Facebook removed 26 job listings from its careers page this week, likely after filling roles in engineering, recruiting, product marketing, sales and other areas.

It seems the company has found another partner manager to work with DSPs involved with the Facebook Exchange, as that program is quickly growing. There was also a job removed for a Manager, Business Partner Management, PMD Program.

Prior listings removed from Facebook’s careers page:

• Software Engineer, Compiler & Virtual Machine (Menlo Park)
• Financial Analyst, Infrastructure and Technology (Menlo Park)
• Technology Sourcing Specialist (Contract) (Menlo Park)
• Executive Administrative Assistant – Contract (Menlo Park)
• Paralegal (Legal Assistant) (São Paulo)
• Facebook Exchange (FBX) Partner Manager, PMD Program (Menlo Park)
• Product Specialist, User Operations (Menlo Park)
• BI Engineer (Menlo Park)
• BI Engineer, Visualization & Reporting (Menlo Park)
• Manager, IT Engineering (Menlo Park)
• HR Specialist – Contract (São Paulo)
• Recruiter (Tokyo)
• Data Visualization Designer (Menlo Park)
• Research Participant Recruiter (Menlo Park)
• Engineering Manager, Data Center Design (Menlo Park)
• Asset Strategy & Optimization Analyst (Menlo Park)
• Associate Product Marketing Manager (Menlo Park)
• Product Marketing Director, Monetization (Menlo Park)
• Online Marketing Specialist – SMB (Menlo Park)
• Payment Operations Analyst – Contract (Austin)
• Risk Analyst, Contractor (Austin)
• Account Manager, QSR (New York)
• Account Specialist, Global Marketing Solutions (Menlo Park)
• Manager, Business Partner Management, PMD Program (Menlo Park)
• Client Partner, Quebec (Toronto)
• Global Business Manager, APAC (Singapore)

Who else is hiring? The Inside Network Job Board presents a survey of current openings at leading companies in the industry.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Facebook added 19 new positions to its careers page this week, including a number of openings on the communications, marketing, sales and infrastructure teams.

New listings added to Facebook’s careers page:

• Software Engineer, Entities – Local Data (New York)
• Director & Infrastructure Controller (Menlo Park)
• Internal Audit Analyst (Menlo Park)
• IT Audit Manager (Menlo Park)
• Manager, Public Policy, France (Paris)
• Manager, Technology Communications (Menlo Park)
• Technical Systems Principal, APAC (Hyderabad)
• Recruiter (Contract) (Hamburg – Stockholm – Amsterdam)
• Recruiting Programs Associate, EMEA (Contract) (Dublin)
• Data Visualization Designer (Menlo Park)
• Technical Project Manager – Accessibility (Menlo Park)
• Regional Logistics Analyst (Luleå)
• MySQL Database Engineer (Dublin)
• Industry Marketing Manager – Contract (Menlo Park)
• Associate, Marketing Designer (Contract) (Singapore)
• Account Manager, Retail (Chicago)
• Growth Manager, India – New Delhi (Hyderabad)
• Manager, Global Sales Outsourcing (Brazil) (São Paulo)
• Lead, Vertical Measurement – Retail (Chicago – New York – Menlo Park)

Who else is hiring? The Inside Network Job Board presents a survey of current openings at leading companies in the industry.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Facebook removed 21 job listings from its careers page this week, likely after making hires in the areas of business operations, data analysis, software engineering, sales and others.

The company appears to have filled a position for lead privacy counsel, as well as a data steward. Facebook has removed a listing for an executive briefing center manager first added three months ago. The company also seems to have hired a merchant operations analyst to work on the new Facebook Gifts product.

Prior listings removed from Facebook’s careers page:

• Lead Privacy Counsel (Menlo Park)
• Executive Briefing Center Manager (Menlo Park)
• 3D Graphics / Visualization Engineer (Seattle)
• Hardware Test Engineer Intern/Co-op (Menlo Park)
• Compensation & Forecast, Program Manager (Menlo Park)
• Business Operations Manager, LATAM (São Paulo)
• Data Steward (Menlo Park)
• Software Engineer, Supply Chain and Logistics (Menlo Park)
• Academic Relations Specialist (Menlo Park)
• Controls Engineer (Prineville)
• Hardware Test Engineer Intern/Co-op (Menlo Park)
• Data Analyst, Payments (Menlo Park)
• Data Analyst, Developer Operations (Menlo Park)
• Merchant Operations Analyst (Menlo Park)
• Media Solutions (Austin)
• Lead, Small and Medium Business Growth (Tokyo)
• Small and Medium Business Specialist (Singapore – Tokyo)
• SMB Regional Manager APAC (Singapore)
• Client Partner, Dutch (Dublin)
• Client Partner, Korea (Singapore) (Seoul – Singapore)
• Quantitative Modeling and Forecasting Analyst, Business Operations (Menlo Park)

