Would your company recruit skilled employees using a video game?

That isn't a rhetorical question. Recruiting the right people is an unavoidable and costly challenge for many organizations.

SkyTroller could help address a pressing HR issue. The Federal Aviation Administration, on which Ronald Reagan hit the reset button early in his presidency, faces a huge loss of ATCs around 2016.

The FAA also suffers ongoing ATC shortages, at least according to the ATCs. The FAA insists that US control towers are not understaffed, but echoes of this "disagreement" can be heard in places like Australia and Europe as well.

Could SkyTroller help match ATC organizations worldwide with people who show the raw talent to keep the skies collision-free? Maybe.

SkyTroller concept originator Dale Leier, a 20-year ATC vet (retired) with Nav Canada, now with iPhone app incubator HeavyLifters Network Ltd., says that the game contains about as much of the real thing as HeavyLifters could wedge into a phone screen.

And NavCan, Leier's old employer, has shown interest. (SkyTroller hasn't yet registered on the FAA's radar.)

Using technology to find promising staff is nothing new. There's even a B-movie precedent, The Last Starfighter, in which aliens recruit the protagonist, an American teen, using a video game based on the gunships used in a far-off intergalactic war. That game notified the recruiter when the teen recorded a high score.

To help aspiring ATCs get jobs, SkyTroller would need a similar alert mechanism, on top of buy-in from the FAA and its sister organizations.

While this recruiting scenario remains incomplete, it still seems promising:

• One low-cost app that could be used to test budding ATCs.
• Millions of iPhones and iPod Touches sold that run the app.
• Perpetual worldwide demand for ATCs.
• Extra time for newly unemployed owners of these Apple products to figure out if they can help meet that demand.

Do you know of other "recruiting apps" made for handhelds? Would you develop such an app for your company? Let us know what you think.

With Profile Organizer, bookmarking is simple. Users save contacts with one click and are given the option to create category files for their contacts. If you want to separate the product managers from the designers or the engineers from the HR staff, you can. Users are given the chance to name their contact folders by occupation, location or other relevant labels. From here you can also choose to add contact information and notes. The information is only visible to you so you can be as descriptive as you like. If you don't already have a tool like Salesforce, the notes section is a great place to jot down a contact's interests and hobbies. If you're the type of person who needs more to jog your memory, it's also a great place to record the details of your last conversation.

The Profile Organizer is available to regular LinkedIn users for a 30-day trial. Business members can access the service but are given a limit of 5 contact folders. Meanwhile, Business Pro and Pro members can create as many as 25 contact folders. To test the new product visit Linkedin.com/organizer.

According to stories on Nextgov and Federal Computer Week, the GSA had a number of other legal concerns about the standard terms and conditions of these services, including problems with indemnification clauses, liability limits, and endorsements, which led it to enter negotiations with these services. Also, a lot of the standard agreements call for dispute resolutions by state courts, while for government agencies, federal law has to apply.

It is important to note that these new agreements only cover the free services offered by these companies. The GSA is also looking into expanding these agreements to a wider range of social media services.

A number of federal agencies, like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or the Library of Congress already use services like Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr. To do so, however, these agencies either needed special waivers, or they negotiated terms directly with these services. Some of these initiatives have been very successful. Pictures from the Library of Congress, for example, have been viewed over 15 million times.

Library of Congress on iTunes

In addition, the Library of Congress today announced that it will begin to share more of its content on YouTube and, as podcasts, through Apple's iTunes. This initiative will launch in the next few weeks.

Engaging the Public

We are glad to see that the GSA has now removed some of the major stumbling blocks that stopped a large number of government agencies from using social media sites. Now we just hope that these agencies will also use these services to actually engage with citizens.

Called Portable Contacts, the technical spec offers a standard, interoperable way for social networks to serve up your friends lists to anyone you give permission to access them. This should allow application developers to innovate on top of your social connections much more efficiently.

we're seeing major Internet companies making contacts APIs available, such as Google's GData Contacts API, Yahoo's Address Book API, and Microsoft's Live Contacts API (with more to come). Not surprisingly though, each of these APIs is unique and proprietary. We believe this creates the ideal conditions for developing a common, open spec that everyone can benefit from.

Why is This Important?

The social web works best when it's truly social. New applications that use social sharing can be much more useful when new users can port in their existing network of friends and see who they know is already using a site. That's much better than starting cold.

These types of standardized approaches to passing that data are secure (that's good) and allow developers to write code once to use all the supporting sources of data. You've heard the old illustration about railroads? When all the railroads in the US accepted a standard size of rail, all the trains were able to travel much farther than ever before. That's where we're headed with all this information on the web. When we give it standard methods of transport, it can go further and do more than ever before.

That's a pretty big deal and it's fantastic that Google has moved to support the Portable Contacts standard. Hopefully sometime soon everyone will and then we'll wonder what took the web so long to enable social interoperability.

This is a great idea and we expect that young people who discover it will appreciate it. At first glance it looks better to us than iTunes University. This could genuinely help young people make more informed decisions about what schools to apply to. There's also a lot of great content on the site for anyone to learn from.

Last year we asked "Is YouTube the Next Google?," noting that video search is one of the most compelling types of search online. There is video content online, and on YouTube in particular, about just about anything. College content? That's a no brainer.

If you like academic videos, make sure to check out Academic Earth as well.

