232 years!

Have a happy and safe holiday weekend from all of us at Select Metrix.

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Most modern calendars mar the sweet simplicity of our lives by reminding us that each day that passes is the anniversary of some perfectly uninteresting event.

-Oscar Wilde

We have made it through another year of posting and pontificating.  Today, The Hire Sense turns two.  Thanks to all of you for allowing us the chance to share our thoughts, opinions, anecdotes and suggestions in this format.

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Interesting history lesson in a short Inc.com post:

William Wrigley, Jr. arrived in Chicago in 1891 with just $32 to his name. The 29-year-old entrepreneur began manufacturing soap, first enticing customers by offering free baking soda with every purchase. He later tried offering customers free chewing gum. The gum soon became more popular – and profitable – than his soap venture. Like many of the famous companies which have sprung up during recessions, Wrigley sold inexpensive goods that could be easily mass produced. Now, I’m not saying that chewing gum actually served as a distraction from the strife of the times, but what kind of startup do you think fairs particularly well during a recession? Do consumers need distraction during downturns? If you have a great business idea, does it even matter when you launch your business?

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We are in the midst of a snowstorm so Easter and Spring seem oddly out of place against the backdrop of 6″ of snow.  It is amazing how stunningly beautiful snow can look before Christmas and how utterly awful it looks before Easter.  However, the JustSell.com guys provided me with some context to this Easter in their daily email (sorry, no link):

Unless you’re 95 years old, you’ve never celebrated Easter this early.

This year Easter falls on March 23, the earliest the holiday has been celebrated since 1913. Nearly 80% of consumers plan to celebrate this year and will spend $14.44 billion (about $135 each) on food, apparel, gifts, decorations and candy, according to the National Retail Federation.

Easter is the No. 2 top-selling candy holiday, behind only Halloween, according to the National Confectioner’s Association. Candy makers produce 90 million chocolate bunnies each year, and five million marshmallow chicks and bunnies each day during the year to fill Easter baskets.

Early Easter = snow in Minnesota.  Have a joyful Easter from all of us at Select Metrix!

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Newspaper subscriptions are plummeting and have been for some time.  I think it is pretty clear that this trend is going to continue as newspapers struggle to redefine their product.

The future for them appears to be online according to Media Daily News:

WHILE THEIR PRINT EDITIONS CONTINUED to slide, newspapers enjoyed an online audience boom in 2007, according to the Newspaper Association of America, which says the total unique audience for newspaper Web sites increased 9% in the fourth quarter to an average 62.8 million per month, compared to the same period in 2006. The figure from October, when 63.2 million people visited a newspaper Web site, is an all-time record.

Furthermore, the statistics, compiled by Nielsen Online, show that 39% of all active Web users visited newspaper Web sites during the fourth quarter, for an average 44 minutes per month–a slight increase over last year’s fourth-quarter average of 43 minutes, but substantially higher than the 36 minutes in 2004.

Most newspapers have suffered from a common ailment amongst monopolies – they thought they could define the market.  Instead of staying ahead of the market shift, the newspapers appeared to have a hardening of the categories.  The online content shift has been underway for many years and the dailies have been slow to react to it.

One thing is for sure in the Internet age, companies are penalized for moving at glacial speed.

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Happy New Year from all of us at Select Metrix!

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This story is almost unbelievable.  The scam was set up at AIG and involved a VP of HR.  From Workforce Management (my editing):

Federal authorities have charged a former human resources vice president of American International Group Inc. and three accomplices with defrauding the insurer of $1.1 million with phony bills for employee search services.

According to a federal criminal complaint, Falcetta moved from Philadelphia to New York to take his job with AIG in September 2005. His duties included managing contracts with employee search firms, and he had the authority to add firms to AIG’s approved list of vendors and to pay vendor bills up to $50,000.

Over the next two years, until AIG terminated him in August, Falcetta approved payments to bogus headhunter firms set up by Santone, Pombonyo and Broadbent, authorities allege. Those payments included $320,525 to G. Santone Associates, run by Santone; $674,886 to two firms, Enterprise Business Group and Global Search Affiliates Inc., run by Pombonyo; and $120,000 to Broadbent Advisory Group, run by Broadbent, the complaint says.

The four companies then kicked back $462,476 to Human Capital Management Partners, an entity Falcetta had created, authorities charge.

None of the search firms actually performed any work for AIG, and at least some of them appear to exist only on paper, the complaint suggests.

It never ceases to amaze me how criminals will go to such lengths to set up a scam.  Imagine if they used their skills for a legitimate enterprise.

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Ok, there are plenty of college football games to digest this holiday week so why not try something different on New Year’s Day?  We here at The Hire Sense are huge hockey fans and all of our sons play in our local association and high school program.

The NHL is a second-tier (at best) league in the US, but they are fairly progressive in their approach to marketing their league.  Online Media Daily has an article titled NHL’s ‘Winter Classic’ Coverage to Include Historic Broadband Firsts.

In case you haven’t heard, the NHL will have an outdoor game on Jan. 1 from Buffalo, NY.  I love this idea (they held an outdoor game in Edmonton a few years ago).  Their tie-in to the Internet is well-constructed:

For the first time, the NHL is creating two live broadband shows, which will be available exclusively on NHL.com.

The first program will be a live preview show from the XM Radio Studio within the NHL Powered by Reebok store in Manhattan. Hosts Don La Greca and E.J. Hradek will cover topics such as outdoor games of years past, game analysis and the decision process behind the AMP Energy NHL Winter Classic.

The second show, hosted by Bill Clement and Sam Rosen, will broadcast live from Ralph Wilson Stadium in Buffalo, and will attempt to capture the experience of being on-site at the event, giving a behind-the-scenes look at creating an outdoor ice rink.

Buffalo natives William Fichtner of the Fox television series “Prison Break” and Chad Michael Murray, star of The CW’s “One Tree Hill,” are scheduled to participate in the NHL.com’s blogging community.

Smart, very smart, by the NHL to go to these lengths.  If you are tired of college football that day, click over to NBC and watch some of the coolest game on Earth…outdoors.

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We are calling it a wrap today and are on our way to be with family and friends.

All of us at Select Metrix would like to wish you and yours a joyous and blessed Christmas!

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is a GPS receiver.  I get lost in my driveway and yet I still do not own one of these things.  In case you were wondering (you probably weren’t wondering, but I was), here is how the thing works:

When people talk about “a GPS,” they usually mean a GPS receiver. The Global Positioning System (GPS) is actually a constellation of 27 Earth-orbiting satellites (24 in operation and three extras in case one fails). The U.S. military developed and implemented this satellite network as a military navigation system, but soon opened it up to everybody else.

Each of these 3,000- to 4,000-pound solar-powered satellites circles the globe at about 12,000 miles (19,300 km), making two complete rotations every day. The orbits are arranged so that at any time, anywhere on Earth, there are at least four satellites “visible” in the sky.

A GPS receiver’s job is to locate four or more of these satellites, figure out the distance to each, and use this information to deduce its own location. This operation is based on a simple mathematical principle called trilateration.

My simple mind finds that fascinating.

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