Bulletstorm

Laugh-a-minute ultraviolence

We’re not sure how Bulletstorm manages it, but there’s something about this Epic/People Can Fly co-production that’s brilliantly retro and excitingly fresh at the same time. For all its headline-grabbing Skillshots and ultra-violent spectacle, Bulletstorm has the feel of one of the great 90s PC FPS games; the sort of game that the makers of Duke Nukem, Quake, Blood and Unreal might have made if they’d had today’s technology to work with. In a world dominated by po-faced military shooters and grim sci-fi epics, there’s something wonderful about an FPS full of bright colours, needless carnage, swarming, rushing enemies and big, fat shotguns that go boom. In a way, Bulletstorm is what Daikatana would have been had it been anywhere near as cool as the legendary Jon Romero made it sound. As the credits roll, you half expect him to appear and reveal that, after all this time, he’s finally made us all his bitches.

Of course, the credit really goes to the good people at Epic and Painkiller developers People Can Fly. With Painkiller, PCF tried to make a latter-day Doom and almost, but for some sloppy design, succeeded. With Epic’s help, it’s now created something even better. You might not realise it by the end of the prologue - effectively a slightly clumsy, extended tutorial - but this is the best balls to the wall shooter to come along in years.

The secret isn’t in the story or the atmosphere. The plot is spectacularly generic while the characters are the sort of one-dimensional, quip-throwing meatheads that we’ve seen in shooters from Duke Nukem to Gears of War. You have a hero who’s a drunken ex-space marine, his buddy who’s unwittingly become a cyborg and one of those stereotypical tough chicks in a vest. They’re on a despoiled, once lovely planet dominated by feuding gangs and they all want to get off. Bar the odd twist or turn we won’t spoil here, that’s it. If you want originality or depth, you probably want a game with a different title.

Here, however, there’s a difference: the writers and the characters know how ridiculous it all is, and the impressively sweary script spares no opportunity to throw in a fabulous, filth-ridden punchline or gleefully dumb in-joke. Bulletstorm never takes itself seriously, and it encourages you not to either. It’s a shooter that knows that the fun in shooters is in shooting - oh, and maiming, slaughtering, spiking, decapitating and generally making things go bang.

The Skillshot is Bulletstorm’s smartest idea. Sure, you can kill off your foes just by shooting them in the noggin, but you’ll earn more credits for disposing of them in a range of even more grisly ways. Here the game throws in two vital tools - a leash which throws enemies up into the air before pulling them towards you, and a brutal kick that sends them flying, in gratifying slowmo, the other way. As a bonus, there’s a nifty slide move that gets you into the fray that little bit quicker, and lends you some element of surprise. These tools then mix with an inspired selection of weapons - all 90s FPS classics but made more interesting with alternate firing modes and burst attacks - and a collection of environmental hazards too numerous to mention.

Skillshot credits can be spent at special dropkits on ammo, burst attacks and weapon upgrades, plus new moves for the leash which pound your foes into the ground and send their compadres flying - again in slowmo - into the air. This results in what Epic likes to call “the circle of awesome”. The more nasties you kill in more spectacular ways the more ways you get of killing even more nasties in even more spectacular ways. This is a game, then, that knows that if leashing an enemy towards you then kicking him into a massive, spiky space cactus is fun, then kicking an exploding hot dog cart into a crowd of goons is even, erm, funner. It’s the kind of game where a Skillshot called “rear entry” is awarded for shooting a flying baddie exactly where you might expect. To say it won’t be everyone’s cup of tea is putting it mildly, but if you like the sort of sick and twisted cartoon gore that characterised the classic 90s shooter, then Bulletstorm brings it bang up to date.

Bang up to date means, of course, that the graphics are spectacular. At first Bulletstorm doesn’t seem to have the visual grandeur of some other Unreal 3 games such as Gears of War, but the alien scenery becomes more beautiful and detailed as time goes on, and the game ramps bigger, jawdropping moments with each passing hour. If we were mean we might say that the levels could do with a bit more variety, but there are still plenty of standout moments, including remote-controlled monsters, speeding trains and one of the best sniper battles we’ve ever seen. Where the likes of Call of Duty: Black Ops want to be action movies you can play, Bulletstorm aims at being the kind of big, dumb sci-fi action movie that nobody would ever have the guts or the budget to make (though we’d like to see Zack Snyder and Jason Statham try).

