How to get a job using social media is a recent topic in job seeking conversations. The innovation of social media is allowing people to find work every day. Getting a Job using social media is easier than you think. Social media helps you connect to the right employers because many companies are using social media as a tool to scout for talent. Some job seekers are using the traditional way of finding jobs and it is giving them negative results. Using social media as a tool to find a job enables you to beat the trend of failure. Understanding who you are and how your skills translate into the job market will help you find the job you’ve been waiting for.
Social media websites allow you to create a unique profile that showcases your skills. After you have created your profile you can start relationships with other job seekers or people that are employed at the location you want to work at. Realistically, job seekers find and learn about jobs through other people, not so much computers. If you develop a personal relationship with employers through various social media websites your chances of getting hired will increase. Social media benefits not only job seekers but employers because it eliminates cold calling.
Here are some websites that can help you develop relationship with other job seekers and employers.
LinkedIn is a great website for job seekers. When you create a profile, it’s recommended that you upload all your email contacts. LinkedIn allows you to filter your job search to keep the results relevant to your set of skills. With this website, job seekers can perform background research on each company. Finding background research on each company helps job seekers because employers will notice that “homework was done” during interview.
One the most popular websites on the planet Facebook has a job board overlay known as InTheDoor.com. This tool connects Indeed.com job board database and your Facebook social graph.
Technology has enabled us to apply for jobs on the go. More job seekers are using smart phones like IPhone and Android to look for work. These smart phones can help you look for jobs around the area you are currently located in. If you have an IPhone, you should download an application named Layar. Once this application is installed you should search for a tool name JobAmp Mobile. This allows for a convenient way to search for jobs while you walk around your city.
Having paper resumes isn’t always the best choice when preparing for your job search. A recent survey from OfficeTeam survey, suggested that eventually paper resumes will be replaced by social media and its profiles on networking sites. Profiles let job seekers be creative and really show their uniqueness to employers. Having the right profile helps you stand out in an application pool that is unfortunately increasing every day.
The Nokia Lumia 920 comes with an immense amount of camera innovation. It’s the first time we see a cameraphone with real optical image stabilization system in place and surprise, surprise… it doesn’t come with a huge hump on its back. While only having 8MP of maximum image resolution, the Nokia Lumia 920 also wows with the high-quality Carl Zeiss optics, a last-gen backlit image sensor, multi-aspect shooting, the extra wide viewing angle (up to 26mm in 16:9 mode), a new type of high power/short pulse LED flash and finally, the extra bright F2.0 aperture.
As you see, with the Nokia Lumia 920, PureView development has zoomed on low light performance rather than class leading sharpness and dynamic range. But the results we get should be as impressive as ever. It’s just that this time Nokia’s R&D team is focusing in another direction.
PureView becomes a marketing buzzword
But before I get to the nitty-gritty details, I’d like to get something out of the way. I find the reuse of the PureView moniker for pure marketing’s sake a letdown. What was once the name for a pioneering image technology using a high-megapixel sensor with pixel oversampling to produce sharp images with wide dynamic rage is now turned into a dumbed down name of a series of camera-centric smartphones by Nokia.
I get it, it’s their trademark name, they are free to use it however they like. But it still feels like cheating, sorry. “Whilst some may associate the PureView moniker with specific features, specifications or functionality introduced along with the 808 PureView, Nokia’s ultimate intent for PureView is to be synonymous with high performance imaging.”
And while the announcement of the Lumia 920 yesterday was marred by other forms of cheating too, I still can’t help but be fascinated by the amount of innovation that has gone into making the Lumia 920 camera system.
Capturing light
The backside illuminated image (BSI) sensor or the “backlit sensor”, as it’s commonly called, usually delivers superior pixel performance in low light situations. The advantage you would expect from this type of sensor is getting lower noise levels at a given ISO sensitivity compared to a similar frontside illuminated sensor (FSI). Nokia’s Damian Dinning claims they’ve utilized the absolutely latest generation BSI sensor, which reportedly, has gotten rid of most inherent disadvantages of the technology.
Much like in the Nokia 808, the sensor is oversized (it’s actually 8.7MP rather than 8MP) to allow for higher resolution 16:9 aspect shooting mode. In 4:3 shooting mode the Lumia 920 captures 8MP stills, and in 16:9 aspect mode, the stills turn out 7.1MP, which is a lot more than what competing cameraphones without this multi-aspect oversized sensor would turn in.
When you are aiming in letting as much light as possible to the image sensor, you can hardly go wrong with a wider aperture. The wider the aperture, the wider the “hole” through which light gets to the camera’s sensor. Nokia has gone for a F2.0, which is really wide.
And good-quality wide aperture optics are pretty hard to make and most importantly, usually, they are bulkier.
Keeping it steady
Much like zooming, optical image stabilization (OIS) has long been among the mainstays of digicams, something that’s been out of reach for cameraphones up until now. Creating their OIS system, Nokia has gone for a complex design that is more advanced than the one used in your regular-sized digital camera.
The diminutive optical system on the Nokia Lumia 920 allowed the engineers to create something they call “floating optics”. Rather than shifting a single lens element inside the module to compensate for camera shake, Nokia’s OIS system moves the entire optical assembly to counter the camera shake. “The benefit of this approach is that the amount and form of camera movement that can be compensated for is much greater.” And as Damian Dinning himself puts it, this has been their “most challenging opto-mechanical design to date.”
