So if you are a student and want some experience working shoulder to shoulder with us, deep the trenches of a pretty exciting start-up, then contact us!

At the moment, we are looking for three interns to help us out.

1. Marketing and business development intern

We are looking for someone to help us expand our online buzz as well as implementing a range of business development activities.  Ideally, you are someone that is well versed in the online sphere, including the use of blogs, Twitter, and other relevant social media tools.

On a daily basis, you will be working closely with our site manager to tackle the following tasks:

•    Coordinate our media marketing activities, including managing our presence on Twitter, blog and Facebook
•    Develop and maintain relationships with our users, which include key bloggers and online influencers
•    Manage business development projects with potential clients
•    Support business development activities through research and analysis

2. Website and product intern

We are looking for someone to help us track and maintain our various performance metrics and improve our product development processes.  This is ideal if you are someone who is interested in the agile project development methodology and want a closer look at how the process is implemented for a evolving Internet product.

On a daily basis, you will be working closely with our site manager to tackle the following tasks:

•    Supporting our usability and product quality processes by tracking:
o    Various site analytical data
o    Site optimization data
o    SEO tools
•    Hands-on work with our proprietary algorithmic PeerIndex system:
o    Product work for clients and partners
o    Liaison with clients, including maintenance, trouble shooting, communication and presentation of results to clients

3. Data analyst

We are looking for a data analyst to help us identify key trends, patterns, segments and clusters, product enhancement and revenue opportunities in the online influencer market.

We are looking for someone with the following skills:

•    Computer science or similar strongly numerical degree
•    Fluency with major stats packages like R or SPSS
•    Skills around large scale analytic
•    Plus points if you have played around with large scale regression models (like K-means, SVMs)
•    Double plus points if you are familiar with Amazon Elastic Map/Reduce

Now, logistics.

Ideally, you are based in London, which is where most of us are.  But if the fit is super duper, then we can arrange for you to work remotely and still get as much out of the experience as possible.  The idea is for you to start immediately, especially since there’s a lot of stuff going on with us in June.

We are happy to help you get credits for the length of your internship, and we can dish out a small stipend which might pay for your lunch from time to time.  But really, the idea is to get involved, meet some cool people (other than us) in the start-up community, and work with a super dynamic Internet business going through a pretty exciting growth phase.

And please do tip us if you come across something you’d like to share with the rest of the Viewsflow community!

All week here on Viewsflow, we are following the 2010 World Expo in China.

Beginners’ guide to Shanghai by CNN: 51 things you don’t know yet about the city, and the best Expo opening parties!

Flickr photostreams of various Pavilions are here, and the official Expo site introduces five themes of the exhibition.

First impressions on the ground from the Shanghaiist: Pure mayhem and madness, see what a lined up crowd looks like, and Little Mermaid big draw for Denmark.

Pavilion overview from ChinaSmack: Computer generated graphics of what various pavilions look like.  Walk through one, and walk through two.

Pictures of when trial runs turn away crowds courtesy of LostLaowai.

Here are some of the news outlets covering the Expo:

NPR World Expo

ABC News

CNN Go Asia

Shanghai Daily

XinhuaNet

SINA.com

CCTV

Shanghaiiist

And don’t forget to follow our Twitter account as we update you with real time links all week on the Expo, and follow our Twitter Expo list too!

I’ll outline the changes we made but first some background.

Background

2 weeks ago we boosted (quadrupled) the incoming content.  This shone the light onto several issues, which were not apparent at lower content levels.  This ranged from standard load issues along with somewhat unexpected issues with our content classifiers. Tossed into the mix was the random failure of one of our servers (something that I could have done without at this particular point in time).

Changes Made

• Moved to a new (bigger) server
• Instigated better filters for spammers and robots
• Improved the throughput of ingesting and processing content
• Brought forward the shift to a more distributed, flexible architecture

The improvements are on-going as we adjust and tune. We are now in a better position for some the great features we want to implement over the coming months.

Each day, the Viewsflow platform scans several thousand content recommendations from smart people on Twitter. These recommendations are then weighted and ranked over the course of the day.

We take a look at the top 15 stories out of several thousand in a given day, and quickly place them in the email that you get in your inbox by 7am GMT.

Some questions people often ask us are:

Why don’t you build those email automatically?

