Picture this

A couple of days ago someone tweeted about a new “social network” that allows you to upload old photos to their site and share with the ubiquitous family and friends. The tweet took me to the BBC Technology report; the app, Clixta (yeah, I know) was launching that day.

The idea is that by digitizing and sharing these pictures, you’re doing a lot more than getting them out of the shoebox at the back of the closet. You’re able to open up the past, getting comments and edits that flesh out what you know about those photos.

Eventually, these repositories of family and local pasts could be made available to historians and be a huge asset to our understanding of the world. Think of the alternative histories you could layer on to what the local planning council would like you to believe about a parcel of land they want to sell to developers. Or new generations of relatives that can now be visible to you, your kids and your grandkids

And, you can get help putting names, and eventually stories, to the faces. That's priceless.

Yeah, I have some concerns about privacy and uses that some entities could make of such a trove. It’s interesting that they started with the mobile app and claim to be working on a web browser interface. (Although their FAQs page promises “From Q4 2015 you’ll be able to upload directly from your Mac or PC using the new web browser based [sic] version of Clixta.” They might want to edit that.)

What I also find interesting is that in its web story, the BBC includes this photo/caption:

I got a little wound up trying to figure out what the hell, exactly, that caption means. Any thoughts?

Reality ping

Following on yesterday’s post that harks back to the world of corporate recruiting, I was interested by this story in the Wall Street Journal about the possibly parlous state of tech companies’ health.

It posits that you may be able to predict whether these enterprises are doing well by checking on the state of sales of ping pong tables. One of the examples used to illustrate the point comes from Twitter, which was apparently buying table tennis equipment like it was going out of style until a year ago. Then bupkis, followed by last quarter’s poor performance.

It’s a cliché—but a largely true one—that tech companies (especially those on the start-up side of their growth) in the Valley They Call Silicon ply their engineers with “free” food and games that they refer to as benefits. “Come work for [insert Disruptive Tech Name here] and get catered dinners, Foosball and the use of noise-cancelling headsets!”

Good health coverage and retirement plans—not so much.

(And if these kinds of enticement look good to you, just consider what they mean. The first two are indicative that they expect you to be around every night for those dinners, and that you’re supposed to unkink your computer-focused vision without actually leaving the premises. Although you will have to go outside if you want to call your gynecologist because of the open-plan office, which is why they’re giving you the headsets.)

The mindset as articulated by the CTO at Lithium Technologies is indeed there: having the ping pong table (or whatever is the game-du-jour) validates your credentials as a thought-leader ninja rockstar serial entrepreneur. Like all the other thought-leader ninja rockstar serial entrepreneurs. It’s part of the whole package that you present to VCs and technology journalists.

I question the correlation between their purchase and predictions about a company’s financial performance. I mean—at some point, don’t you hit ping pong saturation? Not only are they rather large (9’ x 5’), but you also need space around them to actually play. So after the first two or three—what are you going to do?

As for the CMO with his $100 paddle in its special bag—well, that’s more an indicator of individual arrogance and excess than of corporate success.

But that’s the Valley for you.

Thanking you, Aruba Networks, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company

This came into my queue last month:

I find it interesting for several reasons.

The only time in the past years I applied to Aruba Networks, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company, was last October. So—six months for a response; not the worst ever from any modern business.

However, it looks like they’ve outsourced their recruiting, their communications, or both. Or perhaps they’re simply saving money by hiring gerbils to write these things.

I refer you first to the subject line, where “And” has been substituted for “An”. And paragraph three, where “show” is used instead of “shown”. Another possible money-saver is not using appropriate punctuation. Perhaps they’re saving up all those commas like air miles for a trip to Vegas.

It’s indicative that they talk about “find[ing] jobs that match the content of your resume.” Everything in the corporate recruiting business hinges on the data-mining algorithm of the Applicant Tracking System (ATS); you’ll never speak with a humanoid unless the ATS finds sufficient mention of keywords in your résumé.

(True suggestion given by a savvy recruiter: you can splatter keywords like “Javascript” or “data science” all over your résumé by entering them in tiny type that you then color white. Human eyes won’t see them, but the algorithm will, and it will move you to the top of the list because it’s programmed to give preference to the number of times the keywords appear.)

But the telling touch is that closing. “Thanking you” is just so South Asia. The email doesn’t start out with “Hope you are doing great!”, but I’m still thinking it originated somewhere in the vicinity of Bengaluru.

If the ATS was done by the same crowd of gerbils, then I’m truly sorry for anyone who has to navigate it in hopes of finding a job with Aruba Networks, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company.

Painted green and pagan

Here’s another indicator that civilization is headed straight to hell in a handbasket: The Guardian’s page of photos of the Beltane festivities held Sunday at Glastonbury.

It’s not just that the photos look like they might have been submitted by what the Brits refer to as Members of the Public. (They’re colorful, but not especially well composed.) It’s that the captions are mindless. “A woman holds up a bunch of flowers”; “A dance is performed”; and (my favorite) “A man painted green and dressed in green”.

It’s like The Guardian has turned over the amateur photos to a caption-bot. Or possibly outsourced the work to Minsk.

Just for ducks, I checked out the Telegraph, The Guardian’s polar political opposite. Their picture page is not materially better. My only take-away from them is that Beltane is a pagan festival. Because they say so in eight of the 14 captions.

Gratitude Monday: Beauty growing on trees

At some point during the development of the various communities in the Valley They Call Silicon, someone must have got a terrific deal on magnolias, because they’ve been planted all over the South Bay and the Peninsula, in residential yards and along municipal parking strips.

I used to love encountering them on my walks; they never failed to lift my spirits, whatever their stage of blooming. If you caught them at just the right time, you could even step into their scent.

But let me say that, on a walk around my neighborhood last week, I was struck as of old by the power of dogwood, which I prefer to the vaunted cherry trees. When dogwood are in full bloom, they are just clouds of beauty, white or pink.

And today I’m grateful that I am back amongst them.