Bulletstorm inevitably works best as a single-player experience, but Epic and People Can Fly have found ways to get your friends involved. The first is the Echoes mode, which remould select, ultra-violent portions of the campaign as Skillshot-heavy, high-score challenges. You can compare your efforts against those of mates on your friends list and unlock new chapters by collecting stars for your performance. It’s what Bizarre’s unjustly forgotten The Club should have been, and more. Beyond that, we get Anarchy mode, which is effectively a variation on the Gears of War Horde or Halo: Reach Firefight mode with added Skillshots. Both are brilliant additions that will seriously extend the longevity of the game.

Verdict:

By now, you probably know if Bulletstorm is or is not your bag. If so, then it’s an easy, caveat-free recommendation - it’s just as much fun as it sounds. If not, you can easily find something more original and worthy to fill your time. This might not be the deepest or richest FPS this year, but if you like the odd burst of cathartic ultraviolence, you won’t find anything better on the market.??? ?

Tags: Gaming Xbox 360 Bulletstorm Epic Games PS3 PC games EA

               

Bulletstorm originally appeared on http://www.pocket-lint.com on Fri, 25 Feb 2011 15:16:00 +0000

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Patagonia, Adidas, Walmart Team Up on Sustainable Apparel Coalition

What happens when you put executives from Walmart and Patagonia in a room? This isn't the start of a bad joke--it's how the Sustainable Apparel Coalition was born.

The seeds of the Sustainable Apparel Coalition were planted in 2009 when Patagonia and Walmart teamed up to help the latter company create a sustainability assessment tool for its supply chain (Patagonia was also working on an assessment tool for the Outdoor Industry Association). The partnership was successful enough that the pair decided to start working on a larger sustainability assessment tool for the apparel and footwear industries. In the fall of 2009, Walmart and Patagonia invited the CEOs of twelve companies to help found the Sustainable Apparel Coalition.

Fast forward to today. The Coalition is made up of more than 30 annual dues-paying companies and environmental organizations--including Levi Strauss & Co., Li & Fung, the EPA, Marks & Spencer, Mountain Equipment Co-op, New Balance, Nordstrom, Otto Group, and REI--all working together to develop an industrywide supply-chain index that measures water and energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, waste, social labor practices, and more.

The companies have committed to collect supply-chain information, work toward a standard level of best practices, and share information that may be helpful in improving supply chain sustainability.

"We came to the conclusion that one of the principles of this should be to leverage the work that's already been done by other companies. That looked like taking the OIA index and mashing it up with the Nike Considered Index and adding in pieces of Walmart's supplier sustainability assessment tool," explains Rick Ridgeway, the Coalition's Chairman and VP of Environmental Initiatives at Patagonia.

Version one of the Sustainable Apparel Index will be ready for pilot testing by member companies in April. "It's an indicator-based tool. The next version will evolve into a metrics-based tool," says Ridgeway. Version two will be ready to go by the end of 2011.

By the end of the year, the Coalition will expand to 40 to 50 companies--by invitation only. And by 2012, it will expand to all footwear and apparel companies that want to join.

That's just the beginning. Eventually, the Coalition hopes to launch a consumer-facing sustainability index. "We're all in alignment on the ultimate value of that," says Ridgeway. "We consciously decided to avoid working on it because we want to focus initial efforts on [developing] a robust tool."

Further down the line, Ridgeway imagines that the tool could be expanded to include other industries, too. For now, though, the goal is to "create something that will be available to any apparel and footwear companies that want to adopt it."

Follow Fast Company on Twitter. Ariel Schwartz can be reached by email.

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Augmented reality at work - maintenance and repair

AR WEEK: Will we ever need a mechanic again?

Picture the scene. It’s late. You’re driving down the motorway on a snowy Christmas Eve when disaster strikes and that ratting somewhere in your engine reaches breaking point. Your car slows to a stop and with it your dream of getting home in time for turkey. Or so you think, but that's only if you're looking at this scene as someone from 2011.

This is the future, and a not too distant one at that. So, you get out of your car with no automotive repair knowledge whatsoever and open the bonnet to see what mystery awaits. As you prop up the metal lid, a series of tiny projectors flicker on like the lights of a kitchen fridge and, instructed by your car’s internal system, they display virtual, computer generated directions of exactly what the problem is and, more importantly, what you need to do to fix it. This is the goal of Steve Feiner, Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University and augmented reality pioneer.

“Well, there are a few problems with using fixed projectors for AR,” he explains to Pocket-lint grounding our dream down a crackly line from his office in New York.

