’re a marketing communications expert.

Judy’s Book is hiring!

Judy’s Book is growing fast, and we need your help to make sure we do it right.

We have several positions available, but our most pressing need is for a marketing communications expert with a track record of success in growing and nuturing online communities.
The perfect candidate will combine impossibly high energy, boundless creativity, staggering smarts and a passion for delivering measurable results in a fun, fast-paced work environment.

To reply, please send a brief personal statement and current resume to jobs@judysbookteam.com

HOP-ON Unveils Its $39 Carrier Grade Wi-Fi Phone

The HOP1502 handset provides all the features and functionality of a VoIP terminal adapter but has the advantage of enabling users to talk from any available public or private Wi-Fi access point..

According to market research firm Instat, “The number of mobile/WLAN (VOIP) subscribers is to reach over 256 million worldwide by 2009. By 2009, the numbers of subscribers using WLAN for voice is expected to exceed those using WLAN for data only.”

I highly doubt that VOIP is going to win out over the cell networks in terms of mass adoption. But I do think if there’s a killer app to be created that merge voices and data in innovative ways, it’s may well be more likely to occur initially in the VOIP space than in the cellular phone space.

In biology, evolution occurs most quickly when a population is isolated and undergoes environmental stress.

By analogy, the evolution of the killer voice-data app is more likely to occur in the mobile VOIP space, free of the fetters of the carriers. Consider:

• VOIP customers are a small subpopulation of early adopters likely to try new things.
• the companies that serve them are under competitive stress to differentiate themselves from each other and the cellular companies.
• the barrier to entry to becoming a VOIP carrier is much lower than becoming a cellular carriers, so competition is more intense.
• the underlying VOIP technology is inherently more open and friendly to integrated voice-data applications.

I have no idea what the killer voice-data app will be, but it is likely to be an application that drives billable minutes, that has viral and community aspects, and that is accessible from any telephone while providing providing the best experience on a phone with data support. Once such an app establishes itself in the VOIP playground, it can leap to the much larger cellphone population from a position of stength relative to the carriers.

A while black Alan Steele blogged about Dodgeball, which sounded like it was trying to create such a killer app. Google bought them, so there’s must have been something good there; I’m going to give it a try. I am somewhat skeptical, however, whether a purely SMS based experience like Dodgeball could be rich enough. Voice should be the lowest common denominator, not SMS.

Fun space, please comment if you know of any interesting voice-data apps.

John Ludwig writes:

Boy Google has become pretty polluted on the topic of home networking, many of the top pages are thin bags of links, clearly just thrown together to generate google hits and revenue. Here’s my own list of home networking resources that I use.
…

(Read more at a little ludwig goes a long way: Home networking resources.)

Excellent point. Really, I think the search engines should be thinking about solving the problem. How can search engines tap into the energy of communities to make search better? We’ll soon reach the limits of purely automated search strategies. When we reach those limits, we’ll need a way to inject the judgement of communities into the search process.

In a sense, Jobster is attempting to address this problem: we will combine automated crawling and search with a trust and knowledge network to create a more effective job marketplace.

In a very small sense, SearchMe is also a response to this problem.

My plan is to allow anyone to take a posting with a list of links and with a single click turn it into a search form. I’ll add a feature that allows the search form to be hosted here for those people who don’t have the ability to host their own search forms. These two features will reduce the barrier to entry for community generated search filters.

It’s interesting to think that a service might crawl your blog, attempt to infer the categories of sites that you link to, and then automatically construct search forms for those different categories. So with no effort on your part I could search “home networking sites that John Ludwig talks about.�

More on Scott Haug’s ivy+svn integration.

Berry 411 white pages are now better formatted and included links to maps for each of entries.

Interestingly, Berry yellow page searches outnumber white page searches by a 5 to 1 margin, perhaps because most people have their personal contacts already saved in their address books.

Jobster’s own Scott Haug has released an open source plugin for the Ivy Java dependency manager.

ivy+svn allows you to use subversion instead of the filesystem to store dependencies managed by Ivy.

As Scott notes in his blog:

Currently, our application uses more than 40 third party jars. With Ivy, I now have a full accounting of what libraries our project relies on directly. We now have clear understanding of our dependency tree.