Jeffrey Donenfeld

Tag: techcrunch

  • Get The Job: Focus on Skills, Not Resumes with Smarterer

    Updating a boring resume is certainly a pain in the ass – but Smarterer, as well as a few other visual resume engines such as Vizualize.me makes the process much easier and more engaging for both sides.. Smarterer’s Philosophy:

    Redefining the Skills Section on Everyone’s Resume
    Skills are arguably the most valuable – and most wasted – details about professionals in today’s economy. They become meaningful only when they’re empirically validated.
    Truth in Testing
    We believe falsifying your scores is a felony in the professional market. If we find someone abusing the system, we kick them out and erase all of their scores.
    What You Know, Not Who You Know
    Your capabilities are determined by your skills, not by the accumulation of friends or ability to communicate often.
    The Smarts of the Crowd
    Standard tests can’t measure at this pace. Only the combined intellect of all consumers can validate the rapid proliferation and daily evolution of tools and technologies.

    No Resumes, Just Skills: Smarterer Grabs $1.75M From True, Google Ventures; Tony Conrad Joins Board | TechCrunch.

  • Once-Free MTV Online Music Video Archive’s API Restricted

    A while ago I wrote about MTV music video archive being put online, free and open to the public. I think this is a great move on their part, and one of the best parts about it was they also were giving access to their media via an API – perfect for developers wanting to tap into this resource in media applications – and a great opportunity for MTV to extend their media reach.

    However, TechCrunch is now reporting that MTV will be discontinuing API access to the embeddable video player. This means that any developers who were using the API to fetch music video content with the player are going to be cut off. Although I realize MTV is concerned about their media rights, this is a major blow to the freedom of their amazing video archive. The new MTV video API limitation not only hinders developers from building powerful and relevant applications, but also themselves from continuing to extend their reach and connect with viewers. MTV’s Justin Tormey breaks the bad news via the MTVN Content API Developer Blog.

    One final note – forcing developers to simply link to MTV video content, rather then embed it, reminds me of the ABC Hulu deal – ABC tv show listings show up in Hulu searches, but to watch shows, users have to click over to ABC’s own, ultra terrible ABC video player. – Pop up window, quasi-functional full screen mode, re-windowing from full screen for ads, forced click to continue from ads, non-standard video plugin install, etc. – Ugh.