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Microsoft is preparing to unveil a new investment arm called the Bing Fund.

The company hasn’t made an official announcement, but ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley put together a variety of public pieces to assemble the picture.

• There’s a public Bing Fund Twitter account, which so far seems to consist mostly of bland haiku about entrepreneurship. (Sample tweet: “Want to change the world? / First, you must believe you can. / We believe you will.”)
• There’s a placeholder web site at BingFund.com, which simply says “thanks for stopping by” and promises more information “soon.”
• VoodooPC founder Rahul Sood, who ran the boutique PC maker until it was sold to HP in 2006, is now stating on his LinkedIn profile that he is the GM/Partner of the Bing Fund.
• And Microsoft has posted a job opening for the creative director of the Bing Fund.

BingFund.com doesn’t have much useful information yet.

In other words, Microsoft isn’t trying to hide the existence of the Bing Fund. It is, however, being coy about what exactly the fund will do. Given the amount of infrastructure and the job postings around the Bing Fund, it seems likely that it will include incubation features as well as monetary investment.

Foley notes another job posting for an engineer, which suggests that Microsoft won’t be limiting itself to investing in companies that use Microsoft technologies exclusively. Instead, it is looking for someone who has experience with

Microsoft’s web/cloud stack (C#, ASP.NET, Azure), HTML/Javascript/jQuery, as well as one or more popular startup stacks (LAMP, Ruby on Rails, PHP, AWS, Heroku, Google App Engine etc.)

That’s smart: Microsoft, if nothing else, is highly practical, and limiting its focus to Microsoft-only shops would be like shooting itself in the foot right now. That’s because many startups actively avoid Microsoft technologies — be they consumer-facing ones like Office or back-end technologies like .NET and Azure — preferring to focus on more open-source Internet technologies.

However, Foley speculates that the name of the fund might imply a requirement that funded startups utilize Microsoft’s Bing search engine somehow.

We’ve asked Microsoft’s representatives for comment, but it’s Sunday, so we aren’t expecting to hear back soon. We will update this post if we get a comment, however.

Top photo of Rahul Sood from Rahul Sood’s Facebook page

Filed under: deals

Stop the presses! Facebook and LinkedIn are about to become archrivals in the recruiting market! At least, that’s the implication of a Wall Street Journal article, which reports that Facebook plans to launch a job posting board later this summer.

It’s a nice scoop if true (the Journal cites “people familiar with the matter”), but reading the story is a strange experience. Basically, it starts out by explaining why the job board isn’t a big deal. Then, having established that it isn’t a big deal, the story talks about what a big deal it is.

The board will reportedly aggregate job listings from third-party services like BranchOut, Jobvite, and Work4 Labs, making them searchable for Facebook users. One of the quoted sources describes it as “lightweight” and says, “It doesn’t feel like a big effort that they’ve worked on for a long time.” Someone also says Facebook didn’t build the site itself, and instead got a third-party developer to do it. The Journal reports that Facebook doesn’t plan to monetize the service initially, and says it’s “unclear” whether the company will do so in the future.

Apparently, the job board might be an extension of the Social Jobs Partnership that Facebook announced with the US Department of Labor last fall. In fact, if you read the program announcement, one of the partnership’s plans was to “explore and develop systems where new job postings can be delivered virally through the Facebook site at no charge.”

A Facebook spokesperson, meanwhile, sent me the obligatory statement: “We don’t comment on rumor or speculation.”

Add that all up, and what do you get? A cool-sounding feature, possibly part of an existing partnership, but not a major new direction or revenue source for the company. So … why talk about how it could be “more of a threat to other professional networking sites such as LinkedIn”? Or the stuff about the evolution of recruiting and the size of online recruiting industry? All of this speculation comes with caveat of, “If Facebook decides to get serious about this … ” but the story doesn’t offer any real evidence that that’s going to happen.

Again, I’m not trying to take away from the Journal’s scoop. It’s just that parts of the article are … puzzling. And as someone who’s had his own moments of pressure (from myself or from my editors) to make news seem like a bigger deal than it is, I’m seeing some familiar signs. With all the “ifs”, “shoulds”, and “coulds” it almost feels like the Journal had a dramatic story in their head about Facebook vs. LinkedIn. When it turned out to be less of a page turner than expected, they weren’t quite willing to let it go. (I’m also not opposed to blue-sky speculation — speculation is fun! — but a little dodgier when mixed in with real reporting.)

Put another away: Could Facebook become a more serious player in recruiting? Sure, anything is possible. But there’s nothing here to make me think it’s more likely.

Apple’s Aperture team is looking for managers, user interface engineers and software coders who have experience operating in the iOS environment, possibly signaling that the company is developing an iDevice-centric version of the high performance photo editing program.

A pair of newly-listed job postings on Apple’s “Jobs at Apple” webpage point to a possible redesign of the current 30-pin dock connector used by the company’s portable devices since the third generation iPod was released in 2003.

New job postings for System-on-a-Chip engineers in Israel hint at the company’s continued endeavors to expand its first international R&D facility.