"It became very, very evident to me that as technology moves forward, there will come a day where we'll be able to not just create animation based upon our comic books and our characters and stories that we've told, but there will come a time when eventually we'll be able to take existing comic art, the flat, static art, and be able to animate it," said Marvel editor-in-chief Joe Quesada. "So [now] we can put out a product that is not quite a comic book and not quite animation, [but] a wonderful hybrid that incorporates all of our great talents."

X-Men and Spider-Woman are among the first books to take on the new format. No pricing or release date has been set.

While printed works have always held promise on iTunes - and the iPhones and iPods that derive content from it - this new comic format could be the perfect fit for the handheld Apple devices that excel with audio and video.

When you combine the Apple hardware - or any device capable of playing iTunes content - with the geek appeal of Marvel's universe of heroes, this seems like a sure winner for both Marvel and iTunes.

As of October 29, 2008, the Market offered 167 applications, the vast majority of which were categorized as tools or games. Of those apps, roughly a quarter garner the lion's share of the downloads.

So what types of apps are Android users downloading? Turns out the most popular Android apps, so far, are very similar to those that tend to lead the iPhone market: entertainment and reference.

Pac-Man and the Weather Channel lead all apps. Ringdroid - an app that allows users to record and edit sounds - and iPhone-favorite Shazam - an app that can "listen" to a song and help users identify the name and artist - are also among the top downloads. Yes, there's also a flashlight app.

How does Android Market traffic compare with the Apple App Store? At this point, it's difficult to tell. Based on the initial metrics, VentureBeat offers estimates that the Android Market downloads may reach "58 million after 100 days." For comparison, the Apple App Store reached 100 million downloads in 60 days.

While the Android Market numbers aren't earth shattering or record breaking, they are respectable. Given the current trends, the number of downloads should climb steadily, as should the number of applications available for download.

We're sure to see more and more happening with the Market and the handset it supports - even though Google is currently in the position of following a path established by Apple. Lest we forget, this isn't the first market Google has entered in this position. And they seem to have done fairly well for themselves in those markets. Will Android prove to be a similar win? That remains to be seen.

In Part 2 of this story, we reveal some of Zoho's cookbook.

At the Web 2.0 Expo in New York last week, Jason Fried of 37 Signals, another company that has done well by defying conventional wisdom, advised entrepreneurs to "follow the chefs". He meant that great Chefs give away their recipes. That just makes you want to come to their restaurants even more. Particularly if the recipe looks complex. And Zoho's looks complex.

So I hope they won't mind me giving out the recipe they revealed when I met with Raju Vegesna, one of their founders, last week. I noted 3 major ingredients:

1. New ways of competing for talent

2. A related cash cow business

3. Pragmatic, non dogmatic approach to winning business

New Ways of Competing for Talent

If I had to select one "secret sauce" in Zoho's recipe, it would be how they recruit. Zoho (with parent company, Adventnet) has 700 developers. All the developers are in India, specifically Chennai.

India is a ridiculously competitive market for developer talent currently. I see parallels with Silicon Valley in 1999, when average developers got inflated expectations and inflated paychecks. Attrition is problem # 1.

Developers see their career path as managing other developers. Your mojo is based on how many people you manage. Managing 1,000 makes you ten times better than managing 100 and so on. This is the reverse of America where a developer will drop custom service work as soon as it is possible to work on a product.

This is a terrible environment for a product company to compete for talent. How does Zoho compete for talent in this market?

1. Hire from school. Yes, school, not college. So they don't compete to hire from final year of College or in the even more hot market of developers with a few years experience. Great code is typically written by young people - which explains a lot of the "college drop out makes $ billions" stories in America.

2. Pay one year of college fees. This is a salary, not a loan, with no strings attached. According to Raju, 90% join Zoho at the end of that year, but there is no obligation. This gives Zoho an edge with the brightest at school as they have an unusual offer.

Zoho's philosophy is that 4 years college when you are young is not right for many people. Better to have life-long learning but get real world experience early and get some cash while you are at it. This gets a big "yes" from parents paying college fees!

Zoho have their own Zoho University. This is not uncommon for big employers in India. It is a necessary complement to hiring early.

Related cash cow

Zoho has a related cash cow business that enable them to fund Zoho. This is not unlike Google. Microsoft's problem is that their cash cow - Office - is the one that both Google and Zoho are going after. That gives them one nasty Innovator's Dilemma.

Zoho's initial cash cow business is selling network management tools. This has been profitable for 12 years. Zoho itself is due to be profitable next year.

The network management tools business is doing the same as Zoho - products at least as good as the competition for a fraction of the price. This business also gives Zoho a capability for running large data centers, which is a core competency for a SaaS business.

Pragmatic, Non Dogmatic Approach to Winning Business

By all accounts, Zoho won GE's business in head to head competition with Google. GE wanted to cut cost and enable collaboration, which meant Microsoft was less of a contender. Google was the obvious "you never got fired for choosing" winner. Why did GE choose Zoho? There are two likely reasons:

1. Zoho allowed GE to run the software in their own data centers. GE has the economies of scale to run their own data centers and clearly prize the control that this enables. Zoho specified the hardware, but GE bought it and deployed it. Is a "Zoho Appliance" far behind?

2. Visual Basic Scripts in Spreadsheets. Current tech orthodoxy frowns on VB, but if you have thousands of existing Excel spreadsheets running VB that would be a show-stopper.