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The headline wasn’t exactly subtle: “Even if It Enrages Your Boss, Social Net Speech Is Protected.” This New York Times article, which ran a few weeks ago, outlined a series of recent National Labor Relations Board rulings that analyzed employee firings in the wake of potentially-damaging Facebook posts. Centered around a case involving the nonprofit organization Hispanics United of Buffalo, the Board ruled that the group was unlawful in terminating five workers after another employee alleged harassment.

So the boundaries are a little clearer now, right?

Not exactly. You can enrage your boss via social media and be fired legally. In fact, the Times article contains two examples of people — “lone wolves” — who were fairly terminated for statements they made on Facebook.

“The Board has issued a bunch of the decisions — and in a lot of cases the employer won,” Benjamin Sachs, a Harvard Law professor and faculty co-director of the school’s Labor and Worklife Program, reiterated to me. “It’s not the case that you can just go on social media and scream about whatever you want to.”

So what’s the difference?

Organizing. And we’re not necessarily talking about rallying your colleagues for a walkout, or overthrowing a regime. We’re talking about the much more subtle distinction, per Article 7 of the National Labor Relations Act (1935), which stipulates, in full:

Employees shall have the right to self-organization, to form, join, or assist labor organizations, to bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, and to engage in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection, and shall also have the right to refrain from any or all such activities except to the extent that such right may be affected by an agreement requiring membership in a labor organization as a condition of employment as authorized in section 8(a)(3) [section 158(a)(3) of this title].

The key here is the phrase “concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection.” That, according to the NLRB, is what Mariana Cole-Rivera and her colleagues at Hispanics United of Buffalo were doing when they used Facebook to discuss their coworker’s threat of exposing their alleged poor performance.

Understanding and employing this line, both for workers and for companies, isn’t easy, and is rife with unknowns and hypotheticals.

A January 2012 NLRB memo highlights a year’s worth of their decisions involving social media, 14 in all. The cases run the gamut: There are situations where an employee was wrongly fired based on a broad social media policy, as well as cases where employees were fired legally even though their company’s policy was deemed problematic.

For employees, the message is easier to navigate: You have the right to air concerns based on “concerted activities” and “mutual aid” on social media. But you may still be taking a risk depending on what you say, especially if you’re not engaging with other employees about work conditions. And because your words are launched into the world, or at least into easily mined data clouds, employers can easily find them and try to use them against you.

It may be trickier for companies. When you’re dealing with concerted activities or mutual aid, your social media policy can’t leave open the possibility that group action could be perceived as banned. So, for example, simply stating that employees can’t make “disparaging comments” could imply that they can’t speak out collectively about a work concern. And if they did — and you fired them — they probably have legal recourse. You should be as specific as possible, like banning employees from putting proprietary information on social media.

And while employees are taking a risk when posting criticisms out in the world, Sachs pointed out to me that companies have at least as much, if not more, risk because anything that’s said on social media can turn into a PR scandal (does Applebee’s ring a bell?). And, of course, this is why many businesses have blanket social media policies in the first place — but it’s becoming increasingly clear that they’re legally problematic.

“Workers’ rights to collective action often conflict with owners’ desires to control their corporate image,” argued Josh Eidelson this past July in Slate, prior to the Hispanics United ruling. “But the former is enshrined in law; the latter isn’t. The power of social media to air criticism shouldn’t change that.”

“One thing this flurry of activity shows,” Sachs adds, “is that even though traditional unions or organizing is on decline, employers can’t ignore the National Labor Relations Act.”

While we all try and sort out next steps, Sachs recommends that companies “get the best legal expertise they can in this area of law to craft and carry out these [social media] policies.” In the end, he says, “it’s really difficult to say, with 100% assurance, that this policy is legal and this policy is not.”

Editors Note: This blog was originally posted on letsmove.gov.

First Lady Michelle Obama invited Big Bird to to the White House to learn how easy and delicious it is to eat fruits and vegetables. Check out the latest PSAs from Mrs. Obama and Sesame Workshop celebrating Let's Move!'s third anniversary!

