The story I kicked off a few days ago, Tech layoffs: The scorecard, is a real bummer. On it, we’re tracking the current layoffs in the tech economy. I hate the story, since each line on the sheet stands for real people who have lost jobs.

So earlier today I sent a query out to my Twitter followers: Send me good news. That led to this anti-layoff spreadsheet, the one tracking companies that are hiring. I present it here. Most recent entries are at the top. Happy hunting, everyone.

Want to add your open positions to this sheet? Fill out this form. I’d like to see this spreadsheet get bigger than the layoff scorecard.

See also: Crunchboard, Monster.com, Dice.com, etc.

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This shot of Kutztown University in Pennsylvania is the first image from the GeoEye-1 satellite. Google is a commercial customer for the satellite’s imagery. Click for a larger view.

(Credit: GeoEye)

Golden Bears fans, take note: The first high-resolution photos from GeoEye’s newest satellite, GeoEye-1, have begun arriving, and Kutztown University in Pennsylvania is the first subject of scrutiny.

These are the shots that eventually will show up on Google Maps and Google Earth; Google has an exclusive partnership to use the GeoEye-1 imagery for online services. The satellite’s camera can capture image details as small as 41 centimeters, though commercial customers only get 50-centimeter resolution because of U.S. regulations.

The Kutztown University image was taken at noon EDT Tuesday while the satellite was moving south at an altitude of 423 miles at a speed of 4.5 miles per second relative to the Earth’s surface, GeoEye said.

GeoEye launched the satellite on September 6; GeoEye-2 is slated for a launch in 2011 or 2012. It has a 25-centimeter resolution.

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NEW YORK–After listening to Jason Fried (37 Signals) give his compelling Web 2.0 Expo talk Wednesday about building companies in the modern world–which could be summed up as “simplify, and don’t work too hard doing so”–I walked across the hall to hear Fraser Kelton (Adaptive Blue) discuss the negative ramifications of this strategy.

Kelton posed the question this way in his pre-conference writeup: “What happens when early adopters have become spoiled by single-feature technologies that take no more than a moment to grasp? The challenge faced by the next wave of innovative start-ups for technology adoption increases by an order of magnitude.”

The real problem, he said during his talk, is not that Web 2.0 technology is easy to use, it’s that it is too easy to build. Which means that there is “too much noise”: too many new products vying for the attention of the early adopters who can give a start-up its first taste of success. And blogs don’t help, he says: They encourage readers to skim without “chewing” on content, just as they encourage writers to post often and quickly, without writing thoughtful pieces.

In other words, there’s a deluge of choice. Yet at the same time, social technologies moving into Web 2.0 products lock users in. Who wants to try a new, possibly better photo-sharing site when he or she has 10,000 photos already in Flickr?

Kelton has two possibly workable solutions to the start-up’s dilemma: First, “make magic,” he says. But on the back end, not the interface. Build a simple interface to a complicated service that isn’t so easily replicated. He points to Google search. Simple UI. Rather complex on the server side.

Second, improve on existing products. Pointing in this example to Summize (acquired by Twitter) and Disqus (we’re waiting) as services that add important improvements to existing platforms (Twitter; blogs), Kelton says that a start-up can ride on the success of a previous wave if its founders find a smart way to embed their technology in that of the key players in the market.

Obviously, it’s easier to build just another single-function service than it is to come up with a plausible growth strategy and a unique service back-end. So both Fried and Kelton are right: Users gravitate to simplicity and focus. But if your business itself is so simple that anyone can replicate it, you don’t have much of a business after all.

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One of the coolest things to be shown off at the TechCrunch50 conference might not ever become something any of us can use. It was a mythical technology demo from a company called Tonchidot Corporation, which showed off its “Sekai Camera” application. It uses both the camera on your phone and GPS to offer up a near real-time tag of what you’re looking at.

The funny thing is the entire demo could have been a complete hoax. We never saw the service in action–just a video of it placed in the gadget-saturated Akihabara district of Tokyo. It identified things like restaurants, local shops, and even products with links to user reviews, ratings, and of course buying options.

If the technology is working, objects on the touch screen get tagged in near real time. Users can then interact with those objects, making use of their handsets’ interface. In this case it was the iPhone, so users could manage what they’re seeing into ordered lists and candy-colored floating tags that moved as they moved.

According to its creators, the technology does not pull as much information from the camera as it does from your location. The information gets piped over to Tonchidot’s servers, then filtered into tags. It also uses a similar model to some of the location-based social networks seen on the iPhone, so users can leave little virtual “hobo codes” for one another around major cities. So say, for instance, you ate somewhere and didn’t like it, you could visually tag it and leave your review. Others would then be able to see it when they use the application.

Things we still don’t know about the technology include:
-Who will be serving the advertisements attached to local shops and products
-If it’s limited to the iPhone or any device with a camera, GPS, and a fat data pipe
-What happens when things change in local areas, since the visual tags are based partially on things the technology recognizes
-When this would be available as something you’d get in the iPhone apps store

(Credit: Tonchidot Corporation/CNET Networks)

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The most important business benefit that service-oriented architecture (SOA) can provide is the ability to respond swiftly to change - thus helping to “future-proof” a company’s IT investments. On November 19-21, in the San Jose Fairmont Hotel, California, at SOA World Conference & Expo 2008 West Sponsors and Exhibitors will be viewed as the leading companies driving the future of Enterprise IT and delegates will have the opportunity to cast their vote for their favorite SOA technology providers.

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A video from Microsoft Research and the University of Washington has been causing a stir online. The seven-minute clip, which was presented at Siggraph 2008 this week in Los Angeles, gives a small peek at some photo-viewing technology that’s effectively the next generation of Photosynth, one of Microsoft Live Labs’ most eye-popping technology demos.

Photosynth’s technology puts hundreds of photos on a 3D map that users can browse and navigate in a similar fashion to real life. This new technology lets the viewer see several sides of a captured object using the varying angles from multiple photos. It also figures out where most of the shots have been taken to automatically create “orbits” that let users sweep around to view alternate angles–simulating distance and perspective.

One of the most amazing aspects is how selective the system is to build a better user experience. For instance, if shots come from different angles or heights, the photos will be centered or properly moved around the 3D space to make it smooth. It will also pick out only photos from a specific time of day, and make automatic color corrections to even everything out. The demo of this around the 4:17 mark is really, really cool.

While Photosynth continues to be a technology demo, here’s hoping we get fun stuff like this to play with as part of popular photo-sharing sites. Users are already geotagging their shots on sites like Flickr, but the browsing experience once they’re on a 2D map is a little blah. Going forward it should be all about making that viewing experience both engaging and as realistic as possible.

[via IStartedSomething]

Related: Microsoft touches up video editing

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