Steve Jobs Email to Google: Stop Recruiting Apple Employees

Posted by on February 4, 2012 No comments

apple-googleFormer Apple CEO Steve Jobs emailed Google to ask the firm to stop trying to recruit its staff, according to court documents made public in an investigation into the hiring policies in place at several major technology companies.

In the court document it is revealed that Jobs emailed former Google CEO Eric Schmidt to tell him about the incident on 7 March, 2007.

“I would be very pleased if your recruiting department would stop doing this,” he wrote.

Schmidt then, according to the filing, did as was asked.

“I believe we have a policy of no recruiting from Apple and this is a direct inbound request. Can you get this stopped and let me know why this is happening?” he wrote in an email to undisclosed recipients.

Schmidt was then informed by the Google staffing director Arnon Geshuri that the employee responsible for trying to employ the Apple individual would have his contract “terminated within the hour.”

“This was an isolated incident and we will be very careful to make sure this does not happen again,” they added.

Shona Brown, Google’s senior business operations vice president, thanked the staffing director for his action and told him to use the incident as a warning to other staff.

“Appropriate response, thank you. Please make a public example of this termination with the group,” said Brown.

The document is part of a lawsuit that alleges that Apple, Intel and Google had an agreement to not poach each other’s employees – despite high-level acknowledgement that such action was “likely illegal”.

Meanwhile Intel chief executive, Paul Otellini, referred to Intel’s employment policy with Google as an “unofficial no poaching policy.”

The lawsuit has been brought on by employees against seven companies including Apple, Google, Intel and Walt Disney’s Pixar unit Lucasfilm.

“The explicit purpose of the agreement was to eliminate competition for talent, suppress employee compensation, and lower wages,” said the court document, discussing the employment agreements.

Neither Google nor Apple would comment on this story. Intel said it would defend the challenge.

“Intel disagrees with the allegations contained in the private litigation related to recruiting practices and plans to conduct a vigorous defense,” it said

In 2010, a number of companies including Apple, Intel and Google, agreed to a settlement with the U.S. government that restricted them from creating such anti-competitive employment agreements in the future.

Google, Microsoft, Facebook Teaming Up to Fight Phishing

Posted by on February 4, 2012 No comments

Google, Microsoft, and Facebook are teaming up with banks and security vendors to develop a platform for blocking phishing attacks.

The Domain-based Authentication, Reporting and Conformance group (DMARC) will seek to develop a system which can authenticate the sender of an email message and weed out potential phishing messages.

The group’s aim is to create a feedback system where both the sender and recipient can be authenticated and impersonation attempts can be automatically blocked.Phishing emails illustration

The group said its aims to create a standards-based platform that will allow service providers to set policies on their messages which can block unauthenticated emails and provide reports on how security protections are operating.

AOL, Google, PayPal, Yahoo and Facebook are among the companies participating in the development process. Financial firms such as Bank of America and Fidelity are also working within the group.

“Email phishing defrauds millions of people and companies every year, resulting in a loss of consumer confidence in email and the internet as a whole,” said Brett McDowell, PayPal senior manager of customer security initiatives and chair of the DMARC.org project. ”Industry cooperation, combined with technology and consumer education, is crucial to fight phishing.”

Phishing attacks have become increasingly sophisticated in recent years. Criminals have been developing techniques to create more personalized and believable phishing messages and pages.

Additionally, phishing has spread to social networking platforms, where the trust users place in their contacts can be exploited to increase the effectiveness of an attack.

Google AdWords Keyword Tool Searches Showing Zero Results

Posted by on December 3, 2011 No comments

google-zeroGoogle’s AdWords Keyword Tool has been experiencing some substantial and ongoing issues over the past week. Complaints have arisen from marketers using the service that the results are showing zero search volume when performing exact match requests.

Issues with the popular Google service were first reported on Thanksgiving. It seems that the zero results aren’t showing in all searches but are for a random selection of search results. Preliminary tests performed reported zero search volumes for both global and local searches, even when the country location was changed.

It seems that most head and middle-tail related keyword searched are being affected. It is premature to state if long-tail phrase searches have been affected as well due to the normally low search results associated with these types of phrases.

The issue doesn’t seem to follow any particular keyword or industry type, or to match any definable criteria making it difficult to analyze the results being given.

Although the numbers may be incorrect and/or non-existent, the data is of some value. If you do manage to get results, you can use comparative analysis to make use of the limited data.

For instance, if you perform a search for [apples] that yields 6,000 results, and a search for [bananas] that yields 3000 results, you can be relatively assured that twice as many people are searching for one over the other assuming all else is equal such as significant ranking report runs and other automated queries for one phrase over the other, etc.

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Posted by on December 3, 2011 1 comment

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