Job Seekers Turning to Online Social Networks: Los Angeles Times, April 2009

Almost as soon as Guang-Yu Xu was laid off from his engineering post at a Silicon Valley Internet company last month, he visited LinkedIn.com and updated his job status from “current” to “past.” Through their interconnected contacts, he soon heard from headhunter Robert Greene, one of more than 530,000 recruiters trolling the professional networking site […]

Tech Ventures Running Lean but Upbeat: Los Angeles Times, March 2009

With tech-savvy entrepreneurs planning their next ventures and pulsating parties packed with digital hipsters, this year’s South by Southwest Interactive Festival didn’t feel like an event on the verge of Great Depression 2.0. But underneath it all lingered the reality: Tech company valuations have tanked, venture capital has grown scarce and Americans are obsessed with […]

Author Julia Angwin talks up ‘Stealing MySpace’ at SXSW: Los Angeles Times, March 2009

For all the dirt that gets dished on the MySpace social network, very little of it has spilled about MySpace itself. But in a new book out today, and unveiled at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival, author Julia Angwin unveils the somewhat tawdry story of the company’s roots in spam, porn and spyware. “When I started reporting […]

Media Companies Learn to Mash Up at SXSW: Los Angeles Times, March 2009

It’s been a few years since mashups became a hot thing in the tech industry. Companies would open their programming tools, known as APIs, to the public, and then enterprising developers would come up with new tools built on the company’s platform. Think of the way people merged apartment listings from Craigslist with Google Maps, or […]

Dennis Crowley: Foursquare Doesn’t Use Google’s Dodgeball Code: Los Angeles Times, March 2009

Several years ago, attendees at the South By Southwest Interactive Festival loved keeping track of each others’ whereabouts using a service calledDodgeball. They could enter their location on a mobile phone, and it would be broadcast to their friends. Google Inc. bought Dodgeball in 2005, but the service never took off, and the company pulled the […]

SXSW to AT&T: Free Our iPhones: Los Angeles Times, March 2009

For all practical purposes, the South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas, is a de factoiPhone convention. People who don’t have the white-hot Apple device often feel left out. But not this year. With so many iPhone users descending on Austin, the convention center has become an almost impossible place to make a call or […]

In Hard Times, Freelancers Turn to the Web: The New York Times, March 2009

WITH layoffs mounting daily, the ranks of independent contractors appear ready to grow. People who have lost full-time jobs are seeking work on their own, and businesses that once hired full-timers and paid them benefits are turning to more affordable freelancers. Several online companies are easing the transition to a freelance economy for workers and […]