Employment

This guest post is by Sid of GeeksMakeMoney . It has been a year now since an eventful day when I was browsing the Internet and clicked on an advertisement that seemed an obvious scam: Get 90% off a new iPad. “Yeah, right,” I thought. But I wanted to check it out anyway since I seemed to recall seeing the same ad previously, and I wondered if it was a new type of scam I should be aware of. As it turned out, it wasn’t a scam, just misleading advertising … and thus began my blog on penny auctions , which are a class of entertainment auctions. I found the idea exciting enough to blog about. I was just getting interested in multi-player game theory and thought that auctions are a nice field to study. The problem was, I had no experience of problogging at all. Like so many others, all I previously had was a blog for my random musings but nothing serious. I had a very elementary knowledge of SEO which I gained working as a freelance writer. I knew nothing about how to rank well in Google or...

Kirk Simpson learned a thing or two after his first start-up joined the dot-com graveyard in 2001. Such as: don't start a business with friends. "There's a tendency with your first business to surround yourself with friends as co-founders," says Simpson, who launched adventurelifestyle.com in 1997 at age 23, after dropping out of college. The site helped people arrange extreme adventure trips, such as bungee jumping excursions. "I think there's a natural desire to do it. You have to look at it from 50,000 feet: if I didn't know this person as a friend, would I want to work with him or her? Then look at the friendship -- is there loyalty, trustworthiness?"  Adventurelifestyle.com was largely self-funded, with some angel financing. Simpson and his buddy hired five more employees (friends) before it folded. He blames the failure on his youthful naivete, among other things. "We didn't have a big enough network," he says, to really figure o...

I have just returned from nearly a week in Spain, delivering a plenary address at a conference on nonlinear economic dynamics in Cartagena. I also spent a day in Madrid. Spain has the highest unemployment rate in Europe, as high as 40% for youth, and many think that it is the linchpin to maintaining the eurozone, with Germany and the other big countries able to manage defaults and bailouts for Greece, Ireland, and Portugal, but not for Spain. There have been people camping out in the main squares of cities around Spain, and the conservative opposition party has just swept the local elections big time. There was a small group camping out in Cartagena. People there were speaking out and singing in the evening. However, the biggest group camping out is in Madrid, in its central square, the plaza of Puerta del Sol. I visited this area and walked through the encampment that fills the plaza, actually a long half-oval rather than a square. There were many tents and also tables with peo...