Category: Business

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Business News

Copy, an alternative to Dropbox or Google Drive

Here’s an alternative to Dropbox and Google Drive that just appeared. Since I’m interested in moving PDFs and EPUBs around, I tried that out. Unfortunately, the Android app does not know what to do with EPUBs. You can ask the app to open the files as text, but none of my readers are available as a choice for opening the file. Same situation with PDFs, although PDFs are recognized as such and viewable inside the app.

Compare this to Google Drive. If I click on an EPUB from the Drive app, it just downloads and opens in Aldiko.

Copy

Copy is the easiest way to store, protect and share amazing things. It keeps your computers in sync and your files available from anywhere, even on your mobile devices. With Copy, you can also easily share files with anyone publicly or privately. Copy for companies extends the cloud storage and sharing benefits into corporate environments with user and group management and added control of proprietary company data..

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Business

Riddles have no place in job interviews

Indeed.

I have been presented with these riddles, even after I was a best-selling author. The last time it happened to (years ago), I told the interviewer it was a ridiculous question I refused to answer. However, I heard a story last night of what must be the worst interview hazing I’ve heard about. For an employee being interviewed for a promotion, the company arranged for a three-way conference call. By design, one of the attendees did not call into meeting. The test was to see if the employee being interviewed would speak poorly of the jerk who was bailing on an important meeting with no notice.

I wonder if these pranksters understand they’ve made a clear invitation to dishonesty at the crucial beginning of a working relationship.

assertTrue( ): Riddles have no place in job interviews

I’ve seen “tech recruitment” from both sides of the desk. I have been a job applicant, and I have been a hiring manager. Neither role is pretty.

One of the unprettier sides of the hiring process in R&D is the on-site-interview stage, when the hiring manager (or one of his peers) gets to ask the applicant highly technical domain-knowledge questions. This can be done skillfully or poorly. It gets ugly fast when it becomes a hazing ritual based on riddle-solving.

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Business Politics

Government kills Intrade to save movie exec jobs

Stossel shares some entertaining outrage, but the WSJ coverage leads with a reference to Hollywood that’s closer to the mark. Intrade must have been terribly threatening to the practice of picking hit movies. Even a stinker makes some cash, but not if a market warns everyone beforehand.

Government Crushes Innovative Online Prediction Market

Today, Americans were told that they must close their Intrade.com accounts. That happened because the federal government agency known as the “Commodity Futures Trading Commission” (CFTC) today sued the prediction market, where people from all over the world bet about things like who will win elections.

Intrade decided all its U.S. customers must now close their accounts and withdraw their money from the site.

UPDATE 12/07: I wanted to note that  probably first read about the Hollywood angle on the Overcoming Bias post Zitzewitz The Wise. I just couldn’t find that link when I wrote this post.

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Business

Freakonomics On Consulting

The Freakonomics podcast is great–I listen to it in bed with my Logitech Squeezebox Radio before falling asleep.  The most recent episode has Stephen Dubner talking to Robin Hason, one of the authors of the Overcoming Bias blog.

It’s about consulting: I Consult, Therefore I Am. There’s some useful (if cynical) advice, such as fifty percent of the job is nodding your head at whatever’s being said, thirty percent of it is just sort of looking good, and the other twenty percent is raising an objection but then if you meet resistance, then dropping it.

Overcoming Bias : Freakonomics On Consulting

Me in January on Too Much Consulting?:

…

The CEO often understands what needs to be done, but does not have the resources to fight this blocking coalition. But if a prestigious outside consulting firm weighs in, that can turn the status tide.

Freakonomics Radio interviewed me about it a bit later, and they’ve just put up a podcast they say was “inspired in part” by my post. In addition to me, they talk to Keith Yost, a former consultant:

Fellow consultants and associates … [said] fifty percent of the job is nodding your head at whatever’s being said, thirty percent of it is just sort of looking good, and the other twenty percent is raising an objection but then if you meet resistance, then dropping it.

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Business News

Samsung to Apple: apology accepted

Obvious. And by the way, as the titles of the related articles below show, it seems like a certain D-Generation X catch phrase came to mind for several other people.

Samsung hits Apple with 20% price hike: report – MarketWatch

Samsung Electronics , the world’s largest technology firm by revenue, raised the price of mobile processor supplied to Apple Inc. AAPL -0.77% by 20% recently, Chosun Ilbo reported Monday, citing a person familiar with negotiations between the two tech giants.

“Samsung Electronics recently asked Apple for a significant price raise in (the mobile processor known as) application processor,” the person was quoted as saying in the report. “Apple first disapproved it, but finding no replacement supplier, it accepted the (increase.)”

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