Who else is hiring? The Inside Network Job Board presents a survey of current openings at leading companies in the industry.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Today Trifacta, a company building a cross-platform interface for dealing with big data, announced that it received a $4.3 million investment from the Accel Partners Big Data Fund. The company also raised money from X/Seed Capital, Data Collective LLC, Dave Goldberg, Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman.

Trifacta is a team of computer scientists with deep experience in data visualization trying to pull off one of the Holy Grails of data tech: making big data accessible to the non-Ph.D level analyst.

It’s a huge opportunity, if they can get it right. Moore’s Law gives us better and cheaper hardware, and software like Apache Hadoop makes use of it. Humans are now the real bottleneck in technology says Ping Li, who runs the Big Data Fund at Accel.

But unlike other companies trying to make big data simpler to use, such as Datameer Trifacta is focusing on building an interface that can be used on many different platforms, ranging from traditional relational databases to Hadoop clusters. The promise is that Trifacta will generate SQL queries or map reduce code that will run against the actual data storage and processing systems in use.

The company hopes not just to make big data easier for normal business users, but also to make it more efficient for data scientists to process as well. The user will be able to pull a data set, or perhaps just a sample of it, into memory and use Trifacta to explore the through an interface that includes different ways of visualizing the data. The application will suggest different operations you might want to perform and there will previews of what the effects of a particular operation might be. Once you’ve decided on the operations you want to perform, the code or queries are generated.

The founders are CEO Joe Hellerstein, a professor of computer science at University of California Berkley, and “Chief Experience Officer” Jeffrey Heer, a computer science professor at Stanford, and CTO Sean Kandel, who did a dissertation at Stanford on the behavior and productivity of data analysts.

Kandel was one of Heer’s students at Stanford. The two were part of the university’s Human-Computer Interaction Group and the Visualization Group. As part of the Visualization group Kandel worked on Data Wrangler, an acclaimed tool for cleaning up data sets. Heer co-lead the JavaScript data visualization projects Protovis and D3.js.

These guys have some chops, but they’re not going into this alone. They’ve also assembled a team of advisers they call the “Trifaculty” to help them out.

They’re going to need all the help they can get — this is an ambitious project.

Accel started its big data fund last year. It’s a $100 million fund dedicated purely to . So far it’s backed online backup company Code 42, energy management company Vigilent and a stealth startup called RelateIQ.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

It’s a good time to be a healthy geek — and to start becoming one. Of late, we’ve seen an exponential increase in digital health data thanks to growing popularity of a new generation of smart, wearable devices that help us track and stay on top of our health. These Quantified Self devices scratch our geeky itch for data and allow us to take doctors and fitness instructors home with us — or out on our jogs. However, while dashboards and analytics are great, for data to really be useful, people have to be able to interact with it. It has to be fun and engaging, cutting through the noise of our everyday routines.

Eli Holder founded Notch.me earlier this year in an attempt to make health-tracking beautiful, creating consumer software that helps people visualize and engage with their health. Holder sold his first startup, Unblab, to AOL back in 2010 and, since then, has been plugging away on Notch. Having struggled to stay healthy himself (like so many others), the core idea behind Notch is that our busy lives make it tough to keep our health at the top of mind, which is obviously a key part of staying motivated and healthy.

So, to help put health back on the priority list, Notch is trying to create a positive health experience by presenting data in a more visually stimulating way: Through personalized infographics. Sure, infographics can be annoying and mind-numbing, but the idea is to create visualizations that lower the bar on ease-of-consumption, making health activity something you actually look forward to. When Notch first debuted in May, it’s primary source of data came through Fitbit, turning users’ Fitbit steps into an infographic — like this one.

Since May, Holder says that the most-requested feature has been RunKeeper integration, so today Notch is launching a new set of infographics that offer just that.