Reportedly, the new system is performing even better than the OIS on some dedicated digicams catering for about 50% more movements per second than conventional OIS systems. It’s also capable of responding to new movements surprisingly quickly without much lag, as they’ve implemented a system that constantly monitors the position of the lens assembly, allowing continuous updates to the movement pattern regardless of how random it is.
Internal tests have revealed that the OIS on the Lumia 920 is able to compensate for shutter speeds, which are up to three stops lower. So instead of a minimum handheld speed of say, 1/30 of a second, the Lumia 920 can have its shutter shooting wide open for 1/4th of a second – an 8x longer shutter speed – and that’s again, handheld.
The following figure shows the exact benefit of having the OIS on board as the shutter speed goes down. There’s already a big difference at 1/30 and the gap only widens as shutter speed lowers.
In video recording, the OIS system is tuned slightly differently. It makes sense of the movements you are making with the camera and will only compensate for the unintended ones, so panning for example is uninterrupted. This is not evident on the video below, but it still the conveys what an amazing feature OIS is in video recording.
Lighting it up
Unlike the Nokia 808, the Lumia 920 lacks a xenon flash. Instead, it makes use of Nokia’s latest generation LED. It’s reportedly, over 2x more powerful than their previous best LED flashes and Damian Dinning would like to have us believe the new short pulse mode would help “freeze” subject movement in much the same fashion as a xenon flash would.
Now, good flash pictures depend on the force of the flash burst rather than on its duration, so I am not quite sure about the advantages of this new short pulse mode. The technical details are scarce at this point so I’ll just give it the benefit of a doubt.
Of course, nothing can beat a xenon flash with a big enough capacitor for freezing the moment in low light photography but that’s one of the compromises they had to make. Also, the LED can also be used as a video light and as a flashlight.
Making it smarter
Using the Windows Phone 8 new imaging framework has allowed Nokia engineers to integrate into the Lumia 920 a wide range of their proprietary image processing algorithms concerning the autofocus, the exposure metering and the white balance among others. Damian Dinning shares that one of the most important new algorithms is Nokia’s new denoise algorithm for reducing visual noise while keeping the image’s natural look.
Another area of advancement is the new lens add-ons that you can install under the Windows Phone 8 camera app. Nokia’s Damian Dinning eagerly promised that the Lumia 920 will come pre-installed with a nice set of lens apps, which are “to be followed in the future by yet more magic.”
Wrapping it up
Unfortunately, we failed to get the awesome big megasensor from the Nokia 808 in a Windows Phone. Instead, Nokia’s R&D decided to spend their efforts on optimizing low light performance. The integration of a real OIS system inside a phone is an exciting feat and I’d really like to see some more from where that innovation came from. The Lumia 920 seems like a well rounded smartphone/cameraphone and its market release cannot come soon enough. Then the real hands-on testing will continue in our over eager hands.
This week, Portland debuts its startup festival, Portland Digital eXperience, to showcase local innovation and offer a platform for industry discussion.
SXSW has come to epitomized startup culture. For all its faults – which generally run along the lines of launch overhype and an overwhelming amount of events and parties (to be filed under “First World Problems”) – the Austin-based festival has firmly made its name as the place where the worlds of digital, social, and startups collide.
Now, Portland, Oregon, is ready to give the similarly-spirited Austin a run for its money. This week marks the opening of Portland Digital eXperience, a startup and social festival that will run alongside MusicfestNW.
Though smaller and admittedly wetter than Austin (with the exception of this past SXSW, which I can vouch for being engulfed in a nearly permanent torrential downpour), Portland has become synonymous with innovation, creative talent, and ingenuity – and yes, hipsters and PBR. But don’t forget that this is where legacy names like Intel, Nike, and Wieden + Kennedy are headquartered. And a slew of new and notable startups have begun to follow in those prestigious footsteps: Urban Airship, Geoloqi, Lensbaby, Trapit, Vizify, and Grove all call Portland home.
And thus, Portland Digital eXperience is rising out of the short-lived North by Northwest festival’s ashes to focus in on the growing energy in the city. There will be speakers from Flipboard, Tumblr, Spotify, as well as more local names from outlets including Chirpify, Grove, and Cloudability, all on hand to cover both the intensely unique Portland spirit as well as larger industry trends. Events include a Startup Crawl through Portland’s Pearl District and Old Town neighborhoods, as well as a music hackathon to round out the festival.
The mix of big names with promising startups harkens back to some of SXSW’s earlier days, before mass chaos made attending more than a handful of events a near impossibility – a pain point many of us are more than willing to tolerate for what the show has to offer. That said, spreading this wealth can only mean more exposure for startups and more access for the rest of us.
Portland Digital eXperience starts tomorrow, September 5, and runs through September 8. You can still pick up passes here, which are also good for access to MusicfestNW shows. We’ll be attending Portland Digital eXperience and bringing you startup, social, music news, and everything that’s sure to fall in between this week.
The latest report according to infographic on visual.ly shows that start-up incubators across the African continent is booming, “need, they say is the mother of invention” From the Open innovation Studio, Codebridge & Google Developers Apps Hackathons in CapeTown to House4Hack in Johannesburg, from iHub in Kenya to CChubNigeria in Lagos Nigeria, indeed Africa is now rising to the challenge. Where are the centres of innovation in Africa? The infographic below explains, double click on it to expand
