Who would want a night in the slammer? Apparently 60% of U.S. workers would if the alternative was to lose their employee benefits. Ask.com uncovered this little fun fact in an effort to gauge what strikes a job candidate’s fancy when it comes to deciding on a new job. While some of the responses to the 2012 State of the Workplace: Benefits and Perks study were expected, you’d be surprised at some of the other results – check it out!

It’s also clear from the survey that Americans are protective of personal time and actively seek employers invested in their health and well-being. In fact, unlimited PTO is gaining traction with companies such as Netflix, Zynga and of course, Ask.com. But how do Americans feel?

• 69% said they would be swayed to take a new job if the company offered unlimited time off
• Unlimited PTO matters more to single people (42%) than those who are married (30%) or divorced (27%)

Check out Ask.com’s infographic on the benefits of adopting an unlimited paid time off policy, a benefit Askers enjoy themselves.

As we dive into November, Ask wanted to take a moment and thank the East Bay Tech Community for honoring us as the winner of the 2012 2.Oak Innovator Awards in the Digital Technology Innovator category. 2.Oakland asked the local tech community to cast their votes and we have to say we were very pleased with the results. Ask.com was recognized for our continued technology innovations, our investments in the community and for the countless jobs we’ve created. Ask.com CTO Lisa Kavanaugh and Director of Engineering, Nan Guo attended the award ceremony to accept the award on behalf of all Askers. We take great pride in calling Oakland home and will continue to foster today’s growing tech community. We’re excited to see that the community appreciates our efforts so far but there’s more to come! We’re still growing and continuing to look for new team members right here in Oakland. Oakland has a very special place in our hearts and Ask.com is honored to be a part of the community’s success.

- Suraya Akbarzad, Ask.com

Whether you’re in New York City riding the S Shuttle or in San Francisco riding the Muni trains, you can’t help but notice that Ask.com has a few questions for you. Why is New York City called the Big Apple? Why is the Statue of Liberty green? How many people ride the subway each day? What’s the oldest running restaurant? When did Alcatraz close? What’s the fastest way to get across town? Why are rainbows so colorful?

Have you spotted us in these cities yet? Send us your pics and go to Ask.com to find out the answers!

- Suraya Akbarzad, Ask.com

Yesterday marked the closing of the About.com acquisition and another milestone for Ask.com. Askers in Oakland joined Doug Leeds and the About.com staff in NYC on a video conference where we celebrated the marriage of the two companies with a champagne toast and a wedding cake (of course!).

Here’s to living happily ever after! Cheers!

- Suraya Akbarzad, Ask.com

They came, they saw, they hacked. And they ate ice cream sandwiches from local supplier CREAM Nation - courtesy of Ask.com. Hey, when you’re burning the midnight oil at the biggest Hackathon TC has put on to date (a record 147 teams presented 1 minute pitches on Sunday night) warm cookies smothered in ice cream sound, uh, really good. In fact, they might just be the perfect pairing with our personal favorite Hackathon entry, Sirious Margaritas – a Siri powered margarita machine. 

But I digress. Our heartfelt congrats to this year’s winner – Livebolt – which is a cloud-based system that uses a $60 block of metal and an iPhone app to authorize the locking/unlocking of virtually any door. What will these folks think of next?

Happy Hacking!

Valerie Combs, Ask.com

As reported Sunday, Ask will purchase the About Company from the New York Times, a top 20 US Internet property whose assets include 3 million handcrafted articles from nearly 1000 subject matter experts.

This is an incredibly positive move for both parties, and here’s why:

I’ll start with Ask. Since shifting away from algorithmic web search and re-focusing on Q&A back in the summer of 2010, we’ve learned a thing or two from our users. First, an increasing number of them are in “browse mode” when they come to Ask, looking to discover and explore information (for our mobile users, who cite Q&A browsing as a top reason for using Ask, this behavior is even more pervasive). In fact, the most satisfied Ask users say they want more than just “one right answer,” they want multiple perspectives combined with the ability to discover something new and unexpected.

As such, Ask has been moving toward a content-rich Q&A experience with the goal of building more engagement with our mix of people-powered and search-powered answers. We’ve also been heavily ramping content from carefully-vetted partners to ensure we have access to fresh, trusted answers in key verticals like food, health, travel and reference.

