Posted in economics, news on April 26th, 2009 by Michael Ewens – 1 Comment
From the Indeed job listing aggregation site, one can look at trends in both supply (employers) and demand (potential employees). The demand-side is slightly tricky to interpret because it is a function of not only real employment demand, but the popularity of Indeed as a search platform. Here are some interesting facts:
Finance: Supply of jobs falls, demand increases
Financial Services and Banking job postings have decreased 39% since March 2008.
Clicks on Financial Services and Banking jobs have increased 96% since March 2008.
Construction employment falls
Healthcare bucks the trends
Tax-related employment is volatile
SimplyHired.com also has a trends section with similar patterns.
Also see my own take on apartment rental supply and demand using online listings + web scraper.
Posted in news on April 23rd, 2009 by Michael Ewens – Be the first to comment
What if they had another option? SecondMarket, which operates markets for trading illiquid assets online, is creating a marketplace for trading shares of private companies. It puts investors together with shareholders and collects a fee, which will be 2 percent from each side for the private company market.
Typically, venture-backed start-ups are sold or go public within five to seven years, but lately it is taking longer. As the exits are delayed, venture capitalists who are unable to cash out cannot return money to their investors or devote time and money to new companies. Some employees inside the start-ups, being paid low salaries, get impatient for a payday.
The first real hurdle to setting up such a marketplace is the SEC. There are tons of restrictions regarding equity in private firms. One easy way around one of the rules is to put a middle man between the new owners and the current equity holders. The other substantial problem is transparency. When a VC invests in a entrepreneurial firm, they get to see the books. I am not sure that existing (non-selling) equity holders will want the books opened to secondary firms so that potential buyers can properly price shares. It would be interesting to see how this is handled.
Posted via web from Michael’s posterous
Posted in news, random on April 23rd, 2009 by Michael Ewens – Be the first to comment
I love Mechanical Turk. We used it at my agency where we were having a big problem with time clock fraud (a.k.a. people were asking their friends to punch them out and then leaving hours early)
So I built a very simple add on to our timeclock (which is essentially an ELO touch screen and a PC) and had it use a web cam to take a picture of each person punching. Then we created a program that showed turk users a person’s badge picture and then the picture taken at the punch and asked “Is this the same person?” (with answers of Yes/No/Maybe) Doing that virtually eliminated the problem overnight.
I agree with the author that M.T. won’t completely change the market. But what it will do is allow people to monitize their spare seconds and in doing so make a lot of the “no-brainer” grunt work that companies have to do a lot cheaper
This is a fascinating way to use Mechanical Turk. See my take on using it for research.
Posted via web from Michael’s posterous
Posted in news on April 12th, 2009 by Michael Ewens – Be the first to comment
In 2006, the Ford CEO prepared for the worst by borrowing billions from banks. He avoided the need for bailout money and may have just saved Ford:
On Nov. 29, 2006, Ford Motor made a surprising pitch to the nation’s biggest banks. In a packed ballroom at a New York hotel, Ford’s chief executive, Alan R. Mulally, said he would mortgage all the company’s assets for billions of dollars in loans to finance an overhaul of the troubled automaker. Although the economy was healthy then, Mr. Mulally said the money would give Ford “a cushion to protect for a recession or other unexpected event.”
At the time, the request was considered an act of desperation. But the $23.6 billion in loans it received turned out to be Ford’s salvation.
via How Ford Avoided the Meltdown that Hit GM, Chrysler
Posted in news on April 9th, 2009 by Michael Ewens – Be the first to comment
In this interesting article about going undercover at Wal-mart, you find this little tidbit about encouraging competition among low-level mangers by giving them pricing power:
And so we came to the Wal-Mart Pledge. Solemnly, each of us raised one hand and intoned: “If a customer comes within 10 feet of me, I’m going to look him in the eye, smile and greet him.” Having pledged ourselves, we encountered the aspect of Wal-Mart employment that impressed me most: The Telxon, pronounced “Telzon,” a hand-held bar-code scanner with a wireless connection to the store’s computer. When pointed at any product, the Telxon would reveal astonishing amounts of information: the quantity that should be on the shelf, the availability from the nearest warehouse, the retail price, and (most amazing of all) the markup.
All of us were given access to this information, because – in theory, at least – anyone in the store could order a couple extra pallets of anything, and could discount it heavily as a Volume Producing Item (known as a VPI), competing with other departments to rack up the most profitable sales each month. Floor clerks even had portable equipment to print their own price stickers. This was how Wal-Mart detected demand and responded to it: by distributing decision-making power to grass-roots level. It was as simple yet as radical as that.
