Amsterdam, NL, Full-time, Improve Digital

We are an ad tech company looking for a Software Engineer and a BI developer (internship) to join our growing Data Team in the Amsterdam office.

Software Engineer - Data Systems

Skills we are looking for include: Hadoop, AWS, experience with managing (and mining) large datasets, JVM languages (scala).

http://www.improvedigital.com/en/about/careers/software-deve...

BI developer (Internship)

Design, implement and publish reports and dashboards by blending together heterogeneous sources.

Prototype and productionize the delivery of data according to analytics use cases

Keyword/skills include: R, stats, analytics, visualization

http://www.improvedigital.com/en/about/careers/business-inte...

Possibly church? http://projects.csail.mit.edu/church/wiki/Church

Technically they are not startups, but for for gmail you may want to have a look at Graph Your Inbox ( http://www.graphyourinbox.com/ ) or Gmail Meter (http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2012/04/know-your-gmail-stats-...).

Hi, thanks for pointing it out and sorry for miss reporting.

The discount reference came from a mailing list where I read the news from, unfortunately I am not able to provide a link to the message (private archive).

Do you have any reference to companies doing so?

If anything, that could serve as a good qualitative metric for filtering out eventual employers/clients.

I really liked this overview!

For the academic inclined, there is some awesome body of work done by the Affective Computing group at Media Lab: http://affect.media.mit.edu/projects.php?id=3162

As for myself, one of the next gadgets on my buying list is the zeo personal sleep coach (AFAIK there are no affordable consumer-level competitors at the moment): http://www.myzeo.com/sleep/

Would love to hear from people with hands on experience with it.

> Would love to hear from people with hands on experience with it.

I suppose I could promote myself since you asked for it: http://www.gwern.net/Zeo

I would recommend the sleeptracker watch.

Thanks for sharing your experience. Having performed a sort of reverse migration (mongodb -> pgsql), I'd have a few questions.

Is it possible to know the use case of your setup? Which size (storage, load etc.) are you currently operating at? What is the projected growth in the medium term? What is main the benefit of this migration? Is MongoDB solving a specific problem that could not have been addressed by mysql/pgsql (or some document oriented/nosql other than mongo)? Are you using any ORM and/or middleware to interface to MongoDB?

I am actually just finishing writing an article with all the details, I will post a link as soon as it is online :)

We are not using any middleware and all our queries are hand-sculpted to make sure we are never causing more I/O impact than we need to.

I am sure everything we do could have been done with mysql/pgsql with enough consideration for the performance characteristics of either database.

Ultimately, a document-based storage was simply a better, more natural fit for us.

http://www.songkick.com/ (YC07) provides something similar to what you describe, though with a slightly different UX.

It lets you import your listenings (bands/artists) from last.fm, pandora & itunes and creates a personalised calendar - location aware - of nearby gigs.

I love it :)

This looks pretty promising. I guess "there's a YC for that", hehe.

While I agree that to this day Unity still has a long way to go, I firmly believe that in the long run all the effort and focus Canonical is devoting to UX could become ubuntu's unique selling point.

What is left to see is how long this "long run" will be, but as a rule of thumb and as far as Unity goes I think it is more fair to consider non LTS releases as experimental builds.

I am very positive about initiatives such as http://design.canonical.com/2010/11/usability-testing-of-uni...

The sole existence of a design group within Canonical [1] singles them out - AFAIK - from other major distro vendors. In a way, though I generally dislike this kind of comparisons, I can see ubuntu as the potential osx/nextstep of the linux ecosystem: full blown unix user space coupled with a distinctive, reliable look & feel and a consistent UX.

I know many long time *nix users that switched to osx for this reason [2] and I'd like to see a linux distro able to appeal this audience. Actually I would really like to know if there exist studies or data points that show whether such a market share indeed exists.

Ultimately the only thing I can say is kudos to Canonical for the courage shown in taking a somewhat radical decision and keep up the good work :)

[1] design as in UX and interaction desing, not limited to artwork or wm themes. [2] this is not intended as a statistically significant statement.

As a reference on the topic, I found Andy Lester's "Land the Tech Job You Love" (PragProg) an informative and entertaining reading.

It contains a few useful tips & hacks on how to tailor your CV and "hunt" jobs that match your expectations (backed by real life stories and examples). Some of the treated aspects - imo - fall under common sense, but I would suggest anyone with little (or none) experience on the job market to pick it up nonetheless.