The images show off examples of advanced runners’ achievements (celebrating their endurance), while encouraging non-runners and beginning runners by rewarding them for reaching shorter distances. Every time the user hits a new milestone, the infographic adjusts itself to show another set of graphics and presents a new milestone to aim for.

Holder says that, for now, Notch is focused on running and on adding the trackers that are most popular among the community. The road forward begins with visualizations, the low-hanging fruit, which he hopes leads to Notch being able to let users access real motivation profiles — and build long-term engagement. As of now, Notch is actively pursuing partnerships with all the leading fitness and health software publishers and sensor device makers, offering them a way to add a layer of creativity to static health data.

As for RunKeeper, founder and CEO Jason Jacobs tells us that the company is looking to round out its platform by adding a set of serious motivational tools, like goal-setting and training plans. So, he sees Notch as a cool way to lighten up that experience and present data in a more creative way. While it’s all about adding serious, useful training tools, fitness needs to be fun, he says, and personalized infographics that display your actual health data is a great entry point.

Focusing exclusively on Fitbit at the start made sense for Notch, but it also limited the potential reach of the service, so adding RunKeeper is a step towards a bigger market. To be clear, Notch is simple, and it’s more of a project than a company, or an experimentation in data visualization. So far, it has a lot of appeal (and potential), but there’s also a long way left to go.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook engineer Sean Lynch has built a mind-blowing, custom server-monitoring tool for the company that uses heat mapping to keep tabs on a huge number of servers at a glance.

Lynch is part of the cache performance team at Facebook. When things go wrong he needs to know quickly whether problems are being caused by caching or something else. Off the shelf monitoring tools just weren’t good enough.

So he built Claspin, a server-monitoring system named after a protein that monitors cells for DNA damage. And today he’s giving curious readers a tour of the system in a post on the Facebook Engineering Blog.

Claspin displays grid-like maps representing servers grouped by rack. Each cell of the grid represents one server, and its color depends on the health of that particular server. Green for good, red for bad, yellow for in-between and black if it’s missing a stat (which means it’s probably down). This visualization approach enables Facebook engineers to check the status of a huge number of servers at once.

“On a 30″ screen we could easily fit 10,000 hosts at the same time, with 30 or more stats contributing to their color, updated in real time — usually in a matter of seconds or minutes,” Lynch writes.

“When I first deployed Claspin, the view above had a lot more red in it,” he writes. “By making it easier for more people to spot server issues quickly, Claspin has allowed us to catch more ‘yellows’ and prevent more ‘reds.’”

As to how Claspin determines the health of a system, Lynch writes: “I settled on coloring a host by its ‘hottest’ statistic, with hotness computed from predefined thresholds. It’s dirt simple, but it gives us a way to encode tribal knowledge about what values are ‘bad’ into the view.”

Claspin provides a tabbed interface so that Lynch can toggle between different views. He can also change which stats affect the color of the cells. “Mousing over a host draws an outline around its rack and pops up a tooltip with the hostname, rack number, and all the stats Claspin is looking at for that host, with the values colored based on Claspin’s thresholds for that stat,” he writes.

The interface is entirely browser-based. Coloring is done with JavaScript and the heatmaps are drawn with SVG. You can find out more and see a couple more screenshots on Lynch’s blog post.

Facebook engineers have talked about Claspin before in interviews, but I think this is the first time we’ve gotten a peek behind the curtain.

It doesn’t look like the company is open sourcing this project quite yet. “We always try to open source tools like this, so it’s something we’ll consider with Claspin,” a Facebook spokesperson told me. “But it’s possible that it’s so tightly integrated with our infrastructure that it wouldn’t be broadly useful.”

Facebook has open sourced a lot of its custom-built development and operations software, including the NoSQL database Apache Cassandra and its PHP to C++ transformer HipHop. It’s even gone so far as to open source its data center infrastructure plans. So don’t be surprised to see this hit GitHub in the future.

In the meantime, who’s going to be the first to clone it?

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook added a number of interesting new job listings to its careers page this week, including a Chinese language specialist and a growth manager for Russia.

Facebook is currently blocked in China, but the company definitely has interest in the region. The new job listing says applicants for the Chinese language specialist should have “strong familiarity with the target culture and trends in social networking.”

The Growth Manager, Russia position calls for an employee who can “identify and monitor strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats relevant for Facebook’s adoption in Russia,” as well as “influence and improve the Facebook experience of users in Russia by identifying product/market fit gaps.”

