my linkedin profile has been viewed of late with people with this job title
so what is talent acquisitio?
the new (perhaps nearly new) job title for recruiters and human resourcers it would appear not. a quick google explains why. enlightening!
Keep the 23rd of June 2016 free as this is the date that has been announced by Prime Minister David Cameron for the UK Referendum when the UK public will decide whether the UK will stay in or leave the EU.
The media have coined the phrase #brexit
So what can we expect:
iii) 4 months of media speculation
So what is the main question
What do you need to know and will we actually know the truth before deciding what to vote
As it currently stands I have no idea how I will vote I have many thoughts but have seen little conclusive evidence to backup the ideas being muted at the moment.
The scare mongering has begun especially around immigration already there is talk of if we exit then the French Authorities will not allow UK border checks at Calais et al (on French soil) so we will be powerless to stop the migrants from crossing the channel so the migrant camps will spring up in the UK.
The referendum date was announced after Cameron announced he had secured a good deal with Brussels and afford the UK a special status within the EU so as to ensure the UK has more controls over its own laws and policies. Already several media and political figures are disagreeing over how effective in practice this deal is.
There are two choices i) Stay In and ii) Leave, already it seems there are at least two Leave camps Grassroots Out and Vote Leave the latter being a Tory led group. At some point the Electoral commission will anoint one official group for In and One for out. Let’s hope that some sense prevails and the Out groups merge into one before then. If they don’t then it’s possible in my view they will not be seen in a united front and will be less likely to persuade people to join their cause.
What do we know so far of public opinion; it seems quite tight according to the polls but what do they know given the polls being wildly out for the general election. Prior to the referendum in May there are council and police commissioner elections to be had I doubt there will be much public appetite for that esp the police commissioner one.
Back in 1999 a husband and wife plus a friend conceived an idea based on the US website classmates.com. This idea was called Friends Reunited and was launched in July 2000 after lots of media interest in the year that followed from a base of a few thousand members the site had 2.5 million registered users. The idea of the site was to link people via their schooling, all of a sudden you could look through list of people and old mates that were at your school and see what they were now up to. When I registered I recall seeing names from my school days 14 years previously that turned on a dim lightbulb of memory from my distant past. It seems others were able to rekindle romance from previous teenage encounters and supposedly the site was a cause of numerous affairs and divorces.
Today its been announced that due to lack of active users making the sites upkeep and running non economical the site would close. An awful lot of the 2.5 million members that registered in the early days probably cant remember their sign on details and probably did not even realise the site was in existance. I personally can’t even remember how long after registering I ceased to even view the site.
So what happened to the site born in Hertfordshire? It seems that by 2005 there were around 15 million registered users; a similar site from Australia and one from New Zealand were merged into the site. ITV purchased the site for £120 million with further payments based on its performance up to 2009 which supposedly were £55 million. Quite a success story though even though its founders no doubt became miillionaires overnight its not obvious whether they had gained funding from Venture Capitalists to keep the site afloat and running one would hazard a guess of yes. Though reports suggested they recieved £30 million from the deal.
Interestingly in 2005 News Corp International bought the social network myspace for $580 million; myspace was the largest social media site in the world for the next few years.
Why did ITV acquire the site; It seems combining ITVs userbase would make the user base the 8th largest online presence of unique users which would provide attractive advertising prospects.
By 2009 things had gone sour and ITV sold the site for £25 million ITV had made a loss as a company for the previous year and advertising revenues had collapsed. Even though MySpace had a large user base the newly launched websites of Facebook ad Twitter had overtaken it in terms of users and use. ITV sold the site including Genes Reunited to a company called Brightsolid who already owned fingmypast.com which contained the census from 1901 and 1911.
After a rebranding exercise a few years back Brightsolid no longer considered the site to be integral to its business. It will now close.
Friends Reunited was a site that delivered what was misisng at the time but never really reinvented itself to compete with the multi functional new generation sites of Facebook, Bebo et al.
No visitor number have increaed substationally since the announcement. So what does it mean for the data it holds; analysts believe the data is outdated and no longer relevant as the majority of people have not kept their cotact details updated for many years. It would be a shame to see the site go offline completely and the school data lost. Perhaps it can be kept alive by an archive site. We will see.
So the final nail in the coffin of the married at first sight uk experiment.
The only couple that stayed together of the two after marrying Emma Rathbone and James Ord-Hume have announced they are to divorce. The reasons being lack of chemistry, love and bickering.
This has not come as a great surprise as they did not seem that matched during the process but looked to have given it a chance to work.
To recap the other couple that married on the tv show were Jason Knowles and Kate Stewart their marriage only lasted two weeks and it was reported that Jason had started internet dating during this time. Their marriage has now been annulled on the grounds of Jasons unwillingness to consummate the wedding
The third couple Sam McDonald and Jack Finn-Kelcey did not actually get married . Sam pukked out of the process shortly before they were due to marry. It was reported after the tv show aired that Sam had got in contact with Jack after seeing him on the show when it was aired. They subsequently started dating but after a few months.
So what now …. Channel 4 are looking to air a second series and have invited applicants. Presumable they are now going through a selection process . No known air date has been announced to my knowledge
So the final of the 2015 apprentice lineup was between Joseph Valente and Vana Koutsomitis.
Joseph’s business plan surrounded expanding his plumbing business by pitching an idea to become preferred suppliers to property agents to areas outside of his current region
Vana’s business plan was to launch a dating app that combined online dating with game playing. The games would be a form of psychrometric analysis.
Industry experts and Lord Sugar quickly picked up the fact that Vana’s business would require more than the £250,000 investment to get to market. Vana had spoken to an app developer who suggested a basic app with few features would cost £30000 to £40000 to develop and for a more fully featured app would cost hundreds of thousands of pounds and would need marketing.
Lord Sugar chose Joseph Valente as his business partner.
In his final summing up Lord Sugar did say he knew technology rather than the service industry, but the required investment for Vana’s idea seemed to be the downfall of her idea. Questioning her further she admitted the £250000 would be used as seed funding to get an app developed and to market and hopefully withing 6 months they would have 100000 users, She admitted she would have to get further funding to succeed but believed she could sell her idea to get extra funding from Venture Capitalists.
Unless Lord Sugar was willing to put in more money this would water down his shareholding so probably was not an attractive proposition. One industry expert implied there were about 15 dating apps coming to market per month.
It does make you wonder how people with ideas can become successful in the internet/app world. The average person could not easily provide the funds that are being suggested. Most successful apps are free and people seem to expect them to be free. In app purchases seem to work but there has been numerous negative reports of how easy it is for people to run up very large bills to use the app or if a game (progress further). This is especially true of apps aimed at Children.
Up until recently adverts were fairly non existant on apps and users were using the app version more tha the browser version of sites. Today apps now do show adverts but numerous ad blockers exist to stop ads from being displayed though these apps are being outlawed by the app stores; even some websites have been coded so that they show a banner to users if they have ad blockers installed in the browser and wont let them use the site unless the blocker is disabled.
It seems that perhaps bedroom technologists will be lucky to succeed; though this is no different to what happened in the video games industry as todays video games have budgets that are in excess of hollywod feature films. The likes of manic miner and pacman just dont get developed today
It will be interesting to see if Vana does launch her app.