Employment

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The Slide group within Google has been busy. Disco, the group messaging app, quietly launched back in March. Then last week, Pool Party, a group mobile photo service entered into private beta . And today the team is back again with Prizes , a service that apparently aims to link up people with a problem to those with a solution — for money. Found at Prizes.org (which DotWeekly reported that Google secured back in April for Slide), Prizes is still in beta testing. But it is available for the public to use right now — though contest creation is still invite-only. You simply sign up with Facebook or Twitter (no Google options) and you’re ready to go. Once you sign up, you’ll be presented with a stream of activities you can do — such as creating a soul mixtape — for money. You can follow any of these contests, or drill down into them for more information. And you can submit entries (solutions) for each contest. Each contest has a time limit for completion. And they can get votes from oth...

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...