“First, they’re limited in the volume that they can project and, second, not all surfaces are good for projecting onto. You could probably do it onto the nice, shiny metal parts of a car not long after you’ve driven it out of the showroom but once it’s covered in grease and whatever else, I’m not so sure.”

Instead, Feiner and his team on the ARMAR project (Augmented Reailty for Maintainence and Repair) have been focusing on the use of head-mounted displays (HMDs) since inception in 2009. Funded and partnered by the US Marine Corps, they’ve managed to build a set a virtual set of instructions and guidance system for soldiers out in the field to perform repairs and maintenance tasks to the LAV-25A1 armored personnel carrier, what Feiner describes as essentially “a smallish tank”.

The system works by overlaying the computer generated graphical assistance over the soldier's real view of the inside of the vehicle as supplied by a camera attached to their headwear. Their movements are tracked such that a red arrow from over the shoulder can point them in the right direction for the next part of the task and, once in field of view, a simple animation of the missing part and where it should go leads into the correct mechanical move.

“We got to test the system out with at the Marines’s Aberdeen training ground using people who had enlisted and just taken the course to become mechanics. These were kids who grew up fiddling with cars and taking radios apart to see what’s inside, and they all really liked the AR system. Some would even hang out while we were setting up the tests. These were all people who’d grown up with 3D and computer games and they were really interested in what we were doing.”

The full ARMAR set up was tested against a group just working from a normal set of PDF instructions on an LCD screen inside the vehicles as well a third set of subjects with an HMD with virtual instructions that just hung in the air, i.e. not with the animations over the parts where they should be. As had been hoped, even with trained mechanics, those using the full AR set up performed the task significantly better.

Feiner and his team actually tracked the movements of the subjects’ heads to see how efficient their work time was. Those using the ARMAR system used 37 per cent less head travel than those with the PDF instructions whom themselves ended up spending much of the task with their heads bobbing back and forth between the LCD screen and parts of the vehicle they were fixing.

“If you looked at the head movements of someone who knew exactly what to do without instructions at all, in the case of AR, it was very close to that; not perfect, but very close.”

A highly successful piece of work then. So, have the US Marines adopted AR in their armoured vehicles as standard? Not quite yet.

“It’s not really ready yet. It needs to be counted on, so the software needs to be amazing,” explains Feiner detailing the ongoing work on the project at Columbia.

“Unlike mobile AR, which if it doesn’t work 100 per cent of the time, it doesn’t matter, this has to be relied upon absolutely and, at the time, what we had come up with wasn’t bulletproof.”

The hardware itself hadn’t quite been what Feiner had wanted either. It turned out that the top grade HMDs were too big to allow the mechanics to turn their heads properly in the small turret space they had to work inside the vehicles. Two years of ironing out the creases later, though, and the puzzle is nearly complete

“We’re approaching that point where the stuff is ready to go. We’re just trying to problem solve the issues.”

“We have computer power, bandwidth is good enough to get information through and the tracking is good as well but there are still problems when we need really small details - such as getting down to the level of one small screw among a very small area of hundreds - but that’s coming because there are lots of people out there working on that.”

Metaio and Qualcomm are two of such companies sponsoring just that kind of research. The ARMAR set up is a pre-mapped environment which the computer in charge has a copy of. To get the real and the virtual to line up, it’s a case of knowing the starting point of the mechanic’s head and accurately tracking its movements through the space from there. The other option is for the software to recognise real world objects through the camera and to adjust the computer generated components in real time.

The likes of a smartphone can already track physical edges as well as faces, of course, and Feiner is confident that a detailed enough system is getting near. Proof of such advancement was one of his own student’s apps, FARMAR, which reached the latter stages of Qualcomm’s augmented reality developer challenge. One area where the system doesn’t need to be perfect, though, is the graphics themselves, in fact, it’s of paramount importance that they’re not.

“It’s no good if we develop the animations to the point where they look like the real thing. The mechanics need to be able to differentiate between the real and the virtual otherwise it becomes impossible to know which bits to fix. But, if you think about it, all manuals and instructions have used caricature-type drawings, so what we have right now fits just right.”

The big question, of course, is should this system become “bulletproof” as Feiner puts it, if the US Marines do use this as standard in their vehicles, does that mean that we, the consumer, will ever get a taste of AR in our maintenance and repairs as well?

