DETROIT (AP) -- General Motors is kicking the tires on a unique new internship program for Detroit-area high school students.
GM has hired 110 students for paid summer internships, the automaker said Monday in announcing the formation of the GM Student Corps, a program that combines service, education and mentoring.
The students will work in teams of 10 to develop and implement service projects in Detroit-area neighborhoods. They'll be trained and mentored by 60 GM retirees and a dozen GM student interns from the University of Detroit Mercy. GM will pay for the student projects and provide Chevrolet Express vans and Chevrolet Silverado full-size pickups so adult mentors can transport materials and students to project sites and life-skills classes.
GM North America President Mark Reuss said the company wants to help rebuild Detroit because it'll need a highly skilled workforce that wants to live in the area, Reuss said. The program, he said, is designed to break "a bad sort of swirling idea of despair," in the city and nearby communities.
GM said it selected the Student Corps members based on leadership potential, enthusiasm, school activities, citizenship and academic performance. The teams are currently planning their projects; work is scheduled to begin in mid-June and finish up in August.
At the end of the summer, leaders from each student team will present their programs and results to Reuss and his staff.
The GM Summer Corps experience also will be chronicled in a documentary filmed by Detroit Mercy professor Jason Roche, and interns are being encouraged to document their projects on social media.
The company wouldn't say how much it's spending on the program. But Reuss, who came up with the idea, said the company wanted to give promising students a chance to find summer jobs because there are few in the city. He hopes that other businesses will join with GM to expand the test program.
"Imagine if we had five companies full-force," he said. "That's what happens with some of the seed ideas when you plant them."
All the students will be paid and will get to put General Motors on their resumes, Reuss said. Those in the program would be good candidates for GM jobs in the future, he added. For many, this will be the first job they've ever had, he said.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/gm-giving-paid-internships-110-184637228.html
MavenSay, a social recommendation app, just got a surge of unplanned downloads coming from Indonesia, and its founders are moving quickly to include Southeast Asia in its expansion plans as a result. The company’s Toronto-based co-founder, Jesse Dallal, said the two-month old app got 100,000 downloads over the past fortnight. It has a total of 130,000 downloads so far, and the sudden surge was tracked back to a power user based in Indonesia. They’re not sure which one it is, but the source of traffic points to the country, he said. The way the app works is similar to Pinterest, in that users follow other users’ recommendations. These could cover places they’ve eaten or music they’re listening to, for example. For its launch, MavenSay roped in what it called “influencers”?featured brands to follow such as Momofuku and Refinery29. The Indonesian user that triggered the downloads isn’t a celebrity that MavenSay had canvassed, but was clearly influential enough over his or her social network to move the downloads, said Dallal. “It’s been an unanticipated consequence of our [social] strategy,” he said, referring to the way things get viral on these recommendation platforms where people reblog items from influencers. “We’ve reached out to influencers in North America, but we’re also going to reach out to influencers in Asia now. We’re thinking of coming out there and talking to users to understand what the differences in culture and usage might be,” he said. MavenSay has seven people, including its three co-founders Dallal, Mike Wagman and Bryan Friedman. The small company can’t be expected to have concrete plans for Asia yet, but seeding interest in one of the world’s fastest-growing, mobile-hungry countries may pay off eventually. According to mobiThinking, Indonesia has 260 million mobile subscribers, although those with data connections make up just 47.6 million, or 18 percent of that. And Indonesians have been quick to embrace social networking sites, with fierce loyalties once something sticks. Aged social network Friendster started to pivot towards Asia around 2008, when it realised that 90 percent of its user base was coming from the region. While it was, by that time, lagging behind Facebook globally, some markets like Indonesia stayed loyal to Friendster. MavenSay has raised funding of $890,000 so far.














