BAIA, the nonprofit business network I am proud to serve as Executive Director, has a whole new set of web properties. We are starting the new decade with a bang.
BAIA is first and foremost a community, so it comes at no surprise that BAIA Link, our online social network, has become a reference resource for BAIA members and friends. The network is on its way to reach 1,000 members early this year and all performance indicators are on the upswing. Very good.
I sometimes work on Sundays. Usually not more than 2 or 3 hours, but still… I find it easier to start the week with the right energy and velocity if I take some time to prep on a weekend. Last Sunday was an exception, in that I spent the entire day and most of the night at my desk. While at it, I wondered how many in my extended circle shared this habit. So I ran a quick Linkedin poll.
Turns out I am not alone. In fact, about only 14% of the respondents never work on Sundays and almost half (47%) work on Sundays often (2-3 times a month!)
More interestingly, the results suggest a strong inverse correlation between the size of the company you work for and the chances that you will work on Sundays. The self-employed/startup/small biz people work harder?
Entrepreneurs around the world often grossly underestimate what it takes to enter the US market. Take for example technology or software, sectors that I know. Attracted by the size of the American market and the potential opportunity to raise millions in capital that is not available home, entrepreneurs decide to take the leap and create a beachhead.
Conventional wisdom around Europe and Asia is that a local parent company will keep its engineering and product development home and “open a Silicon Valley office to market the product/service/technology”. Perfect. Until you get down to assessing what resources are required. And assessing you must, least finding out later in the game that you are grossly undersized for the challenge.
I may cover legal costs, accounting, infrastructure, rent and other investments another time. Now I want to focus on talent, the scarcest of resources, even in this market.
I have been wanting to take a break and get back to Yosemite for a couple of years now. The prospect of summer crowds not that appealing, I started looking for a good solo hiking trip in the Yosemite wilderness that I could complete in less than a week and that would afford some solitude. It took just a couple of weeks planning. Because I was purposefully avoiding the more popular options, such as the John Muir Trail and the High Sierra camps, I was able to secure a permit just a couple of days in advance. I called the Wilderness Reservation line and booked a 6-day, 5-night stay in the park’s southern backcountry, timing the 50-mile loop so as to hit the remotest sections over the weekend and get in and out Yosemite Valley during weekdays. Oh, and I travelled from SF to the park (and back) by train and bus.
So, here is the log. Keep reading →
In aviation circles, the span of time between the two World Wars is remembered as the Golden Age. A global race to speed, range and performance records pushed the limits of technology and pegged countries and manufactures against each other. It was a great run for Italian engineering too, culminating with the 1934 Schneider Trophy speed record that Francesco Agello established on a Macchi MC 72. His 709 km/h (440 mph) remains the fastest speed ever attained by a piston engine seaplane.
As an an aeronautical engineer, I was very excited to learn that, on June 12, 2009, Maurizio Cheli established another speed record and aviation milestone on an Italian built craft. Keep reading →
I have been in looking into crowdsourcing business models for the last couple of months. Personal and professional interest. As often the case, when a subject is on your mind, you stumble upon it. So, when ads like this one started popping up on my Facebook page I clicked through.
The ads send you to Logo tournament (LT), a crowdsourcing play on logo design services. It’s quite straightforward. Company needs a new logo, it submits a “contest” to LT and sets a price. Designers send in one or more designs. The best design wins and the designer gets paid.
I tried to figure out how a business model like LT’s would look like.
Revenue
LT charges designers a 15% transaction fee. Companies set the price they are willing to pay in advance, with a minimum allowed of $250. Paypal transaction fees are passed on to customers.
Note that LT will take the money from companies in “escrow” and select and pay a winner at the end of the contest even if a company does not select a winning design. That means that if a contest is listed, the money will be paid and the commission earned.
LT lists all open and closed contests at any given time. I counted about ~165 open concurrent contests with an average age of 5.1 days and ~1,800 closed contests. I sampled 100 contests at random and calculated an average prize amount of ~$315. Assuming a steady flow of contests, that means about ~1000 contests a month (i.e. 30/5.1*165=971).
With commissions at 15%, that adds up to a monthly revenue of close to $50,000. The estimate is obviously highly sensitive to the monthly contest count estimate. Here’s a back of the envelope revenue estimate (with lower and higher estimates to test for sensitivity).
The recently published IMD World Competitiveness Yearbook 2009 shows some significant changes over last years overall rankings, though not much at the top:
Of the 57 economies ranked by IMD, the US still ranks No. 1 in 2009. Hong Kong has switched places with Singapore to gain the 2nd place and is swiftly “closing the gap” with the US. Switzerland maintains its 4th rank from last year.
Out of 10 people that can do a job, 1 is an A-player, 3 are B-players and the rest are C-players, or so the story goes… Simple enough, right? So, I ran a couple of public polls on Linkedin. Just for fun. They probably have no statistical relevance, but the results are interesting :).
First, I asked respondents to self select in the A, B or C player category. 78% put themselves in the A-Player list…
In a recent post, Auren Hoffman argues that, in this economy, hiring has become harder… and he is rather convincing at it:
That’s right … hiring in tough economic times can actually be much harder than when times are good. In a downturn, the amount of resumes from C-Players massively increases while the amount of resumes from A-Players probably remains the same.
I generally agree with Auren’s premise and conclusions, though I believe it is important to recognize that most companies will never have access to the A-Player pool in the first place, and explained why in my comment.
If Foreign Direct Investment is the single most important indicator of how attractive to business a country is, this data from the Economist must be troubling.
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