“Oh, absolutely. I believe this is for end users and not just professionals; folks who might know a few low level things - how to use a screwdriver and a wrench - but not in what order to do stuff. It should show you what to do next and how to do it as well. So it’s not just ‘this screw here’ but ‘tighten this one carefully but not too tight’ or ‘be careful with this task because this part here will pop up’.

“Most of all though, to be really successful, this stuff has to be fun and not burdensome or no one will use it.”

If that means cutting down on garage bills, mending your own boiler and never having to call Ikea because the manual’s not clear enough, then we’re pretty sure that’ll make AR enjoyable enough on its own.

Related links:

• Feature - 10 augmented reality tricks to try right now
• Feature - Augmented reality at work - advertising and retail

Tags: Science Augmented Reality Features Interviews Steve Feiner AR Week

Augmented reality at work - maintenance and repair originally appeared on http://www.pocket-lint.com on Tue, 01 Mar 2011 15:30:00 +0000

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Gmail reset bug deletes correspondence history

Big bug affecting up to 500,000 users

Oh dear - looks like Google has dropped the bomb on hundreds of thousands of Gmail accounts, wiping out years of email and chat history.

The number of affected users is reported as high as 500,000 although Google is said to be claiming that less than 0.08 per cent of users have been affected - so the number may be closer to around 150,000.

The bug means that some users are being treated as new Gmail users (complete with a friendly welcome message from the Big G) with no emails appearing in their inboxes, sent items or personal folders. There's also no Google Chat history logs on offer either.

Google has released a statement saying: "Google Mail service has already been restored for some users, and we expect a resolution for all users in the near future. Please note this time frame is an estimate and may change."

This roughly translates to - "Luckily a few seem to be okay now, but as for the rest, we haven't really got a clue when the issue will be resolved".

Read

Tags: Software Internet Online Gmail Google

Gmail reset bug deletes correspondence history originally appeared on http://www.pocket-lint.com on Mon, 28 Feb 2011 11:03:03 +0000

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Samsung: 3D Blu-ray exclusives scrapped

EXCLUSIVE: UK branch to try something new

Samsung UK is to look for ways to add value to its 3D TV and Blu-ray products other than exclusive content deals with studios and their 3D Blu-ray portfolios.

Consumers have long complained that deals between movie studios and CE companies, restricting 3D Blu-ray releases to give-aways with new equipment, have hamstrung the format before it has had a chance to take root.

And while Samsung doesn't exactly agree that 3D uptake has been hampered by content exclusivity, it has suggested to Pocket-lint that those days have come to an end, at least for the UK: "[Exclusivity deals are] managed on a global basis, so there may well be discussions by them on that," said Andy Griffiths, vice president of consumer electronics UK.

"But while we are working with all of the studios on a local basis, to try different things and come in at different levels on that, exclusivity isn’t a major feature for us in Britain."

This comes after a strong Christmas for Samsung's 3D TV division, which bundled a range of 3D Blu-ray discs with products, including the entire Shrek trilogy in three-dimensions for the first time. However, it was the introduction of a different source of content that Griffiths believes helped drive sales, Sky's new 3D channel: "We’re thrilled with [3D]. We’ve got about 70 per cent of the market in the UK. So we’re the number one brand," he said.

"There was a lot of interest back in the spring [of 2010], when we were first to market, and, of course, it was quite a slow burner those first few weeks as people got used to the idea. I felt it was as they started to look for content.

"So one of the first real kicks we saw was with the start of the Sky channel. That gave people a lot of confidence in terms of having regular 3D content. We saw a huge jump in the last quarter of 2010 [in sales of 3D TVs]. And that’s really when the market started to catch fire."

But he thinks that, as more and more content becomes available, sale will continue to rise: "Certainly, the debate continues about the breadth of content that’s available to people, so obviously as it becomes more interesting, people will become more and more confident about the format."

And eliminating the exclusivity of 3D Blu-ray titles will undoubtedly help.

Tags: Home Cinema 3DTV Samsung 3D Blu-ray DreamWorks shrek

Samsung: 3D Blu-ray exclusives scrapped originally appeared on http://www.pocket-lint.com on Thu, 24 Feb 2011 16:27:20 +0000

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The Start-up Paradox

Patrick McDonald opened the Airdrome restaurant in Monrovia, California, in 1937. The Airdrome was a reasonably successful little business, so in 1940, Patrick invited his two sons, Maurice and Richard (Mac and Dick), to help with the flipping of the burgers.

