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Geekpreneur - make money being a Geek

Make Money Being a Geek. Geek Tips, Geek Culture, and GTD from Geekpreneur.com

In the financial year of 2006-7, Japan broke a record. Around 355 workers fell ill from overwork. Of those, 147 died, usually of heart attacks or strokes. It was Japan’s highest figure ever and an increase of 7.6 percent from the previous year, despite a government campaign to cut work hours.

It’s such a Japanese phenomenon that they’ve even termed a word for it: “karoshi,” which means “death from overwork.” The term dates from the 1980s when the economy was bubbling and several – apparently healthy — top executives suddenly keeled over.

The cause is Japan’s painfully long work hours. Officially, Japanese employees put in an average of 1,780 hours a year, just 20 hours less than Americans (although 340 hours more than Germans). But those figures don’t include unpaid overtime, which Japanese companies take for granted. According to a report in The Economist, a third of Japanese men in their thirties work more than 60 hours a week, but half receive no overtime pay at all. Shortly before he died, Kenichi Uchino, a 30-year old Toyota employee who coll

Telling Better Business StoriesJuly 21

Photography: Vicki’s Pics

Create a professional website and inevitably, you’ll have to do it. You’ll have to write an About Us page that tells a lead who you are, what you do and how you got there. It’s the story of your company and while that account might not be as important as your product or your services, your business’s narrative is an important part of your image and your branding – especially when you find that it plays the role of the bad guy. Google, after all, would still have a world-beating search engine and advertising system even if it didn’t come with a story of two noble geeks who promise to do no evil. Microsoft, on the other hand, has produced a standard-setting games console but its competition-squashing has made it the computer world’s Lee van Cleef, a characterization that only inspires young virus-writers to call the company out.

It’s up to PR firms to create – and change — the stories that the public believes about large companies. Small firms just setting out start with a clean sheet have a much easier time. They can produce a tale that explains where their idea came from, how they’re trying to make life better for customer

Making the Placebo Effect Work for your BusinessJuly 15

Wouldn’t it be great if you could just pop a pill and hey presto!… you’re Bill Gates? Well, maybe not that pill. But how about one that turns you from entrepreneurial dreamer into successful business person, from someone with ideas to someone who takes action, from someone who wants to someone who achieves?

Usually, those sorts of transformations require massive amounts of hard work, long investments of capital and sometimes a complete personality change too. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Popping placebos has long been known to end even the toughest illnesses and it’s possible that there are a few little sugary confidence tricks that can have an equally transformative effect on a business’s growth.

Take one Sales Pill After Meals

Seth Godin, for example, has talked in the past about marketing as a kind of placebo effect. A product that’s no different to any other on the market and only a little different from its previous model suddenly becomes the most incredible innovation since… well, the last most incredible innovation. The item itself is nothing special. What makes the difference is the status of its source or the sound of the sizzle:

“We don’t like to admit that we tell stories, that we’re in the placebo business,” he wrote once on his blog. ” Instead, we tell ourselves about features and benefits as a way to ratio

4 Simple Steps to Minimize Failure For Your Next Business IdeaJuly 9

Photography: Martin Kingsley

So you’ve got an incredible idea for a new business, and can’t wait to roll up your sleeves and get to work. However, before you pour dollars and hours into creating your product, it’s a good idea to see if people are actually willing to buy what you have to offer.

Why not just conduct a survey, I hear you ask. Well, I’ve learned that survey data can’t be relied upon at all. During a business implementation class in university, one of our assignments was to conduct a survey and see if our product had sufficient demand. We surveyed our fellow students and asked if they would be interested in buying our Japanese fried cakes, which we planned to offer in campus for a week.

8 out of 10 of our respondents said yes. We based our sales projections on this figure, and projected a 250% return on investment. When we actually sold our product however, we hardly broke even. If it wasn’t for some very persuasive sales tactics and risking annoying our friends, we would’ve reported back a huge loss to our professor and received a relatively low grade for the implementation part of the assignment.

You see, most people

Selling Freelance Services in a RecessionJuly 8

Photography: Wallyg

Start freelancing during a boom and it feels that nothing can go wrong. Companies have more work than employees, more money than they know what to do with and more gigs to pass out to freelancers than available contractors. You’ll be picking and choosing your jobs, demanding higher prices each time and wondering where it’s all going to take you.

Presumably then when the economy hits a wall, freelance opportunities dry up, money is short and the future a wave of instability. Recessions should be good for no one, including those with no one employer and no permanent contracts.

In practice, hard times don’t seem to put people off trying. According to the US Department of Labor, the percentage of employed people describing themselves as “independent contractors” remained level at 6.7 percent from 1995-1997, fell slightly during the Internet boom years from 1999-2001, rose sharply in 2005 and is now back to the 2001 level of 6.4 percent. Whether the economy is growing or not, people still seem to see independent