Buy.com is running a few Blu-ray specials. The first has 40 Blu-ray titles starting at $15. The second has 21 Blu-ray titles starting at $17.50. They’re also having a sale on the PS3 Blu-ray remote, and other accessories.

Many of you probably have profiles on LinkedIn - I do. For those who don’t, LinkedIn is basically a social network aimed and professionals, designed to help people keep in touch with past and present co-workers, etc. in the same way Facebook or MySpace target a younger audience for social connections. LinkedIn also serves as a resource for both recruiters and job seekers, and it seems that TiVo is one of the testers for the new ‘LinkedIn Recruiter’. Inside Recruiting, obviously aimed at the recruiting industry, has an article in which they talk to TiVo about the new features.

It seems that William Uranga, TiVo’s senior director of staffing, is fairly well impressed with the new LinkedIn Recruiter functionality. But what I found most interesting, probably unsurprisingly given my interests and the focus of this blog, are the TiVo hiring stats revealed in the article. 30% of new hires come through employee referrals. 17% come from networking/niche boards. 23% come in via TiVo’s website. Temp-to-perm conversions account for 9%, as do internal transfers. And agencies account for 10%. And it helps to be experienced if you want to work for TiVo:

“Hiring here at TiVo tends to be very boutique,” Uranga explains.

“The majority of hires here at TiVo tend to be in the experienced column, and to that end, we’re typically looking for people with a minimum of three years in a particular field,” he says.

A little peek at the business side of TiVo.

I last mentioned Gefen’s HD DVR during CES. Well, Dave Zatz at Zatz Not Funny got some hands-on time with one. Frankly, it sounds like a lot of money for very little functionality. It carries a hefty $999 MSRP, yet it has only an 80GB drive and lacks any USB or Network connections. It also lacks an EPG - recordings are scheduled by time, or manually initiated. It isn’t even time & channel - it doesn’t control an external source, it just records whatever you feed it. It has four inputs - composite, S-Video, Component, or HDMI, and it has an HDMI output. It does have an SD Card slot, so you can record directly to SD Card to take recordings on the go with an H.264-enabled PMP.

It does appear to record from HDMI, despite of HDCP. But it looks like the loophole is that it takes the digital HDMI signal, decodes it to analog, then encodes the analog signal on the fly as H.264. So there is no true digital copy being made. It looks like a very narrow range of features and capabilities. To me the most interesting thing is, as I said before, the first availability of consumer level chips capable of encoding HD on the fly, albeit high-end consumer level. As the pricing on these chips comes down we’ll likely see them used in more gear, and it’ll really be interesting when a real, full-featured product like TiVo makes use of them.