Philadelphia! My employer decided to establish the headquarters there (when I joined, there was still hope that it would be Cambridge/Boston), and I chose to move. So far, so good. I still have to get used to using the car to get places (rather than bicycle or public transportation), and the city certainly doesn’t have the intellect of Boston or the charme of San Francisco, but New York City is just over an hour away, and they have some decent coffee houses here. So I’ll be fine for a while.
YesMail got now acquired by infoUSA, which is a big Direct Marketing player with many brands, inclduing Donnelly Marketing, Walter Karl and ClickAction. I wonder how much of the original technology is still there.
To sum it up, we have money in the bank, we have a management team, and we have a huge space to fill with people. I am one of the few people still working in the Cambridge office. Considering how the economy is doing, Concurrent seems to do rather well.
Check out this article in the Philadelphia Inquirer about Concurrent Pharmaceuticals, my current employer.
The last project I worked on at Netcentives was internationalizing their software. I took the opportunity to write an article about the project, as I had to deal with pretty cool stuff. The article just got published a week ago in Multilingual Magazine. I converted the article in a PDF file (5 MB). Enjoy the read!
Sold! Post Communications, my former employer, got sold off in a chapter 11 bancruptcy auction to Yesmail. Sad to see the story end like that, but at least the place wasn’t ripped into bits and pieces, but sold as a whole.
Now it happened! The end of a long story, a saga for me. Netcentives, my former employer, goes belly-up. But wait, there is more! My real former employer, Post Communications, will survive! Hans Peter Brondmo, Post’s founder, is probably going to buy it. Life is funny sometimes…
I left Netcentives two weeks ago, to work for a Biotech Startup in Boston. Turns out that my departure date couldn’t have been better. Earlier this week, there was another huge round of layoffs at Netcentives. From 345 down to 180. On the bright side (if there is one), rumors say, that EMG (formerly Post) much less affected than the rest of the company. Either way, the stock price is deep into the water…
While I am not supposed to comment on this, I can point out that there are many similar lawsuits going on these days. Investors compaining that there is – indeed – a risk to investing. Oh, boohoo! Personally, I am not worried about this.
I used to work for a really cool place, Post Communications. It got acquired by Netcentives, and quite a bit of the coolness disappeared. Even more uncool, 120 people got layed off today. That’s what it takes these days for profitability. A lot of goo d friends of mine were asked to leave.