The unemployment rate in the U.S. was still 9.4 percent in July, but some cities are better than others to look for a job. Of the top 50 metro areas, Washington, D.C., is the easiest for unemployed workers to find a job, while Detroit is the hardest, according to a new Job Market Competition index put together by job search engine Indeed.

The index ranks cities based on how many unemployed people there are compared to job listings. For every one unemployed person in Washington, D.C., for example, there are six job postings. Whereas in Detroit, there is only one job posting for every 18 unemployed people. The higher the ratio of job postings to unemployed, the more chances there are of landing a job.

The top ten cities in the index for finding jobs (and their corresponding ratios of job postings to unemployed) are:

1. Washington, DC (6:1)
2. Jacksonville, FL (3:1)
3. Baltimore, MD (1:1)
4. Salt Lake City, UT (1:2)
5. New York, NY (1:2)
6. San Jose, CA (1:2)
7. Hartford, CT (1:2)
8. Oklahoma City, OK (1:3)
9. Austin, TX (1:3)
10. Boston, MA (1:3)

The worst ten cities for job searches are:

41. Buffalo, NY (1:6)
42. Orlando, FL (1:6)
43. Sacramento, CA (1:6)
44. Rochester, NY (1:6)
45. Chicago, IL (1:7)
46. Portland, OR (1:7)
47. Los Angeles, CA (1:8)
48. Riverside, CA (1:9)
49. Miami, FL (1:10)
50. Detroit, MI (1:18)

This guest post is written by Marcelo Calbucci, the founder and CTO of Sampa — a personal homepage creator that will be shutting down next month. He’s writing a series of posts about the lessons learned from the venture at http://blog.calbucci.com. He’s also the publisher of Seattle 2.0, a web resource for tech entrepreneurs and startups in Seattle.

Consumer startups are tough. You have two basic choices: A paid offering or a free offering (or freemium). If you charge people a penny, you’ll turn off the bulk of your visitors. If you offer free services, you might grow to be the next YouTube, WordPress or Facebook. Most entrepreneurs are not risk-averse and the dream of being big is just too appealing and the majority of us take the “free-route”.

Once you offer something for free, all shades of people will try to benefit from your service. You’d think a service like Sampa with a strong family and baby branding would just repel small business, teenagers, criminals, etc. but that’s not the case at all. And I suspect most blogging services; photo-sharing or web-site building solutions face the exact same issue we did.

Most entrepreneurs and investors will look at data analysis and talk about averages or totals: Averages number of blog posts per user per week, average number of sign-ins per user per month, viral coefficient, total number of active users, etc. Entrepreneurs who are more sophisticated will split their “averages” and “totals” in two or three groups. For example, fixing one of the dimensions into users that sign-in 30 or more times per month (very engaged), between 10 and 29 times per month (engaged), and between 0-9 times per month (on the brink of leaving) and then run the averages and totals for the different groups (e.g. “very engaged users upload 25 pictures/month, engaged users upload 7 pictures/month, etc.”)

Very few startups actually look at demographic and psychographic data as a way to group their users. Primarily, because it’s hard to get gender, age, income, interests and intentions without asking the user, and once you ask them you might just scare them way or get the wrong information.

One time we went to pitch Sampa to a VC in Seattle, and out of the blue he mentions this other startup growing amazingly fast – had nothing to do with our business. After the meeting I went to check the startup website. Their Compete and Alexa growth was just amazing. Their website contained profiles of all users since it was a public social network. So I clicked on the profile of the 20 people featured on their homepage (“most recent users to join”). Of those, about 75% were girls between the age of 9 and 13 – likely the worst demographic to make any revenue from.

Did the startup know about this? Oh, yeah. Did that VC that was looking at investing on them? Likely not.

In the middle of 2008 we decide to do a qualitative analysis of our user base. People of all kinds were creating sites on Sampa. There wasn’t an automated way to know if it was a baby site, a family site, a small business, a technology blog, etc. We looked at more than 300 sites, randomly selected and created a spreadsheet with the category, the demographic of the author (if we could figure out) and we plugged that into our own analytic system to split our averages and totals for each site category. The results sucked!

Just 20% of our users were on the target audience. That meant 80% were not building any kind of family or baby site. Ok, maybe we can live with that. But it turned out that more than 25% were by pre-teens. There are two problems with that: First, It’s actually illegal in the US and most countries to allow a younger than 13-year-old to sign up to your service without parental consent. Second, pre-teens are not a great audience to build an advertising-based business model.

