Striped:Shirt

Steve Rubel from Micro Persuasion just wrote a blog entry titled “Three Internet Careers That Soon Won’t Exist“. One of the three professions he mentioned is Social Media Consultant/Manager. Steve refers to this graph to depict the decline in jobs where ’social networking’, ‘web 2.0′ and ‘blogs’ is/are mentioned. (Even ‘ajax’ is on its way down.) He writes that all these jobs will soon be merged into ‘broader roles’ and that everyone is expected to be comfortable with using new media to stay employed.

Here I am studying IT and marketing hoping to find a job that’s a good mix of both. I’m even taking a course called Social Media and Corporate Communication Across Asia. Is this good or bad news for undergraduates like me? Steve’s point is that a PR role will be the one ‘managing’ the social media aspect of a corporation. At first I thought that we were going to have an advantage because of our background and interests in IT (which makes social media part of our everyday lives) plus the fact that we take courses like Social Media and Corporate Communication Across Asia.

I’m not sure how these trends are reflected in the Asian region compared to The US, but I sure do hope for a more positive prospect here in Asia with regards to social media jobs because I think companies are just starting to utilize such tools.

Steve also includes internet advertising jobs on his list. There goes another of my options. Oh well…

In the meantime, I’ll wait for his next post on emerging digital careers.

Stephen from Office Snapshots had a post earlier this week with photos of the Apple Cupertino HQ. Apple is a very secretive company and it surprised me that these photos reached the web. Anyways, one thing that I can say is that their office environment and culture is definitely reflected in their products: cool, minimalist, user-friendly, innovative, simple, etc.

I was fortunate enough to be able to work at the Apple office here (the interiors are quite similar to the Cupertino office), and it was one of the most memorable experiences in my life. It was 4 to 5 months of hard work and late nights (and sometimes overnights), but it was all worth it. Those guys work on every project, be it small or big-scale, to the very last pixel. It’s because of their work ethic that they get to develop products like the iPhone and OS X.

I have some snapshots of the office but to prevent getting into trouble, here’s a picture which doesn’t reveal too much. Team De Anza, with classic Apple ads. (We named our team after the founder of Cupertino)

Apple’s office is no Googleplex, but they get the job done exceptionally well.

It’s the third day of work here at the !oohaY office. We’ve been search testing here to provide more relevant results to our countrymen back home. We still haven’t reach our benchmark as of yesterday before we go into live testing. Hopefully, after today’s evaluation we get to start use real data.

The office is pretty nice I must say. The lobby is huge, white and minimalist a la Ogilvy Centre. The environment is very relaxed which is an ideal workplace for me. I’ll post pictures (if we are allowed to) when we finish next Friday.

As for our school-project-turned-startup, the meeting yesterday went very well. New features were discussed and the energy level was pretty amazing. Everyone was on the same page. Our homework for the next meeting is to come up with 5 features each and from there we’ll be able to scope the project appropriately and come up with a timeline.

Anyways, back to search testing. Toodles!