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Snapchat is popular app among young people. As the name suggests, it is a mobile chat app that also allows for communication using a device’s front-facing camera, as well as the sharing of photographs and drawings. The big draw here is setting an expiration — up to ten seconds — on the images, or video, sent. SnapChat’s short-sends gives it a bad reputation — as a “sexting” app. That will not change with today’s announcement.

The company is “thrilled to announce the arrival of video to our Android community”. The update is included in version 2.0 of the app, which just hit the Google Play Store.

While video is the big addition in this update, there’s more. SnapChat has also “revamped our notification system to give you more informative, exciting, and customizable notifications from your friends”. In addition, a claim of more reliable behavior was made, due to bug fixes that are also included in 2.0.

Before you get too excited, the announcement comes with a caveat — “Some users will still experience difficulties”. Hopefully those difficulties will not include images and video not expiring, which could result in evidence a few customers may live to regret. However, the company also promises that “We have a ton of great updates on the way”.

Google has launched a new Change History feature in Google Analytics, aimed at helping users understand updates to their accounts.

“Have you ever wanted to learn more about changes made to your Google Analytics account, wanted to refresh your memory as to when a particular profile setting was changed, or wondered who on the team made a goal change? Now, all of that is possible with the launch of Change History,” Google’s Scott Ellsworth and Matt Matyas say in a joint blog post.

“Change History presents a summary of many important changes to your account over the last 180 days. Users will find records of changes made to users, accounts, properties, profiles, goals, and filters. This feature is available only to Analytics account administrators.,” they explain.

Here’s what it looks like:

Google is in the process of rolling out Change History. It might be several weeks before you see it. It will appear when you click the “Admin” button, and select the account. You’ll see a “Change History” tab.

Apple’s (AAPL) iPad mini stole the full-size tablet’s thunder when it launched last November, and a number of industry watchers believe the larger iPad’s heyday is behind us. Not so, according to plugged-in market research firm TrendForce. In a new report, the Taiwan-based research firm says that Apple’s fifth-generation iPad is set to debut in the third quarter this year and it will feature an extensive overhaul that will reignite consumer interest in Apple’s 9.7-inch slate.

Continue reading…

Yahoo Japan and BrightTag have expanded upon their strategic partnership , making Yahoo Japan the exclusive Japan market distributor of the BrightTag One platform.

BrightTag says that through the partnership, Yahoo Japan’s dominant market position and its own patent-pending Server-Direct technology will create “a new standard for data collection and distribution across the entire Japan online media market.” That market, according to projections from eMarketer.com/comScoreDataMine.com, is expected to grow to $8.91 billion (¥835 billion) this year, making the country the second largest online media market in the world (behind the US and ahead of the UK, Germany, and China).

“Managing tag code and the data associated with tags has become dramatically more complex for ourselves and our clients in recent years,” said Masatsugu Shidachi, Corporate Officer, Head of Marketing Solutions Company, Yahoo! JAPAN. “BrightTag’s versatile technology solves a wide range of integration challenges for both Yahoo! JAPAN and our clients, helping to position us for faster growth and more rapid innovation.”

“The BrightTag ONE platform is more than just a tag management system,” Shidachi added. “It leverages data instantly and effectively through the cloud and provides all parties with a unified data integration layer making the linkage easy and seamless between website owners, publishers, and the growing number of digital marketing services available in the Japan market.”

Yahoo Japan will offer its new Tag Manager, powered by BrightTag, to its direct, agency and medium-sized business clients.

Earlier this week, Yahoo Japan entered into a joint venture with Free to invest in social gaming.

The unveiling of the PlayStation 4 has the gaming community divided. Some think the presentation was fantastic, and showed just enough to whet the appetites of gamers. Others felt Sony held back too much information, and relied too much on vague spoken promises. Our favorite Taiwanese animators at NMA definitely fall into the latter.

Check out our coverage of all things PS4 here.

Canon announced the launch of its MREAL system for “mixed reality” today, which includes a head-mounted display that allows wearers to combine virtual objects with the real world in 3D, which essentially sounds like a product designer’s dream. On the consumer side, augmented reality hasn’t done a great job of proving itself generally useful at this point, but in an industrial design setting, the payoff could be big, and that’s why Canon’s MREAL is priced at a professional-level $125,000.

