Photography: CarbonNYC
Identity theft marks its 453rd anniversary this summer. In 1556, a man named Arnaud du Tilh arrived in the French village of Artigat claiming to be Martin Guerre, a peasant who had left his wife and child eight years earlier. The man fitted Martin Guerre’s profile. He looked like Martin Guerre. He repeated a number of facts about Martin Guerre. And he was accepted as Martin Guerre by Martin Guerre’s wife with whom he went on to have two children. It wasn’t until the real Martin Guerre turned up in 1560 – minus a leg – that du Tilh confessed. He was hanged in front of Guerre’s house.
Today’s identity thieves have less to fear. They also have much more opportunity and they’re becoming increasingly sophisticated too. They no longer need to rely on an uncanny resemblance to a missing husband to win themselves an easy life, and they don’t even have to rummage around in suburban garbage cans for old bank letters to pick up useful information.
Photography: Esteban
The Internet is big. Really, really big. And really, really valuable too. Google has indexed over 40 billion pages and counted more than 1 trillion unique URLs. Estimates of regular users have ranged from 500 million to a billion (although no one really knows how to produce accurate user figures)… and retail sales have been estimated at as much as $178 billion in 2008 alone.
Those are huge figures. The revenues are the kind of money that could make a noticeable hole in the national debt, keep a small bank afloat or even repay Bernie Madoff’s victims several times over. It’s no wonder then that so many businesses have built an online presence, hoping to pick up a slice of those online billions – and make sure that their competitors don’t take a chunk of their offline market share too.
Photography: jef_safi
Ask most people to describe their ideal job and it’s likely to contain a giant salary, of course, but also lots of responsibility and perhaps most importantly, plenty of creativity. Having the freedom to think for yourself – and be rewarded for it – is priceless.
And one of the advantages of a world in which iPhone apps can let cubicle workers give up the day job is that earning from creativity is easier than ever before. If once imaginative thinkers were restricted to the creative departments of large advertising companies – where they were free to think up catchy slogans for airline companies and sketch storyboards for TV slots – today’s creative types have a giant range of options.
Image: Paul Rj Muller
Usually, Web 2.0 just gets it right. Facebook has brought together old friends and keeps connections alive, blogs have given everyone the power to publish without the need to be a media baron first, and Twitter is now letting Iranian demonstrators bring millions onto the streets and send out information that might just change the government.
And yet, those same tools that have proved so useful for communicating, networking and publishing have also been used for more dubious purposes. Here are a number of ways in which Web 2.0 has gone wrong:
Photography: michaelsharon
Whenever the going gets tough, tough companies don’t react by getting going. They tell their employees to get going instead. The US economy is said to have already lost some 6 million jobs since the recession began in December 2007, the largest number of layoffs in a downturn since World War II. Some of those fired workers are finding other jobs, perhaps with less pay and sometimes as a stopgap until something better comes along. Others are taking the opportunity to set up their own businesses or, if the last recession is anything to go by, rebranding themselves as “consultants” – the geek version of what actors call “resting.”
Lots of former workers though are neither collecting unemployment benefits nor looking for new niches in the marketplace. Instead, they’re going back to school. Even as endowments are falling and fees are rising, colleges are reporting an increase in applications, including from people hoping to graduate with new skills just as the economy gets going again.
iPhone apps have become every frustrated geek’s dream path to riches. While computer games now demand the budgets of Hollywood movies and productivity programs mean eventually going head-to-head with either Microsoft or Adobe, iPhone apps can still be created in the way that software should be made: by lone developers spending their weekends in their bedrooms with a keyboard, a Mac and a manual for Ruby-on-Rails.
And it can work. While many apps have been developed by companies rather than individual programmers, there’s no shortage of stories about programmers who have struck it rich enough to give up the day job and dedicate themselves to a life of one-man mobile game-making.
So what are the key ingredients of an app that goes all the way? What sort of decisions does a developer have to make in order to increase the chances of success? And what can programmers learn from the experiences of others?
Tell regular jobbers that you work as a freelancer and you can see the envy in their eyes. They imagine you sitting on the beach with your laptop propped on your knees. They see you crawling out of bed while they’re still sitting in traffic, believe you take leisurely lunch breaks as they’re rushing back to their desks, and assume that you never have to argue with the boss.
If only. What day jobbers – and new freelancers too — fail to understand is that freelancing is work, and like any work, it comes with difficulties and frustrations, challenges which can, and sometimes even should, drive a freelancer back to the safety of the 9-5.
There are no figures that describe the numbers of people hanging up their lances and heading back to the office, but only around 48 percent of respondents in some surveys indicated that they would even consider telecommuting. A similar number said that they would like to stick to the day job but with flexible hours. Perhaps it’s no surprise then that despite the improvement in communications, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the rate of self-employment has remained relatively steady at between 7-9 percent of the workforce since the 1970s.
Photography: J.N. Stuart
When Al Gore gets to wave an Oscar for a film about drowning polar bears, and Richard Branson announces that he’s committing all of the proceeds from Virgin Atlantic to the search for alternative fuels (a commitment said to be worth around $3 billion over ten years), you know going green is a serious business. And as it turns out, it’s good for business too. Although some of the steps that an entrepreneur can make to green their company costs money, most save cash.
What would once have looked like parsimonious penny-pinching now makes a company look with-it and generous to the planet. Here are 38 ways to give your business a touch of green.
When Steve Jobs pulled a Macbook Air out of a manila envelope at MacWorld 2008 it was a seminal moment. Not only did the new machine have the usual Apple-sexy design and must-have looks that have been thrilling fanboys even since before the birth of the first iPod. It was also incredibly light yet still feature-heavy. Jobs showed that an office was no longer a place where you can find an envelope; an envelope was now capable of holding an entire office.
It’s a revolution whose effects can be seen in cafés across the country. Wherever coffee is poured, croissants are served and wi-fi is delivered for no additional charge, tables are full of laptops stuffed with professional software and manned by tech types who are writing code, creating designs or typing emails. They might not be doing it on Macbook Airs, but they’re not doing it in company offices either.
It’s the goal that any business would hope to reach. You’ve picked an area of specialization, demonstrated that you’re knowledgeable about your subject, built trust in your market, and you have a loyal following that buys from you, returns to you and recommends you to their friends.
You’ve mastered your niche and moved your business from the start-up phase to a much more stable phase.
And that’s when the trouble begins.
Photography: James_Michael_Hill
If prizes were ever given for poorly-coined terms, “freelance” might well have to hire a writer to put together its acceptance speech. Few of us carry lances around these days and if the “free” refers to anything, it’s more likely to be the amount clients expect to pay for their products than the freedom that should come with being free of a boss.
In practice, freelancers just have lots of bosses, multiple deadlines (sometimes in the same day) and, thankfully no shortage of work.
It’s a thought that would once have occurred to only a few people — writers maybe, who need little more than Word, a telephone and an Internet connection to churn out their texts, and graphic designers, who are happy anywhere they have a Mac, an Adobe suite and a place to show off their creative coolness.
All of them at some point would have had that killer thought: “I could be doing this at home.”
Photography: *Tom*
We’re all in favor of niches. They’re very useful ways to start out in business, find your feet and build a foundation before expanding into different areas. They make the first steps easier but they don’t make the very first step easier: you still have to choose the right niche.
Perhaps the most tempting mistake to make is to leave the niche too big. Create a role-playing video game, for example, and you’ll find yourself competing against World of Warcraft, a thankless challenge. Create a role-playing game for people who like to cast their spells in teams instead of alone though, as the makers of Warhammer have done, and you’ll stand a better chance of staying in the fight and surviving long enough to take on the leader once you’ve grown stronger.
Photography: Scott Beale/Laughing Squid
It might not have struck you yet, but you can feel it getting closer. It’s one thing to hear about the credit crunch on the news and see the stock footage of Detroit’s production lines, now running on government loans and a promise to build cars that run on recycled sunflowers. It’s quite another when a friend at Sun tells you he just got his P45 or an old classmate asks if there are any jobs going at your place.
If you still haven’t had one of those conversations, expect one soon. According to one outplacement service, the tech sector lost just under 187,000 jobs over the last year, three quarters of them vanishing in the second half of 2008 alone. Sun has already sent home 6,000 of its workers, Microsoft has slashed 5,000 (hopefully, most of them from the team that created Vista) and even Google is said to have discovered that the Googleplex has an exit as well as an entrance, even if it is focusing on support staff – at least for now.
If every cloud has a silver lining, the skies these days should be raining precious metal. The economy has been shrinking for a year, recruitment firms are awash with gilt-edged resumes and barely a week passes without some other major company either firing out P45s or filing for bankruptcy. Even Adobe recently told 600 workers to start shopping around for a new job.
You’d think that being part-owners of a pile of banks would make us all feel a lot richer than this.
Photography: asmythie
Progress is a wonderful thing. There was a time when computers were the size of office buildings. Soon they were the size of offices. Things began to take off when they could fit comfortably inside an office. Now they contain Office.
Stick your laptop in your bag and your mobile in your pocket and you’ve got everything you need to do business and complete a day’s work.
One of the problems of working online is keeping track of your life. It doesn’t matter whether you are researching for an offline job or are a hardcore web worker. In the past, a lot of us have used paper day planners, but if a significant part of your day is spent online, you likely have digital information to track. One of the most powerful and flexible ways to do this and stay productive is with a Personal Dashboard.
A Personal Dashboard doesn’t have to be just for your personal affairs but can include aspects of your life and work on or offline. There are actually a number of web applications that are considered a type of web dashboard, including Pageflakes and Netvibes. Some people even use an RSS reader such as Google Reader, or a calendaring tool such as Google Calendar as a sort of web dashboard.
The drawback is that these sorts of apps are very narrow in their feature set, especially Google Reader. Sure, you can track all the sites you like to read daily, but that’s about it. With portals like Pageflakes and Netvibes, you can do a bit more. Yet you cannot track other types of information, images, links, lists, etc. Most of all, it’s not necessarily in a handy format.
Photography: elliotcable
It’s a type of holy grail: trying to get more work done in less time than you’re spending now. Entrepreneurs, web workers, freelancers, writers, designers, coders… Doesn’t matter what type of work, you’re probably wondering how to increase your work productivity.
Well there are ways to increase work productivity. These are some tips that have worked for me over the years.
