We are glad to keep the enthusiasm of recruiters and students who have faithfully waited for us to wrap up our beta period. However, in our first version of Next Acropolis we learned many new things that delayed, and improved our product.

One important area we depend on is our use of cloud computing. Achieving a high degree of availability, redundancy and response speed within the cloud is a central goal. In many ways, taking more time to get these goals right has been a benefit.

Doing startup 2.0 means using a new toolbox: cloud infrastructure, on demand compute cycles, new ajax, and new persistence types. We are not reliant on relational databases. Instead we optimize structured xml. Then we integrate other commodity services into our mix, including search, authentication and other security services. Tuning it all into a manageable user experience has been a job and half. (Hearing recently that Mark Andressen took 3 years to perfect his Ning project, is some consolation). But what we do is not as ambitious — his project is a whole platform for social computing, and we are much more task-oriented, and focused on our corner of the economy.

Using adsense is also a goal of ours, so we can release a product for-free to the public. Using google ajax apis has been a back-up plan for us, should our initial ajax fail to deliver. So we have had to ask the public to wait. But with the recession, and dropping employment, this has challenged people’s patience. I know we will have our product out in early 2009, so I hope people can wait. I will profile a number of employment trends we are witnessing in an upcoming CEO Blog.

Thank you all for your patience. We aim to satisfy your expectations with our upcoming release.

Stefan Bund, CEO

I am pleased to announce that we will be consulting a new software engineer, Sebastian Stadil, at Next Acropolis. Sebastian’s expertise encompasses cloud computing, a major technology we rely on.

At Next, we take the term papers and research products from students around the world, index them and make them searchable for corporate recruiters. In order to satisfy this objective, we have to tap into server resources around the globe and pull them into a ‘cloud.’ This give us a virtually limitless array of storage and bandwidth.

Cloud computing helps us to live in the best of all possible worlds. We tap into the storage we need, and then pay for what we use. This helps us keep our overhead low, and pass on value to consumers, who tap into our services at no cost.

Sebastian is helping us to make innovative technology in the cloud, and it has been inspiring to have him with us. We want to publicly thank him for his contributions, as they move us, each day closer to our vision of the Next Acropolis.

My brother is a theater producer in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and I think I understand what’s it’s like pulling together a stage show. Next Acropolis has its marketing, technology, public relations and legal pieces pulling together, and I predict we will be ready quite soon.

Tech News at Next
We have Sebastian Stadil, an expert cloud computing engineer, consulting our development group, and helping us hook up our cloud infrastructure to our search engine (Google). This will help us more comprehensively link your requests to our universe of research content.

Our user interface will be more data-rich than ever before. We have built a new news search device that will inform you of industry trends in the areas you’re already committed, and do it every time you log in. So each day you can start your day, learning news about stuff you’ve written about.

At this point I will devulge my own experience in graduate school. I remember what it meant to propose a strong research topic, get it approved by my professors, and go forward for months into my work. I did a lot of research into social network business models, so as you can see, my thesis work ultimately matured into a company. I have a belief that what you care about, becomes your life. Our news autosearch tools will help you learn how your research is pertinent with industry, and how trends in the world evolve, relative to your term research.

We believe that if you pursue a term paper, that your investment can pay off in a major way. It’s my belief that the student research paper is an underutilized tools in cultivating the educated workforce, and through our newest tools, you’ll connect to a bigger context of news and events that relate to your personal work. So each day you can view the world of opportunities that relate to your own research.

Marketing Updates
We are currently in touch with 400 students in various academic honor societies and civic organizations, and 275 corporate recruiters. We estimate that we connect successfully with 10 to 20 adventurous students each day, and that in the next month, we’ll double our beta population. Our network engineering staff is working hard to complete our highly redundant service infrastructure, so that our Quality of Service can handle the beta group with its hand tied behind its back.

Our technology group is embarking on a new facebook application that will turn the marketing effort ON. Our new tools for facebook will make the recruiter’s lives easier, and give students a one-click path to their Next account. Since we began the Next Acropolis project in April, their network grows linearly, 2x. We think that this major network will define the age of Web 2.0, and we intend on reaching into this ecosystem, where collegiate america lives and plays.