The MREAL headset isn’t nearly as sleek as Google Glass, and instead of projecting info on transparent displays, it actually takes in video of your surroundings, runs it through a computer which supplies the virtual elements, and then delivers a live video feed to dual displays mounted in the visor strapped to a user’s face. It’s not light and all-day wearable like Glass, but it means the system can deliver extremely clear 3D computer-generated images that blend more realistically with a user’s actual surroundings, which is exactly what you want if you’re designing a coffee table for a specific living room space, for instance, or want to see what a car concept looks like under showroom lights before you build a physical model.

The $125,000 price tag and $25,000 annual maintenance fee might prohibit ordinary folks from picking up one of these, but the system’s impact could be felt at all levels, and in addition to being used by designers and engineers, might make its way to show floors for augmented reality consumer demonstrations. It also could make it easier for inventors pitching an idea to investors to provide a more realistic look at what a finished hardware product would look like, without building an actual prototype. If you’re making an iPhone case, the cost doesn’t really justify it, but if you’re a Lit Motors trying to sell the next generation of personal transportation, it begins to look like a much better bargain on the balance sheet.

Plus, this launch of innovative interactive design tools from an established player invites startups to try to build equivalent low-cost solutions to disrupt the market. I’d love to see a hardware prototyping app come out for Google Glass when third-party devs start building for it, which could potentially bring the cost of AR prototyping down to a more manageable, startup-friendly level.

Bing announced the launch of a public beta program for the Bing Sitemap Plugin, an open source server-side offering, which generates XML Sitemaps (compliant with sitemaps.org) for sites running on IIS and Apache.

The plugin can generate both comprehensive sitemaps of all URLs seen in server traffic and sitemaps dedicated to store URLs that have changed recently.

“Having both comprehensive and delta Sitemaps provides you with significant benefits, as you will always have a full, up-to-date list of all URLs on your website that search engines can use for deep crawl, as well as a concise Sitemap of URLs that were modified recently, which search engine crawlers can prioritize,” says Bing’s Duane Forrester. “This can help in keeping bot traffic bandwidth down. In addition, the Sitemap Plugin automatically adds <lastmod> values to your Sitemap, and generates <priority> values to the Sitemap based on how popular your URLs are.”

“SEO is a complex and ever changing area but there are some key elements that are still as relevant now as they were a few years ago,” he says. “One of them is building high-quality XML Sitemaps, a comprehensive and accurate representation of your website. That way, you keep control of what you want search engines to index in order of priority and you inform them of new or updated content on your website.”

More on the plugin here. It can be downloaded here.

A new Facebook hoax that’s circulating around the network suggests that users need to upgrade to a “Gold” level membership status in order to avoid having their private info leaked for all to see.

Hoax-Slayer first spotted the hoax. Here’s the message that some users are seeing:

It’s official. Communication media. FACEBOOK has just published its price. fee of $? ($ 9.99), to become a member of “gold” and keep your privacy as it is. If you paste this on your wall will be completely free. Otherwise, tomorrow all your documents can become public. Even those messages that you have deleted or photos that you have not authorized …… not cost you anything, copy and paste

Of course, there’s the part at the end about simply sharing the status in order to make all the problems go away. That’s the number one mechanism that scammers use to spread viral hoaxes on any social network – because how hard is it to just copy and paste it, you know, just in case?

In reality, this hoax isn’t exactly new. It’s a mashup of a couple different hoaxes that have been floating around for years. First, there’s the Facebook “Gold” scam. Hoaxes suggesting that Facebook will soon make people pay to use the service have been going around for years, and the particular one involving a $9.99 Gold membership was spotted as early as 2010.

This has the added bonus of a privacy scare, suggesting that users must pay or share a status in order to avoid public humiliation. Privacy on Facebook is a scary subject for many users, so this simply plays into some people’s base fears.

Another Facebook hoax currently making the rounds implies that users could be lock up in “Facebook Jail” if they send too many friend requests that get rejected. There is a tiny bit of truth to this hoax, in that Facebook will temporarily suspend your friend-requesting abilities if you send out too many unfulfilled requests. But the hoax suggests that this could lead to a sudden and irreversible termination of your whole account, which is simply untrue.

