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The company is called Compete, Inc. (http://www.compete.com/). What they do is a little hard to explain, but basically they buy completely anonymous web click data from ISP's, and do massive matrix arithmetic and comparisons to determine what people are doing on your and your competitors' websites. They generate some generic market reports from that, but also do custom ananlysis for other companies. The important thing to remember though is that the only unique identifier they get about users is a random ID selected by the ISP, so there are no privacy issues. Here are two articles about the company and what they do: http://www.ismretail.com/articles/2001_11/011105.htm http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/011210/102589_1.html <GEEK> The technology is pretty cool too. Instead of buying a massive Solaris box or two to do the work, they use a cluster of about 28 dual-processor Intel boxen running FreeBSD that cost about $2000 each. That makes the system very expandable in small increments. They all have gigiabit fiber network cards. They do have a Solaris box for some nfs stuff and a huge EMS SAN for storing the data (they store most of the data live forever so they can slice the data any way they need at a later date). </GEEK> The job will be a mix of C++, Python, and shell scripting. At the start I'm going to be working on the glue that connects the dozens of little subtasks together to accomplish the analysis. More details on that later for anyone who is interested. They are located on Newbury Street by Exeter, so if anyone is interested in resurrecting the LunchBunch group, please let me know. Given that area it will probably be cheaper for me to take the T to another area and eat lunch than eat lunch on Newbury Street (The Fridays isn't too pricey though). If you didn't know, LunchBunch was something that Gingi started and I took over, where Suspoids and associates in the Kendall Square/Park St/South Station area would meet once a week for lunch. It kinda broke up because there were too few people working in that area after Akamai, Pega, and Sandstorm started leaking people. Funny story: I had my interview there about two weeks ago. I felt it went very well, but figured most of the other 80 people who interviewed for it probably felt the same. The following week I have by BLU (Boston Linux and UNIX group) meeting, and the president (Jerry Feldman) says I should use him as a reference too, since I've been working with him on BLU longer than I have any boss in the workplace. So I send his info as a reference to they guy at Compete, CCing Jerry. An hour later I get an email from Jerry with the subject "Do you know how fucking lucky you are?". Apparently, Jerry and the dude at Compete were old buddies who worked for DEC together for about 10 years. Now, the guy at Compete claims the decision was already made by the time he got Jerry's name from me, but I gotta wonder. As I told Jerry, getting a job today seems to be much more about luck and timing than skill, but I have a lot of skill and not much luck. I guess this one slipped through the cracks. Thanks all who were references or support for me. --- DDDD David Kramer http://thekramers.net DK KD DKK D "The great tragedy of science -- the slaying of a beautiful DK KD hypothesis by an ugly fact." DDDD - Thomas Huxley
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