We are also firmly committed to reaching into student groups in Turkey, India and China, above and beyond our current efforts in the US, Australia, NZ, UK, and the EU. We feel like we’re interacting with one big world each day at Next, as we reach enthusiastic individuals in Nigeria, Saudi, and other locales where well-prepared students often run into the glass celing of their respective home countries. However, we believe that big organizations will be depending on students outside the US/UK/EU to build their workforce, and our assignment will be to deliver these highly valuable groups of students to employers in western countries.

A big area of debate for Barack Obama has been the effect of globalization on US employers. I definitely support the notion of a global economy that depends on many people in many nations pulling together to produce our ecosystem of goods and services. This being the case, we respectfully disagree with Obama’s notion that somehow we can build opportunities for americans by closing our borders to non-US people, and preventing US corporations from developing market presence for themselves in other countries. For US exporters to continue to succeed, they must cultivate workforce groups beyond our borders. We hope to be helpful in this traditional, expanding trend.

Each time we reach a new individual in India and other expanding overseas economies, we see the future.

Legal
We have received some requests for our privacy policy and terms of service. We promise to have these items online for your review, when we go live. Our legal team will need our final product to finalize our privacy policy. We generally will have a policy that resembles other major social nets, but we will have some specifics related to the documents we store online.

Currently we are focused on reaching the college population. Students are the primary resource, and the primary consumer for our business, and we are fully focused on this group, currently. We succeeded in attracting the interest of over 250 major corporate recruiters, both from large and small professional recruiting organizations and large multinationals. We won’t divulge who is on our interest list for opening day, but we will say that when you shop for insurance, computers, cell phones, food, banking and financial services, pharmaceuticals, you’ll be transacting with companies who are interested in Next Acropolis.

In order to equalize the network, balance the needs of students and corporate recruiters, our game is to attract the students. This involves contacting students across the entire spectrum of possible venues: student groups, pre-professional organizations, sororities, sports teams, fraternities, student government, activists, honor students, community college populations, students of color, Pan-Asian students, students in Europe, the Middle East, engineers, law students, women’s studies, MBAs, petrochemical scientists, nurses…

Our attitude is to recruit as wide a cross section of students as we can, and let the market for talent figure out the rest. We know that so long as the recruiters are there, the students will be there, and so long as the students are there, the companies will mainstream the technology.

What we are finding is that students are business people; they are concerned about their futures, and desire enhanced tools to help them locate opportunities. The all-business perspective of top students is mirrored by the intensity of professional recruiters, who match the challenge of staffing competitive industries who depend on talent. I have found it very easy to recruit the recruiters to our system, who are massively equipped to streamline these students into their future metier.

The CEO’s office is mainly concerned with this equillibrium between each user population.

All summer I have been spreading the word on Next, and I am slowing down the marketing engine to finalize  NA 1.0. Currently, several goals remain, having to do with scaling, high availability testing and message platforms. In terms of marketing, I am most pleased with attention from over 250 recruiting organizations and major corporations. I was most concerned about getting the attention of big companies in technology, finance and even high-profile government agencies. I found that Web 2.0 has altered their landscape, and they were looking for tools that resemble ours.

As we wrap up our first round of features, my time is being spent on new ones. My graduate thesis at Claremont dealt with equillibriums in social networks, and I am applying that analysis to this company with most moves we make. Here are two key examples in marketing and technology:

1. tech: making it so that recruiters aren’t the only ones recruiting. We are finding ways to help students locate firms that focus on their own interests.

2. marketing: aligning PR efforts around each campus, so that messages appear inside of internet, print, and offline resources, promoting Next Acropolis. I have found that facebook is an indispensible marketing platform.

Future features absolutely include facebook social networking. Also, we will be helping recruiters more extensively. Recruiters will find a whole new set of tools to help them extend their search for candidates, posting jobs within their next acropolis account. Also, recruiters will be able to keep a blog on things happening inside their company, and their news will appear inside of student accounts who have produced related research. So for those of you in technology, science and business, when new ideas percolate around your company, when you blog about it, students with research in those areas will hear about you. This way, students who care about the things your firm cares about, will be able to recruit you.

As always, I am very glad to be with Next Acropolis, and I look forward to my next interaction with you on facebook. Keep me posted on our group, if you’re a recruiter, or if you’re a student or work in academia, send me a line at our Facebook Page, or on my Facebook profile.