Jobs news aplenty this morning, first up there’s the statement from the IDA announcing that LinkedIn is to recruit 35 finance professionals at its international headquarters in Dublin. While elsewhere, and on a far larger scale, The Irish Times is reporting that Stream Global Services, a US firm that operates call centres around the world, is to create up to 400 jobs in Dublin, having won a contract with “a leading manufacturer of video game consoles”.

In March this year LinkedIn announced the establishment of its international HQ in Ireland and it now plans to commence recruitment immediately, with Sharon McCooey, newly appointed international finance director, will head up the operation. Continue Reading

The Large Hadron Collider, particle accelerator extraordinaire and general source of abject terror among those willing to speculate on what it might do, will soon be pushing out its first proton collision… and streaming it live.

Doctore Freeman? Thank goodness you made it!

For those who just can’t miss anything that happens in science (especially for you fans of the Higgs boson), it’s nice to think that we can keep a tab open and tuned to the CERN page and watch our understanding of physics either be confirmed or smashed to pieces. The folks at CERN have even been kind enough to post a nice long timeline for what we can expect to see over the course of the day as it ramps up for its first proton collision. If you’ve got nothing else on, it’ll be worth watching, at least to confirm that they haven’t y’know… destroyed the planet.

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NBC is to crackdown on the high amount of piracy expectd to follow the winter Olympics, starting later this week in Vancouver.

At least it's not the London 2012 logo

Curiously enough, it seems that NBC doesn’t believe there’s the same kind of demand for streaming content as there was two years ago, for what many have termed the “real” Olympic Games. Still, TorrentFreak is reporting that the broadcaster has said that it will be doing everything in its power to ensure that as few people as possible have access to illegal video content from the games.

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After last week’s news that YouTube is stepping into the online movie rental business, comes reports that live sport may soon become a viable part of their web offering as well. Rather unfairly, the LATimes told online readers over the weekend, “the good news for sports fans: YouTube will be showing a series of major matches, live, on the online site. The bad news: The sport is cricket.”

Cricket fans come in all shapes and sizes and will soon be able to watch top-class games via YouTube.

Now, having been unemployed during the Ashes a few years back, I developed a bit of a liking for the game (“live sport that runs for six hours and you’re expected to drink while watching it in the middle of the afternoon… sign me up”), so unlike critics across the Atlantic I’m among the thousands who are delighted to hear that YouTube’s owners, Google, have penned a deal with the India Premier League, to show all 60 matches of the Twenty20 cricket tournament that begins 12 March.

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The BBC’s hugely popular iPlayer streaming service had its best month to date with over 100 million streams during December. The traditionally huge audiences for Christmas television helped matters greatly with Festive specials galore getting watched and re-watched via the iPlayer, indeed David Tennant’s farewell as Doctor Who which chalked up an impressive 1.3 million streams.

Cheer up Doc, lots of people watched you this Christmas

The most watched programme on the service over Christmas was Top Gear’s special set in Bolivia while radio-wise Terry Wogan’s departure from his Radio 2 breakfast show became something of a national event across the water and the velvet-voiced legend’s farewell to fans helped bump up the iPlayer numbers greatly.

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YouTube might well serve over a billion videos a day, but it turns out the average user only spends fifteen minutes a day on the service… something that YouTube wants to rectify.

According to the New York Times, the folks at YouTube are working on tightening up the suggested videos that the video streaming service shows its users in an attempt to have them spend more time on the site per day. YouTube’s director of product management, Hunter Walk, aside from having a very impressive name, is working on the problem, and he sees telly as the model to emulate, saying,

“Our average user spends 15 minutes a day on the site. They spend about five hours in front of the television. People say ‘YouTube is so big,’ but I really see that we have a ways to go.”

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Many Twitter users are reporting seeing some misplaced Tweets in their usual feeds, with some seeing updates from users whose settings mark them as protected, and so shouldn’t be visible to anyone but followers.

Word comes via Cnet that Twitter has added the “misdirected” tweets to its list of Known Issues, and it’s usually a short enough step from there to an issue being solved, but for now users seeing tweets from a source they’re not following looks set to continue.

Of course, this issue has only been worsened by a kind of general misunderstanding of the new “retweet” functionality added to Twitter, which allows users to share content updated from another account with their followers. Unfortunately, the fact that many seem to have been unprepared for the new retweet model means that there were an awful lot of people complaining about misdirected tweets before the bug was really recognised as a bug, rather than users simply misunderstanding.

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Opera has released an update to its browser, taking the browser to Opera 10.10, which sees its much-touted Unite service added to the browser. It’s meant a record-breaking week for Opera.

The numbers are fairly impressive; Opera has seen the latest version of its browser downloaded by around 12.5 million people in the last week alone, beating the record number of downloads it had had by fully 25%, set on the release of Opera 10. Of course, the big question is whether or not Unite, which many see as having been the driving force behind the latest figures, stands the test of time.

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U2 has announced that its upcoming concert in California, this coming Sunday, is to be available to those of us not able to attend live via a YouTube stream of the event.

Regardless of your stance on Bono (and we’re sure pretty much everyone has a stance on Bono), it’s interesting to see U2 streaming content live via YouTube. It’ll also be very interesting to see how much of a logistical headache it is to manage. The BBC is carrying the story, in which it notes that, according to the band’s manager, Paul McGuinness, the set was to have been filmed regardless, which means that it presents a perfect opportunity to extend the party beyond the stadium.”

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YouTube has had its logo updated to reflect the sheer volume of traffic that the service sees.

As well you might have guessed from the new logo, YouTube now serves over a billion videos every day, which is some pretty heavy use indeed, especially considering the sheer amount of data being passed around. According to the post about it on the YouTube blog (jokingly titled, Y,000,000,000uTube) they’re most pleased to have passed the one billion a day mark.

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It’s been reported for a while now that MySpace Music has been doing an awful lot better than some of the company’s other (read, social networking related) endeavours. Now though, news that the auto-play default being changed from “always on” to “off unless you ask” wasn’t anything to do with how annoying things were, but how much it cost.

According to TechCrunch, MySpace as basically haemorrhaging in the form of streamed music. Moreover, the price of being annoying seems to be a lot higher for MySpace than for other companies, with the streams costing around the $10 million mark every month. Given MySpace’s recent staff cuts, we’d imagine that’s not the kind of money it has to throw around, especially on features that seem so hamfisted.

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