TagBusiness

With Asian Industry Astir, More Job-Seekers Go East

Hong Kong Central

In Hong Kong, the recruiting firm Ambition estimates that the number of résumés arriving from the United States and Europe has risen 20 to 30 percent since 2008. These now make up about two-thirds of the more than 600 résumés its Hong Kong office gets every month, said Matthew Hill, Ambition’s managing director for the city. Similarly, at eFinancialCareers, an online job site, applications for positions based in Singapore and Hong Kong have jumped nearly 50 percent in the last year, its Asia-Pacific chief, George McFerran, said.

Landing a position in Asia, though, is not just a matter of being willing to make a new life halfway around the world. Many employers prefer candidates who have track records in the region and who bring language skills and local contacts to the job.

Mike Game, chief executive in Asia for Hudson, an international recruitment agency, said the number of Westerners actually making the move was still fairly small. Many employers, he said, are more demanding than they were during the economic peak of 2007 and are “setting the bar very high in terms of what they want.”

New York Times: With Asian Industry Astir, More Job-Seekers Go East

(via Chris 23)

Photo by Jacksoncam (CC)

NSA and Raytheon Team-Up for Cybersnooping Project

Nuclear Power Plant in  Limerick, Pa.

A piece I wrote for RWW today:

The Wall Street Journal reports, citing unnamed sources, that the NSA is launching a program to help protect critical infrastructure – including private enterprises – from cyber attacks. According to the paper, defense contractor Raytheon has received the contract for the project, which would rely on a series of sensors to detect “unusual activity suggesting an impending cyber attack.” This follows the Lieberman-Collins bill passing committee in the Senate.

The Orwellian nature of the name was alledgedly not lost on Raytheon: The Wall Street Journal claims to have seen an internal Raytheon e-mail saying “Perfect Citizen is Big Brother.”

ReadWriteEnterprise: Do Private Enterprises Need the NSA to Protect Them From Cyber Attacks?

Justin Boland Interview at Boing Boing

Hump Jones

Chris Arkenberg continues to rack-up the interviews:

You’ve released a number of projects under various names. Would you talk a little about these projects and your aliases? Do your avatars embody & express your art in some way?

I suppose they do, man. They definitely embody the fact that my interests are intense and short-lived, that I tend to give all my content away for free, and there’s also a strong whiff of the stubborn stupidity I’m known for. I’ve made music as Wombaticus Rex, as Humpasaur Jones, and as Algorhythms, as well as way, way too much other stuff. I’m somewhere between 50% and 90% of DJ Multiple Sex Partners, depending on the vintage. The Hump Jones project was dangerously stupid, I was really pushing the Total Sexual Freedom meme past legally safe boundaries there, although I will probably still publish the book, Human Sexuality for Filthy Apes, that I was preparing for that. It makes me sound like more of a perv than I am, but that entire project was borne out of a single joke instructional song about anal sex. In retrospect, it was good, loving advice and I stand by it, so perhaps it was not a joke track after all?

Boing Boing: Justin Boland – The indie hip hop game

People with Negative Attitudes More Likely to Learn From Mistakes

negative attitude

Interesting:

This research focused on the relationship between negative emotionality and learning from errors. Specifically, negative emotionality was expected to impair learning from errors by decreasing motivation to learn. Perceived managerial intolerance of errors was hypothesized to increase negative emotionality, whereas emotional stability was proposed to decrease negative emotionality. All the hypotheses were tested in a laboratory simulation. Contrary to the prediction, a positive association was found between negative emotionality and motivation to learn. The effects of perceived managerial intolerance of errors and emotional stability on negative emotionality were as predicted. Moreover, exploratory data analyses were conducted at the level of specific negative emotions and revealed differentiated effects of specific negative emotions on learning from errors.

Barking up the wrong tree: Does a positive attitude make you more motivated to learn from your mistakes?

See Also:

Expressing negativity can improve relationships

Negativity can improve brainstorming

Technoccult posts tagged with “positive thinking”

(Photo by bark / CC)

Newspaper industry stabalizing?

dollar bill

Across the board, the reporting of public news companies reflects a new, if unsteady reality. In short, that reality is one of profit. Not the big profit of 20-percent-plus profit margins — the envy of many other industries — that were a truism as recently as five years ago. Now, the profit’s more tepid, mostly in single digits: The New York Times, 8 percent; Gannett, 8 percent, McClatchy, 1.5 percent. Expectations run that news companies will show a five to 10 percent profit for the year, absent unforeseen calamity.

But that mild profit is good news. Recall that a year ago, much of the industry was in freefall. A number of companies — stunned by the quick near-Depression downturn of ad revenues — went operationally into the red. They responded with draconian cuts in staff and newsprint, and as the recovery has emerged, they’ve positioned themselves as smaller but profitable companies, though their first-quarter revenues still largely lagged the first quarter of the horrific Q1 2009. Wall Street has rewarded them with improved credit ratings and advanced share prices. There seems to be, say investors, some future here. This week’s tenacious auction in Philadelphia with lenders led by the Angelo Gordon private equity company — now a big player in the U.S. daily business — winning the papers with a $135 million bid only reinforces the notion that newspaper valuation may have been trashed too much.

Nieman Journalism Lab: The Newsonomics of reborn newspaper profit

Coca Colla: the new ‘real thing’ in Bolivia

Coca Colla drink Bolivia

A certain US soft drinks giant may disagree, but Bolivia has come up with a fizzy beverage it says is the real thing: Coca Colla.

The drink, made from the coca leaf and named after the indigenous Colla people from Bolivia’s highlands, went on sale this week across the South American country.