Mac and Dick spent almost 10 years tinkering with their business before they introduced the "Speedee Service System," which borrowed techniques from the factory assembly line, to serve customers quickly.

In 1954, 14 years after joining their father in the business, Mac and Dick were approached by a man named Ray. Ray sold them their milkshake machines and wanted to know if the McDonald brothers would be interested in selling him the franchise rights to their restaurant.

Ray Kroc negotiated the rights to franchise the McDonald brothers' idea throughout the United States.

According to Interbrand, McDonald's is now the sixth most valuable brand in the world, with a market capitalization of more than $77 billion. The McDonald clan ran a single-location hamburger stand for almost 20 years before Ray Kroc came along. Mac and Dick had the skills to create a successful one-location business. Under their tight rule and foreman-like management style, they succeeded on a modest scale. But arguably the skills that allowed them to manage a start-up were not the skills needed to grow a business.

I have found that there are three skills that are essential to survival as a start-up that you must "unlearn" in order to grow a business. To be clear, I believe these three skills are prerequisites for getting a business off the ground but also become a liability as time goes on.

1. Flexibility

In the early days, when cash is scarce, you need to be flexible. Instead of hiring full-time employees, you may subcontract work to a partner. This arrangement works out well as you pay subcontractors only when you have work, and they pay their own expenses.

You also stay flexible when dealing with customers. As a start-up, you're not in much of a position to dictate to your prospects, so you listen carefully and adjust your offering to what resonates with the people paying the bills.

Instead of setting up a physical location, you may create a makeshift office by patching together a home office, car headset and a sprinkling of Starbucks locations across the city.

All of this bootstrapping allows you to get your business off the ground on a shoestring budget and enables you to stay in business. In fact, without an ability to remain flexible, most businesses would never get beyond their first year of operation.

The problem is, being too flexible can start to become a liability. Your contract employees may have other customers and can't be at your beck and call when you need them. What you may need instead is a dedicated employee, but you are afraid to make the commitment. Your intuition—the very thing that got you successfully past your first year in business—starts to limit your growth.

Your customers may start to ask for so much customization that the only person in your company with the technical skills to fulfill their special requests is you. However, what you need to build a valuable, sellable business is to standardize your offering so you can train others to do the work while providing a product that pleases most customers.

Eventually a customer will want to see where you work and may think less of you if your office is your car. Your intuition tells you to stay flexible, avoid signing a lease because you can fake it for another year. But maybe what you really need is a permanent place to do business.

It's a cruel twist of fate. Flexibility, a prerequisite in the beginning, actually becomes a liability.

2. Instant ROI Threshold

If you're bootstrapping a start-up, you have no choice but to make everything you do profitable from day one. Your time horizon for a return on investment is measured in days, not years. Simply put, if it doesn't make you money today, you don't do it.

This discipline—bordering on obsession for some of us—of getting an instant return on cash invested allows us to get a business off the ground. But the problem with fixating on immediate profit is that it can undermine your ability to grow.

For example, redesigning your website won't make you more profitable this month, but it could be a necessary investment to attract larger contracts from bigger customers in the future. Our natural inclination as a start-up is to leave well enough alone, but the growth-oriented leader needs to make the investment.

When you hire a new salesperson, you will have to carry him or her for six months until that first sale. This new employee will drag your profits down this year but could be the key to making your business more valuable and sellable down the road. Your start-up genes say wait—your customers are buying your expertise after all—but what you need is a salesperson to pull you out of the day-to-day.

I'm not advocating making wild investments and ignoring profitability altogether. But I am saying, once you have some cash in the bank, placing an equal emphasis on top- and bottom-line growth requires that you invest in some things that don't necessarily pay off right away. After a successful start-up, that just might feel very unnatural at first.

3. DIY

With no money or people to delegate to, a successful start-up owner gets things done on his or her own. Many of us grow to like the control of doing things our way and fear things might get screwed up if we give them to someone else to do.

Since we can do every job in our company, we often just keep doing some jobs long after we should.

To illustrate the point, let's imagine your start-up generates $10,000 in pre-tax profit and you spend 2,000 hours a year at your company. That means for every hour you invested in your business, you generated $5.

Therefore, instead of hiring an assistant to manage your calendar and handle the details of your business, you could argue that it makes sense to do the work yourself because you couldn't hire someone for less than $5 an hour.

Now imagine your business has grown and you're now earning $200,000 in pre-tax profit on the same 2,000 hours at work. Now your time is worth $100 an hour.

