ReadWriteWeb

Every entrepreneur will tell you that recruiting the right candidate is important. While startups are constantly trying to find programmers that mesh well with their culture, team and work-style, one article suggests that companies still struggle finding candidates that know how to program at all. Jeff Atwood published a post this morning entitled, The Non-Programming Programmer with a stunning look at how many interviewees misrepresent their abilities.

An initial public offering, or IPO, is when a company opts to trade its shares publicly on the stock market - a decision that can be a risky investment. At times, unprofitable startups go public in hopes of reversing their situation, but most of the time IPOs come from the profitable startups looking to expand their value. Based on some fascinating new data visualization tools released today from Tableau Software (see note below), an intriguing trend has emerged among profitable and unprofitable IPOs.

SourceForge, the world's largest open source software development website, has backed off a widely unpopular, end-of-January decision that had banned entire countries from accessing the site's vast assortment of open-source software projects. In a blog post yesterday, SourceForge announced that it would discontinue its blanket ban, which was done using automatic IP blocking.

The new policy puts the responsibility for restricting access to certain projects in the hands of project administrators.

Deploying complex software applications can be a real headache. Getting systems running can take many days of skilled effort to install all the underlying components required. Software houses and development shops will perform many installations during a system's life cycle, for testing, demonstration, trade shows and so on.

Each time an install is performed, somebody must run through a long list of instructions. But it does not have to be like this. Instead of shipping a DVD and a 20-page installation guide, software companies can ship their software installed and configured on a Virtual Machine. The machine can contain all the prerequisites such as database, Web server and the language runtime libraries. Installation just requires the virtualization software and some space on the computer to run it.

We had almost forgotten about Orb, the media-sharing software that lets you stream video from your home computer to your iPhone or any other internet-connected device. In fact, the last time we had even looked at the application was November of 2008 when the company announced an update to their iPhone application which allowed you to stream live TV over the 3G network. At that time though, the desktop software portion of the Orb product was PC-only. As in Windows PC-only. Today, that has changed. Orb for Macintosh has finally been released so Mac OS X users can now stream their media over the net, too.

Have you ever wanted to build a better web cam, GPS device or web video pet monitoring service? Well you just might get your chance. Bug Labs recently released their latest BUGbase device module with an embedded WiFi and bluetooth solution. Best known for its Lego-like hardware blocks, BUG offers users a set of programmable modules to develop DIY gadgets. What makes this so groundbreaking is the fact that the company is offering one of the first-ever open source WiFi hardware solutions. This means that both large-scale hardware manufacturers and garage tinkers can utilize the code.

A newly released feature from "cloud desktop" software maker Gladinet lets you perform a new kind of backup procedure: cloud-to-cloud. Usually, when you think of cloud backup programs, you think of applications that take your computer's files and upload them to the web for safekeeping. Or perhaps you think of apps that take your files in the cloud and back them up safely to your PC or external hard drive. What's not as common is finding a way to backup your online files from one cloud storage application to another. There simply aren't many good tools out there for doing so. However, with Gladinet's new cloud backup feature, currently only available for Google Docs, you can backup your files from Google's cloud to someone else's, whether that's Amazon, Box.net, EMC, or whatever else you choose.

Gladinet is a free Windows software program that lets you mount cloud storage as local folders on your PC while keeping both locations in sync with each other. It provides access to a number of "cloud" storage services which include: Amazon S3, Google Docs, Google, Picasa, ThinkFree, Zoho, Windows Live SkyDrive, and more. The product, which debuted as a tech preview back in the summer of 2008, has finally reached the release candidate milestone, a point at which the software should finally be more stable, more usable, and (hopefully) bug-free.

Many a neutech hipster looked askance at the huge IBM-plex situated front and center at this year's Web 2.0 conference.

No one could deny the hardware/software/services giant's place in tech history (their first plant is now almost 100 years old), but what does it have to do with the glassy, streamy, widgety world that tech had become? IBM staff on-site had many answers for that oft-repeated question, which was usually phrased, roughly, "What the hell are you guys doing here?"

