David Fisher

Polar, maker’s of MediaVoice, the platform trusted by many of the world’s largest publishers to create, serve, and scale their native advertising, and Moat, a SaaS analytics company focused on building products for brand advertisers and premium publishers, have partnered to provide analytics to premium publishers including viewability and attention metrics in content and native advertising.

The partnership lets Polar’s MediaVoice customers leverage Moat’s enhanced analytics, strengthening the market-leading reporting features already integrated within the platform. Some of the advanced metrics MediaVoice users access through the partnership include viewability, in-view time, universal interaction rate, hover rate, time to hover, scroll rate, and many others.

“Moat is excited to partner with Polar and provide another powerful integration of Moat Analytics to our clients,” says Aniq Rahman, Moat’s President. “We already share many customers with Polar – grouping native advertising and content analytics for brands creates a new opportunity for publishers to tell a story to marketers about how readers experience sponsored content.”

“MediaVoice has grown exponentially over the past year, now having served over 3-billion direct-sold native ads for premium publishers,” says Polar’s vice president of product, Rahul Nirula. “This explosive growth is proof sponsored content programs are scaling. Publishers need to chart their success and Moat’s industry-leading analytics platform fills that need perfectly.”

Polar and Moat’s customers like The Washington Post and The Globe and Mail are already seeing value from this partnership.

“Clients using BrandConnect look to our team to help create and deliver high quality content programs our audience will engage with. Combining the data and storytelling power of Moat with the innovative native technology from Polar, helps us tell a stronger story to our clients on how their content programs are performing,” says Jeff Burkett, Senior Director of Sales Operations and Product Strategy at the Washington Post. WP BrandConnect is The Washington Post’s sponsored content program.

The Randstad Technologies Employee Confidence Index, a measure of overall confidence among technology workers, reached the highest level ever recorded in the Index’s nine-year history, increasing from 58.7 in Q2 2014 to 61.7 this quarter. The study, conducted online by Harris Poll on behalf of talent and solutions provider Randstad Technologies, showed technology workers’ confidence in the strength of the economy rebounded significantly this quarter, with nearly half (43%) believing the economy is getting stronger. In addition, the Randstad Macroeconomic Confidence Index, which measures employees’ confidence in the overall strength of the economy, increased dramatically from 47.4 last quarter to 52.4 this quarter—the highest level among all other professions surveyed. The study was conducted in July, August and September of 2014 among 189 U.S. IT workers aged 18 and older.

Also this quarter, IT workers are more confident about their own personal employment situation, including the availability of jobs and their ability to find new employment. Nearly four-in-10 (38%) IT workers believe there are more jobs available this quarter, while more than half (56%) are confident in their ability to find a new job. Not surprisingly, many more IT employees say they are likely to look for a new job this quarter, with 40 percent of IT professionals indicating they are willing to job hunt in the next year, an 11 percentage point increase from the second quarter of 2014.

“It is encouraging to see confidence levels among all IT workers reaching unprecedented heights,” says Bob Dickey, Group President of Technology and Engineering at Randstad. “Employers must keep in mind that with more confidence in the job market comes more likelihood of job mobility, a challenge when many organizations are already struggling with finding the right IT talent to drive business goals and innovation. In fact, a recent Gartner report on CIO Agenda 2014/2015, finds 51 percent of CIOs are concerned that the digital torrent is coming faster than they can cope, and 42 percent don’t feel they have the right skills and capabilities in place to face this future.”

According to the National Center for Women & Information Technology, one often overlooked solution to the IT skills shortage is to recruit more women into the profession. The organization cites that there are roughly 1.2 million computing jobs projected to be available by 2022, yet U.S. universities are producing only 39 percent of the graduates needed to fill them. Meanwhile, the National Center for Education Statistics forecasts a total of 13.5 million female college students in 2020 compared to just under 9.5 million males. In addition, a recent New York Times article reported that women hold only 25 percent of IT jobs, and roughly half will eventually quit to pursue a completely different line of work.

Adtegrity (Pink Sheets: ADTY), a Grand Rapids, Mich.-based company specializing in Internet advertising networks and services, today reported its results for the third quarter ended Sept. 30, 2014.

The Company’s unaudited results included net income of $80,892 for the third quarter on revenues of $4.3 million, compared with a net income of $419,215 on revenues of $5.03 million for the same quarter last year.

“Unfortunately, our recent investments in headcount didn’t translate to improvements in our financial performance.  We have also experienced slower-than-expected market growth in political ad spending for the year.  At the same time, we believe we have a solid plan, we remain profitable and we are optimistic that we will see increased sales momentum as we move forward,” said Adtegrity President and CEO Scott Brew. “We remain focused on taking Adtegrity to the next level of performance, and will continue to invest in growing the company.”

Adtegrity reported serving more than 47.6 billion ad impressions during the third quarter, resulting in 27.9 million clicks and 395,000 conversions for Adtegrity advertisers.

Adtegrity’s primary business is the delivery of interactive advertising and marketing services. Since its founding in 1999, the Company has established itself as a results-driven, customer-focused firm providing consistent quality to the top advertising brands online.  Adtegrity currently delivers billions of advertisements across thousands of top-tier websites each month.

The University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) announced today the launch of its recruitment for the inaugural class of the newly developed Master of Technology Management Program, set to begin in the Fall of 2015.