As always, if it sounds ridiculous, it is ridiculous. Facebook is never going to make you pay to use the service and they are never going to make all of your private information public – at least not on their terms.

Bing announced that it has made a change to its Autosuggest feature, which it says makes the search experience faster by completing your query when they’re “confident” they “really know” what you’re looking for.

Bing refers to its latest development as “Autosuggest Ghosting”.

“Autosuggest algorithms are able to determine just how likely it is that you want the #1 suggestion with various degrees of confidence,” explains Dan Marantz, Senior Program Manager Lead, Bing Experiences and Query Formulation Team. “This confidence is highest in the two major patterns: Navigation and Search History. Ghosting is a way to pre-populate the query most likely to be used in the search box (blue selected-text style below) in an effort to speed up the time it takes to express your intent and get to your destination. This has seen to help users speed up by over 16%.”

“The design challenge was to focus on simplicity and intuitiveness. The interaction should feel natural and instinctive when you need it, and easy to work around when you don’t want it,” he says. “The simplest solution is to grey-in (or “ghost”) the high-confidence suggestive text and hope you notice. The problem then becomes – how do you accept the suggestion vs ignore it?”

Naturally, he takes a dig at Google.

“Google’s model complicates this by not being clear about what happens when you hit <enter> to submit the query,” he says. “Will the search be for ‘bed’ or ‘bed bath and beyond’? Turns out the query is only ‘bed’ and you need to press <tab> or <down> to select the full query.”

The Bing philosophy, he says, is not grounded in applying already-learned interaction models.

Users can press Enter to accept a suggestion, continue to type through it with something else, or press Delete/Backspace to remove the suggested text.

Sony revealed the PS4 last night at a two hour conference that focused much more on talking than showing. There were plenty of games shown, but the conference really was all about what the console means to developers and gamers. The former actually had quite a bit to say.

In a tradition dating back to who knows when, Sony had the usual video reel of developers talking up the PS4 hardware. Such luminaries as Tim Schafer from Double Fine and David Cage from Quantic Dream talk about how Sony took feedback from developers in building the PlayStation 4. As expected, there’s quite a bit of hyperbole, but these guys do seem genuinely excited by Sony’s next console.

Expect more developers to talk about the PS4 in the coming months as more information trickles out. E3 will probably feature the bulk of the commentary as Sony now has free reign to focus on games instead of hardware at the annual trade show.

Google Drive is getting a new file preview feature. It works with over 30 file types, and lets you quickly browse through previews visually.

“You’ll see the new preview automatically if you open a photo, video, or PDF,” explains Google Drive engineer Ian Kilpatrick. “To see a preview of a Google document, right-click on the file name and select “preview.” Once the preview window is open, you can click on the arrows on either side to flip to other files. And right from within the preview, you can watch video files or scroll through multi-page documents.”

“You can select and copy text from the preview — even for a PDF or Microsoft Word document — or use the zoom buttons to see a file in more detail,” he adds. “Each file preview also gives you one-click access to share, download, print or open a file for editing.”

The feature is in the process of rolling out to Rapid Release users.

In a new update to the Google Drive Android app, users can now stream video files.

Shia LaBeouf has certainly become vocal about what he wants in the past year, and has moved far past his Disney Channel roots into full-frontal nudity/acid trip/Baldwin feud territory.

Since last summer, LaBeouf has been trying hard to make a name for himself that isn’t tied to his child acting past, appearing in a Sigur Ros video wherein he does interpretive dance and shows us his anatomy and then following that up with a part in a Lars Von Trier film that depicts graphic sex scenes. Later, he admitted that he readied himself for another film, “The Necessary Death Of Charlie Countryman”, by tripping on acid.

Now, LaBeouf is adding another link to the crazy chain by quitting a Broadway production of The Orphans less than a month before the show premieres because he doesn’t get along with Alec Baldwin–which in itself isn’t too hard to believe–and then posting emails between himself and the director on Twitter.

In one email, he prefaces an apology by talking about what makes a man a man and mentions Mark McGuire as a shining example of what not to do.

