talent

Now Simon Cowell wants to find great, um, talents on YouTube

How would you feel if Simon Cowell came out of the closet?

Yes, your closet. The one that is full of your truly fashionable black clothes and discarded board games.

That seems to be the remarkably exciting premise of a new venture created by Cowell, together with the nice people at YouTube.

TV talent shows have been struggling of late. Why, last week's "American Idol" managed a series low in the Thursday ratings.

Cowell's own "The X Factor" has largely been disappointing too. Can you tell me who won the last one? Or the first one, even? Or anyone who won "America's Got Talent?" … Read more

Intel science contest picks 40 high school seniors as finalists

Forty of the nation's best and brightest high school seniors have been chosen as finalists for Intel's 2013 Science Talent Search.

Offered by the Society for Science & the Public, the Intel-sponsored program chooses finalists based on several factors, including their own scientific research, their achievements, and their leadership, both inside and outside of school.

The competition asks students to come up with scientific solutions to answer questions and resolve problems that affect the entire world.

"This year's Intel Science Talent Search finalists are presenting a wide range of research, from optimizing algae oil for biofuel … Read more

Would you like a patent search with your recruiting tool?

If you thought patents were intruding into the tech industry just a wee bit too much, brace yourself. Now they can be part of the recruiting process.

TalentBin, a San Francisco startup that scrapes social media sites ranging from Quora to Twitter in order to index hiring prospects for recruiters, has added the U.S. Office's patent database to the sources it scours for information on prospective employees.

Call it novel or horrifying, but I can see how it would be useful for recruiters, particularly in areas like biotech and manufacturing. And, yes, software, though you could argue that … Read more

AngelList launches talent recruiting portal

Are you a tech startup desperate to hire the best talent around and looking for a central repository of skilled engineers? Or a kick-butt coder trying to get in on the ground floor of a hot new venture? AngelList may have just the place to go.

This evening, AngelList, a service whose alumni companies have raised more than $1.1 billion in funding, launched a new talent portal, a one-stop shop where startups can search for qualified tech talent, and where skilled engineers and others can seek out the best new companies.

"We noticed that people were using AngelList … Read more

SuperTalent shows lower-cost PCIe-based flash storage

HANOVER, Germany--SuperTalent showed off a forthcoming product at CeBIT, a PCI Express flash storage system that beats out conventional SSDs in performance but that doesn't cost as much as the company's existing PCIe products.

The RAIDDrive UpStream uses a SandForce controller to handle data-transfer speeds of 1GBps. That's roughly twice the speed of SSDs that, like the pokier but cheaper hard drives they typically replace, use the SATA interface.

The product should go on sale in weeks, said product marketing director Peter Carcione in an interview here. "I'm hoping the end of April," he … Read more

High school math wiz wins Intel Talent Search

Honoring some of the nation's brightest high school seniors for achievements in math and science, Intel yesterday awarded the three highest prizes in its Science Talent Search for three very different types of projects.

The top prize of $100,000 went to Evan O'Dorney, 17, of Danville, Calif., for a project in which he compared two ways to estimate the square root of an integer, discovering which one was the quickest. Though that may sound abstract to non-math people, the results of O'Dorney's research allowed him to solve other equations that could be used to encrypt … Read more

Microsoft mulls legally poking Facebook over ad-talent raid

AllThingsD

Microsoft--furious over a recent talent grab of its top advertising exec by Facebook--has been considering a wide range of options, including legal action to block the move, according to sources close to the situation.

Lawyer at both companies have been in back-and-forth talks in recent days after the hiring of Microsoft's global ad sales head Carolyn Everson by the Silicon Valley social-networking powerhouse to be its VP of global sales.

Among the more likely solutions being discussed: Barring Everson--a longtime ad sales exec who came to Microsoft from MTV Networks--from using any strategic information she learned at the company … Read more

Teen wins $100,000 Intel science award

Erika DeBenedictis' research to help spacecraft quickly and more easily travel to other planets has earned her a top student science award from Intel.

The 18-year-old from Albuquerque, N.M., took home the $100,000 first prize from Intel's 2010 Science Talent Search, an annual contest that challenges students to envision solutions to the scientific problems of today and tomorrow.

DeBenedictis' goal was to design a software navigation system that could help spacecraft more easily journey throughout the solar system. Her research discovered that gravity and the movement of the planets could create low-energy orbits to propel ships faster … Read more

Useless birthday analysis

Whether we believe in horoscopes, numerology, and the like, there's one thing we can probably all agree on: MB Birthday Number stinks.

Rarely do we come across a piece of software that is so abjectly useless. The program promises to "give an insight into the middle years of your life. It also tells you about the various talents you possess." The program allegedly accomplishes this by analyzing your date of birth, and it has you enter your full name and the month, date, and year you were born, we suppose to create the illusion that users are … Read more

Susan Boyle falters, clutches stomach, and sings on

After exposing so much reality, who could be surprised that she began with a false note?

Susan Boyle, the singer who entered the world's consciousness and was given a very large apartment there, all because of YouTube, stepped onstage for her second performance in "Britain's Got Talent" to expectations that exceeded anything she could possibly deliver.

Her hair was darker (though still pleasantly wild), her eyebrows still brooding, and her dress a little more expensive.

Her voice, though, faltered under the lights of a billion eyeballs.

The first notes of "Memory" from the musical &… Read more