Today Mayor Bloomberg rolled out the Made in NY Digital Map, an easy way to find New York City’s tech startups and job opportunities. The interactive map keeps startups, investors, developers and designers in the know about what’s going on in Silicon Alley.

From the Made in New York Map site: “The Made in NY Digital Map is a visual testament to the vibrant state of New York’s digital industry – showing a powerful constellation of over 500 homegrown startups, investors and coworking spaces across the five boroughs. Browse by neighborhood, review job postings, or add your own startup to the digital landscape – the Made in NY Map is a living resource that reflects New York City’s dynamic innovation ecosystem.”

According to the site there are currently 324 NYC tech companies looking to hire. Every startup, investor and shared workspace in all five boroughs is mapped out with links to each respective company and job board. This is yet another feather in Bloomberg’s cap in an effort to push New York as the next tech hub.

A series of job postings from Microsoft hint at – well, actually they come out and state that – Microsoft intends to bring Skype to the web browser. The posts, which describe positions for software development engineers, mention that the Skype web app would be built (thankfully) using HTML5 and JavaScript, not Microsoft’s own Silverlight or Adobe Flash, for example.

The addition of a web-based version of Skype that works without plug-ins could provide a better user experience than today’s Skype Facebook app currently offers, but it could also extend the browser to anyone with a modern web browser who wanted an alternative to running desktop software.

There are four job listings which have been spotted so far, describing a “Skype for Browsers” project. One describes the project like so:

Team at Skype is looking for passionate, team-oriented and self-motivated developers to help us bring Skype experience on to the Web.

You will have a chance to integrate existing Skype solutions on to the web with the support of the backend services build from the ground up using latest Microsoft technologies.

Result [sic] of your work will be used by hundreds millions of thankful users worldwide. You will work in dynamical environment with the team of true professionals participating in defining, designing, developing, testing and documenting one of the most popular applications of the modern world.

You will closely cooperate with colleagues developing Skype cross platform core library in Tallinn, Estonia, audio/video team in Stockholm, Sweden, User management team in Prague and web plug-in team in Palo Alto, US.

So far, the postings refer to jobs in Prague and London only.

In addition to possibly providing an improved experience for Facebook users, the Skype for Browsers experience would also serve to bring Skype to the Metro version of IE10 on Windows 8, which won’t support plugins.

Microsoft acquired Skype for $8.5 billion last spring, finally bringing it to Windows Phone just this February. Skype is also available on Windows, Mac, and Linux, iOS, Android and Symbian, some smart TVs, and more.

h/t: LiveSide

In part II of his Founder Stories interview with host Chris Dixon, Kayak.com’s co-founder Paul English discusses why job applicants will be hard pressed to find job postings on Kayak.com, relays the lessons he learned from Kayak’s mobile app and tells Dixon the traits founding teams need to possess in order to impress him as an angel investor.

Having helped grow the company to roughly 150 employees, English says Kayak is somewhat unorthodox when it comes to hiring talent. “We don’t hire for open positions but we are looking for athletes, we are looking for star performers and then when we find someone great, we make a spot for them.” He adds, “I am always recruiting.”

In addition to beefing up staff, Kayak has expanded into mobile, which accounts for “almost 20-percent of our traffic” says English. Initially weary that its mobile platform would be a watered-down version of its website, English’s fears have been swept aside. “The team that we hired to build our iPhone product actually found a way to build the version of Kayak that has all the same power of Kayak but is expressed in way that was actually more simple than our website.” He adds, “I think the design experience we have learned on the iPhone, which is to force simplicity, because you have less real estate, has caused us to rethink how we do design on the web.”

English wraps the interview by telling Dixon key lessons he’s learned as an entrepreneur and offers what he looks for when investing in startups.

Make sure to watch the entire video to hear all his insights, and watch episode I of this interview here.

Past episodes of Founder Stories featuring founders ZocDoc, Charity: Water, Turntable.fm, Bump, Birchbox and many other companies are here.

The video game landscape has blossomed from pixelated ping-pong tables to beautifully scripted adventures that are cinematic in scope. At the 2012 Inside Social Apps conference in San Francisco, GalleyCat editor Jason Boog sat down with Aunim Hossain, CEO of social gaming company Tista Games, to talk about the growing demand for creative writers.

Social media used to be an unfriendly sphere for professional writers, with character limits to cramp their style and very few paid gigs. (This blogger has typed the words “user-generated content” so many times that it’s surprising the words weren’t typed by someone else for free.)

But making video games has always required more technical skill than posting a blog or uploading a video. And just like YouTube has given rise to fully-funded Web series like “Fred” and “The Annoying Orange,” more sophisticated story lines in video games mean new employment opportunities for creative writers.

Watch the video to find out what it takes to break into video game writing. And stay tuned for job postings at Tista Games and mediabistro.com.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Help wanted ads and job postings tend to use the same jargon, e.g., looking for “detail-oriented” “team players” who can work in a “fast-paced work environment.” Fortune Magazine suggests these buzzwords can clue you in to secrets about the potential employer. More »