“A man owns up. That’s why Mark McGuire is not a man. A man grasps his mistakes. He lays claim to who he is, and what he was, whether he likes them or not,” he wrote.

The show’s director, Daniel Sullivan, said, “Alec is who he is. You are who you are. You two are incompatible. I should have known it. This one will haunt me. You tried to warn me. You said you were a different breed. I didn’t get it.”

LaBeouf also tweeted about putting his hand through a wall while rehearsing the show, so now we’re all curious as to what exactly happened on that stage. A source told The Daily News that LaBeouf is inexperienced onstage “and treated the role like he was an action star on a movie set”.

See his audition here.

put my hand thru the door at rehearsals. then apologized to our playwright-this was his response. lesson?PACE. twitter.com/thecampaignboo…

— Shia LaBeouf (@thecampaignbook) February 18, 2013

Fanhattan, an iOS app that helps viewers find movies and TV shows to watch on an iPad, rolled out a beta web version of its service on Thursday.

Fanhattan is something like a TV Guide for online video: Users enter the movie or TV show they want to view, and the app hooks them up with a list of online providers (Netflix, Amazon, HBO Go, and so on) where they can watch it. The company’s expansion to the web allows it to offer more content recommendations from more providers — 29 providers on the web, compared to 16 on iOS — as well as more free shows, for a total database of a million shows and videos. Web viewers, for instance, can watch shows on broadcasters’ websites, and they can access Hulu as well as Hulu Plus. “Depending on what device you’re using the service on, it will clearly show you your options for watching,” Fanhattan CEO Gilles BianRosa told me.

BianRosa says that Fanhattan launched on iPad first because the difficulty of finding content to watch was more pronounced there — “all those apps that don’t talk to each other.” The web is a little different: “Many people actually discover movies and shows on the web, so we wanted to make sure that the discovery aspect was really front and center, especially the social aspects.”

The company is launching a new blog, Fanhattan Voice, that provides video recommendations and other entertainment news and features. And the company’s WatchLists feature, which has been available on iOS since last summer, is being expanded on both iOS and web: Users can now curate their own lists around different themes and can share them with others, rather than just marking which TV shows and movies they want to watch.

BianRosa told GigaOM’s Janko Roettgers last summer that the company will expand to connected devices in the future, but he isn’t ready to announce anything yet. “We’re going it one screen at a time,” he told me. “But we think that launching on the web in the way we have will help consumers in the living room discover what’s available.”

GigaOM readers who want to try Fanhattan on the web in beta can sign up with code “GigaOm.”

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“I can’t leave now. I don’t want to waste the 50 grand I paid for my master’s degree.”

Susan mulled over her second-year experience at a large consulting firm. She was hardly experiencing flow but didn’t despise her job either. When I pressed further, she maintained a steely resolve: “Be damned if I’m going to quit the job I spent my entire school life trying to get, at the firm all of my classmates wanted to break into.” Perennially caught between the dream of pursuing her true passions and the responsibility of generating a direct return on her education, she once again decides to grin and bear her current role.

In researching Passion & Purpose, I met many talented young professionals boasting unlimited potential but finding themselves handcuffed in low-impact, high-paying corporate jobs. The limiting factor? Credential overhang. Defined simply, it’s the perverse way in which our university schooling limits our career options, rather than enhancing them. If you’re skeptical, then in the words of JoJo, here’s some numbers: 58% of Millennials now have college degrees (compared to 36% of Boomers), driving total student loan debt past $1 trillion. As unemployment continues to hover around 8% and average college salaries remain stagnant (PDF), the unfortunate economic reality begins to take shape. We’re now literally unable to put our credentials to work.

Student debt is hardly a new phenomenon, but the negative impact of over-credentialing on our professional lives has never been greater. Here’s why:

1. Rising debt cripples our career choices. Feel a slight pang of terror as you access your end-of-month loan balance? You’re not alone. As college tuition continues to surge, more of us are forced to turn our careers into financial equations. One interviewee lamented: “I wouldn’t have done an MBA if I knew about the economic baggage and what I’d need to earn after graduation.” He may be disappointed but shouldn’t be surprised. As it turns out, the number one career regret we face is taking a job for the money. Although external accreditation can open doors, the sheer cost of those same credentials are inhibiting the pursuit of individually meaningful careers.

