—Zynga: The FarmVille creator has hired Steven Chiang as president of the development studios, CEO Marc Pincus announced on his blog this week. Chiang co-founded EA-owned Tiburon Entertainment, the studio best known for the Madden NFL franchise. A longtime EA executive, he was most recently SVP and group GM for EA Sports.

—Fairchild Fashion Group: Patrick McCarthy, chairman and editorial director of Condé Nast’s Fairchild Fashion Group and de facto editor of the fashion magazine W is leaving the company at year’s end. He joined Fairchild as a reporter in 1977, rising to chairman and editorial director in 1997.

—Emmis Communications: One we missed earlier this month: Greg Loewen added president of Emmis Publishing to his role as chief strategy officer. The units regional and city mags include Texas Monthly and Los Angeles. Loewen replaced Gary Thoe, who left to focus on his family business, MidCountry Media, Inc. Loewen joined Emmis in 2007 from the Toronto Star, where he was VP-digital media and strategy.

—Zynga: The FarmVille creator has hired Steven Chiang as president of the development studios, CEO Marc Pincus announced on his blog this week. Chiang co-founded EA-owned Tiburon Entertainment, the studio best known for the Madden NFL franchise. A longtime EA executive, he was most recently SVP and group GM for EA Sports.

—Fairchild Fashion Group: Patrick McCarthy, chairman and editorial director of Condé Nast’s Fairchild Fashion Group and de facto editor of the fashion magazine W is leaving the company at year’s end. He joined Fairchild as a reporter in 1977, rising to chairman and editorial director in 1997.

—Emmis Communications: One we missed earlier this month: Greg Loewen added president of Emmis Publishing to his role as chief strategy officer. The units regional and city mags include Texas Monthly and Los Angeles. Loewen replaced Gary Thoe, who left to focus on his family business, MidCountry Media, Inc. Loewen joined Emmis in 2007 from the Toronto Star, where he was VP-digital media and strategy.

With this year's Game Developers Conference in San Francisco complete, organizers have been collecting the event's substantial volume of visual documentation.

This volume chronicles many of the speakers who highlighted the main conference tracks during GDC, part of the UBM Techweb Game Network (also this website's parent company), from inspiring creative manifestos to in-depth discipline-specific talks.

These include notables such as Blizzard's Rob Pardo and keynote speaker Sid Meier of Civilization fame, as well as last-minute secret speaker addition Will Wright (The Sims), and many more from the over 450 GDC speakers this year. An earlier roundup collected images from the Independent Games Festival Summit, Pavilion, and Awards.

Game Developers Conference 2010 Sessions

These pictures capture moments from a wide variety of talks, drawn from the considerable official GDC photo archive.

Firaxis design legend Sid Meier (Civilization, Pirates!) headlined this year's conference with his keynote "The Psychology of Game Design (Everything You Know Is Wrong)."

...and fellow design legend Will Wright (The Sims, Spore) closed out the show with his sprawling and fascinating "The Metaphysics of Game Design," initally presented under the pseudonym Phaedrus.

Warren Spector (Deus Ex, Epic Mickey) waxed curmudgeonly about the dangerous of obsessing over progress during this year's incarnation of the annual invitation-only "Lunch With Luminaries" event.

These game developers just can't wait to confer at the Game Developers Conference! Soon, they will get their chance.

How does Blizzard make so much money? It's the game design! Rob Pardo (World of Warcraft, StarCraft II) "explains it all" in a practical development lecture.

"You'll love our new game this much," gestures Peter Molyneux (Fable II, Fable III) in a detailed talk explaining the Fable series genre metamorphosis.

Much like the children, connectivity is our future. A panel of esteemed game developers consisting of, from left to right, Jason Holtman (Valve), Brian Reynolds (Zynga), Ray Muzyka (BioWare), Min Kim (Nexon America), and Rob Pardo (Blizzard) discuss what it all means.

Much like connectivity, free games are our future. Kristian Segerstrale, founder of social game developer Playfish (Pet Society, Who Has the Biggest Brain?), argues that the game industry shouldn't fear the concept of "free."