You can keep your fusty old venture capital. For our money, you can't beat the Tamagochi-eqsue cuteness of Miro's Code Adoption Program.

Miro is the free, open source, cross-platform online video player that manages queued downloads much like TiVo for the Internet. And although the number of users has tripled to about 1.1 million uniques over the past three months with the release of Miro 2.0, the amount of funds available for nonprofits such as Miro has dramatically dropped. Insert yet another generalization about the crumbling economy here.

U.S. government agencies can now officially use YouTube, Flickr, Vimeo, and blip.tv, using special service agreements that comply with federal terms and conditions. Today, the General Services Administration (GSA) announced that, after nine months of negotiations, the government has signed agreements with these companies that will allow federal agencies to officially post content to these sites. The GSA is also negotiating special terms and conditions with MySpace and Facebook, and it has already determined that Twitter's service agreement is in line with federal requirements.

Google has announced that the company now offers a secure way for third party websites to access any user's list of friends, with their permission, and based on a proposed new industry standard. No more giving away your GMail password and then having random services you want to try go into your account and scrape the information there.

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.

YouTube launched a handy new page last night that aggregates all the videos from more than 100 institutions of higher education around the US. YouTube.com/edu now serves up campus tours, free lectures, research and other college news all in one place. Search queries can be limited to the Edu part of the site as well.

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.

Evernote, the popular note-taking, cataloging, and bookmarking service has been busy over the past month, cranking out a number of updates. In this short period of time, they've added support for Safari, integrated with Mac's Growl, updated the Android version, revamped their Web Clipper, and partnered up with business card and receipt scanning service Shoeboxed. Oh, and they started a podcast too.

Xobni, the Outlook email plugin that makes your inbox a more social experience, is finally leaving their beta phase after 10 months of testing. The company is also announcing they've taken in an additional investment of $3.2 million to bring their series B round to over $10 million.

Yesterday, I was with my wife in the L'Occitane store. The shelves were filled with fragrances, soaps, lotions: all sorts of handcrafted beauty products. It occured to me while looking at the labels that I have no idea how these products were made. I am reasonably versed in chemistry, but the process of manufacturing perfume is not something I know anything about.

In general, I am just not good with physical things, because I am a software person. I've always been fascinated by people who can easily make sense of physical objects, because for me it takes a lot of effort even to put together children's toys. My brain is wired differently, to see patterns in software, not in hardware. But most people are the other way around.

How easy is it to launch a new web application these days? Easy enough that we see scads of new ones every day, in our tips inbox, on other blogs, raining out of the sky like cats and dogs. We love many of them, we really do, but after that short period of excitement - how many of these apps do we keep using for the long haul?

We asked seven members of the ReadWriteWeb team to list apps they discovered about a month ago and that they still find useful today. The resulting list was 22 services long, with consensus around a few in particular. Whether you're a long-time early adopter or just discovering many of the apps that the new web has to offer, we think you'll find some things on this list that you'll really appreciate well into the future too.

It's all about the web apps these days, right? Everything important's in the clouds? Not so fast! Spend some time separated from your physical computer and you'll likely be reminded just how much time and care you've put into setting it up like you want it. Even in this era of web app hype, we still love a good piece of desktop software, don't we?

Here at ReadWriteWeb, we'll be honest with you - we love our computers. Not just the web. In that spirit we thought we'd offer readers some short video tours of the apps we use every day. You may discover some things you want to try out for yourself.

Recently, Google's photo sharing app, Picasa, was updated to a new version that now does facial recognition and tagging. There are also rumors that the soon-to-launch next version of Windows Live Photo Gallery will do the same. Today at DEMO08, new Mac software, iLovePhotos, claims to do the same. Unfortunately, their interpretation of "automatic facial recognition" leaves a little something to be desired. However, some of their other features like automatic sharing and slideshows look pretty great.