2. We suffer from Rubber Stamp Syndrome. Today’s university looks more like well-oiled corporation instead of a socially valuable academic institution, as we continue to demand degrees in droves. One business school professor actually quipped to his students, “You’re not the customer, you’re the product.” As social affirmation theory predicts, we yearn for the external validation that degrees and certificates confer. But following the herd into school and funneling off into supposedly desirable companies afterwards can be a strategy that eventually leads to a profound sense of professional emptiness. Voice laced with regret, one individual said, “I feel like I’ve lived my whole life on guardrails.” Remarked another: “I want to stop doing what I should be doing and start doing what I want to do.”

3. We make career moves based on ever-increasing sunk costs. As any microeconomist will tell you, there is no surer path to bad outcomes than incorporating retrospective expenses that cannot be recovered into your decision making. But as the cost of accreditation rises, the temptation to “use” our degrees and certificates to land high-paying (but ultimately dissatisfying) jobs has never been greater. The more credentials you have, the worse the problem gets. One interviewee remarked, “I’ve done a bachelor’s degree in accounting, a master’s in accounting, and a certificate of public accounting. I can’t just leave accounting.” Another said, “I think of my degree firstly as a cash-generating device.” By force fitting your past education into your current vocation, you’re incorrectly counting sunk costs and might be closing doors to exciting professional paths as a result.

If any of these traps sound familiar, you can take two steps forward. First, eliminate your debt load. Huge student loan balances can cause suboptimal career decisions in the long run, so do everything you can to get out of the red as quickly as possible. Then, once you’re above water, change your mind-set toward credentials. Instead of mindlessly following the well-worn path into the next prestigious program, see whether alternative forms of learning and experience, like online classes or internships, can get you to your goals. When individuals from even the most traditional backgrounds focus on mastery, rather than accumulated awards, they feel liberated. And when all’s said and done, if you still see true value in a credential, then chase it. But let it broaden your professional life instead of bogging you down.

Teradata (TDC) introduced Teradata Aster Discovery Platform 5.10, a comprehensive discovery solution with more than 20 new big data analytic capabilities, including purpose-built visualizations.

Teradata is a leading analytic data solutions company focused on integrated data warehousing, big data analytics, and business applications that provide actionable business intelligence.

Insights from the discovery platform analytics can empower organizations to be more profitable by enhancing customer engagement and improving sales.

“The Teradata Aster Discovery Platform is full of new capabilities that can empower them to accelerate their innovation and supply new options to their business users,” said Scott Gnau, president, Teradata Labs. “It is Teradata’s goal to be our customers’ trusted partner in building a Unified Data Architecture, which includes a powerful set of big data solutions. The result is effective deployment of transformational technology that drives tangible results.”

New technical enhancements to the Aster Disaster Recovery Platform include Visual SQL-MapReduce functions, that generate sophisticated purpose-built data visualizations coupled with other Aster SQL-MapReduce analytical functions generated inside the database. It also features in-database ‘R’ execution capability, support for in-database PMML execution via Zementis, in-database integration of Attensity capabilities and manufacturing and financial services industry analytics.

“With newly added analytics and visualization functionality, the Teradata Aster Discovery Platform offers the convenience of a ‘data scientist in a box,’” said Dan Vesset, program vice president of business analytics and big data, IDC. “Much of the market attention has been on vendors trying to build SQL engines on Hadoop. Teradata Aster Discovery Platform already provides an ANSI SQL-compliant method with its SQL-MapReduce framework to acquire, prepare, analyze, and visualize data from any data source including Hadoop. Without the need to integrate multiple point solutions, customers using this Teradata technology are able to accelerate the discovery process and visualize information in new and exciting ways, and to focus the scarce expertise of data scientists on highest value- added tasks.”

Apple (AAPL) has always been known for its trend-setting designs, but it looks like an early sketch of its long-rumored “iWatch” took a page from a long-forgotten fad from the early ’90s. Patently Apple has some good analysis of a 2011 patent filing that shows Apple has been working on a wristwatch that is essentially “a slap bracelet configured to display information wirelessly transmitted from a portable electronic device.”

