Category: News and Views

BofA Intern Death and Wall Street’s Culture | Daily Intelligencer

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There’s a game played among young Wall Street analysts, usually late at night after everyone but the janitors have gone home. It goes by various names, but the one I’ve heard most often is “Misery Poker.” The rules are simple: If your workload is worse than your colleagues’, you win. So “I’m staffed on two deals, and I haven’t left before midnight in a week” might prompt a raise of “Oh, yeah? Well, I’m staffed on three deals, and I stayed past 2 a.m. six nights out of the last eight.”

Usually Misery Poker is played with a wink to its ridiculousness. These are 22-year-old investment bankers, after all, not battlefield medics or single moms working three jobs. All of them are being well compensated for the pain they endure. But last weekend, when a London-based Bank of America intern dropped dead, reportedly after pulling three all-nighters in a row, we learned what happens when a game of Misery Poker goes high-stakes.

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Million-Dollar Startup Secrets | AllBusiness.com

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Most small businesses never reach $1 million in annual sales. Instead, they struggle just to survive. Of businesses started in 2004, barely more than half — 56 percent — were still around in 2009, a study from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation found.

In fact, cracking the $1 million barrier at any point in a company’s lifetime is a major achievement. U.S. Census data from 2007 shows that more than three-quarters of the country’s 6 million firms with employees made less than $1 million in revenue. And most solopreneur businesses don’t earn anywhere near that much: According to IRS data for 2008, the average solo business brought in less than $60,000.

Given these sobering numbers, reaching seven figures in a business’s very first year — and with a startup’s often-scarce resources — is nothing short of extraordinary.

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Soldiers Turn Entrepreneurs as One Million Exit Military | Bloomberg

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Robert Rummells, a U.S. Army Ranger for 22 years, says it was a natural transition when he opened a Mosquito Joe pest-control franchise in Richmond, Virginia, earlier this month.“I’m an outdoor type of guy, and I didn’t want to be chained to my computer in an office, talking on the phone,” said the 49-year-old, who tried jobs such as installing equipment at a community college and simulated firearms training after retiring from the military in 2009. “I learned I needed to work for myself.”

As more former service personnel turn to entrepreneurship, they’re generating jobs that are helping to cut the unemployment rate for veterans to a four-year low of 6.2 percent in April, lower than the 6.9 percent rate for adult non-veterans. The boost to the labor market matters: More than a million Americans are projected by the White House to transition out of the military through 2015.

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Your Hidden Censor: What Your Mind Will Not Let You See|Scientific American

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It was a summer evening when Tony Cornell tried to make the residents of Cambridge, England see a ghost. He got dressed up in a sheet and walked through a public park waving his arms about. Meanwhile his assistants observed the bystanders for any hint that they noticed something strange. No, this wasn’t Candid Camera. Cornell was a researcher interested in the paranormal. The idea was first to get people to notice the spectacle, and then see how they understood what their eyes were telling them. Would they see the apparition as a genuine ghost or as something more mundane, like a bloke in a bed sheet?

The plan was foiled when not a single bystander so much as raised an eye brow. Several cows did notice, however, and they followed Cornell on his ghostly rambles. Was it just a fluke, or did people “not want to see” the besheeted man, as Cornell concluded in his 1959 report?

Okay, that stunt was not a very good experiment, but twenty years later the eminent psychologist Ulric Neisser did a better job. He filmed a video of two teams of students passing a basketball back and forth, and superimposed another video of a girl with an umbrella walking right through the center of the screen. When he asked subjects in his study to count the number of times the ball was passed, an astonishing 79 percent failed to notice the girl with the umbrella. In the years since, hundreds of studies have backed up the idea that when attention is occupied with one thing, people often fail to notice other things right before their eyes.

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Personalized Shopping Startup The Hunt Adds Tyra Banks As Investor | TechCrunch

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The Hunt, a website designed to help shoppers find specific items to buy online, has added Tyra Banks to its list of high-profile backers.

This is not the first time Banks has expressed interest in the tech startup community. The former model added an investment sector to the Tyra Banks Company, Fierce Capital LLC, and told Betabeat she would have liked to have invested in startups such as Uber and Airbnb when they first launched.

The amount of Banks’ investment was not disclosed, but The Hunt CEO Tim Weingarten tells TechCrunch the money will go to improving functionality and user engagement. While Weingarten also declined to give specifics of the direction The Hunt is heading, he says users can expect to see new developments within the next few months. Prior to its most recent investment, The Hunt raised $2 million from Javelin Venture Partners and another $700,000 from Ashton Kutcher, Guy Oseary (Madonna’s manager) and Rohan Oza.

Weingarten’s website functions through “hunts” that users post to find items they want to purchase. Weingarten tells me 75 percent of the time that a user is satisfied with an answer and declares the hunt “found.” However, this majority is solved by the minority of users — 15 percent of registered users aid in others’ hunts. With over 300,000 registered users and  250,000 products added to submitted hunts, a simple and generalized calculation comes out to an average of 55 hunts from each person in that percentage. That’s not necessarily representative of what actually happens, but it’s still a lot of hunts to be solved.

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Cash Scarcity Threatening Berlin’s Thriving Startup Scene | Bloomberg

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Naren Shaam spoke virtually no German and knew only one person in Berlin. That didn’t keep him from founding his travel planning website, GoEuro, there.

“Berlin was the right choice,” said the 30-year-old Harvard Business School graduate, who now has 20 people working for him at his offices in an old industrial building. “I would do it again here.”

Young people like Shaam have made the German capital a global hotbed for startups, drawn by a raw, artsy atmosphere that rivals Brooklyn’s as an icon of global hip. The city is home to 2,500 fledgling tech companies, employing some 30,000 people, according to the Federal Association of German Startups, which was set up in the city last year.

But even as Berlin jostles with London for the title of Europe’s latest Silicon Whatever, a lack of financing threatens its growth. Shaam, for instance, acknowledges that finding backers would have been easier and valuations higher in the U.S. or Britain, though he felt free-wheeling Berlin, with its growing talent pool, was a better fit

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Ikea Jerker Do-It-Yourself Treadmill Desk| lifehacker.com

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Love the idea of a treadputer and happen to own the well-loved, easy-to-Craigslist IKEA Jerker? Turns out it makes for a really nice treadmill desk.

The muscle soreness I’m experiencing today after walking around Comic-Con this weekend made me realize: I’ve got to incorporate more standing and walking into my daily routine. Maybe a treadmill desk? There are some expensive desks made to fit over a treadmill (sold separately), but someone on Hacker News modified an IKEA Jerker desk to do the job. The discontinued but beloved model of desk, which I already own, plus one of those inexpensive but utilitarian wire shelving units gives you a wide monitor stand plus plenty of keyboard and mouse room. It’s not the prettiest thing in the world, but it looks really tempting to try. The owner says:

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