It is black, sweet and comes in a bottle with a red label – but similarities to Coca-Cola end there. One is a symbol of US-led globalisation and corporate might; the other could be considered a socialist-tinged affront to western imperialism.

Guardian: Coca Colla: the new ‘real thing’ in Bolivia

(Thanks Paul)

No immediate revenue boost for Gizmodo from iPhone leak?

Leaked iPhone 4G

Nick Denton says that although the iPhone leak was “pretty much the biggest tech scoop ever,” he says “There were no immediate revenue benefits whatsoever.” Interesting.

Business Insider: Gawker Media’s Denton: I Lost Money On That Huge Gizmodo iPhone Scoop

(via Nieman Journalism Lab)

Guru Fatigue: Getting Paid Without Being The Wizard

Guru fatigue

I was glad to read this, since it’s stuff I’ve been thinking about as I work on Mediapunk and the hypersigil project:

Truth is, I’ve seen an increasingly level of what I’d call “Guru Fatigue” these days.

For a long time, the wisdom in the word of “making money from what you know” was you had to position yourself as the wizard. The top dog. And, for certain clients and fields, that’s likely still true.

But, over the last few years, I’ve sensed a growing movement of people who are really looking not for the opportunity to worship at the feet of the guru or rulebook, but the chance to connect, to be listened to, to be valued, to join in something bigger than themselves, to be inspired and rekindle hope and to learn something that will take them or their companies a serious bit further down the path than they are now from somebody who’s a serious bit further down that road…who they trust.

They’re not looking for the wizard, but rather, someone real they can trust to get them to the next level. Which, interestingly enough, is much closer to the literal definition of the word guru.

Jonathan Fields: Guru Fatigue: Getting Paid Without Being The Wizard

See also: Brave New Development

Projection: digital textbooks will be 18% of the market in 5 years

five year digital textbook projection

I take projections with a heaping lump of salt, but this is interesting:

Considering current digital textbook sales increases, and basing our assumptions of the favorable evolution of factors contributing to increased digital textbook availability and access, we project the digital textbook market to surpass 18% of combined new textbook sales for the Higher Education, and Career Education markets in the U.S. by 2014. Overall digital textbook sales will increase 100% year-over-year in 2010, and continue to grow at rates of 150% and 120% respectively in 2011 and 2012. As publishers struggle with the eventuality of transforming their product models to digital-first, and as they adjust their sales efforts to address the growth in the digital market, we expect a certain amount of churn and an adjustment to sales growth in 2013 and 2014. In those years, digital textbook sales will increase 90% and 80% respectively.

Digital Textbook Sales in U.S. Higher Education — A Five-Year Projection

(Thanks Wes)

Blogs are not businesses

Sleazy salesperson

David Risley writes at Problogger:

I’ve been quite direct about the fact that blogs are not businesses. I believe that so many bloggers get so hung up on their medium that they haven’t stepped back to look at the big picture. A blog is a promotional medium and a communications platform. And in order to really monetize a blog, you have to ask the question: To what end?

What is your real product? What is the thing that you can provide to others in exchange for some of their money? […]

Most bloggers today operate in a dream world of made-up business rules. They try to make money with their blogs when they have nothing to sell. They’ll try to monetize the eyeballs only by littering the blog up with banner ads to sell other people’s stuff. It doesn’t take long for most bloggers to realize what a freaking difficult way to monetize a blog that is!

So many bloggers seem to think of their blog as a newspaper. Newspapers are monetized by ads. Guess what? Newspapers are disappearing left and right last time I checked. The model is limited and broken. So, why try to perpetuate it in a completely different medium?

No, the REAL answer to full-time incomes from blogs is to answer that question: What is my product? And if you don’t have one, you need to create one.

Problogger: Poor Bloggers Focus Too Much On Blog Posts

(Thanks Aaron)

This sounds about right. It’s possible to make money from advertising on a blog – maybe even a living (in the journalism world, The West Seattle Blog is apparently doing well). But it’s damn hard. Selling a product or service is also very hard, but it’s far more realistic than selling advertising.

By the looks of it, Risley is in the “info product” business. Technically, this means selling any non-fiction or instructional content be a book, DVD, or e-book. Generally this means selling short high priced e-books (say, $100 for a 10 page PDF). I’m certainly not accusing Risley of this (the free e-book on his site is quite good, though I can’t speak to his paid products), but be warned: if you start to go down the “info product” rabbit hole, you’re going to find a greasey business full of hucksters who despise their marks. Not everyone in this business is sleazey, and there are plenty of good products out there.. But I can sum up at least 80% of the info products out there: they’re just explanations about how you can make money selling info products. But you’ll have to buy the next, more expensive info product to find out more. Hit up a torrent site, and you can find gigs of this trash.

ANYWAY. Info products are ultimately content, and I’m cynical right now about the future of selling content as a business model. But there’s probably good, honest money to be made here. Think about it – everything from The Economist special reports to Vice guides are “info products.” (That’s not an endorsement of either organization or their products, just examples).

I’m slightly more bullish on the prospects of selling services. That’s what I’ll be doing here at Mediapunk. (Though I do hope to come up with some “info products” [*gag*] to sell). There’s even potential for news organizations to move into this business in the future. To use The Economist as an example again, they have their Intelligence Unit that does business intelligence research for corporations. (See Future journalism business models: research and explanation services).

There’s plenty of other things you can sell – physical products, software, subscription services. But although “starting a business and using your blog to promote it” is fine advice, it’s far easier said than done.

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