Facebook also added positions for a Head of Business Operations, Mid Market and Small & Medium Business and a Technology Partner, Sales & Marketing Partnerships. The former position will be part of the finance team, responsible for providing analytical support to the company’s Global Mid Market and Global SMB Sales teams. The latter position will concentrate in the short term on defining and implementing a revenue forecasting and quota setting process for the company.

The social network is also looking for a creative strategist for its London office. This is in addition to a similar position in New York that is yet to be filled.

Posts added this week on Facebook’s Careers Page:

• Head of Business Operations, Mid Market and Small & Medium Business
• Manager, Technology Communications
• Public Policy Manager (Sao Paulo)
• Language Specialist, Chinese
• Technology Partner, Sales & Marketing Partnerships
• Infrastructure Security Engineer
• Software Engineer, Supply Chain and Logistics
• Global Mobility Representative – Contract
• Engineering Leadership Sourcer
• Executive Technical Recruiter
• Communication Design Manager
• Data Center Automation Controls Engineer
• Data Center Business Analyst
• Creative Strategist (London)
• Head of Operations, Global Marketing Solutions – Hyderabad
• Manager, Italian Mid Market Sales (Dublin)
• Software Engineer, Measurement Systems
• Data Engineer, Data Warehouse
• Data Engineer, Visualization & Reporting
• Growth Manager, Russia

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

 Facebook added 23 new positions to its careers page this week, including a job for lead commercial counsel, among several others for recruiters, engineers and analysts.

Posts added this week on Facebook’s Careers Page:

• Lead Commercial Counsel
• Data Warehouse Engineer
• Data Engineer, Visualization & Reporting
• Software Engineer, Measurement Systems
• Quantitative Modeling and Forecasting Analyst, Business Operations
• Infrastructure Security Engineer
• Oracle Application Developer (supply chain and logistics)
• Design Recruiting Lead/Manager
• Recruiting Coordinator – Contract (New York)
• Recruiting Coordinator – Contract (London)
• Technical Recruiter – Menlo Park
• Technical Recruiter – Menlo Park (Contract)
• Technical Recruiter – Seattle (Contract)
• Technical Sourcer – Menlo Park
• Technical Sourcer – Menlo Park (Contract)
• Technical Sourcer -New York (Contract)
• Data Warehouse Engineer
• Infrastructure Security Engineer
• Sourcing Manager, Network Hardware
• Media Solutions (Toronto)
• Quantitative Modeling and Forecasting Analyst, Business Operations
• Software Engineer, Measurement Systems
• Associate, Custom Market Insights (Menlo Park)

Jobs posted by Facebook on LinkedIn:

• Quantitative Modeling and Forecasting Analyst, Business Operations in Menlo Park, CA
• Business Operations Associate, Finance in Menlo Park, CA
• IT Manager in Dublin
• Principal, Monetization (Menlo Park) in Menlo Park, CA
• Lead, Custom Market Insights (New York) in Midtown Manhattan
• Associate, Custom Market Insights (New York) in Midtown Manhattan
• Marketing Mix Science Specialist (Menlo Park) in Menlo Park, CA
• Data Engineer, Enterprise BI in San Francisco Bay Area
• Technology Partner, Supply Chain/Logistics in San Francisco Bay Area
• IT & Security in San Francisco Bay Area

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

If you are among those who feel that we see too many infographics these days, be prepared for a little more eye candy: Visual.ly, which offers an online tool to create instant visualizations of data, is launching its first public product out of beta.

The service will let users take publicly-available data such as information from a Twitter hashtag or a Facebook feed, and then select a template (currently five, with each having two to three variations within it) to instantly visualize it. It will also team up with third parties and brands to offer other data feeds to users: one, for example, will involve sports statistics from ESPN.

While infographics seem like the kind of thing that would mostly be the domain of number-crunching analysts and journalists, created for consumption by the wider public, the use of Visual.ly’s beta — launched last year — testifies to there being a bigger audience for actually making these pictures firsthand.

Stew Langille, the company’s founder and CEO, tells TechCrunch that since launching that beta, it has seen the creation of over 11,000 infographics and seen 2 million visitors per month. And more than than 500,000 people have used the specially-created Twitter Visualizer since it launched in July 2011.

“There’s a reason why we’re seeing so many infographics,” he says. “It’s because it’s just a better way of telling a story.”