However the data showed an even worse picture. Pre-teens were a quick burning flame. They would come, upload lots of pictures, write lots of blog posts, “bling” their site, invite 20+ friends and they would be completely gone in a month. That behavior skewed our data enough that once we looked at our growth, viral rates, and everything else, our business didn’t look so great.

Being Proactive Can Backfire

Can you force users to comply with your Terms-Of-Service and still be successful on a UGC service? Yes, you can. Facebook manage to be very aggressive on the enforcement of their TOS, and so did Flickr. However, if you look at most Web 2.0 startups, they are not doing that at all. The most prominent case is YouTube, which allowed copyright infringement on their website and can plot a $1.6B exit based on their “turn a blind eye” strategy.

We didn’t do that at Sampa, and I’m sure we could have seen 2 or 3 times more growth if we had used the same strategy. We proactively removed pre-teens websites. They weren’t easy to find, but every time we found one, we would remove the website and notify the owner she was 12-years-old. They would be mad at us and tell that “Jamie, Emily and Sally also have a website on Sampa”, and we would say thank you and delete all their friends websites too.

We would also proactively delete porn websites. There is nothing wrong with porn. It’s not illegal or immoral in my view, but it didn’t go well with our family-oriented business proposition. Also, most UGC porn sites are infringing in someone else copyright and we just didn’t want to deal with DMCA or lawyers.

We also found criminal websites, from people trying to steal credit-card and passwords to the ugly side of online pedophilia. We had the FBI come over twice to collect evidence.

And let’s not forget link-farms. Although we had CAPTCHA and email confirmation for new websites, every once in a while someone managed to create dozens of websites in a single day all full of links to some bank, real estate agent, mortgage broker, auto dealer, etc. I’m sure the business that were benefiting from it didn’t know they hired a “black-hat” SEO.

Pretty much every Social Network-builder, website builder or content sharing site deals with the same issues we dealt with. A good number of entrepreneurs (and most investors) will be oblivious to those facts and just think that everything is going great and the growth is sustainable and proof they are creating great value and soon will be able to turn a huge profit or to sell for hundreds of millions of dollars, until someone takes the time to figure out what people are using their service for and finds out it’s really not what they thought it was.

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Earlier this year, a company called Face.com brought facial recognition technology to Facebook by way of an application called Photo Finder which scanned through untagged photos and identified the people within them. Now, using the same facial recognition algorithms that made Photo Finder possible, the company is introducing Photo Tagger, an app which scans through select online albums to automate the tagging process.

The two Face.com Facebook applications are very similar in nature. They both use the company’s facial recognition technology to match people with their pictures by way of a special algorithm called the “hybrid descriptor-based funneled” model. To the layperson, though, all that matters is that the technology makes facial recognition possible even in “everyday” photos – meaning photos taken from different angles, out-of-focus shots, photos in low lighting or those in which people are making odd facial expressions, etc.

About Photo Tagger

But where Photo Finder focuses on discovery, Photo Tagger focuses on productivity. With the new app, you can choose the albums to scan – whether your own or those belonging to your friends – and the app will process the photos they contain. Photo Tagger will batch the people it finds into groups and will then suggest tags for them. Once you confirm the tags, they’re automatically pushed to Facebook where the people tagged are notified, just as if the process had been done manually.

Facebook users who upload a lot of photos will find an application like this extremely useful as it dramatically cuts down on the time it takes to tag images. Instead of having to go through each photo one-by-one, you can simply confirm the tags the application suggests. And surprisingly, it doesn’t make a lot of mistakes. The facial recognition technology employed by both of these applications is incredibly accurate. In our tests, the most common mistake it made was to identify a picture of a friend’s child as the friend themselves – a problem that has a lot to do with how facial features between related family members are so alike. But for the most part, the app identified photos correctly.

The Photo Finder app has already produced amazing results. It has scanned more than 1.5 billion photos so far and has identified more than 2.3 million faces. What’s even more shocking about these numbers is that the app is still in closed alpha. Imagine how many faces it will scan when it opens up!

Get in on the Alpha

Photo Tagger will also launch in closed alpha but will probably be closed for a shorter period of time than the Photo Finder application. The reason for this is because Photo Tagger scans albums on the fly as opposed to scanning an entire network of inter-connected users and their photos like Finder does – a number which can be on average over a hundred thousand photos. Since that causes a bigger impact on the service’s back-end than Photo Tagger, it will remain closed for longer while the company works out the kinks.