Continue reading…

If you still don’t think Amazon is serious about winning enterprise accounts for Amazon Web Services, you need to get over it. The public cloud leader wants to be the preferred cloud for even the largest and most security-obsessed companies. In fact, attracting enterprise users — and reassuring C-level execs about the safety and reliability of Amazon’s cloud — was a primary rationale for last November’s inaugural AWS: Reinvent.

But until recently, the hiring spree underlying this effort — Amazon has been seeking (and in some cases poaching) high-level sales engineers from enterprise IT companies like Sungard, HP, Oracle and EMC for a year or so — was a bit under the radar, as GigaOM reported in November.

Can you sell to a CIO? AWS wants you

What’s new, as Business Insider reported this week, is that it’s now out in the open; Amazon has posted lots of listings for enterprise-focused sales reps and sales managers. BI claimed 75 — I didn’t count them all, but the list is pretty rich. As of Thursday morning, AWS was seeking enterprise sales managers for New York, Dallas, Herndon, Virg., San Francisco, Irvine, Calif., and Seattle, among other areas.  As one listing puts it:

“As an Enterprise Sales leader you will have the exciting opportunity to help drive the growth and shape the future of an emerging technology. Your responsibilities will include driving revenue, adoption, and market penetration in enterprise accounts within the local geography. Your responsibilities will include building and managing a highly talented sales team focused on driving revenue, adoption, and market penetration in the Enterprise market. The ideal candidate will possess a technology sales management background that enables them to lead a team of senior enterprise sale representatives with engagements at the CXO level.”

Brian McCallian, founder and CEO of New York-based Bronze Drum Consulting, sees a tangible change in his AWS interactions of late. “What I see as a difference from 2012 is also the kinds of people AWS is hiring … the new Enterprise Account Manager and AWS Solution Architect I met with this week and last are more focused on eliminating organizational barriers that limit consumption of Cloud Services. And the focus area seems to be enabling Direct Connect for enterprise to simplify how enterprise connects to AWS.”

Startups and enterprises: two different animals

The fact that an established enterprise is, by definition, not a startup,  illustrates Amazon’s conundrum. Selling services to developers in startups is one thing and AWS was built on that business. But selling into an established enterprise with existing IT and with an internal bureaucracy is a whole other matter.

For all of AWS’s momentum — it claims enterprise accounts including Nasdaq and systems integration partners like  Accenture, Deloitte and Capgemini — some still doubt that big companies will trust mission critical loads to what they see as shared, and therefore insecure, infrastructure.

Amazon has worked to ease these concerns with new enterprise support options; with Virtual Private Cloud, which cordons off a section of Amazon’s cloud for a given company’s use; and management tools like Trusted Advisor.

And then there are such enterprise-y services as RedShift data warehousing, the Data Pipeline data consolidation service, and any number of new big data and other services promised by Amazon CTO Werner Vogels at Structure: Europe last year. The Register picked up on yet another job listing indicating more big data goodies to come from AWS. Perhaps some sort of big data managed service similar to DynamoDB would be in order.

Christopher Smith, cloud analyst at Cloud Technology Partners, a Boston-based systems integrator, says corporate customers are warming up to AWS and are getting more sophisticated about the notion of putting IT loads outside the firewall. “”Obviously [AWS is] the elephant in public cloud space. Clients are hesitant because of associated compliance and governance risk, but we’re seeing more openness due to key enabling technologies, while at the same time a cultural shift and greater understanding that just because you can see and touch the box, doesn’t mean its secure.”

But that new-found understanding comes as more cloud providers enter the scene. Going forward, Amazon will face more enterprise-focused competition for those business accounts.  EMC chief strategist Paul Maritz will doubtless speak about Pivotal Labs’ take on cloud infrastructure at GigaOM’s upcoming Structure:Data conference in New York, March 20-21.  And, as Rackspace, HP and Red Hat gear up their OpenStack-based clouds — IBM will likely say more about its OpenStack plans at the upcoming OpenStack Summit — one thing is for sure: Amazon may be the biggest cloud seeking enterprise customers, but it won’t be alone. And all of those rivals sport enterprise relationships that Amazon still craves.

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