The company also continues to work directly with companies to create custom infographics for news organizations as well as brands — these have included Showtime, Smirnoff and Cisco — and Langille concedes that for now this is where the company’s primary revenue generation lies. Another important partnership for Visual.ly, he notes, is with Tableau Software, the business intelligence software company — that could point to the kind of place where Visual.ly might land itself one day.

But for now, the company, which has raised $4.4 million to date and is likely to go for another round in Q4, is still focused on building out more ways of visually representing data and ways of then offering that for use by everyday people. Langille, and his co-founder Lee Sherman, both hail from Mint.com, and as with that site, which attempts to make personal money management tools into something usable by everyone, the idea is that Visual.ly can also have a wider remit.

He talks of the impact that blogging sites like WordPress, Pinterest and  even Facebook’s Timeline — in itself a kind of constantly changing infographic — have had on how people have chosen to be creative online.

WordPress he singles out also for the role that “crowdsourced” design has played to usher in that process: the idea is that someday Visual.ly will have the same kind of design repository for representing information, and that information could then be used anywhere. “We want to turn data into something that is really beautiful and usable.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

How would you like to crunch your way through big data on your iPad? That’s one of the many promises of Lucky Sort, the stealthy new Portland, Oregon-based startup building a visualization and navigation engine called TopicWatch meant for discovering patterns in live data streams.

The company just raised a half-million seed round from Neu Venture Capital, Invite Investments (founders of Invite Media) and several angel investors, including Adam Riggs (Shutterstock.com), BankSimple co-founder Alex Payne, and, oh, geek out on this one: chaos theory physicist, quantitative trading pioneer, and roulette wheel hacker Norman Packard, Ph.D., who is also now the Chief Science Officer at the firm.

According to Lucky Sort CEO and founder Noah Pepper, “everyone complains about information overload, but until now, there have been few technologies or solutions that can really help a user control and even take advantage of the data deluge in flexible and creative ways.”

That where TopicWatch comes in. With the new service, Lucky Sort’s first product, the company wants to enable users to sift through social media, government filings, news and commentary in real time, in order to find, summarize and analyze any text-based content. To be clear, TopicWatch is not yet another “sentiment analysis” or “social listening” platform – those are just subsets of what can be done on top of its platform.

In addition, TopicWatch isn’t just for public data, like Twitter updates or RSS feeds. While those are supported, users are also able to import their own text content into the platform, and then analyze that alongside other data from Lucky Sort and its (yet to be announced) partners.

The big idea here is that the startup is trying to build the next generation interface for discovering information from huge, unstructured data sets. The system uses NLP (natural language processing) that favors statistics and user input over ontologies.

“Moving away from ontologies and dictionaries is pretty radical,” explains Pepper. “NLP relies on using known properties about language data. If you don’t have a database of nouns, verbs, etc., it’s hard to know what the linguistic structure is and therefore how to do more traditional NLP that leverages knowledge from the field of linguistics.”

For the company, Lucky Sort represents a philosophical shift away from trying derive structure from unstructured data, and a move towards embracing unstructured data mining through statistics. OK, that is pretty radical.

And if that’s all too complex an explanation, perhaps this will help. The end result are visualizations that look like this:

This visual interface for data manipulation just happens to work via touch, too. Yes, on the iPad. Of course, if you’re old school, you can do it all on the desktop, and there’s an API available for other developers to use. But that iPad app looks pretty hot, if you ask me.

The product has the potential to turn anyone into a data journalist and/or analyst, as it’s focused on ease of use, despite the complexities on the backend. With TopicView, users can embed and share restricted web views that provide interactive explorations of events or topics directly onto their website.

Forget infographics, these are living, breathing graphics.

Before Lucky Sort, Pepper was the Director of R&D for Qmedtrix, where he oversaw machine learning and visualization platforms to detect fraud and abuse in medical reimbursements. He also serves as a Collaborative Researcher for the Advanced Computation Group at Apple. However, Pepper says the concept for the new startup grew from his earlier work at Reed College’s Artificial Life Lab in the Center for Advanced Computation. He’s joined by CTO and co-founder Homer Strong and Chief Information Architect Devin Chalmers, who both have extensive development backgrounds as well.

The TopicWatch applications for iOS and the Web will launch in May 2012, as will the API. An enterprise private cloud solution will also be available in the future.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch