As the technology industry lays off thousands, a division of the German conglomerate, Siemens, takes a different approach. I like the idea of having a sabbatical of sorts with half pay instead of simply being laid off. Of course, this would never happen in the U.S. - we love laying people off here and contributing to overall unemployment and higher welfare rates. Just look at what Salon has to say about it.... (note, you need to scroll down to midpage).
posted by gloege on Sep 5, 2001 - 5 comments

Postal Savings is great. Nothing beats having a cash machine on every corner. Except maybe having a cashless Coke machine on every corner.
posted by dfowler on Apr 26, 2001 - 17 comments

Kill a patent, make a bundle. This is one of the more creative uses of the web to date. A new kind of matchmaker, actually. Patents are a common source of litigation and often a company accused of violating a patent wants to prove that the patent is invalid. The easiest way to do that is to find "prior art", to prove that the invention described by the patent actually existed elsewhere before the owner of the patent filed for it. So this web site offers prizes ($10,000!) for leads to prior art in specific cases. Those offering the prizes are anonymous, though it's often possible to figure out who they are just by the questions they ask if you have a knowledge of disputes in the industry.
posted by Steven Den Beste on Feb 3, 2001 - 3 comments

51,631 dot com layoffs as of Feb. 01, 2001. Is it that the web allows us to simultaneously view the usual failure of 99% of new businesses, a sign of the coming recession, or just a result of bad business plans and get rich quick schemes? Or was it simply too good to last? Whatever the reason, it's depressing.
posted by crushed on Feb 2, 2001 - 19 comments

For those who like to watch carcrashes but don't want to patronize that site with the vulgar name, The Standard maintains Dot Com Flop Tracker, Dot Com Layoff Tracker, and Dot Com Ex-Exec Tracker.
posted by Steven Den Beste on Oct 7, 2000 - 6 comments

Amazon.com apologizes for random price test... Yeah, but look how long it took them to do it. "Oh, um, now that we've covered our costs for R&D we can end the test and apologize. That's the ticket!"
posted by silusGROK on Sep 28, 2000 - 4 comments

I love The Industry Standard, especially their daily emails like the Media Grok and Intelligencer. Friday's Intelligencer email spotlighted a story on credit card fraud, but if you click on the link in the email, it redirects to the Standard's main page. I searched for the article and you can see it in the results at the top, but it is dated two days into the future and clicking on it redirects to the front page. I wanted to read that article, too bad I don't have a time machine around...
posted by mathowie on Feb 26, 2000 - 1 comment