Moscone Center's North Hall is overrun by game developers at the Game Developers Conference!

Noted game designers Jenova Chen (Thatgamecompany), Kim Swift (Airtight Games), Heather Kelley (Kokoromi), and Erin Robinson (Wadjet Eye Games) battle to the death novelty prize with game designs based on "real-world permadeath" during this year's Game Design Challenge. (Spoiler alert: Chen wins.)

Denki's Gary Penn was just one of numerous presenters at this year's Microtalks session, three of whom are highlighted in Gamasutra's coverage of the event.

Veteran game designer Brenda Brathwaite (Wizardry series, Train) explains how board games led her to dump electricity and learn to love design.

"We're all doomed," Chris Hecker doesn't actually really claim as he reflects on the potential dangers of gaming's nightmare scenario in his talk "Achievements Considered Harmful?"

"Now that was some mighty fine conferring," these people are probably thinking as they decompress during this year's evening Speaker Party.

[More pictures of the Game Developers Conference as a whole, taken by Vincent Diamante, are available on the Official GDC Flickr stream.]

Sears Holdings Corp. just announced they posted thousands of jobs on Twitter via the Twitter-based job board service, TweetMyJOBS.com. The parent company of retail stores like Sears and Kmart and home to brands like Kenmore, Craftsman, DieHard, Lands' End, Jaclyn Smith, Joe Boxer, Apostrophe and Covington, Sears Holdings posted over 500,000 job openings last year via traditional recruiting channels like job search sites and newspapers. Now those same jobs will be on Twitter, too. Says Lance Brolin, Director, Talent & Human Capital Services Operations for Sears Holdings, of the decision to engage on Twitter, "we're quickly realizing that we needed to broaden our employment marketing to include social media."

Sponsor

According to Gary Zukowski, president and founder of TweetMyJOBS, this partnership makes Sears one of the largest brands to embrace mobile recruiting. Although Twitter is the platform used for the service, the primary function of TweetMyJOBS is to connect job seekers with jobs via text messages sent to their cell phones.

The TweetMyJOBS service lets job seekers receive instant notifications on their phone when new jobs are posted online via the popular micro-messaging service Twitter. The company aggregates the Twitter-based job postings from over 7000 companies and maintains over 8250 specific job channels within those companies, all of which are searchable via their website.

However, it's the job matching service that makes TweetMyJOBS worth using for those in need of work. Instead of having to follow potentially hundreds of Twitter accounts belonging to companies, the service will match a Twitter user's interests with the available jobs posted to Twitter. Users can also specify a particular geographic region where they prefer to work. They can even use the service to post their resume to Twitter. When a job seeker and a job listing match up, the user is alerted via a text message sent to their phone via Twitter.

For job posters, there are fees involved for adding listings just like there are with any other job board. At present, it costs $4000 to list 500 jobs and $8000 for unlimited job postings. Single posts are $1.99. In return, companies are able to directly connect with qualified candidates while also tracking the clicks on the jobs they list.

At launch time, Sears Holdings has posted 7000 jobs to TweetMyJOBS. The lineup includes everything from cashiers to vice presidents, a company representative tells us. And this is just the beginning. Over the course of the year, the company will continue adding all their available jobs to the service. Since, as noted above, the company posts hundreds of thousands of jobs per year, they will soon have thousands more to post to TweetMyJOBS.

In today's tough, competitive hiring market, a service like this can give motivated job seekers an edge. Since it allows for instant notification when a job is made available online, users of TweetMyJOBS can be among the first to apply to available positions. They can also rest assured that the jobs sourced are from reputable companies assures Rich Trombetta, TweetMyJOBS co-founder. Unlike on many job boards today, filled with questionable get-rich-quick schemes, work from home offers and other spam, only legitimate jobs are made available on his service. "We are very careful about the types of jobs we list on the site," Trombetta recently told the Chicago Tribune. "We eliminate the spam."

Interested job seekers can sign up for the service here at TweetMyJOBS.com.