UC Santa Barbara’s Master of Technology Management Program (MTM), a selective nine-month immersive master’s degree program, is designed to catapult highly qualified, early-career engineers and scientists into leadership positions within established and start-up technology companies by developing critical management skills.

Utilizing a synchronous customer and product development process, this unique, competitive program was developed in tandem with the recruitment of practiced professors, and engagement with brand-name technology companies with interest in employing graduates who will have developed both technical and management skills.

“Companies are recognizing the need for candidates with a hybrid of technical and management proficiencies,” explained Robert York, Chair of the Management Technology Program at UCSB. “We are thrilled to offer students the opportunity to accelerate their careers, prepare themselves for real-life working environments, and an on-ramp to prospective employer.”

UCSB employed SyncDev, Inc. a company that coaches cross-functional teams to develop customers and products simultaneously, to support its faculty and student-recruitment team to develop their student and corporate ‘customer funnel’ while developing the MTM Program. Using SyncDev’s sell-design-build method, UCSB’s team fostered relationships with technology companies, garnering vital information about which skills and experience are important, and used the results to help recruit additional faculty and define its curriculum.

“We are honored to work with a top institution on this game changing educational experience,” said SyncDev CEO, Frank Robinson. “By tapping into those who make hiring decisions, students will gain the most tailored education available.”

The differentiation of this Masters of Technology Management program lies in its narrow focus, which is designed to accelerate graduates’ career trajectory by years.  While most MBA programs are constructed to provide a breadth of skills to create managers from any background for a variety of administrative, operational, and finance roles, the MTM program is structured to admit only candidates with an interest in gaining the framework, skills, and applied knowledge necessary to become a leader in technology-based companies.

Camber Corporation announced today that for the second consecutive year, Camber has been selected as a finalist in the Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation, and Education Conference (I/ITSEC) Serious Games Showcase & Challenge for a RQ-7B Shadow UAS operator training game called “Eagle Eye.”

“Eagle Eye” is a serious game that leverages an expansive, dynamic, and immersive 3D virtual environment. The application provides our military with the latest reconnaissance and security doctrine and tactics training to the Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) RQ-7B Shadow Platform. The game puts the player in control of an Unmanned Aircraft supporting a Brigade Combat Team in which the player must leverage past performance based training and develop decision making skills.  As players progress through the game they will be trained through intense real world situations using advanced scouting tactics.

At the 2013 ITSEC Conference, Camber was awarded “Best Mobile Game” and “People’s Choice” for GORRDEE, a device agnostic mobile application that uses as an immersive trainer for the Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) Shadow platform.

The goal of Serious Games Showcase & Challenge (SGS&C) is to identify innovative game-based technologies and solutions that improve training across all segments for individuals, groups, and systems.  SGS&C opens the door for game developers to expose their work to some of the best gaming and simulation companies in the world.

The October Randstad U.S. Employee Confidence Index, which tracks U.S. workers’ monthly perspectives around jobs and the economy, increased 1.8 points to 58.2 from 56.4 in September. Workers showed growing confidence in the strength of the economy, with 37 percent believing the economy is getting stronger, up from 31 percent in September. Only three in 10 workers (30 percent) believe the economy is weakening. The study is conducted online by Harris Poll on behalf of Randstad, among 1,010 employed U.S. adults ages 18 and older.

Despite more confidence in the overall job market in October, fewer workers indicated plans for changing jobs. For example, employees expressed increased confidence in the availability of jobs, with 30 percent saying there were more jobs in October compared to 26 percent saying so in September. Also, nearly five in ten workers (47 percent) are confident in their ability to find a job, a three percentage point increase from September. However, when it comes to workers’ beliefs about their current employment situation, fewer workers in October felt confident in the future of their employer as compared to those reporting confidence in September, and fewer employees plan to seek new employment. In October, just over one-third (34%) of workers said it was likely they would look for a new job, a slight decline from the 36 percent who said so last month.

“U.S. workers are showing more confidence about both the overall economy and the jobs recovery, as demonstrated by our recent surveys,” said Jim Link, Chief HR Officer, Randstad North America. “As we noted in September, an employment environment not seen since before the recession is within sight, and once it arrives, employers will need to turn up their retention efforts. The last bridge to cross before reaching full economic and employment recovery is wage growth. In previous post-recession environments, accelerated hiring eventually drove up pay rates. Wages have yet to improve in the current recovery, but most economists anticipate they will. And when wages do improve, the financial incentive to seek new employment will only stimulate employees’ job mobility and interest in changing employers.”

In September, the average U.S. hourly wage dropped a penny to $24.53 despite the increase of 248,000 jobs. The 12-month increase in hourly wages decreased to 2.0 percent from 2.1 percent in August, falling just slightly faster than the rate of inflation. The U.S. Labor Department reported in October that workers’ weekly earnings in the third quarter ticked down from earlier in the year and are just now matching the amount workers took home near the start of the recession.

“Slow earnings growth typically indicates employers aren’t feeling pressure to increase compensation,” continued Link. “While job openings are high, the pace of hiring is still below that of pre-recession rates, and workers likely sense that all the pieces of the employment picture aren’t together yet. We still see workers opting for stability rather than career change, but believe that with wage growth we’ll see workers demonstrate more interest in new career prospects.”

Randstad, the second largest staffing and HR services firm in the world, has been tracking workforce trends and publishing the U.S. Employee Confidence Index since 2004.