The answer is two-fold. First, the Viewsflow platform is still in an alpha and the various scoring and machine learning systems are still getting trained and optimised. So for the next little while, we need a little bit of manual tweaking – which in turn is a piece of knowledge-engineering that improves the core system.

The second reason is that we want the Daily Briefing to be a human experience.. Computers don’t engage particularly well yet, although we think we know how to resolve this in the next few weeks.

Is the Daily Briefing personalised?

Right now, the Daily Briefing isn’t personalised, although for those of you who register through Viewsflow.com, we can build a personalised view (based on people you want to track or topics you are interested in). We are shortly moving the personalised mailing into an alpha (an alpha of an alpha, is that an alpha squared?) and will be in touch with some of you to test it with us. (If you would be so kind.)

We would love to hear from you

Please leave your suggestions or comments on Daily Briefing below!

Our rankings can be applied in a range of applications, including expert-lead, algorithmically driven curation.

We are looking to bring on-board our a full-time lead developer/architect to help us make the right decisions in building out systems, and then execute on the implementation

We need someone prepared to work at the pace of a growing venture; as ready to recode our corporate Website as you will be evaluating key-value stores. As we grow the team, you should be someone capable of leading an architecture team, taking on responsibility of the development of a specific product line.

We need someone with experience in ‘just-in time architecture’  and hands-on delivery

• Real-time feeds (such as Twitter, Facebook, as well as proprietary feeds)
• Content aggregation (from RSS feeds and the like)
• Machine learning (we have a number of machine learning components developed by our ML team)
• Distributed systems
• Private and public API standardization, design and implementation: We will be launching a public API later in the year
• Help scale. We expect to be scanning 10m+ in bound content messages within a year; and applying our rankings across millions of people

Our current systems:

• Machine learning system : C++, Python, JVM (Clojure & Scala, Hadoop)
• Web development in PHP/Zend and Postgres
• Hosting: Cloud
• Using a lot of 3rd party APIs for ancillary parts of the service.

You need to be able to work legally in the UK.

To apply, please do so via this form.

• We now calculate expertise ranks across 156,000 users. You may be one of them. Simply search for twitter handle here
• We have increased our rate of content ingestion. Increased isn’t a fair statement. We quadrupled it, with help from the awesome guys at Superfeedr.
• We broke our content classifiers. The classifiers which identify where an article is about China, India or the US (or indeed any other topic) broke. We have been working the weekend on not just a fix but a substantial improvement and hope to have this in place by Tuesday 22nd February.

Ipad (courtesy of Gdgt)

So if you like the idea of winning an Apple iPad – and we’d love to see you with one, then become an active subscriber of Viewsflow’s Daily Briefing!

Here is how to enter to win an iPad:

1. Sign-up to our Daily Briefing service.

2. Tweet that you have signed up. (Please make sure you tweet!)

3. Read, and enjoy it.

4. On one day between now and the 14th February, we will randomly select one of the active users to win the iPad.

(If you are already a subscriber, then you don’t need to do anything except read the Briefing as you already do.)

Boring terms follow:

1. We’ll determine the day that we are sampling at our own discretion, but only state that it will be between now and 14th February. We’ll announce the winner on March 2nd.

2. We will count you as ‘active’ if you are tracked as having opened the newsletter by Mailchimp (our mailing partner) on the day that we sample.

3. Obviously, one email account per person.

4. See update below. The prize of the Tablet will be the lowest priced Tablet available up to a maximum retail price of $1,200 or currency equivalent. (On the off chance that the Tablet is more than $1,200 we’ll agree a bundle of Apple products to a similar value).

5. We will ship the Tablet to you to destinations served by Federal Express.

6. We won’t enter into any correspondence other than what it discussed above.

Update: Now we know the name and pricing and launch date of the device, to clarify: the prize is an Apple 16Gb Wifi iPad, which we will purchase as soon as they are made available on the Apple Store UK. If we can get one earlier from the US, we will endeavour to do so.

We digest the best of the world’s business and economic content in a summary of 20 stories chosen from mainstream sources and blogs. In a typical week, our algorithms and user community scans around 2,000 articles of which we select the top 1% for inclusion in the newsletter.

Whether you access us from your computer, your BlackBerry, or iPhone, our email will make sure you get caught up with the must-know stories in no time.

Click here to sign up for our newsletter, if you haven’t already.

To become a registered user, access our reputation ranking system, tweak your business news preferences, and receive personal recommendations, please click here.