Your entrepreneurial upbringing dictates that you manage your own calendar, but the math says it would now make more sense to hire an assistant for $40,000 a year, or roughly $20 an hour.

If you're not self-reliant in the early days, you won't even get a business off the ground. But at some point, your inclination to roll up your sleeves and do it yourself can be what stops you from growing.

The take away is this: flexibility, thrift and self-reliance are the essential ingredients of any start-up. But the paradox of a successful start-up is that to get to the next level, you might just have to unlearn some of the things that made you successful in the first place.

John Warrillow is the author of Built To Sell: Creating a Business That Can Thrive Without You, which will be released by Portfolio/Penguin on April 28, 2011.

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How to Save Thousands Recruiting the Best Candidates

You are probably tired of hearing about SEOmoz and EnergySavvy recruiting bounties. In a way, it’s working because everyone keeps writing and talking about it. Here is how these companies could have saved thousands of dollars… Sponsoring local events! Yes, I’m biased, because Seattle 2.0 will be the beneficiary of this strategy, yet let me make my case.

 

Startup Recruiting is Hard!

 

There are two things that make it very hard to recruit for a startup, as compared to a big company. First, it’s hard to get the word out. The good candidates won’t know about you unless you make a lot of noise. Second, the perceived impact and reward of working at a startup plays a major role in a candidate deciding or not to apply to a job.

 

On the first point, I don’t need to elaborate a lot. Startups have one, two or a handful of openings at any given time, so they don’t see the influx of candidates a company like Microsoft, Google or Facebook sees. Because of that, startups have to spend money on job boards, on recruiters, and other job openings advertising tactics. Even startups that have a pretty descent social media reach have to do those kinds of things. You don’t have to look any farther than Cheezbuger Network. Massive social media reach, yet they have to do the same things every other startup does to recruit.

 

The second point is more complicated. If I’m a great candidate for your position, but I don’t believe your company will be successful, likely because I don’t understand what you do, why would I apply for a job at your startup? Didn’t you hear there are dozens of good startups recruiting? By the way, since I don’t understand what your company really does, I’d prefer to apply to a company I understand and value their purpose.

 

Recruiting = Marketing

 

A big mistake a lot of startups make is to have an excessive customer-focused identity. In other words, they value more their customers above anyone else on this planet, including their employees and their overall impact in the world. You can see why this is a turn off for candidates, don’t you? More and more I see people that look for purpose. It’s not only about how much money am I going to make, but how we’ll make the world a better place and have fun while doing it.

 

To be honest, a lot of startups are not fun, their mission will not make the world better and they are unlikely to succeed. Your job as the CEO / Founder of a startup, it’s to make it absolutely clear how your startup is different from the ones that suck. You’d think it’s obvious, yet lots of (good) startups fail at this test. Most startups don’t deliver their real message to potential candidates well. Primarily because the candidates are not the target audience of the product they are building, or have little (real) understanding of the industry the startup is disrupting, and the startups don't wear the candidate hat while reading the homepage, the about page and the job description.

 

The Good Candidates Are Not Looking

 

You can list your job on a dozen job boards; you can buy Google, Facebook and Bing ads. You can hire a dozen very expensive recruiters to fill your open positions. It’s likely to work (it has been working for decades). Or, you can try to seed opportunities on the head of the future candidates without these future candidates even knowing you’re planting that seed. And that’s where going against established procedures might work for you.

 

The best engineers, designer, product managers, marketers, and biz-dev guys for your startup are already working on another startup. They might or might not be happy, but they are unlikely to be looking because they are awesome and busy working on their tasks. How do you reach these people? What would make them say “I should learn more about SEOmoz”? Or, how do you make sure when their startup goes into the dead pool, is acquired or they get tired because of opportunity cost is not right anymore, they think about your startup as a next place they should be looking for a job?

It’s pretty clear to me that keeping your brand popping up in front of these people, showing how fun of a workplace it is to work for, showing how much you get involved with community, sponsoring events, hosting lunches, giving talks, is part of what your startup is.

 

The bottom line is that making an outrageous bounty offer for referrals only works if you are the only one doing it. The next startup will need to offer at least $15,000 (or a car) as a bounty otherwise the gimmick will not get noticed. You still need to have the traditional recruiting to a certain extent (job board, website, social media, etc.) for those that are looking, but you have to augment that with an outreach for those who are not looking at this moment, but are ready to think about a new job. By the way, recruiters know this trick pretty well.

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