No matter, because out of the two applications, Facebook users will likely find Photo Tagger the more useful of the two since it offers a more direct purpose: tag these photos fast!

Photo Tagger launches today in private alpha. If you want in, you can click this link to add the app to Facebook right away. Only the first 100 ReadWriteWeb visitors who do so will be given access. Good luck!

In a Beet.tv interview posted yesterday, Wikimedia deputy director Erik Moller gave a few clues as to the Foundation’s train of thought when it comes to video editing and distribution.

In the interview clips, included below, Moller hints at the site’s upcoming suite of editing tools and sharing options. He compares video to text and image content, subtextually posing the question: If other kinds of non-video content are so easy to grab, remix, and reuse, why not video, too?

“The typical video that we see on the web is basically a black box format in a Flash container. I can’t easily manipulate it; I need to buy proprietary tools to really do things with it or even to rebroadcast it.” All these factors go harshly against the free-as-in-beer, Creative Commons grain of Wikipedia/Wikimedia, so it should come as no surprise that the Foundation’s video player and tools are to represent a dramatic shift from current web video standards.

Although videos have been part of the Wikimedia stable for a couple years through the open-source Ogg Theora format, the offering has been limited. Now, however, a Firefox 3.5 plugin called Firefogg will allow for server-side transcoding to the Ogg format. In addition to allowing for downloading and editing, the Ogg format also consumes significantly fewer resources during video playback.

Of course, any open-source technology that makes information free (both free-as-in-beer and free-as-in-free-to-move-about-the-Internet) is not without controversy. The Ogg codec’s role in HTML 5 is of particular interest to those concerned with the evolution of web-based video.

Of particular interest to those concerned with the evolution of content ownership, however, is the Foundation’s proposal, as stated by Moller, to allow users to “take a video, to crop it, to edit it, to take different assets and mix them into a single video – not just video… a text slide or… a slide show. You can mix videos, tag them with audio, obviously. So we want to build a completely open standards-based environment that people can use to remix video.”

As we reported last month, when news of the new player was breaking, hundreds of thousands of public domain videos from sources such as the Internet Archive and Metavid will be available in the new format.

The editing tools to be made available later this year are led and funded by open source video company Kaltura. Moller also revealed to Beet.tv that Wikimedia is looking for a CDN partner to ensure streaming video performance.

It seems the new electrics motor startup created by my Stanford ME classmates and friends is doing preety good – Tesla Motors has finally begun deliveries of its awesome 100-percent electric Tesla Roadster, but eco-conscious sports car fanatics willing to plunk down the $109,000 need to reserve one quick. The company said it only has 25 production slots left for the second quarter of 2009. Locking in a reservation will cost a refundable $5000. An additional $55,000 will give you a set production slot and delivery time frame.

For your money, you’ll be getting one of the fastest all electric vehicles around. The 2009MY can accelerate from 0 to 60 mph in 3.9 seconds, has a top speed of 125 mph, and can go 227 miles on a 3.5 hour charge. If you’re especially opulent, you can add sweet extras like a painted carbon fiber top for $3,200 or a premium leather interior for $1,800.

Want to think a little more before you let this sweet lil’ ride burn a hole through your bank account? Here’s a couple of reviews to help you make your decision. Or if you’re in California, scuttle over to their dealership in LA. [Tesla Motors]

Source: gawker.com

High on the Alantejo Plain, in Eastern Portugal, the world¡¯s biggest solar photovoltaic farm is nearing completion. When the ¡ê250 million ($500 million) farm is fully operational later this year, it will be twice as large as any project of its kind in the world. It is expected to supply 45MW of electricity every year, enough for 30,000 homes.

In a patent application dated April 24, 2008 and titled “Solar cells on portable devices” attributed to a number of Apple employees, Apple reveals possible plans to integrate solar cells into devices such as iPods and MacBooks.

gadzook33 writes “CNN is reporting that oil billionaire T. Boone Pickens is planning to invest billions of dollars in what will probably be the world’s largest wind farm. It will eventually generate 4 gigawatts, enough to power 1.3 million homes. The first 600 GE wind turbines are scheduled for delivery in 2010. Pickens says that each turbine will generate about $20,000 in income annually for the landowner who hosts it.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

At long last Tesla Motors has opened its first dealership in LA. The $109,000 all-electric sports car has just started shipping to the people who first preordered them. So you can certainly go test drive one in LA now (with more dealerships set to open in other cities in the coming months), but expect to wait 15 months to get one if you decide to place an order. We’re not talking about Honda Civics here, after all. [CNN]

Source: gawker.com