But About.com allows us to execute on our content vision at a whole new level. About.com is home to more than 900 topic sites, all created by guides who are true independent subject matter experts, passionate about what they cover. Ask.com is home to 100 million global users, asking millions of questions in hopes of finding great answers. The immediate synergies are obvious: Ask now has the ability to better satisfy our users with answers drawn from millions of handcrafted, quality articles published on About.com, while providing significant, additional traffic to About.com’s guide pages at the same time.

Matching millions of potential quality answers to user questions is where the synergies begin, not end. Ask can also make About.com’s awesome content much more discoverable through both extending our search expertise to the About.com site, and syndicating our recently acquired content discovery platform, nRelate, across About’s pages.

These are just some of the ways this acquisition represents a no-brainer for us, and a real opportunity for both parties.  I can’t wait to dig in and, together with the combined teams, learn more about how About.com and Ask can tap each other’s strengths, learn from each other’s experiences, and deliver a better experience for all of our users.

Congrats to all of the teams who made this deal possible, and a hearty welcome to the About Group to the Ask.com family!

Doug Leeds, CEO

Ask’s very own, Lisa Kavanaugh talks vacation recovery in Fast Company! How do you get back into the swing of things after a vacation?

- Suraya Akbarzad, Ask.com

When my office phone rang late in the day last month, I answered it and was greeted on the other end by Doris, calling from Knoxville, Tennessee. However, this was not a courtesy call. Doris got right to the point.

“You have to give me my money back,” she said. “All of it.”

It seems Doris had posted a question about how to list items for sale on eBay, paid her money, and then received no helpful answers. But there was just one problem, here: Ask.com is 100% free for consumers to use, and we don’t take money from people for posting questions.

I explained this to Doris, and we figured out which other site she had actually visited. Then, I was able to answer her eBay question as well.

“Now I just need to figure out how much all this stuff is worth,” she said, referring to her soon-to-be-listed items.

Those are great questions to ask our community, I told her. We have over a million registered users, and some of them are bound to know what kind of value to attach to the Motley Crue leather jacket (signed by the band), and a vintage, first-edition Cabbage Patch Kids doll signed by Xavier Roberts.

Doris signed up a free account with Ask.com that evening, and has been posting questions ever since. She also knows the answers to a lot of things, too; she owned a bar in Knoxville for ten years, and before that she once won a fishing derby off the Florida Keys. “I caught the biggest fish of the men’s and women’s competitions,” she proudly told me.

If you run into her around our community, be sure and ask her how the auctions are going.

Who Are the People In Your Neighborhood is a monthly feature by Eric McKirdy, Ask.com’s Customer Support Guru, spotlighting members of the Ask.com Q&A Community. Have you run into someone other people should meet? If so, tell Eric about it by sending a note to cs (at) ask.com.

SXSW PanelPicker is now open and we’d love your help in getting Ask.com on stage in Austin! This year we have some really great speaker ideas coming from Ask CTO Lisa Kavanaugh; Robbie Waeschenfelder, Director of Marketing; Matt Binkowski, Sr. Director, UX Design, Strategy, & Execution; and Valerie Combs, VP of Communications.

While speakers are determined partly by SXSW judges, a large portion of the selection comes from the community! And that’s where you come in.

Most important is doing #1 but we’d love for you to spread the word by urging your friends to vote, too!

1.       Sign up for the PanelPicker and vote the panels. Here they are:

·         Why the Neanderthals were Lousy Entrepreneurs

·         Building an App on Speed: From 0 to 60 in 6 weeks

·         Going Old School with Retro Marketing for Startups

·         Mobile Marketing – Death to the QR Code

·         Jailbreak Users with New Social Experiences

·         Grassroots Marketing: Local, Organic and Fresh

2.       Post the panel on Facebook.

3.       Tweet about it. Don’t forget to use the hashtag #SXSW

4.       Your professional friends are a great network, too. Post it on LinkedIn.

Voting ends on August 31. Thanks in advance for vote!

- Suraya Akbarzad, Ask.com

Ask CTO, Lisa Kavanaugh led the charge for an impromptu happy hour at District Oakland last night. A great time was had by all as we celebrated another great work week. Good food, good drink and most importantly, a great team!

P.S. – we’re always looking for new members to join the Ask.com team ;)

- Suraya Akbarzad, Ask.com